Great Big Teeth Read online

  “Hello, is anybody there?” she called out, added to herself, “Am I anywhere?”

  6

  Tuesday, April 29, 2019: 10:19AM

  The ambulance was eight minutes gone. The highway patrol arrived after the mess was already over. “Okay, you, you’re the one?”

  Peter West sat alone at the front of the classroom, hands between his thighs, face flu pale, and feet jittering, rubber of his soles squeaking. The other students of the class were out of the room, headed uptown to be away from the scene. Rob Hill was a sequence of mounds beneath a fire blanket, the rifle he used to fire on Juliet Snyder and Becky McLeod lay next to him. Halfway between the body and the chalkboard was the bloody shotput shot.

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened, from the beginning?” The cop was middle-aged, fat and balding. His hat was on the desk where he leaned, had a legal pad perched on his knee.

  “Like from when I got him?”

  “No, from the start. Why were you out of class?”

  “Oh.” Peter rubbed his palms on his legs and stilled the jitters for a couple moments before they started anew. He kept his eyes pinned on a trail of blood. “So Missus Wabigone said she was going to teach us about gravity and needed a shot—as in shotput shot—from the gym storage. I got the best score on the quiz yesterday because I was the only one to get everything and the bonus question. But it wasn’t fair. My dad is a fisherman and took me and Mom out only just three weeks ago. I got to skip and we went out and down to Prince Rupert and Haida Gwaii, learned lots about whales and the question was, name three types of whales off the coast, like the BC part I mean.”

  “What’d you write?” The cop was in no rush to get this wrong. He’d never seen violence like this and wasn’t aiming to screw it up. So patience.

  “Orcas and humpbacks, everybody got those, but I also put minke whales, they’re pointier whales, I saw a fin of one and a pod of orcas, but no humpbacks, they’re more regular down closer to Vancouver, I guess.”

  “Lucky. I’ve always wanted to go to Haida Gwaii. Maybe see a spirit bear. You know about spirit bears?”

  “Sure. Didn’t see none though. The tour lady said they knew where there are two, for sure, but they don’t want to get in their habitat too much on account of how rare they are.”

  “Of course. So your dad took you fishing off the—”

  “No. Not fishing, just floating and over to the island. It was a vacation…I guess we did drop lines a couple times, but not like big fishing, I didn’t catch nothing, Dad did, same with Mom, but not like work fishing. Mostly we swam and floated. Dad drank about a hundred cans of Cariboo Honey.” Peter had calmed enough that he no longer vibrated, his hands were still, and his eyes met the cop’s.

  “I’m more of a Cariboo Ale man myself.”

  “Me too,” Peter said and actually smiled. He looked all of his fourteen years.

  The cop smiled back. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. So you went and got the shot, then what?”

  “I was in the storage when I heard the bang. Before I got there though, I saw Rob coming down the hall. He had that duffle bag out in the hall. Could be it’s still there. I didn’t think nothing of it, like a backpack is a backpack and some people use a duffle bag and some people use a plastic bag from the Pick ‘n Save, you know?”

  The cop nodded, pen pressed to paper, jotting the pertinent points.

  “So I saw him, but I don’t remember if he looked crazy. He was just walking, though I guess his room would’ve been round in the senior wing, huh?”

  “It’s okay. No way you could know.”

  “I know. So I heard the first sound and didn’t think too much of it. Then. Then I was out of the closet and I heard the second shot better, I got scared then and wanted to get back to class, I didn’t know, how could I know, so I was running and I got to the door, and I still had the shotput ball, and the door was open and I ducked out of sight when I saw the blood and heard the screaming, and then Rob Hill said he was gonna kill every girl in the school, and in my head I saw him doing it and piling them like some kind of crazy Vietnam guy making a wall of Gooks like that Clint Eastwood movie where he’s super racist and said he piled Gooks to scare some Asian guy, but I imagined all the girls in piles and my sister dead,” Peter took a deep breath, “then I ran in quiet when Rob Hill was yelling and pointing the rifle, he kept on squeezing the trigger too, but it wasn’t going, like he didn’t know about reloading, but he was still doing it and pointing it at Missus Wabigone, and she was covering her head and crying, so I ran at him and lifted the ball over my head and conked him hard as I could.” Peter had lowered his face again, his legs bouncing overtime. His hands rubbed between his thighs. He sniffed back tear-boogers. His eyes had returned to the drying blood puddle spilled out beyond the blanket’s reach.

