Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(43)

“I was done,” Zazu repeated.

“Yeah, done,” Matt snorted. “They achieve some crazy state of enlightenment, who knows what the f*ck. Performing miracles cobbled out of bits and pieces of myths and Bible stories. For fun, as far as I can tell. Just to make themselves friggin’ happy.”

He sounded offended by the mere idea.

“Do they explain what’s going on? No chance.” He snaked the truck through a narrow lane, banging through a stack of tractor tires. It was a fake, a curtain made of hanging rubber pieces. They thudded on the truck roof, like fists.

Beyond the curtain were trailers: temporary school classrooms, a water recycler, a generator.

“Home sweet home,” Matt said.

Lindy checked the rearview. Zazu was eating saltines out of her battered red box.

Can you get out of there, kid?

Zazu shook her head. “Did you make the peanut butter?”

Do as you’re told, she thought, trying to flavour the thought with her sister’s bossiest voice. Get that door open right now, young lady, and run to town.

“I want peanut butter!”

No miraculous escape, no f*cking peanut butter!

Matt yanked Lindy out of the truck. The cop car came with cuffs – he locked her hands behind her back.

“Go,” he said, nudging her toward the trailers.

She went, slow as she dared, and then froze beside an old iron bathtub. It was filled with ice: entombed within was a 10-year-old boy, blue of skin, with a carved willow flute.

“Hoof it,” Matt said. “This ain’t the zoo.”

She stumbled into the classroom. It was laid out like an ambulance, or hospital room, with a cot on either side. A Winkle was laid out on the left, a teenaged boy in a Vancouver Canucks jersey. His eyes were pinned open and his teeth were digging into a bit. His upper skull was shaved and open; a laptop umbilicus vanished into his brain.

He had ice skates on, black skates with black wings growing from the ankles.

Lindy retched, and Matt turned her away, so she couldn’t heave colourful cereal onto the boy’s open cranium.

“He’s perfectly okay,” he said.

“Okay? It’s not sterile in here,” she managed, when she could breathe again.

“Yet he’s alive,” he said. “You could still take the modem, Lindy, and walk back into town.”

“I’ll f*ck you,” Lindy said breathlessly.

“What?”

“Let Zazu go.”

He made a dismissive noise. “Way too late to go pretending you give a shit.”

“I—” Part of her agreed; what was she doing?

“I miraculous scaped.” Zazu stood at the trailer entrance, with her little hood pulled off her head – her hair was a shaggy black mane – and snow on her feet. She had a cracker in one hand and her faded plastic pitchfork in the other. “Whajja do to Jason?”

I told you to run, Lindy thought. She tried to boot Matt in the crotch.

It didn’t work: he’d probably felt her getting ready before she’d formed the thought. Dodging her knee, he grabbed her throat. “No horsing around near the equipment, girls.”

Lindy went wireless.

Configuring her glass umbilicus into slivers, Lindy arrowed a thin, snaking line into Matt’s wrist, digging into his skin.

The grip on her throat eased, enough to yell. “Run, kid!”

Zazu had her hand in her mouth, sucking and watching.

She pushed through the wrist, a bright narrow icicle of glass, and arced it toward his face.

Matt shoved Lindy away. She dropped to the trailer floor, near the door, near the kid. A sticky tendril of hot smartglass stretched like a loose clothesline between her palm and his wrist.

“Loafs and fishes,” Zazu said. “You got all you need.”

It was true: Lindy could feel the trailer windows bending inward, disassembling. Outside, the SUV’s windshield and mirrors were coming too. She drew all the smartglass in the automorgue toward her. The strings of glass thickened, forming a web between her and Matt.

He put his head down, charging, an enraged-bull bellow.

Zazu patted her, consolingly, on the back. The throbbing in Lindy’s face subsided.

She jacked up her bit rate, crying out as the modem began to melt against the edge of the handcuffs, spreading the burn through her much-abused wrist. The glass fused, melting together in a wall, safety glass, half an inch, one, two.

Behind her, Zazu was moving, climbing up onto the cot.

“We gotta know,” Matt bellowed. “Why are they waking? How fast will it happen?”

Lindy lumped up window glass around him, trying to block out the sound.

Zazu had, by now, pulled the other kid’s monitors off, dropping them on the floor carelessly, along with little chunks of wire and brain. She pulled on the hinge of skull, mushing it down like someone forcing a suitcase shut.

“Arise, Jason.”

Matt laughed, a brittle noise, muffled by increasingly thick glass. He snatched up a wrench and began pounding it against the makeshift wall.

“We should go,” Lindy said. “He’ll break out eventually.”

“Can we take Jason?”

And do what? Feed him Berry Loops?

“Cereal’s for breakfast.”

“Stupid me.” Lindy shook her head. “I can’t get Jason into Matt’s truck, not like this.”