wildcat

The police explained to the little girl that her father was killed by a freak swarm of rare, poison-winged butterflies; one hundred and four of them caught, counted, and mounted less than two hours after his death was reported. The hero was a two-fisted entomologist and the villain cruel Mother Nature. The girl was raised by a pair of maiden aunts who tutored her in their crumbling mansion until she left—inspired by the entomologist, she went in pursuit of a lost city of intelligent fire ants last seen in Brazil. One of the aunts died from Malaria and the other from despair. The girl made all the scientific journals and taught at Harvard for several years—her further adventures popularized in a series of novels written by a distant cousin she'd met in passing one summer night, at her aunts' mansion. There had been a party, and he'd been too forward. She'd slapped him and they never spoke again. The royalty cheques were always returned to his publisher, unopened.

He kept his head down as he passed the alley—a pack of Greys over by the trashcans, huffing low-quality space-gas from origami packets that crumpled in their delicate three-fingered hands. Space-gas wasn't going to help him. Maybe he make a few bucks off the Greys, let him probe his ass up against a wall for five bucks a pop. Their invasion was already a bust and they probed because that was all they were trained to do—a repetitive action that made them feel briefly normal under the scorching sunlight. He could relate, maybe, hovering around the mouth of the alley and scraping at the scab on his forehead with a thumbnail.

The white reindeer twinkles wire mesh fiasco with a motorized head that pivots with the doggedness of a crack addict under the binge fluorescent lighting. The Box Store has us, caught between cardboard bins piled with plush penguins in Santa hats. I knock the goddamn reindeer out of your hands and try to dissuade you with stories of cats gobbling fallen tinsel and shitting glittery death pellets into people's coffee, or worse. "Bowel obstructions," I shout and wave my arms while you paw at garlands. No dice. There is no War on Christmas, this year, because Christmas has already beaten us—a shambling nightmare Christmas drawn like a death masque across the failing, diabetic economy. Christmas this year looks like it's been shot in the head but it's still coming. "We'll do stockings, you bastard," I say. "That will be my one allowance for this atrocity!"

1. Don't Talk to Me.

She dressed like a mime to avoid talking to people. She applied makeup, found an black unitard and white gloves. Shuffled like she was inside an invisible box if someone—like canvassers on corners—called to her. She spotted the other mime capering around the Living Statue—noticed him following her but never catching up. Maybe thinking she was a kindred spirit. He kept scaling her damn invisible walls.

2. Instructions.

Difficult to speak tongues all day and pretend the Lord's in your throat. Gibberish must be divine but inconsistent—no pattern if possible, but humans are repetitive. Gaze should be glassy yet fixed, otherwise people will come to you for spiritual guidance. Keep your foot tapping beside the collection plate and Mary Magdalene between your legs—scrub her ceramic with your fingers to keep the warm. Props are important.

3. Valid Criticism.

The argument isn't rehearsed—they stood at the bus stop, shouting at each other. He worried, meeting her in a parkade after storming off in separate directions, that the dialogue was too Neil Simon. "When you insult my mother, is it a big mother-in-law cliché?" She wanted to tell him his mother once threatened to poke her eyes out with a meat skewer. Maybe in the rewrites.

Rainclouds seeded with the week's stale antitoxins and a headless body clogging the storm drain. For this he dragged his ass out of bed at three in the morning? Everything's washed with sodium-yellow and the icy shit-water sluicing past means Carmine can't feel his feet. Mandrake's doing the dirty work, kneeling by the body to pick at it with her blue-condomed hands. "I trust you've had your shots," she says—the city's unofficial slogan, delivered with the cool detachment of someone who will never ever feel the cold. She was probably already out when the call came through, hunting nuns from Our Lady of the Grinning Epidemic into the wee hours.

"Do I even want to know?" The way the body's legs are jammed right into the vomit-crusted grate, the way the ass bobs up and down in the water, Carmine can already guess. If he was a rookie he'd be planning to skip breakfast, but even with the way things are he's picturing a bowl of hot udon and Mama's meatballs on the side. Mandrake straightens up and stands, like ceramic tiles brushing over each other. She snaps off the latex gloves and tosses them in the drink. "Tell me it's a serial killer. Tell me that's a saw wound."

Only, her response runs like, "Judging by the pustules along the neckline..." She stops, because there's no need to continue. Fuck. The city doesn't need another Walker outbreak. He doesn't need another outbreak—he remembers quite well what it looks like when you're landlord stops in the middle of shaking you down for the rent to let his head bud off in a squealing eruption before it scurries down the damn hallway on freshly formed finger-feet. The last of the great space-plagues to sputter upon the Earth. "One hopes the head drowned and didn't have the chance to spread anything."

"Fat chance." You can hope for a lot of things around here—that maybe it's nothing more serious eyelash fever or that tumour on your lungs will develop meta-cancer and die off. Hope is a wet, phlegmy cough first thing in the damn morning. "They're persistent little survivalist bastards and they don't breathe." Carmine hasn't taken his hands out of the pockets of his coat, even coming down the near-sheer embankment, but he squelches down the urge to massage his temples about the same time he surpresses a yawn. He was promised a full night's sleep and now he's staring down at a possible outbreak, which means mandatory headhunter duty—which he knows from experience does shit-all to your sex life, thanks. Hanging out the gutter waiting for the head of some housewife or city official to spider by so you can harpoon it and get blistered brain-bits all over your shoes. "This whole section needs to be sterilized, now." Up to his ankles in human waste and there's a walker out there. "Instead of a leisurely shower listening to music and massaging shampoo into my scalp, I get an hour of decontamination scrubbing with Doctor Cream leering at my damn ass the whole time." Carmine gives up and fishes his phone out of his pocket, splashing around in the slush until he's got more than a bar's worth of signal—must be some router-rats swarming through nearby tunnels—to fire off a text to Central so they can send in the clean-up crews. He scrapes rainwater out of his eyes and diluted snot from the end of his nose.

"I'll see to it they erect statues in your honour." Ugh. Perhaps creepier than the idea that some nameless fucker's infected noggin's making the rounds is Mandrake saying something that sounds passably like sarcasm.

Slush on the streets and telephone poles. Easy to forget sometimes, that people still use land-lines, that it's not all cell towers and wireless signal. "Who's going to save my soul now?" In the old days, people stood on street corners and espoused religions. Now they ask who's coming to save them. Ask them for pamphlets and they ask you if you've got anything to show them. Earnestly—not a come on, no eyebrows arched in the direction of the nearest alleyway. "There's nothing left to peddle," say the drug dealers while they ask passers-by for any gum or pain-killers that happen to jostle to and fro in their pockets and purses. "I'll do your taxes for you," calls one of them, one of the old dealers, trying to fill up a basketball with a bicycle pump up until a car swings by and splashes him with brown snow and muck. What was the name of that guy who was supposed to come save us? "You talking about Ted? I think he's got a blog these days."