  The cop continued writing for more than a minute after Peter finished talking. He lifted his eyes, shook his hand holding the pen to ward off a cramp. “You’re a goddamned hero, you know that?”

  “I wish he didn’t die.”

  “Better him than you or anyone else. Those girls…” The cop flipped back a page on the legal pad, searching for the names.

  “Juliet and Becky.”

  “Right, they’re gonna be fine. He got them in the shoulders. They’ll have scars and maybe some bad injuries, but they’ll be okay. That’s because of you.”

  Peter shrugged his shoulders.

  The cop stood and stepped around the body, put his meaty hand on Peter’s skinny shoulder. “I mean it. I’d be surprised if the school doesn’t put up a statue or a plaque or something.”

  That sounded okay, but Peter couldn’t think about that yet. “Can I go outside for a bit? I wanna sit outside, okay?”

  “Stay close, in case I need you to clear anything up.”

  Peter nodded and tiptoed around the blood, the steel shot, and door. He moved quickly. There were noises coming from other parts of the school. They’d evacuated the entire high school portion of the student body and Peter felt all alone. He jogged over to the area outside the elementary doors, crossed the lot and a patch of grass, and fell onto the plastic seat of a rusty swing set.

  7

  Tuesday, April 29, 2019: 10:51AM

  “Call me Dick. I was thinking we could take this show to the equivalent of our town hall, use a table—”

  “Can’t,” Tonya Waggon said. She was still behind the till at the Pick ‘n Save. “There was a shooting at the school. Rob Hill, his dad’s Mike and his mom’s that makeup Nazi Peggy. You know, she does Mary Kay and don’t let anyone start up with Avon on her turf. She tells everyone a woman is like the man’s helper monkey and sex buddy, like, to be obedient.”

  Dick opened his mouth. He knew the Hills, weren’t his favorite people, but he couldn’t imagine the kid with a gun in the school.

  “The students from the nine/ten class are in the church, doing statements or something. I just heard it over the radio. Elevens and twelves are there too, watching a counselor on Skype. A bunch of RCMP are on the way. You can use the tool bench at the back though. Scout ain’t in today, so I know nobody doing anything with the bench.”

  “Okay…is…is that coffee fresh?” Dick managed to say in a hiss.

  “Not even two hours yet, but there’s only a couple cups left. I’ll cook a new pot.”

  Dick looked to the out-of-towners apologetically and waved them back to the tool bench. He had rolled maps in one hand and an iPad in a dusty cloth case in his other.

  Charlie Warinka had a full cart. She’d long added all she needed, but kept rolling in the aisles while the radio reports came in, after that, she kept feigning interest in products, afraid to go outside. When Dick Sapperstein came in, the fear eased a bit. The man was excited, happy even, meaning the world wasn’t over.

  She pushed the cart up to the till. “Hey.”

  “How you doing?” Tanya wore a strained but authentic smile. She put a hand on her stomach, daydreaming a bulge
that wasn’t yet there.

  “Okay. I can’t believe that kid shot up the school… It’s getting harder to keep busy, this big. I just wanna sit around and eat.” Charlie loaded the items from her cart onto the conveyor belt. “Soon that’s all I’ll be able to do.”

  “Yeah…me too.” Tanya’s smile bloomed then. She was twenty and her life finally had some kind of meaning. She was going to be someone’s Mama.

  Charlie stilled then and let out a wheeze. She was much smarter and a more than a decade older than Tanya, and she too fell for Scout’s charms. “Who’s the daddy?”

  Tanya leaned across the counter. “It’s a secret.”

  “Yeah, Scout told me to say that too. I was excited for a while, but he’s full of shit.”

  Tanya leaned away, her smile gone. “What?”

