The Longest Night

A week after New Years, Dave nor Catherine had felt any more symptoms of the virus. Thirteen people had died and had been taken off by the RCMP somewhere outside of the community hall. Everyone else was kept indoors; no one was allowed outside. One day no food came. People hounded the officers for questions, but none offered any answers. Every eight hours they rotated, and someone new from the outside would come into the hall, only to be goaded for answers once more. But there were none, other than: no news, no phone calls, no reports, no ideas.

By the next day, people had figured out that food was actually on high shortage. There were no trucks coming in, and no trucks could go out. A local distributor had spread word that a search party had gone north in search of extra supplies, but considering Fort McMurray was the largest collection of people in Alberta this far north, it wasn’t likely they would find enough to feed twelve people.

Catherine was sitting on a bench in a hall near the front of the building. The hall served as a daycare or a preschool. Colourful coat hooks lined the walls with animal-themed name tags above them. Names of children that no longer existed. Over three quarters of the people in the community hall had succumbed; she could only assume that three quarters of the outside world had died as well. She was hungry, cold, and she was certain she had caught some sort of infection. The facility had run out of hand soap and sanitizer days ago.

How long it would last? Them being caged in a hall? She was certain this was illegal, and almost positive that this operation was no longer headed by any federal body. The RCMP didn’t anymore know how to keep them safe than the people did themselves.

“You look at me when I’m fucking talking to you!” a man shouted from down the hall. A few more words were muttered, and the man shouted again.

“Yes, there is a pretty big god-damned problem here!”

She slowly stood from the bench and made her way towards the double doors from where the argument drifted. The doors were wedged open. She pressed herself up against one door and slid to the edge slowly to peer around the corner. A man and a woman stood facing two officers, and the man looked furious. They were standing by the main doors, the officers blocking the couple’s path.

“For the final time, you are not permitted outside. Please step back, sir.”

He let out a humourless laugh. “‘Step back’! Hah, you hear that, honey? He’s asking me to ‘step back’ again. My God, if I’m not fucking tired of being told to step down from my own free will. Stay cooped up inside with the fatally ill, starve, be miserable. ‘Step back’!”

“Sir, calm down—”

“You’ve overstepped your boundaries by a long shot, you asshole,” the man snarled, literally standing nose to nose with the officer. “I will not calm down. My wife is sick with a cold. We all need food, goddammit! My life is in jeopardy in this miserable shit hole, and your men have done nothing for us. You’re screwing us over.” He turned from the officer, leaned against the wall and stuck out his rear. “This is how you have us.”

The one who had been nose to nose with the angry man looked to his partner and gave him a tired, critical look. Even though they still wore their masks, Catherine could see the wear in their expressions. They looked just as tired about the entire situation as the angry man was. The second officer stepped forward, his gun loosely held in one hand, and reached out with his other to touch the man on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s get you—”

“Don’t touch me!” the man howled savagely, then turned on his heel to swat away the officer’s hand. The officer changed stance while the other fell back. The man lunged forward, hands in the shape of claws, swatting at the officer’s mask. It was knocked from his face and torn through the middle amidst the struggle.

“Sir!”

“What the fuck—”

The man was pushed back. The officer fired once.

The gunshot was deafening; it whipped off the walls with a tremendous clap.

The woman fell to her knees, her cry muffled in Catherine’s ears. The body slumped on the ground like it had no bones. A chunk of his forehead had been blown straight off, and it left an unbelievable amount of blood in its wake.

“BILL!” the woman screamed over and over. Catherine spun away, her hand clamped firmly over her mouth. All she could hear was the gunshot and Bill’s name echoing over and over and over. All she could see was red. She ran to the washroom without even realizing her legs had carried her there and she dived into a stall to puke.

Scattered footsteps ran by the door. More and more people piled up towards the doors, crowding to see what they already knew had gone wrong. Catherine stared into the toilet bowl, watching her vomit float around, trying to get the grotesque image out of her head, trying to forget what she had seen.

But it can’t be unseen oh God the howls they’ll never be forgotten—

It flew up her oesophagus without warning and she choked a bit. She hacked and coughed for a while before her breathing returned to normal. When she flushed the toilet, water did not refill the bowl.

The hall was crowded, but even so she found Dave’s eyes almost instantly. They were like live wires, bright and full of intensity.

They were all barred in the kitchen while the officers cleaned up the mess.

“I’m scared, Dave,” Catherine muttered tearfully. It was late at night, they had missed their sixth meal in a row, and she was certain yet another person had passed away not ten feet away from where they sat.

“Hey,” Dave said, much the same way he had said it the first time she cried in front of him.

