Out - part 1

Some nights Joanne could see the skyline from her window, if she tucked the shutters down just a touch with the tip of her middle finger. But not this night. This night everything, the sky, the shore, the stars darkly hanging as though lightbulbs asking for reinforcements, everything, seemed two shades dimmer than it was supposed to be.

            This, too, was common. The electricity surged in and out and the water would sometimes burst out brown gunk instead of chlorinated clarity. Joanne was lucky to have made her tea before it all went out again. She nursed the steaming cup by the shutters, watched the police lights crackle and swirl along the highway underneath her high-rise. Then, with a tingle of premonition, she reached into her back pocket just before the phone exploded in a violent buzz-ring.
            “Hello?”

            A new voice answered, as though from across a tunnel and not a radio wave. It seemed to be a man, but then, with all the echo Joanne couldn’t quite tell the difference.

            “Foreground Market, Avenue and St. Clair.”

            She shook her head, as though the voice could see her all the way from wherever it sat.

            “There’s nothing there. Just some old houses.”

            “Avenue and St. Clair.”

            “You’re not the usual guy.”

            Static cut the voice off before it could respond. Or maybe the person had hung up. The room was silent again, except for the soft pitter-patter of wind blowing against the shutters through the mesh bug-cover. In the distance the lake rumbled a little, the darkness almost shaking in its blind dance. If there was a single car left moving on the street, it had very good cloaking. The television’s antennae were letting off a low mechanical buzz, and somewhere on a neighbour’s balcony a single wind-chime struck some irrelevant hour. Joanne sighed her contribution to the evening’s jam session before trading her tea for the old leather jacket.

            From the lobby to the narrow steps her rain boots became half-submerged in lake water. The week’s reserve of rain was still dripping dutifully from the eaves of the third-floor balconies, making a sort of water-curtain around the building. Pieces of cardboard debris from the old factory down the street were washing up at her feet in dilapidated clumps of orange-brown mush. Joanne kicked aside a floating board and headed for the Fort.

            The once-sleek metal of the little museum had been covered up in fresh graffiti, and if Joanne were to be honest, it suited the environment much better. Water reserves dripped from the highway above her as she climbed the hill, digging her toes into the mud with satisfying crunches and squishes. A helicopter buzzed far above – must have been one of the Greens on patrol. Joanne pulled the hood of her sweater out from under the jacket anyway. No need to risk being wrong, especially on a clear night. That would just be embarrassing.

            Florence flashed the light before Joanne even reached the crest of the hill. Then every flashing lantern of the Fort blinked all at once, sort of the way Christmas lights sometimes blinked in and out in rhythm to carols. That was their new way of cloaking, she supposed – to that helicopter it would like just another power surge. But not everything at the Fort was as diligent as all that. Joanne walked right through the gate, no questions, no passwords, nothing asked of her. The fellow on duty in the visitor’s centre must have fallen asleep. She trudged through more mud, puddles deeper and deeper, but at least cardboard-free, toward the second barracks on the right. Florence was already holding a door open for her.

            Joanne flashed a grin and nodded her thanks as she slinked in through the doorway. Only once Florence shut the door did the sulfur lamp come alive once more to fill the entire room with bright white light. Florence leaned over the lamp to dim it a little.

            “You look pretty,” said Joanne, “Got a date tonight?”

            Florence shot her a smirk.

            “I found some eye-liner,” she said, “wanted to see if I still knew how to use it.”

            “Well, that you do.” The machinery was covered up with cardboard boxes and canvas bags, mickey-mouse blankets, old copies of The Globe and Mail, and somebody’s red velvet curtains. It seemed pretty conspicuous to Joanne, but then, without a search warrant, any Blues that came by the Fort wouldn’t be able to enter past the door, and what they couldn’t see directly, they couldn’t prosecute. Joanne moved to lift up a blanket branded with Mickey and Minnie in a chaste embrace.

