Chaos Calling, page 7
“Ma’am, Lakeshore is closed.” To her dismay, she doesn’t recognize the officer, a white woman stern enough to be one of her Irish aunts. What Anna glimpses of her weathered expression is exhausted but firm as she flashes her Maglite into the car. Anna flinches as the beam passes over her face, struggling to retain her composure in its glare. “Where are you headed?”
“My sister’s,” she lies, waiting for the demand to produce her license. “King and Yonge.”
The woman winces. “Turn around and go home, ma’am. You won’t be able to get anywhere near that intersection. There’s a police line from University Avenue to Church Street and from Front Street to Dundas Street. It’s all closed off.”
“But she called me,” Anna pleads. “She’s got two little kids. Please, I need to find them.” Putting fear into her voice isn’t hard. At the same time, part of her desperately wants to confess her ludicrous plan. Then the police officer will laugh and send her home to Malcolm with firm orders to stay inside.
“Go home, ma’am.” The officer sniffs sharply, her face wrinkling in suspicion. Eyes the colour of slate search hers. “Have you been drinking this evening?”
That stupid glass of champagne. “No,” Anna lies. The officer’s frown deepens. I only had one! Frantic, Anna grasps for the best excuse she can think of as she tries to breathe through her nose. “I’m nine weeks pregnant.”
The officer exhales and stoops lower, her face filling the window and Anna’s field of view. Crow’s feet sit heavy around her eyes, and her thin lips droop with weariness. She smells like sweat and cigars. “Listen to me.” The firmness remains, but it’s tempered with sympathy that feels genuine. “There’s nothing you can do for your sister. She and her kids are probably safe at one of the shelters. What you can do is go home and protect that baby. You’re going to need a good reason for happiness, trust me.”
Despite the possible champagne smell on her breath, Anna can’t stop herself from leaning forward. “What happened?” she whispers, putting her hand on the woman’s, half knowing the answer. “Please tell me what’s going on. I . . . I’m scared.”
There’s a flash of something in the corner of Anna’s eye and perhaps the faintest pulse of blue before the officer pulls her hand away, shaking her head. She’s going to order me out of the car. Malcolm will be livid if I get busted for drinking and driving. But the woman says, “Look over there. The skyline, see? Look at the condo building near the Scotiabank Tower.”
Anna follows her gesturing hand and gasps. The building’s top floors are gone.
“And those two, there. Whole floors blown apart like they never were.”
Oh no. Anna remembers the propane shard in the garage with its razor-sharp edges. At once, the immensity of the task she’s set for herself rolls over her like a tsunami.
But the officer isn’t finished. “The dispatchers are saying crazy things on the radio, like five hundred people dead. That it’s aliens. Maybe they’re right.” She pauses, fidgeting with the weatherstripping at the base of the car window. Anna smells fear, sudden and spiky, and realizes the older woman craves reassurance as badly as she does.
“I saw something,” the officer says, her voice quavering. “Three things, long and orange, rose from the base of those same towers. They went south across the lake ten minutes ago.”
Anna shivers as the hair on the back of her neck stands up.
“They were bright, like the sun.” The woman exhales a shaky breath and seems to remember Anna. “You want no part of this. Go home now. Promise me you will.”
Anna tries to smile as fresh bile threatens to climb up her throat. She coughs. The officer frowns. The name tag on the woman’s uniform says B. Edwards. “I will, Officer. Thank you.”
The expression on Edwards’s face shifts. She stares at Anna like something doesn’t wash, her uneven eyebrows drawing together over her bold nose. Dave says cops are the most skeptical people alive. With his adoptive father on the force, he knew the truth of that long before she did. No one gives the hairy eyeball of doubt like Police Chief Henry Montcalm, but this woman could give him a run for his money. They assume everyone’s lying. And right now, you are.
Edwards, however, doesn’t stop Anna from rolling up the window. “You take care,” the officer orders, stepping back. She eyes Anna as she makes an illegal left onto Spadina. Heart hammering, Anna drives up a small rise and into the heart of Toronto’s condo forest.