  “Who do you think fathered this one? I only quit six months ago, when did Scout start in on you? I’m guessing it was after I found out about him, but maybe not.”

  Tanya swallowed hard. “What? It’s not… It’s not, Scout’s, it’s…”

  “You know he leaves town nearly every night. He has his big flashy house, yeah, but it’s usually empty. He has stores in Clarenberg, and a wife and kids. His father owns stores in Richmond. That’s where Scout grew up. That’s where Scout’s ex-wife lives. That’s all I could find out for sure. He left his laptop one night and since I was pregnant with his seed, I figured I’d take a peek.”

  “What?” Tanya’s mouth was open, wide as a yawn. “No.”

  “I think that’s part of the reason he keeps the old system at the till, no way he can accidentally access something, leave it up, and have one of his baby mother’s finding out she ain’t so special.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Oh? Why do you suppose I only come in when I know Scout isn’t here? Why do you suppose when I do come in I put everything I buy on account? I don’t pay. This is child support. The lying shit sack will pay just about anything to keep people happy with him.”

  “No, but, he’s… What am I supposed to do now?” Tanya had lifted her hand from her tummy, like it was on fire. Held her palm hovering above.

  Suddenly, one of the doctors—Dr. Herbert—appeared at Charlie’s side. “Women, we need a general opinion on something. I figure you two being locals, you might have a social insight.” He looked to Charlie. “You are a local, correct?”

  Charlie was in a mixed bag mood. Heartbroken, sad, furious, and chippy. “Sure I am, can’t you smell it on me? Can’t you see my big Happy Village smile?”

  Dr. Herbert wasn’t sure how to take that, but took it at face value for show. “Well, come on back here a minute.”

  There were no other patrons in the store and Tanya wanted to think about something else a minute, so she came around the till and followed, leaving Charlie’s un-scanned and un-bagged items where they were.

  At the back of the store, on the tool bench was a geological map of the area around Happy Village. On either side of the map were scattered printouts. In Dick’s hands was an iPad, a long-dead bird of some sort on the screen.

  Dr. Herbert snatched the iPad and held it out to the women. “What do you see?” The bird in the picture had flesh draped like brown tissue paper, a scattering of feathers pressed into the mess. There was a metal desk ruler next to it to show scale.

  Charlie turned her head sideways like a poorly directed horror villainess. “A funky chicken.”

  “And you?” Dr. Herbert nodded to Tanya.

  “Not a chicken, it’s too big and why would a chicken be in a mine? That’s in a mine, right?”

  “Very good,” Dr. Whitley said. He wore a smug grin, as if he thought he was smarter than everyone else in the room and could and would explain in all the ways this was true, if challenged.

  “My grandpa was a miner.”

  Dick’s eyebrows went up. “Here?”

  “No, up north, but I know all about these mines. Grandpa used to tell me stories when he babysat me. After he got deep into a case of Molson’s, he told me all the crazy stuff that went on underground. Sometimes miners found stuff. Sometimes miners went weird. Sometimes there were ghosts.” Tanya’s speech seemed detached. “But he was into lots of myths and stuff.”

  “So what do you see?” Dr. Herbert asked.

  “A bird, but I don’t know. Grandpa said sometimes freaky animals, like mutated things, like natural mutated, not like radioactive or something, genetic mutated, would climb down. They’re dying right from birth and like to die in the shade. Lots of things do it. See a wolf on the road dying, it crawls into the ditch for some privacy or something. So lots of things crawl into mines too. Maybe it is a retarded chicken, or whatever.”

  “Okay, that’s a sound theory. Now, Doctor Sapperstein, tell us again what you’re saying this is.” Dr. Herbert folded his arms over his chest.

  “Not only saying. The science is there, you’ve seen it. This is why I almost didn’t call anyone because it’s impossible, but here nonetheless.” Dick turned from the others and leaned on the tool bench.

  “Spit it ou—” Dr. Herbert started.

  “A Velociraptor.”

  “Like clever girl,” Charlie spoke through a smile. “Remember that? From the movie? But it’s not big enough, unless that isn’t a regular ruler next to it.”

  “That story was very misleading about the size of the Velociraptor,” Dr. Whitley said.