“I don’t want to be here,” Catherine tried to say, but it came out garbled in a whine. “I want to go home. I want to see my mom. I want to know she’s okay and I want this to be over…”

Dave moved from his cot, took a seat next to her, and he placed an arm over her shoulders. It was easy to crumble under him, to lean against his shoulder like she had done it so many times before. She cried freely and she clutched his jacket, afraid he’d disappear if she let go.

“Everyone here hates this,” Dave said, squeezing her shoulders as she folded in more on him. “This is all really fucked up.”

“It’s over, isn’t it.”

“Huh?”

She took in a shaky breath and said: “The world. It’s over.”

“No,” he said quickly. He sighed, and opened his mouth several times to answer, but fell short. Then he said: “I don’t know. Hey, come on, kid.” He wrapped his other arm around her in a sidelong hug. “You’ll pull through. We all will. The RCMP will get this sorted out, and then they’ll get us food, and before you know it, we’ll all go home.”

Catherine quivered and shook her head gently. “What home?”

He rested his head gently on top of hers. “Shit…”

She felt his calloused hands on her hair. His roughness made her dirty, oily strands feel like silk. Stroking my hair, she thought. Like a parent.

“Did you have a son or a daughter?” Catherine asked quietly. So quietly, in fact, she thought Dave hadn’t heard her at first.

“A girl,” he mumbled in return. “She was six.”

Catherine’s lower lip quivered again. “I’m sorry.”

“Nothin’ to be sorry ’bout. She’s a tough kid. I’m sure she’s holding up.”

“Yeah.” She sighed.

Little plastic dolls sat unmoving; they had been off for days now. No one left alive to turn them on. “It’s a Small World After All,” they should have sang. She stroked his hair, singing the song to herself, trying to block out the howls from afar. It was enough to turn blood to ice, to scare sanity from the living, to chase hope away from His land.

Don’t think about that story now, Catherine told herself. It reminded her of the man, and it made another well of sadness build up inside her. He was dead as well. Everything she knew was dead and dying. That woman’s scream for her husband…

All traces of the RCMP were gone by morning. Nobody guarded the doors, nobody was even outside in the parking lot. Not a truck, bus, not a soul around for what seemed like miles.

They stepped outdoors tentatively, looking around with uncertainty, thinking that at any moment an officer would point a barrel in their faces and threaten to fire at point blank.

Catherine squinted as the high winter sun hit her from every direction – the sky, the snow, the glare of the road. The cold clamped its hands down on her too, but not as terribly as she would have imagined. The heating had gone off shortly after the food stopped coming – cold was a norm. Cars clogged the road to the south; some empty, some with drivers behind them. They didn’t move. It was so quiet.

And the streets lined with bodies and death, and those who ran and hid for their lives knew what his name was. They knew how to spell it. It was the smell in the air; the decay of flesh; the spilling of blood; the stare of the undead.

She laid him out on the floor of the car before cramming herself between him and the front seat. Somehow managed to close the door. They were silent. She held her breath, needing to pee. Tips of her toes and fingers tingled like they were being bitten. Not in here, not in here, please don’t let that thing come in here.

They were not ready to die.

He groaned, “I think I’m—”

“Shut up,” she hissed more harshly than she intended. She gripped the front of his pyjamas and held on for dear life. “Don’t make a noi—”

The door to the house opened. Muscles clenched and lungs shrank.

Pitch black in the garage, but she could still hear where it was. Tripped and fell over, knocking over the garbage cans. A squeak left her when they clattered and she trembled with fear that it had heard her it had heard it’s coming to tear out her insides.

It got to its feet somehow and wandered about the car. It knew they were in there. She strained her eyes to see movement in the dark but saw nothing. Only felt that awful shuffle like half its foot was missing.

The car shook as it threw its weight on the back door. Oh fuck oh fuck it knows we’re in here it sees us!

Accidentally ripped the buttons off his shirt as a scream tried to leave her. Made no noise—couldn’t breathe. He held onto her tight and she squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for it to break in and drag them to Hell.

Nothing came.

He breathed into her hair as the creature slipped off the car and shuffled away. Back into the house. An hour ticked by; now she could see everything in the garage, could hear every move it made in the house. It was in the half bath upstairs.

And it let out a long roar that chilled her blood. It spoke of death, pain, destruction; the seven deadly sins, of all the reasons God had sent them to do His will.

“Jesus,” Dave said from somewhere behind her.

Fatigue was a heavy weight on her shoulders, like she’d spent twenty years in a dark prison, and this was the first moment she had seen the outside. It certainly seemed that way.

“They’re all dead,” someone whispered. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

She looked north. She could just make out the highway. She started walking towards it.

“Where’s she going?” some man asked as she departed. “Hey, where’re you going?”

I don’t know. Where are any of us going?

