Among the Roaring Dead (6 page)

“I have some children too. I’ll show you tomorrow.”

His eyelids were extremely heavy. It wasn’t until he had crawled into the tent and was halfway to dreamland that he realized the absurdity of her statement. At first, the thought she meant that she was going to share photographs in her purse or something.

He just hoped it wasn’t going to be a grave site that she showed him.

The dreams that came were like horror snippets - monsters and animals, in miniature size. Jess dreamed that he was sleeping on the ground in a field, in the night. He woke to find that hundreds of ants were crawling over his body, biting him, taking tiny little chunks of flesh away by the hundreds. He turned over, trying to get to his feet and saw that his children were in the same situation.

He screamed himself awake.

Anne was about 20 feet in front of the tent, standing on a tree stump like a statue. She didn’t seem to move for ages - straight and tall with her arms close to her side.

He sat up and felt what seemed like a ball of fire burning at the base of his throat.

The air had a distinctly chilled taste to it that made him think it was morning but everything seemed like it was perpetual twilight. In normal times, that minute or two of time between the sun going down and the day transitioning to night was what confused people’s vision and perception. Jess recalled that back when people still drove vehicles manually that statistics showed most accidents occurred during twilight. The equilibrium between absolute darkness and the first hints of light was now constant – it was perpetual confusion of the senses.

“Do you have anything to drink?”

“I have some water,” she said.

“Anything else?” I asked.

She turned finally, to look at him. “There were bottles of stuff back at the other tent, if you want to try to find your way.”

Jess thought about it, trying to determine what she meant. Booze, no doubt, which might be just the thing to conquer the fire rising in his throat. Throw liquid fire over a flame and outburn it.

“Water would be great.”

“Let’s have a little breakfast and then we can get going.”

She pulled a red and white cooler from behind a tree and opened the lid. In it, there seemed to be various vegetables. She handed over some cooked carrots and potatoes along with a knife.

“Slice it up nice and thin - eat lots in small portions for breakfast is usually your best bet, I find.”

It wasn’t bad - probably because he was hungry, he thought.

“It’s good. Where did you get it? I ate a bunch of apples on the way. I found them at an outdoor storefront display. Made me so sick.”

She slapped closed the lid of the cooler and sat on top of it.

“You can’t eat anything that’s touched the ash. There’s something toxic in it. We probably shouldn’t even let it touch our skin.”

Jess popped another piece of carrot in his mouth and then handed back the knife, handle outwards. Anne took it, wiped it off on a piece of cloth kept in her pocket and sheathed it, then dropped it in a fanny back wrapped around her waist.

“Get ready - we’ll go for a walk and I’ll teach you a few things about God’s will.”

She wore these giant puffy snow boots that looked like she was about to hike across the Antarctic but she didn’t make a sound when she walked - in fact, he lost her a few times only to come up aside her unawares. She’d be standing beside a tree, or worse yet, sitting atop some kind of solid unassuming fixture in the landscape, waiting for him to catch up.

She whistled constantly - and at first he thought it was tuneless, just some illogical melody that some people seemed to make up because they thought that it was something that sounded good, though it often sounded like tuneless music to everyone else that heard it.

It was clear that she knew these woods. They went up and down little hills and large roots that broke the surface and tripped him up frequently but she suffered no such effects, side-stepping every little rut in the ground like an Olympian hurdler.

She looked behind her once or twice - just enough to determine that he was still following her, evidently. They crossed two streams, three roads and had to climb over a fence. At that point, they came to a clearing - it was a big field with grass as high as their knees. The outline of a long structure - undoubtedly a greenhouse, could be seen the middle of this dark landscape.

Anne stood at the door, waiting for him to catch up. Her hand was on the doorknob, like she was waiting with some kind of a surprise.

Jess walked across the field, feeling sticks break under his feet and long blades of grass brush away against his shins and knee-caps.

When he got close enough, she opened the door, pushing it wide enough for him to walk in without any impediments.

It was like entering a new dimension - suddenly they were in a place that was warm and expansive and clean. The air simply tasted pure, like it was filtered and free from ash and dirt and everything else floating around their world nowadays.

There were four rows of plants and flowers and vegetables. The rooftop was curved, looking like a thick tarp suspended from floor to floor with bended pipes spaced about 2 feet apart.

Anne walked down the middle row confidently - she obviously knew the place well. She stopped at a plant and pulled something green from its branches, placing it between her teeth and ripped it in two, the second half pulled away by her hand.

“Green beans,” she said. “Perfectly formed. Crunchy and tasty, just as God intended them to be.”

“How do you know this place is safe?”

She plopped the other half of the pea pod in her mouth, chewed several times and then swallowed.

“I don’t, exactly,” she said. “But I have a reasonably good idea given that it’s only approachable from one direction. The other side has the cliff overtop the river that’s a good 50 feet wide and several dozen feet deep. The ground wasn’t trampled - there were no prints of any kind, except for the byward path I always take to the greenhouse.”

Jess was struggling to catch his breath - he was still tired from the walk.

“And what if there had been tracks you didn’t recognize?”

“I’d be gone,” she said. There were four other greenhouses in the area, she whispered, though this one was her favourite.