Sporadic crowds roam the street, slowing her down. There’s a heavy police presence here, too; it looks like Edwards was wrong and they’re starting to push the perimeter farther west. Anna turns left on a side street and finds a parking spot to ditch the car. She’ll have to go the rest of the way on foot. What about Tim and Erin? she thinks, unbuckling her seatbelt. What happens to them and to Malcolm if you open this box again? Listen to Edwards. Go home.
Oh, shut the fuck up, Anna tells herself, smothering her fear. She roots around in the back seat. One of her mother’s scarves is tucked inside a box of books from their house. Anna wets it with the dregs of a water bottle and ties it around her mouth to mitigate the smoke. She locks the car and trots back to Spadina Avenue, pulling her hoodie up to cover her hair.
Smoke and sirens fill the air as Anna moves through the crowd. She’s not the only person wearing a makeshift mask. Why are so many people standing around? She spots fussing children here and there. Other adults stand texting on their phones, occasionally lifting their devices high above the sea of heads to take a photo. Some seem excited. Edwards said there were casualties. Why aren’t people panicking? She spots a few clusters of people heading west laden with backpacks, pushing strollers, and pulling suitcases, but they’re the outliers. The rest of the crowd shifts eagerly, as though keen for answers. They don’t know they need to run.
Ignore them. Anna walks briskly, her shoulders back and her chin up. She reaches for xhen, letting her awareness of it suffuse her posture like invisible armor. She’s used this trick of presumed purpose to breeze backstage at concerts, sneak into movie theatres with no ticket and, as an adult, confidently enter tense negotiations on behalf of her clients. It works equally well now. The security contractors assembling the fence don’t look at her. Neither do the three nearest police officers.
Anna makes for the SkyDome stadium’s south end, moving quickly past the strip of restaurants, bars, and service shops that cater to both visiting sports fans and the local condo population. Don’t stop. There are low buildings on the other side of the SkyDome, near that train museum. I’ll have a good view of the sky there. She moves forward, certain that she’ll need that advantage when the creatures return. If they come back. And what if you’re right? What then?
An echo of joy courses through her body as she pauses across from the SkyDome’s ninth gate. Despite the anxiety twisting her guts, Anna grins and stands tall. I destroy them.
As though in answer to her bravado, the small of her back begins to burn. The pain is so sudden that she cries out, reaching with both hands to brace against its sharpness. In unison, a pair of police officers closer to the gate turns to look at Anna. The shorter man moves toward her, a host of questions plain on his face. But as dread dries her mouth to the consistency of moldy bread, instinct makes Anna whip her head south.
Three orange shapes streak through the night, moving fast over the lake and straight toward her. Massive is the only word for them: They’re ten times bigger than the thing in her garage. Was it a baby?! Overwhelmed, she half turns to head back to her car. I can’t do this!
And then the creatures scream.
The sound travels all the way down to the balls of Anna’s feet, making every muscle quiver. Blinding pain fills her head. Her stomach is a giant knot of fear.
How dare you be scared! You want to spend the rest of your life wondering? Her children’s faces swim before her eyes. She thinks of them and of the other children in her city who must be terrified. Then she shoves those thoughts away. It’s your time. Go prove you’re right.
Light pulses around Anna’s body as her invisible armor seeps up through her clothes and skin to form a shining wall. Gooseflesh ripples over her back and down her legs as adrenaline floods her limbs. The pain recedes, leaving her keenly alert and alive to her new purpose.
The creatures scream a second time. A pale, slender tentacle shoots out of each of their open mouths as orange light flashes around their bodies, brightening the sky with a rancid glow.
Behind her, the SkyDome’s glass-and-metal gate explodes.
Chapter 8
Dave — Purpose
Miinikaa First Nation, ON: Tuesday, August 19
Dave bolts upright in his bed, blood pounding in his ears. He gasps, his heart thundering in his chest as though he’s just run a mile, not awoken in the dead of night in a cold sweat. An artificial chill gusts down his clammy back from the air-conditioning vent in the ceiling above his bed. He falls back against the pillow, which is too soft for his liking, and waits for his brain to catch up and the panicky feeling of nightmare to subside.
Red minutes tick past on his bedside clock: 1:15. 1:18. 1:20. None of his feelings subside.