She kept wandering, thinking of food and water, perhaps some blankets. She wound her way through the neighbourhood and found her way to the highway. There were others wandering slowly through the forest of abandoned vehicles. Survivors. She had no inclination to be with them.

She could see the river from where she stood. It looked so still. After a few moments, she realized that she had been followed.

“What are you doing?” someone asked. She turned. The girl couldn’t have been any older than Catherine herself. She looked like someone who had slowly been eaten away by her own fear: small, cowering, hollowed.

“There’s a grocery store across the river,” Catherine answered. “I want to see if they have any food left.”

“We’ll go with you.” There were plenty more people behind her. In fact, it seemed everyone from the community hall had followed her. To separate now felt like abandoning family. They had only known each other since The End.

“Okay.”

They made their way up the highway in a thick mass. The people who were wandering up and down the aisles between the cars paused to watch the horde of people flood onto the bridge, flowing through the crevasses towards them. One of them turned and ran. The others seemed to drift to the edges, watching like hawks.

As they crossed the bridge, some people gasped and covered children’s eyes. A few bodies were caught in the rocks below, floating belly-down. Someone paused to throw up over the side, trying her best not to soil any of the dead. Catherine looked over the side only briefly, for she could imagine the bodies turning over onto their backs. She closed her eyes.

“Come on,” she urged him, “we need to get inside before the sun sets. Once the sun goes down, we’re in real trouble. Up you get.” Her voice broke as she half dragged her husband across the littered asphalt. Paper, food wrappers, clothes, money, brief reminders that people had been here once very recently, and they were no longer. Lives gone in the blink of an eye. Discouraging.

She paused on the road, for she could see bodies lying up ahead. Her husband groaned at her side, trying to stay on his feet. Grip was weakening. Her legs gelatin, heart ice.

“Please don’t move,” she whispered.

“What?”

She kept staring at them. Shelter, look for shelter. Her head would not turn. Her feet would not move. Fear like jaws clamping down on her spine. Her breath was hard to keep.

One of the corpse’s arms moved and she let her bladder go.

Once they crossed the river, she let her breath go. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding it. Some were crying behind her, while others cussed under their breath. Catherine was no longer at the front of the group as they neared the grocery store. She figured it would give a semblance of control back, being able to navigate their own town. They needed to feel in control of something.

As they travelled down Thickwood boulevard, the grocery store came into view. The parking lot was completely full of cars. At some point people stopped parking in the stalls and simply parked wherever there was empty space. Even the road was jam-packed with vehicles. But all was void of life.

As they got closer, she could see that the automatic doors had been broken in and shoved aside. They were cracked and bent; half of one pane of glass had shattered completely. There were spots of blood on the edges. A faint trail led inside. Her pulse quickened as her mind raced, but the faint promise of food made her step in. The lights were out in the building, but there were skylights throughout the store, dimly illuminating the empty ruin. As they passed the broken-down doors, they could see the mess clearly enough. A rancorous stench hit them as they walked in. Rotten food lay scattered on the tile along with baskets, bags, scales, money. Nobody was here anymore because they had taken all the food there was to have and left. Nobody was here anymore because they died.

She looked to the produce section that stretched from the entrance to the back of the store. A mess of brown and black chaos was in the green cartons lining the walls. Some people began to spread out and look down the aisles for any food that was left. She was almost certain there would be nothing, not even a coupon or a price tag.

“Catherine,” Dave said from behind her. She turned slightly to see him standing there. They shared heavy glances, then turned back to the storefront. A man was rummaging through scattered papers on the ground. His son, who could have been no older than six, stood next to him, crying quietly.

“Shit,” Dave muttered under his breath.

“What are we going to do?” she asked quietly as a man began to curse wildly from somewhere on the other end of the deserted store, throwing around bins and shopping carts full of nothing. She’d known hunger, but she could never have fathomed starving.

A scream pierced the air, shrill, petrifying. Her heart skipped. Dave rushed past her down the nearest aisle and she rushed after him. The shelves were stark white and utterly empty, and the scream just echoed.

Dave rounded the corner and skidded to a stop, swearing loudly. She jerked to a halt beside him in similar fashion. A woman stood leaning against the wall, her hands shaking over her eyes as screams flew from her mouth uncontrollably. A large black and brown stain covered the floor at her feet, where laid the remains of a dismembered body, which had been pummelled and cut.

Their hands were of claws and blades of the beast, their teeth were of the iron that God forged, their eyes were the omnipresent spirit not of neither good nor evil, waiting to claim every last soul and devour their humanity and their bodies. They were the saviours of the world and the reapers of the living, and they would feast on flesh not out of hunger but out of the sanction that God hath given them, and the Judgement they had both received and given. They were the divine, and yet they were the empty vessels of an age extinguished by His wrath.

She heaved up stomach acid onto the floor.

That had been the end.