            “Wait a sec,” said Florence, swooping in from behind to fix up something below the bunch. From her angle, Joanne could only see a couple of buttons and a flash of the metal that encompassed everything below the cover-stack.  “Okay, go ahead.”

            The blanket tore away with a dusty flick, and Joanne tucked it over a cardboard box off to the side. The machinery was buzzing red and yellow lights across a narrow screen. Something from the 90s. Truth was, the only computers you could get since the floods were the oldest ones. Florence and her friends had raided some old internet café on Spadina the moment they realized the power was going to stay surging. And good on them. Labs with laptops were the first the Blues discovered. Something about GPS signals. Still, Florence’s monster-mainframe wasn’t the most efficient of trackers. Sometimes Joanne thought it might be worthwhile to risk a laptop just to cut their wait-times by half. The little screen now rolled out “REBOOT REQUIRED” in pixelated letters. Damned thing. Joanne held the start button until the lights blinked on and off. It would take another minute before the system rebooted.

            “Didn’t have this ready for me,” she said. Florence shrugged.

            “Wasn’t expecting you at three in the morning.”

            “Yeah, well, you saw me coming up the hill.”

            “I was on tumblr.”

            Joanne rolled her eyes. “Is the bike ready, at least?”

            With a mock-elegant reach of her arm, Florence indicated the makeshift closet door. Joanne had visited the Fort maybe twice before the floods, so she hadn’t a clue what the room had actually been. Perhaps a storage space for un-displayed muskets, or a janitor’s closet. In any case, now it was a little garage for their travel gear.

            There it was, the little jumbled mix of a bicycle and a jet ski, with a small soft-seat and muffled engine, and handles like a jet ski, but three motorbike wheels that could release down from the front and sides to glide forward on land. They weren’t any use downtown, nor much good once you got into the boggy wasteland past Eglinton, but in that useless unflooded expanse north of Dupont, those wheels would get her around any street that had any semblance of paving left.

            “Ah,” said Florence out in the main barracks. “It’s on.”

            Joanne tugged the bike out of the closet, into the middle of the room right under the sulfur lamp. Last time she’d used it had been maybe a month ago, and that was before the mudslide. If she was to have any chance of getting up Davenport hill, the bike had to be cleaner than any whistle had ever been.

            “How are you getting internet?” said Joanne, crouching down to examine the bike’s tubing. Florence was busy typing something away on the retro keyboard.

            “Hmm?”

            “I said, how come you’ve got internet? To go on tumblr?”

            “Oh. I cached some pages when we got that info-surge last week.”

            Joanne reached for a pipe-cleaner in her back pocket. Oddly enough, they’d turned out to be the most useful gadgets for post-flood survival. She looked at Florence’s back.

“That’s actually pretty smart.”

            Florence glanced back, swiped away some of the black fly-aways from her eyes. She did look damn great, even in the sulfur light.

            “I’m not just a pretty face, you know.”

            Joanne just shook her head and smiled.

            “If I actually rolled my eyes every time I wanted to, around you, Florence, I’d need correctional eye surgery.”

            A few shoves in, the pipe-cleaner was coming out covered in black mud, stuff that looked sort of like molasses except Joanne had no interest in tasting it. Florence’s machine was making happy beeps.

            “What’s the locus?” she asked. Lacking a proper cloth, Joanne wiped the pipe-gunk off on the bike’s rubber bottom.

            “Some place called the Foreground Market, Avenue and St. Clair.”

            “But there’s nothing there.”

            “I know.”

            “Are you sure you heard it right?”

            Joanne shot her a glare. Up went Florence’s hands in mock fear.

            “Okay, okay, Avenue and St. Clair, I got it.” And she went back to punching buttons. Soon the machine made a processing gurgle, the abdomen of the mainframe shaking a little under its velvet curtain. The bike was prepped within six minutes, just about the same time as the mainframe dinosaur gave its go-ahead beep. The bike switched on with ease, the mufflers reducing its engine noise to a low buzz that could be easily mistaken for a malfunctioning refrigerator. Power surges masked everything these days.