Heart attack? After his illness, it’s an instinctual fear. He doesn’t wear a heart monitor at night anymore. Hasn’t in over a year. Dave focuses on his body. There’s no telltale tightening or tingling numbness in his arms. That’s not it. He continues to breathe hard in the darkness, sweating. Then his stomach begins to clench. Shit, am I going to puke? He sits up again, willing his head to stop pounding. Did I drink too much?
He reruns the evening. After the workshop ended and they’d reset the classroom for the next morning, he’d walked over to Rockcliffe Bar for dinner with Leona, her boyfriend Ryan Charron, and the teaching assistants. He clearly recalls talking through the day’s wins and losses, and the delight on their smiling faces as they toasted their students’ progress. I only had one beer.
What the hell is wrong with me?
As though in answer, his back begins to burn, way down to either side of his kidneys. His next thought is instantaneous: Anna. Jason. Something’s wrong. Something’s really fucking wrong.
He’s out of bed before the decision to get up fully solidifies. He struggles back into his discarded jeans and pulls a hoodie over his head. He grabs his car keys and wallet, cramming them into his pockets with his phone and charging cable. Dave scans the room, a monument to his childhood visits to see Auntie Lee. It’s still decorated with posters marking each of his boyhood obsessions: Star Wars, Voltron, Akira, and the Valoi Knights. Satisfied that he’s got everything essential, Dave crosses the room in two long steps. He opens the door, carefully avoiding the squeaky floorboard because even in her sixties, Leona’s got the ears of a bat, and—
—he’s dashing along a dirt road. Ahead, lights flash in the night. Birch and pine trees sway in the wind, their leaves rustling. Three Ontario Provincial Police cars are pulled to the side of the road. There’s an ambulance, too, its red and white lights beating a steady strobe pattern against the murky green of the trees. Somewhere, a baby wails. Oh no. Please, no.
He runs in time to the flashing—red, white, red, white, red, white—like the world makes sense, like there’s still order in it. His gloves drop from his hands—he distinctly hears the soft thud as they fall—but he doesn’t stop to pick them up because he’s running, running, running toward the brown Buick in the ditch on the side of the road.
“Rose!” he’s screaming in a voice high and shrill. “Rose! Rose!”
Sobbing, he runs along the hard-packed dirt, his breath fiery hot in his chest. Sharp pains stab up through his legs, but it doesn’t matter, none of that matters, because coming around the edge of the ambulance, he sees the front of the Buick, its hood smashed against the side of the ditch like crumpled brown paper, and the figure slumped over the steering wheel, the end of a long black braid hanging out of the open driver’s door.
“ROSE!” Rage, regret, and sorrow ignite an incomprehensible pain in his chest. He drops to his knees, sobbing into his dirt-stained hands as his silver bracelets rattle. Cops cluster around him with their blankly uniform white faces, embarrassed by the rawness of his grief. The baby wails a second time as he looks up—
—and Dave blinks at the familiar cream walls and thick carpet of his aunt’s upstairs hallway, dim in the glow of the nightlight she leaves on when he stays with her. Rose. The name ripples through his mind, spreading strange eddies that don’t belong to him, of pine and gasoline and a policeman’s completely unsympathetic voice demanding to see identification.
My birth mother’s name was Rose. Rose LaRoque. Dave staggers to his feet in the hallway as though shifting himself free of something heavy and not fully his . . . a dream? More of a nightmare than a dream, but that’s not right, either . . . a memory? What the hell is going on?
Fresh burning spreads up his spine as xhen’s long-dormant warning system pulses back to life, as clear and insistent as the rebooting chime of his laptop. Annie, he thinks, as urgent fear surges through him. Annie’s in danger, not Rose. She’s my sister. And she needs me. Now.
“David?”
