The Longest Night

A month went by. Those who survived and remained moved into the houses that were abandoned or where families had died. Bodies were moved to the riverbank, covered in the bed sheets they were found in. White coffins stained with sick, excrement, and blood. Their epitaph.

Catherine and Dave had found a small house together. The day after they had come to the grocery store, everyone began to gather there and talk on a daily basis. Some would just share information about what was going on in other places around Fort McMurray. People got together for the sake of being together. This was all too much to take on alone. Even Catherine, who’d spent her life shutting out the world, now embraced it; she had absolutely nothing left but strangers and words.

Those on the south side of the river were seen as dangerous and erratic. They found food and kept it to themselves; they found supplies and refused to trade. Rumours of their evil began to spread easily, and everyone absorbed the stories, shaping them and changing them.

“What are they doing out there, Dave?” she whispered. She had buried her head into the crook of his shoulder, her niche, clutching at his filthy jacket. He smelled rancid, but so did she. It was comforting to be surrounded in it.

“I dunno, Catherine,” he whispered hoarsely. His arm was wrapped around her and his hand gently rubbed her shoulder comfortingly. “I dunno.”

“Do you think we’ll be okay?”

“I hope so.”

When Catherine tried to talk with him throughout that week, his mind seemed elsewhere, like he couldn’t really hear what she was saying. He’d pace the halls at night, grumbling to himself, cursing, hissing. One night Catherine got up out of bed to peek through the crack of her door to find him tearing the wallpaper down. When he turned towards her room, she saw a ferocious look in his eye, and she quickly backed away out of sight, heart pounding. He looked like the rest of them.

Catherine awoke in the morning slouched against the wall. She was afraid of closing her door, for then it would make it known to Dave she was wary of him and would snap. The bed was also visible from the doorway; she feared he’d watch her sleep, and therefore had resorted to curling into a ball against the wall to avoid his line of sight. When she straightened, a wrenching pain slid down her back, and she had to hold her position for a while before she could stand properly.

Tentatively approaching the door, she called out for Dave. When he didn’t answer the second time, she pushed her door open slowly, the hinges creaking, giving her the sense of being haunted. “Dave?” she whispered sharply a third time. She stepped out into the hallway. All the wallpaper had been stripped from the entire length, and it all lay crumpled on the floor. She stepped through it to his bedroom and opened the door. He wasn’t there either.

Catherine left to look for him. The two weeks they had spent there was mostly indoors; neither had left the house unless it was to look for food or to commute to the grocery store. They stayed inside, away from others, because they were afraid of what they all were becoming. Even now Catherine was unsure of being amongst them. She searched the north side of town for the entire day, but there was no sign. The people Catherine considered safe to approach hadn’t seen him either. As the sun sank from the sky, Catherine’s hope went with it. She went home and cried herself to sleep, wishing he was there while bathing in relief of his absence. At the same time, however, he was her rock, and with no one to lean on, Catherine was sure to falter.

A week later, things started to escalate at the grocery store. People began to follow the big man. Anything he said, they agreed with. Whatever it took to feel safe.

“It goes like this,” he began, crossing his arms over his broad chest and looking around at the blank, hungry faces in front of him. “We all go scavenging during the day, and we meet here by sundown to share what we got. If you don’t find food, don’t bother comin’, ’cause you won’t get your cut.”

He looked unfortunately like a boar on its hind legs: he had a round disposition, extremely hairy forearms, and small, malicious wild eyes that were the colour of mud. When he started dictating “rules” to the community, no one challenged it. The fight had fled; to have someone declare edicts of any kind was welcome.

Every day she would go to that uprooted grocery store for fear they would hunt her down if she didn’t, and every day it would get worse. Most were becoming paranoid, defensive, vicious. Everyone including their de facto leader.

When their anger and malcontent began to surface, she couldn’t bring herself to conform with them. She knew that going numb and surrendering herself to the flow would be far easier, far more comfortable. She could live her life in the direction they did, and all of them could live in blindness…but that another sickness, one that she was as insusceptible to as the virus. She couldn’t imagine surrendering herself to something so…

She looked up at the faces of the people standing around her now, wondering on their reactions to the big man’s declaration. They all nodded sternly, their faces set with heated militancy. They would have to fight for that food, and they were willing to do it. They felt pitted against the other communities to the south, even though they knew nothing about them, and they all prepared for war. They burned for it. Just something to fight, like they could win back what had been lost.

“What if someone’s hoarding food to themselves?” someone asked. “What do we do?”

“Judgement can be a bitch,” he replied. Her heart dropped a little.

“Please…” he moaned. “For me. For us. We don’t deserve…whatever this is. Please.”

Catherine covered her mouth and turned halfway to the side, trying to fight off the sudden wave of uneasiness and apprehension. “Judgement Day” was a story coming true.

