Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(36)

Lindy nodded. The unconcern that accompanied Last Year, Jitterbugs quietly coping as Winkles dozed off by the hundreds, was one of the unexplained mysteries of the Napocalypse.

“I darkened my display specs and kicked my shoes off. Next thing I knew, it was nine weeks later and I was being sliced out of a fantastic dream by this gigantic machete-wielding lunatic. Leopold Drummer.”

“The Leopold Drummer?”

“The hacker giant, in the flesh, I swear. He’d decided the way to kiss people awake was to cut out their cybernetic modems.” Abrik rolled up his sleeve, revealing a wrist-to-elbow scar, worm-white on his dark skin. “Put this on my shard, okay?”

? ?

After Singh had gone, Lindy hit Repurposing, a subterranean parkade where they disassembled used-up cars, stripping out the working parts before adding the husks to the walls Missy was building to keep wolves out of the city.

“Any glazier’s modems?”

A bored-looking mechanic shook his head – she asked every single time – before pointing out the latest corpses. Lindy began busting out their windows and mirrors, gathering material for Abrik’s shard.

Exertion and noise, the act of destruction, calmed her. She had filled an old blue recycling bin with glittering, fractured pieces when Paula Stern showed up.

“I got a complaint you’re neglecting your kids.”

“Don’t f*cking call them that.”

Paula had been a teacher in Wetaskiwin. She’d come into the studio a few times, but refused to bare her soul for Lindy’s project.

“You eaten?”

“Don’t remember.”

Paula handed Lindy a sandwich – caribou and sprouts on bannock. “I have to issue you a warning.”

“Grab a bin. You’ll save me a trip.”

“Sure.” Donning a pair of heavy gloves, Paula began shovelling glass shards.

Lindy bit into the sandwich, which was surprisingly fresh. The sprouts hadn’t had time to collapse to wet threads. “You’re in a good mood.”

“Just got laid,” Paula said. “Mike Chang.”

“Tractor guy?” Mike had been instrumental in salvaging farm equipment from across the Prairies, keeping the grain and rapeseed farmers in oil and working machinery until they transitioned back to horse-drawn plows.

“Your Missy’s gonna make him Minister of Finance. He’s feeling full of himself. I am feeling full of him, too.”

“Congratulations.” Would that make it easier to get Mike into her chair? The prime minister might be prevailed upon to insist.

Right. More like, Oh, Lindy, you and your oral history. Isn’t it time we moved on?

“You old enough to remember we used to call that a hook-up?” Paula asked.

“Mike’s sowing wild oats,” Lindy said, and got a blank look.

It was her delivery; nobody laughed at her, except when she wasn’t joking.

They climbed out of the parkade into twilight and a fresh inch of snow, huffing steam as they toiled along, hauling glass. They stopped at a park bench to catch their breath. Lindy thumbed one of her portable mics when Paula wasn’t looking.

“Hooking up,” she said. “You said once your students were the ones who coined the term Napocalypse.”

“Cute, huh? Better than the Winkling. Or the Big Sleepover.”

“Cute,” Lindy echoed.

“Branding the end of the f*cking world instead of…”

“Of what?” By chance they’d stopped in front of one of Lindy’s bigger displays, neo-Gothic testimonials from a dozen Napocalypse survivors. She was tired of the medieval look, but this was the concept she’d pitched the Arts Council for her oral history of Last Year. Unless she wanted to end up in a canning factory or going on the caribou hunt, she was stuck with it.

Stuck until her modem burned out, anyway.

“If we’d acted sooner and Tweeted less, there’d be more of us left,” Paula said.

“Acted how? People tried waking the Winkles. What was the success rate. One percent?” Lindy rolled the glass umbilicus off her wrist, revealing words, tattooed amid a hash of razor scars: LET ME SLEEP, GODDAMMIT. “You got one of these too, right?”

After a second, Paula responded by exposing her wrist.

“WAKE ME IF YOU CAN, KILL ME IF YOU CAN’T,” Lindy read aloud, for the mic. “Why?”

“I had nightmares. The idea of sleeping indefinitely terrified me.”

“Wow. So, how did they kiss you awake?”

“Acupuncture. Five hundred needles.”

“Were you? Having nightmares?”

Tears spilled down Paula’s face. “I was outdoors, in a meadow. It was the colour of a lawn but felt like mink, or how I imagined mink… buttercup-strewn mink.

“My body felt strong, vibrant. There wasn’t an ache, a twinge of fatigue. Remember being a kid? Never hurting?”

Lindy was suddenly conscious of the sand in her joints. “Not really.”

“My mind, too. Alert, untroubled. I relived a few of my best memories: cuddling a puppy, dancing with my husband at a disco in New Haven. I went back to toddlerhood and listened to things my parents said to each other, stuff I’d heard them say when I was preverbal. Mama had a wicked sense of humour – I never knew that.”