            “Don’t forget your helmet,” Florence brought up the motorbike helmet they kept in storage in one of the darker corners. It smelled like dust.

            “You’re too good to me,” said Joanne. Florence punched back with a light fist to the shoulder as they lifted the bike through the back door together. The sulfur light shut off automatically as soon as they began to push it open. Florence stood leaning against the doorway, lit now only by the stars and the flicker of one streetlight on the Gardiner, as Joanne got her gear on and settled into the bike.

            “Hey Jo. Be careful out there.”

            Joanne lifted up her visor to blow Florence a kiss.

            “Be back in a jiffy.”

            She’d never been much of a biker before the floods, always quicker with her metropass than with any pedals. But now, swerving between posts and rotting bushes across the river of railway tracks, Joanne felt the adrenaline the city’s cyclists must have felt when they wound through traffic at steady clips. She’d gotten better at it, too, since the first time she’d ridden it. No more stopping at every turn, no more slowing down to face the transition from water to muddy ground.

            It wasn’t safe to have lights on her ski-bike, which made the journey all the more treacherous. Under the cover of night all sorts of things emerged: the delivery trucks, swimming across the Queen St. canal, the mail drones sending letters from home to home, even the occasional person wading their way through the debris to get somewhere. Turning her speed down to 20 km/h on the handle-dial, Joanne took her time along the narrower streets. She took alleys when she could, as they tended to be just as flooded but not as littered with stopped cars and sneaking people. When she got to Avenue, Joanne hit the gas.

            Trees, mailboxes, the remnants of the parliament buildings, lampposts, torn-out books from the university libraries, all sorts of things floated about in the flood. She’d seen them before. But now Queen’s Park was also covered in a thick layer of mud, black in the lack of light, and Joanne had to switch her wheels down rapidly to gain some traction across the new terrain. The mud was thick and wet, and her wheels seemed to be doing much less than the flat bottom of the jet ski itself.  It’d be another twenty minutes, at this rate, to Avenue and St. Clair. Up the mudslide hill and into the wilderness.

            She’d been at work when the flooding started, sitting in on a meeting on the fourteenth floor of the BMO tower. It was raining so hard the windows looked just about ripe to shatter, but whoever had put them in must have predicted larger storms than this. Now that tower was hardly half its former size, sticking up against the silver backlight of the stars like an amputated thumb. The office buildings had been the first to be raided for all useful material, but BMO was the only one to suffer a bomb-strike. Joanne still didn’t know who had done it or why, but from whispers here and there it was supposed to be the doing of some ultra-left group seeking justice for the economic crises. Not that the explosion would do anyone any good. There hadn’t been anyone in the building, and it’s not like the stock market was a reality anymore. But idiots were idiots, even in the apocalypse.

            Joanne was almost glad the floods had happened. Truth be told, she wasn’t a very good financier. She wasn’t a very good anything in the age of instant messaging and vocal recognition. She was good at driving. But driving had always seemed a couple rungs beneath her. She was good at sneaking, but that was only useful in laser tag. She’d considered applying to CSIS, but then, the paperwork and hidden identity crap turned her right off. Plus the paychecks weren’t that shiny. What use was being a spy if you couldn’t go to Ecuador on pleasure once a year and keep up an apartment with a view?

            Now all questions of Ecuador had gone right out the window, along with the window itself. Her apartment was hardly a shadow of the impeccably arranged Ikea-catalogue beauty it had once been. But the thing was, Joanne was still really good at driving. Albeit on a jet ski rather than a zipcar. And she was still as stealthy as hell. Much more useful in a wasteland than a corporate web.

            The freaky ROM crystal was covered in branches, mud, newspapers, some of the glass fractured from flying bricks. It’d been robbed through and through, although what people could do with mummy bones and precious gems in this economy was beyond Joanne. The crystal kind of fit in now, she found herself thinking, finally it was appropriate for its surroundings. It sort of reminded her of a newborn robot-tumor baby coming out of its flood-mama still covered in muddy uterus fluids.