“And if any of those Southbounders start any trouble, we start a call to arms. Enough of this bullshit. They pull any stunts, and it’ll be the end of them.”

She wanted desperately to leave but feared it was more dangerous than staying. Her safety depended on her walking on eggshells, and she found herself dangerously close to losing her balance. She was too scared to live amongst these people, too sane to become so detached from it all.

The big man dismissed them after a few more minutes, and Catherine retreated to her small home, where she ate a sheet of paper towel and cried herself to sleep once again. She needed Dave there. Why had he left her behind? She could see that he had become strung out from the pressure, and he could no longer deal with it. She could no more stay in this place than he could, but she was so afraid to go, like a child afraid to move a muscle in the dark after a bad dream. She thought of Dave as the father she never had, and to have him abandon her…

When she awoke the next morning, she threw up some of her napkin, used the last of the water she had collected from the river to wash her face and rinse her mouth, then started out to look for food. She had to think of a way to leave; the authoritarian disposition gave her a constant fear of her life in every action she took. But she couldn’t as easily run away from them. Not on her own.

With no food gained and no Dave found, she spent the night locked in her house. That was another taboo, locking doors. It was considered foul play and ill-will against the community. They would be coming to inspect her home, just to make sure she wasn’t hoarding supplies for her own, just to make sure she was suffering enough for their satisfaction. She was worried what they would do if they didn’t see her hardship as acceptable to their standards.

Her stomach growled as she sat cross-legged on her bed, waiting for them to come find her. Hers was a child’s room, most likely a boy’s. Posters of cartoon superheros were scattered on the walls, along with crayon sketches of stick people standing next to a house. A mother, a father, a child, a baby. They weren’t here anymore. She found herself staring into those pictures often, imagining they gathered into their crayon-drawn car and drove away into the multicoloured sunset, happy and free from all of this.

She rested her forehead on her drawn-up knees, taking large breaths as the room closed in. It had been dark outside for hours by now, and they would be knocking down her door at any minute—

Her head snapped up when she first heard the distant buzz of shouts and cries. It came from outside, and it was coming closer. A lump grew in the pit of her stomach. She crawled off the bed and approached the front door slowly. Each step was weighted. She gripped the handle with a shaking hand, opening it by a sliver.

From where she stood, she could see clearly out to Thickwood boulevard. There were small fires. People brandishing things in their hands like weapons. She froze behind her door, peering out fearfully at the scene. Whatever it was that they discussed at their nightly meeting had led to their militant desires and blood-thirsty demeanour spilling over. They were not going to have a simple discussion with the people across the river.

Catherine ran around the house, gathering whatever she could find and carry, including a spatula and old newspaper. Her body tingled as she slipped out the back door and crept across the yard, for she began to feel like the wife from “Judgement Day,” and all the people with torches and weapons were no longer people.

She could hear the distant sounds of a struggle, or a preempt to one, coming from the south. Walking quickly and quietly, Catherine sneaked through back alley, then headed up the block to the next road. Making sure no one was around, she darted across the street and headed towards the corner store at the end of the block. She had no hope that there was anything edible left, but she couldn’t leave without trying to scavenge something.

The doors to the small corner store had been shattered long before. She had to carefully duck through the lower gap, making sure not to cut herself on the shattered glass. She ran right to the front counter and tried the hatch to the cigarette display. It snapped up, revealing an entire carton of lighters. She slipped her pack off her shoulders and began to stuff them in by handfuls. Beside the counter was a stand filled with batteries, and she shoved packages of AAs and Ds in frantically as well. All the racks of food were bare, but small trinkets stood like relics on their shelves: aftershave, women’s toiletries, small toys for a dollar, cheap paperbacks. She swept a bit of those off the shelves into her bag too.

She rounded the corner of the last shelf and started toward the back. She stopped dead in her tracks the moment she saw the man standing at the end over the half-eaten body, blood covering everything. His eyes glowed and his teeth gleamed. Her hands lost feeling and she nearly dropped her bag. She almost didn’t run away. The moment he moved, her breath stumbled from her in a scream and she tumbled towards the entrance, pumping her legs as hard as she could.

“Come back here!” he shouted, his voice contorted with the most terrifying sound she had ever heard. He lunged forward, colliding with the half empty battery rack as she ran by it. A blood curdling scream flew past her lips when she felt his hand brush her coat. She scrambled out of the window clumsily and cut through the dishevelled parking lot, heading west down the empty road, not daring to look back over her shoulder to see if the cannibal was chasing her. The only thing she could hear was her feet pounding on the pavement and the blood rushing past her ears.

“Come back HERE!” he shrieked as she tore through the trees near the end of the block. She ran across the empty field, and kept running, even after she had long left the outskirts of Fort McMurray, left the horrible screams and brutalities behind her.