Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(44)

Zazu shook her head. Then she went outside.

“You have to stop walking around barefoot in the snow!” Lindy yelled.

“You’re not the boss of me!”

Follow? Or stay? She was afraid to take her eyes off Matt. His lips moved, soundless threat. She could make out the words “… gonna suffer…”

Zazu came back a second later with the peanuts and canola. “Make the peanut butter.”

“I’m a little tied up here,” Lindy said.

Zazu climbed into her lap, peering into her eyes. After a second, the right handcuff slipped off.

“Kid,” she said, “I ain’t fit to be your mother.”

Zazu dug her little fingers into Lindy’s palm, drawing out the umbilicus and scorched pieces of the modem, tracing the line where the overheated cuffs had scorched her wrist, examining the old self-inflicted scars and the tattoo: LET ME SLEEP, GODDAMMIT. She kissed the wrist, and the ache from the burns faded. “Just make the peanut butter.”

“Okay,” Lindy said. There was a bowl on the counter that smelled clean; pouring the peanuts inside, she took a small Pyrex flask and began crushing them to powder.

“Here’s the oil.”

Lindy mixed, a drop at a time, into the peanut powder, until the texture seemed right. Solemnly, Zazu flecked the salt off one of her crackers into the mix.

They dipped a finger each.

“See?” Zazu said.

“Just right,” Lindy agreed.

“Hey, Jason’s up.”

The hockey player’s skull had knitted itself together. He sat, giving Lindy a beatific smile.

He probably has a wicked yen for Pizza Pops, Lindy thought.

“Yuck,” Jason said. Then, to Matt, who was still pounding on the safety glass, he said: “You must be so tired.”

Matt let out a belch of laughter. He sat on the floor. His eyes rolled up in his head and he began to snore.

“Huh,” Lindy said. “I have no capacity for happiness, but he can go down, just like that?”

“Leopold understood less than he thought.” The boy fluffed the black wings on his skates. They stretched, flexed.

Owl wings, Lindy thought.

He reclaimed his toque and rolled it over the incision on his skull. Wings sprouted from the wool. His stick, she saw, was a caduceus.

He leaned down to consider Zazu, then tugged on her sad, wet footies. They tore away above the knee, leaving little black-hooved feet. He tousled her hair, revealing horns.

“I’m going to go cut that Krishna kid out of the bathtub.” He took up his stick, and clomped out. A second later she heard wood chopping at ice.

Zazu was looking, regretfully, at Matt. “He said Wonderbread.”

“We need to refine your palate, kid. Bannock’s actually better. Some things are.”

“So we go home now?”

“I don’t think taking a devil baby back into Yellowknife is necessarily a good idea. And my sister…”

She hesitated. If the Winkles were coming around, everything was going to change. Getting a new modem, coasting on – it wouldn’t work out any longer.

“Missy never helps,” Zazu said. “Let me.”

“Do what?”

“Everything.”

“You’re awfully small to be taking on my problems.”

Zazu raised a sticky, peanut-butter hand. There was a pink antidepressant in the middle of her palm. “Look. From the truck.”

Lindy bit her lips.

“Are you…”

“What?”

Are you evil? Lindy thought, before she could help herself.

“Grrr,” Zazu said, play-acting the Halloween devil. “I’m scary.”

“You’re four.”

“Goin’ on five.”

If she was evil, did it matter? Nobody else was stepping up to offer.

“Okay,” she said, and felt bone-deep relief.

“Okay, your Majesty. ”

“Don’t push your luck.”

Zazu smiled, showing off her food-crusted teeth, and pressed her plastic pitchfork against Lindy’s chest. “Let’s find bannock.”

Lindy nodded. “Hide the horns.”

Zazu rolled the hood over her head and clasped the dangling handcuff on Lindy’s left wrist, tugging. After a second, Lindy followed her out into the snow.

“Ready or not, here we come,” Zazu said, and they began the trudge through the automorgue, trusting the tire tracks to lead them through the maze of cars, past the wolves to the capital.





KEEPER OF THE OASIS


Steve Stanton

The sand sifts between his stubby fingers as Riza digs, and the harder he pushes it aside, the faster it drifts back to void his work. His life has been like this from the first days of record: on his knees cursing the dusty ground and praying for relief from famine. He has been the official keeper of the oasis since his grandfather planted a palm tree on the day of his birth and consecrated the ground to him, the male heir of a proud tradition stretching back to the early days of restoration. The dry lakebed of the Algonquin Basin stretches around him in all directions, a desert left behind when the trees were razed by solar flares from Sungod and the Great Lakes boiled away. In the days of civilization, this hallowed spot contained one-fifth of the world’s fresh water in the largest group of lakes on Earth, but now the oasis has dwindled to a toxic trickle along with the fate of mankind.