  “Plus, what’s with the feathers?” Tanya had her hand back onto her mostly flat tummy, rubbing in circles.

  “Again, movies tell lies. The Velociraptor was avian… I mean, a close part to the modern bird family.” Dick was still turned away, leaned on the bench. “This is why I didn’t want to tell anyone…but I had to. Can’t you see that?”

  “So it’s a dinosaur that isn’t all bones and stuff?” Tanya said.

  Charlie looked at the trio of doctors and then understood. “I see. They think it’s a hoax and Dick thinks it’s real.” Charlie paused to shift her eyes between the out-of-towners. “If you’re asking us if it’s crazy from a public view, I can tell you Dick is the last person I figure would play a trick on people, though there was that one time he promised a terrifying Halloween movie for us and put on Ernest Scared Stupid. We were kids, so it made sense, but he wouldn’t lie about something that matters. Plus, that looks real to me.”

  “That’s what I said, and the feather’s right. I gotta know how you faked this, we all do, all the scientists need to prepare against your method. So what is it?” Dr. Whitley had become excited, thrilled by the great deception.

  “Fine. Let’s go. I’ll take you to the artifacts. You can collect samples for yourself.” Dick spun on his heels. His cheeks were bright red and his eyes held tears in their corners. “Go. Come on.” He pointed to the door. He turned and snatched his map and the photographs. The other doctors were ahead, but Dick caught up in two angry strides.

  Tanya and Charlie stepped lazily back to the front of the store. They’d only just stopped when Dick returned, swung open the door, and said, “I didn’t get any coffee.”

  “Ah, forgot!” Tanya smacked her forehead.

  8

  Tuesday, April 29, 2019: 11:00AM

  Wayne Thomas had taken the secondary lane rather than the main route, and followed it up to the mouth of the former mine. Rubble had closed off the access. Wayne himself had placed those rocks where they were more than a decade earlier to act as a blind. A precaution when the world began its inevitable and impending turn toward devastation and de-humanization. World leaders were nuts, and in the end, the world would be where it has been for billions of years and humans will be gone, but not Wayne Thomas.

  Every day, he added to his bunker. The first five years were straight construction—old money paid for everything; he had more than one hundred million dollars in banks around the world and twenty million in one hundred dollar bills buried in oil drums around his yard. He hired Mexican contractors, flew them up in a demilitarized helicopter
, and had them working. If they tried to tell people where his bunker was, the best they’d be able to explain was way up north, in a mine surrounded by ancient trees.

  A false patch of grass came up on a wall of stone when Wayne pressed a button on the secondary fob next to his car keys. A stairway lit below. A quarter mile north, a series of solar panels stood eighty-feet on stone pillars manufactured for turbine use—he’d considered turbines, but people can get uppity over turbines, so he went with the only thing everyone can agree on—and collected energy. They were self-cleaning and high enough to avoid most wind-blown trouble, but every year he had to give them a good scrub and perform a handful of minor repairs or replacements; again, he’d brought in Mexican help.

  Beneath the door, another set of stairs, cut into the stone, led into the shadows. He hit the fob button again and the door closed behind him. A motion sensor detected him and lit the next hallway while dousing the previous. Energy saving was an absolute necessity, when it didn’t hinder entertainment. What is life’s value when you removed entertainment?

  He continued on a downward slope, deeper into the reinforced and sparkling clean mine shaft. The beer and juice became heavy in their bag and he swapped hands then continued. He walked for nine minutes, passing the dozens of vents and fluorescent light fixtures streaming overhead. Every one hundred feet had a medical kit affixed two feet from the floor.

  He reached a heavy steel door once the mine began to level. The door was originally designed for a submarine. He punched in his code and then spun the wheel—the security code had a backup battery in case of electronic malfunction. The lights before him lit and the quality air hitting him became Rocky Mountain fresh. The shaft lights doused.

  The living area was huge. There were eleven guest rooms that he hoped to someday fill with good guys, reliable women, or children. It was the only point of his future he hadn’t had time to nail down. And it’s tricky; women want a steady man, but they don’t want one prepared for every possible trouble.