He freezes in the hallway. “Auntie Lee?” Without waiting for permission, Dave takes a step, pushes open the door to her bedroom, and—
—he’s getting up from the dirt to take the squalling baby into his arms. The child’s dark head is searing hot against his cheek, the black hair slick with something wet. For a horrible moment, he fears it’s blood before realizing that the baby is sweating, the warmth nothing more dangerous than the heat of tears. No cuts or bruises mark the perfect little brown body. He takes the child into his arms and clutches his nephew, crying tears of relief and sorrow into his glossy hair as one of the cops wraps them in a blanket and he—
—meets Leona’s eyes. She’s sitting straight up in her bed just as he had only moments before. There’s no one else in the room; Dave’s allergic to Ryan’s dogs, so Ryan stays at his own house when Dave’s in town. In the glow of the porch light leaking in her window, Leona’s eyes gleam like a cat’s, bright with unshed tears.
The baby is me, he thinks numbly, staring into her strong face framed by salt-and-pepper hair, unable to speak. Warning pulses through his back a third time, accompanied by the fierce desire to go south. The baby is me on the night my mom died. That was her body I saw in the car. And I . . . I was you. What the fuck is wrong with me?
“Nothing’s wrong with you, David.” His aunt’s dry voice cracks around the edges. She clicks on the bedside light, flooding the room with normalcy. “It’s happening again, that’s all.”
What? What do you mean, it’s happen—
“Your back is burning,” she says, and he drops a hand to his hip, stunned. “Mine, too. Not as strongly as yours, I expect, but I remember. They’re coming.” She gets out of bed with surprising fluidity for a woman of sixty-five with a history of arthritis and takes his hands in hers. Her skin is warm, and the ache in Dave’s back eases as she touches him. “Piiche, listen to me,” she says. She’d named him in Anishinaabemowin for the robins that came and went with the seasons the first time his adoptive parents dropped him off to stay with her for the summer. He’d been eight in July 1987, and just beginning his yearly migrations from Toronto to Miinikaa. “You’re speaking to me with your mind, not your lips.”
Hardly daring to breathe, Dave lifts a hand, so much bigger now than hers, to take her palm. Bracing himself, he lifts it against his own cheek. Her nightmare is there: the flashing cars and the ditch and the white sheet and the wriggling, terrified baby in her arms. Only this time, the grief is washed through with love, so much love for him and his mother that his heart would drown if he were to carry it. “Auntie Lee.” He could stand there until the world ends and it wouldn’t be long enough to absorb what she’s only begun to explain. “How did you—”
“Later. You need to head south.” She grants him a wry smile as she pulls away and puts on her housecoat. “I remember what the pull of a triad feels like. Easier to swim against a current in a thunderstorm as fight that. One of Mei’s twins needs you. Anna, I expect, unless Jason’s come home again.”
“You know about them?” He turns to face her, stunned, as more nighttime memories flood his mind. These, however, are his own: running through the dark with the Lin twins for two and a half crazy years before their training with xhen came to a crashing end. But I wasn’t telepathic then, not by any stretch. Why can I hear thoughts now?
“David.” His aunt smiles. “Chun-Mei Lin and I knew before you were born. Why else would I have let her arrange for the Montcalms to adopt you after we lost Rose?”
A fresh wave of cold sweat breaks over Dave’s skin as he gapes at his aunt, completely thunderstruck. Ignoring his shock, Leona bustles him into the hall and the washroom, telling him to pee as though he’s still eight years old. By the time he’s flushed, washed his hands, brushed his teeth, and gone downstairs, his shock has worn off, but not his wonder. What else does she know? Did Rose know about me, too?
Those questions and more simmer on his tongue as Dave enters the kitchen. There’s a coffee thermos waiting for him on the counter beside a bag of trail mix. “Miigwech, Auntie,” he says automatically, picking up the thermos and tucking the bag into the pocket of his hoodie. Another wave of urgent heat rolls up his back. It takes all his will to stand there instead of bolting for his truck. “But why didn’t you tell me before—”
“What’s coming won’t wait,” she says. “I’ll make your excuses at the workshop. Take care not to speed. You don’t want to be pulled over.” Her smile turns soft. “Give Kalos my regards. Tell him it’s been too long.”
Dave staggers. “You know him, too?” It’s too much. His heart begins to pound again.
Smiling, Leona stands on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. “Go.” With one last bear hug, Dave leaves the house. He dashes across the lawn toward his truck, which is parked on the street.