It was like they were camping, he thought. A false sense of security since the only thing keeping them from the outside a bunch of poles and a big tarp.

Anne held her hand out, and in her palm sat several green beans, dark green and slightly moist.

He took two, and threw them into his mouth, devouring more than tasting.

Green beans weren’t something that he ever would have imagined he’d call delectable but they were just that.

“So these are your children,” he said.

She laughed.

“Certainly not! These are mindless plants good for nourishment of many kinds.”

The texture of the beans was almost course, but crunched wonderfully under the force of his teeth and jaws. He looked up and saw that ash had piled up at the sides of the roof - everything inside seemed free from whatever toxins were stopped by the protective tarp. The apples he had yesterday, in comparison, were probably saturated with it.

A shadow seemed to pass by the building but Anne had her back to it and would not have noticed. Everything outside was blurred by the tarp, as if they were looking through a sheet of dark green water. You could see the general shape of things, like the blurred outline of trees that swayed in the wind. The shadow Jess thought he saw was formless - just a blurred movement in the haze. He thought of telling her but distrusted his senses.

They both had jackets on and the place was surprisingly warm. Jess began to feel beads of perspiration appear at his temples.

Anne walked to the back of the structure and placed a watering can under a large tap.

“Is that clean water?”

“Of course. This place has access to an underground water supply and there’s an on-site water filtration tank in the back.”

She filled the can and walked around, up and down each aisle, giving the plants and flowers a taste.

Jess walked over to the tap. There was a sort of containment area built into the floor directly below the tap with a drain so that the water wouldn’t go everywhere. He turned it on - just a dribble at first. It was clear, pristine looking. He cupped his hands under the flow and heard Anne singing somewhere behind him.

“Come writers and critics

Who prophesize with your pen

And keep your eyes wide

The chance won't come again

And don't speak too soon

For the wheel's still in spin

And there's no tellin' who

That it's namin'

For the loser now

Will be later to win

For the times they are a-changin'.”

The water was cool and every bit as clear in taste as it appeared. He turned the tap up so that the water flowed faster and dropped his head below the flow so he could siphon water off with his mouth, like he did from the end of his father’s green hose in the backyard as a child. He gulped it and felt the water go down his throat in big globs. The singing went on behind him until one of those globs of water got caught in his gluttonous drinking and he started coughing, choking on the water.

“There is a shelf above your head with about a half dozen clean glasses,” she said.

He looked up and she was right. A simple wooden shelf supported a radio and six tall glasses. Water was dripping from his chin - he wiped it with his arm sleeve.

“You ever check this thing?”

“What thing?”

“The radio up here - you ever check to see if you can get a signal?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“I don’t know - to see if there are any other survivors? If there’s any news on why all of this happened?”

“No, I don’t check it - if the Lord wanted me to meet others he would make it so. I wasn’t exactly looking for you when you crossed my path.”

“You think God did that.”

She didn’t say anything - just watered a few more plants until only drops came out of the watering can.

“He is a vengeful God, isn’t he? All these people dying, but not dying. It almost feels like Hell on Earth right now - apart from this place of course but my kids aren’t here so this won’t do them a lot of good.”

“It’s a very wicked world,” finally looking at him for a moment.

“Well, I think we agree to disagree on that.”

She put the watering can away - poured herself half a glass of water and drank from it slowly.

“I should really get going,” he said. “I appreciate everything you’ve done but I really need to find my family.”

“I can take you back to the road.” She started zipping up her jacket. “ It’s not far from here and there is something on the way I’d like to show you.”

She locked the door to the greenhouse behind them and again went stomping off into the woods. It had darkened even more since they arrived but she did not use a flashlight or any other aid. It was apparent that she knew the route well, whereas Jess had to watch his feet and keep an eye out for logs or other tripping hazards.

After a few minutes zig-zagging across fields and through wooded areas she started a steep climb up a hill. Jess couldn’t help but think that she chose the most confusing route back possible so that he would never be able to find the greenhouse on his own.

Jess walked sideways up most of the hill - his knee was aching but once they got to the top he realized they were back on Broadview Avenue looking over the valley.

Anne then walked across the bridge near their position and hoisted herself up on the railing. She looked for a moment as though she were going to dive off it. But she just stood there for several moments, all in white with her arms cast up to the skies.

The wind was blowing at her white hair furiously and suddenly a hole appeared in the clouds above and Jess saw a patch of purple-blue sky - the first indication of a healthy atmosphere that he could remember seeing since this all happened.

The funny thing was that hole in the sky seemed to illuminate their exact position. Twenty blocks up the road everything was still cast in shadows.

The wild woman turned her head slowly, arms now akimbo like handles on a jug and hair whipping about and said: “Come see my children.”

Jess walked slowly over to her side, wondering what lunacy she was up to.
Was she going to say that the clouds and trees were her offspring?

But as she looked up to the skies, Jess’s head swivelled to take in the panoramic vision before him. The valley was a wide sea of green trees sprinkled with grey ash. Deep below their current position was the snaking river and a bicycle trail. But immediately in front of them was a small fenced compound for a large electricity transformer, It was an intricate melding of steel and wire, like a maniacal playground for otherworldly creatures.

But it was what else was in the compound that unnerved Jess the most.