            Just at the bottom of the hill, on Avenue and Davenport, the major mudslide path was so thick that Joanne’s wheels got stuck hardly a metre in. The jet ski function was of no use, either. She had to get off and walk it. And it was good timing, too, because the moment she dismounted the bike, a helicopter on patrol whizzed right along the length of Avenue, shining its great beacon light through the mud and ruins. Joanne ducked behind the brick fence of a nearby house, leaving her bike to sink inch by inch into the dirt.

            “Shit.”

            It was going to require more than a pipe cleaner to get that machine back up and working, and it was a long way down the hill without a motor to run her across the water. Florence was going to kill her.

            But not if the Blues killed her first. In the beginning, in the first flood days, when the Blues and Greens had made themselves prominent as a unified coalition party, their helicopters had been distinct from one another. The Greens flew bright green machines, the Blues flew purple ones. But as time wore on and their feeble alliance disintegrated, their machines too became old and useless. As was the plight of all technology these days, every electrical thing aging before its time. So the parties began stealing the operational helicopters from each other. Now, you could never tell who it was shining the beacon into your face – the party that would send you away for testing or the party that would euthanize you on the spot.

            Joanne used to think they’d be okay, that the technological shutdown was just temporary, and sure the flooding was bad, but someone would come and clean it up. They always had before. There’d been storms worse than this one, storms with ice and snow that toppled all the trees and shut off power in most of the city. But the worst thing about the floods wasn’t the natural disaster. It was the people. The coalition had declared a state of emergency, of course, as soon as the gravity of the situation became apparent. The military came in with glorified buckets to drain water into the lake. The city, everything, came to a halt. No more traffic, no more TTC, no more anyone working.

            That first day of emergency state, Joanne had realized she was out of tomatoes. So she went out to get some at the local grocery store. No big deal, there’d been emergency states before. Things were still open. Tomatoes were still ripe. But that day everything was closed. The tomatoes shut away behind metal bars and a “back in 20” sign. No one was coming back, though – not in twenty minutes, not in twenty hours. Not in twenty years. That shop was raided maybe two days later, all the tomatoes half-wilted by then from the lack of refrigeration.

            The patrol was disappeared over the financial district. Joanne snuck back onto the road, where her bike was sunken to the handles into the mud. Her own legs stuck deep into the grime as she tried to wade through as fast as possible. In some places, were there was more water, her legs pushed ahead without too much resistance. But some parts had managed to dry in the short hours since the last rainfall, and there she had to lift her knees up to her chest in order to keep going. She should have hired that personal trainer when she had the chance. But, then again, what better motivation to get ripped than the struggle for survival?

            The jet ski wasn’t going anywhere. She tugged and pulled at it, heaved from side to side, even tried to shovel some mud from around its sides with her hands. No luck.

            “Shit, shit, shit.”

            She could already hear Florence yelling at her in her brutally logical, quiet way. That girl had some serious guilt-tripping talent, because any time Joanne came back with a smaller load than she ought, or damaged tech, or a wound, Florence would sit her down, with bright understanding eyes, and pour out such a lecture that no matter how necessary Joanne’s mistake had been, she would always wind up apologizing on the brink of tears.

            Those tears would have to wait until after she reached the market. Joanne shot a final glance at the dead jet ski in the mud, then reached forward and began to climb the hill. She tried walking upright at first, but quickly realized it was much easier to use her hands for extra grip, and push off with her legs to propel herself across the mud instead of into it. She must have looked like an ape, but at least an ape that was getting somewhere.

            Avenue and St. Clair came into view, boasting no more architecture than she had expected. It was empty, always had been, except for a few houses and the sharp spear-poles that had once held up traffic lights. A broken streetcar stood right in the middle of the intersection, its windows smashed in and wires fallen in a tangle onto its roof.

            “Foreground… foreground. Where the fuck is that supposed to be?”