Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(37)

“Parenting wore it out of her,” Lindy couldn’t help saying, but Paula wasn’t listening.

“Later, I got to putting together a galaxy. Deciding where every star would go, drawing orbital paths. I licked a black hole and it tasted like limes.

“Then they poke-poke-poked me out of it, because of my tatts. Is it any wonder so many Sleeping Beauties turn on our so-called princes?”

? ?

Paula handed her a foil-wrapped ball of rice and cooked meat when they reached the studio, but refused to schlep the glass up the three flights of stairs. Lindy hauled the bins herself, making two trips.

The second time, she found someone reading the kids’ monitors.

Yellowknife wasn’t so small that everyone knew everyone, though sometimes it felt that way. Before Last Year, the town had 20,000 people; now, since Missy had decided to collapse the surviving Canadian population into the North, it was bursting with 100,000 Jitterbugs and Beauties, plus 500,000 Winkles in storage.

At first it didn’t click. He was just a guy. Tall – super tall – Caucasian and weathered, with grey eyes, he wore salvaged antique jeans that fit him well.

Lindy had a fleeting thought of Paula, hooking up. Was it national get lucky day? Maybe he’s here to laugh at my sowing oats joke. Gimme a plow, big guy?

Then she saw the hashmarks branded into his forearms: 15 on the left for 15 dead cougars, nine on the right for bears killed on Winkle retrieval missions…

Matt Cardinal.

Shit!

“Sorry,” he said. “Your door was open.”

I bet that smile opens a lot of legs.

Lindy swallowed. He didn’t seem to know who she was. “What do you want?”

“Twentieth anniversary of Last Year, innit?” he said. “Don’t you want a testimonial from the Post-nap’s answer to Shakespeare?”

He’s up to something. Her stomach flipped.

Licking her lips, she scooped up a mic and said: “Matthew Cardinal was in the Edmonton Institution, serving a five-year sentence for armed robbery. After Last Year, he joined the Rocky Mountain retrieval team—”

“Retrieved these three, as it happens,” he murmured.

Lindy fought the urge to step between him and the stretcher of kids. Where did that impulse come from? “Matt is Poet Laureate of Canada.”

She gestured at the comfy chair. “Sit down. Tell us all about your Napocalypse.”

Instead of sitting, he walked to her. Lindy backed up; he came until she was against a wall and they were inches apart.

Testing: Would she scream? Fight? Tell him to back off?

As if she’d ever had that much backbone. Twenty years melted away. Her eyes bugged; she could smell fear rolling off herself.

He picked the mic, ever so gently, out of her grip. “Guys at the penitentiary started nodding off in February, right after Frankfurt. Corrections sent the first three to hospital. Then they reallocated cells, shelving Winkles in their cots. They kept us Jitterbugs in another section.

“It might’ve been a relief. An unconscious prison population is less work. But they were losing guards too. Some guy goes home, eats his beef and beans, kisses the kids goodnight and sits down to watch the game. Nods off. Next day, nothing’s getting him out of that chair. Right?”

She forced herself to answer: “He’s just gone, yeah.”

“We had 80 prisoners down and a skeleton crew watching the rest when this team of strung-out geeks shows up with defibrillators, scalpels, caffeine enemas, for f*ck’s sake. They play around with prince charming the guys. Prisoners, right? Who cares?

“Soon they’d killed a fellow in for a short stretch. Evan. Drunk driver, I think. Threw a sheet over him, wheeled the body down the hall, kept going.

“Then they got lucky. Three guys in a row they woke up. One they got with a defibrillator. Stopped his heart. Three. Two. One. Clear! Badoom, badoom. He surfaces, screaming. Cry after cry, like a gut-wrenched horse.

“Thing was, there weren’t enough guards anymore. Thing was, we weren’t lambs in a pen. And the guys they woke weren’t petty vehicular homicides.

“They didn’t just piss and moan, those Sleeping Beauties, they didn’t cry about happy dreams or paradise lost. Sam Gees, the screamer, tried cutting his own head off. While those poor misguided ghouls were trying to restrain him, the other two tore apart everything they could reach.

“They had long arms.”

I hate this spoken-word crap, Lindy thought.

“Riot built, like a tsunami. Soon we had a dozen dead science nerds, the remaining guards’ guns, the keys to the whole lock-up. We scattered, like kids fleeing a haunted house.”

With that, Matt thumbed the mic off. “Howzat?”

Lindy fought to keep her voice steady. “I’ve collected similar stories from your fellow inmates.”

“Oh, you bored? This a rerun for you?”

He definitely didn’t know who she was.

She’d assumed one of the other prisoners had taken Matt’s identity, to hide a more serious crime. But this guy hadn’t seen Matt’s drawings, hadn’t heard his obsessive stalker blah blah: “My girl Lindy, when we get married, Lindy and me, the babies we’ll have…”

Never mind she’d been 16 and he’d been nearly 30. Never mind that they’d met once, at a party.