The Longest Night by K.M. Gibson Page B

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.
     
    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 around Fort McMurray. Mostly 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. It was believed the RCMP shed their uniforms for civvies and settled there. Rumours of their hostility and danger began to spread easily, and everyone absorbed the stories, shaping them, 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 he 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 she got out of bed to peek through the crack of her door to find him tearing the wallpaper from the walls. 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 that she was wary of him and he 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.
    She inched to the door and called 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 of the hallway, and it lay crumpled on the floor. She stepped through it to his bedroom and opened the door. He wasn’t there either.
    She 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 away from others, mostly 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 she considered safe to approach hadn’t seen him either. As the sun sank from the sky, her hope went with it. She went home and cried herself to sleep, wishing he was there while bathing in relief of his absence. Still, he was her anchor, and with no one to lean on, Catherine was sure to falter.
     
    A week later, things started to escalate