The job of the day is a cop-and-buddy film involving guns and betrayal with just about all the actors turning into what Linus calls "lawn sprinklers" at the end. The shoot is going slowly, and the star, hung over from a holiday binge, is forgetting his lines, walking into walls, ad-libbing dumb sight gags, and causing continuity issues that take an hour apiece to clean up while Linus and Pam refit the star with blood charges, makeup, hair, and fresh shirts and pants. As the day wears on and the number of takes multiplies, the minds of workers on the set begin to wander and look out at the view of the city.
Cut.
Pam walks around the living room, touching up the shooting victims who will spend most of their day lying in strange contortions on the furniture and floor, pretending to be dead. She smiles and is a good sport, but in the back of her mind she's thinking of Karen's broadcast last night. She came across as so … sugary gooey. NotKaren at all. Megan came across as an average-seeming teenager. Oh, if the audience knew the truth! And Lois came across as Belinda Q. Housewife. Well, that's TV—that's what TV does.
After lunch, the crew and actors are all in better moods. While setting the mock-dead actors back into place, Linus says, "Pam—look out at the city, the fire." Pam looks out, and rising from somewhere in the city is a smoke plume, pointy at the bottom and rising into a slippery triangle like a mar/ipan tornado.
"Office building fire?"
"I dunno."
The scene continues. The star, mistakenly thinking his enemies have been killed by the CIA, opens his front door calmly for perhaps the first time in his life, only to be assailed with machine-gun fire from which he escapes (of course). After this, he turns around to see black-sweatered armed thugs whom he promptly shoots dead in a series of quick takes. Only the star survives.
"You know, Linus, I wish movies could be filmed in sequence."
"Body number three needs spritzing."
Pam heads to body number three to freshen up the blood. "Wakey wakey, drug lord," Pam says, but the actor plays dead. Pam says, "Smart-ass," and returns to the edge of the scene and through a side window notes that there are now several plumes over the city. She nudges Linus: "Look."
The scenes requiring the bodies are finished. Pam helps them up and out of their mucky togs. "Hey smart-ass—the scene's over." Smart-ass doesn't move. "Oh God, you actors—do you ever get enough attention? C'mon, Gareth, you have to prep for the next scene."
Gareth still doesn't move. Hands on hips, Pam looks out the window of the city now covered with a score of plumes—columns, holding up the sky. She shivers and gets on her knees. In her bones, she feels the truth: "Gareth? Gareth? Oh, shit. Dorrie? Get Dorrie!" Dorrie, the production assistant, comes over. "He's dead."
"What's that?" The director, Don, comes over.
"Call an ambulance.""Dead? Nobody dies during a shoot."
"Don, how can you be a prick at a time like this?"
There's a ruckus out by the catering truck; one of the servers, a plump fortyish woman, has been found dead at the feet of the lunch buffet table. Someone rushes in to say, "Sandra's dead. Call 911. Quick—who ate lunch here?"
A buzz passes through the workers: food poisoning.
"No. It can't be. Gareth's girlfriend made him a macrobiotic lunch. He never eats the catered stuff."
"You mean—well if it's not food poisoning …"
"Nine-one-one's gone dead. I can't get through to the States, either."
"Phones are all dead, Don."
Shit.
Already actors and crew are evaporating from the set. Pam and Linus wipe the makeup and fake blood from Gareth. Outside, they can already see the city on fire, too many fires to count. They walk out onto the balcony. "Karen," Linus says.
"I know."
"We should go home."
Inside the house, the director is screaming at those people still remaining. Don comes out onto the deck, glowers at Pam and Linus, looks at the city, and then screams at nobody in particular.
"Let's wash up," Pam says.
Yet in the end, Pam and Linus stay longer than the others. Duty. Linus says, "My parents are visiting family out in the Fraser Valley, an hour away at the best of times. Pam, take a look through these binoculars—there's no traffic moving anywhere."
Pam looks. "My parents," she says, gently lowering the binoculars. "They're down in Bellingham with Richard's parents—after-Christmas sales."
"Hamilton?"
"At home. Wendy?"
"She's on double-shift at the hospital." They turn around and their eyes catch: fear.Gareth's body still rests on the floor as the sky darkens. A few of the crew members, unable to get anywhere in nightmare traffic and unable to think of anywhere else to go, return to the house. As a group, they wrap Gareth in a canvas tarpaulin and place him in a cool, animal-proof garden shed. And a few minutes later, as Linus and Pam pull out of the driveway in their car, the neighborhood's electricity fails and they drive down the hill under a soot gray sky.
Wendy's "day" had already passed the twenty-six-hour mark when her first sleeper arrived dead at the hospital just shortly into the lunch hour—a North Van housewife a neighbor had found sleeping on the steps outside her house, her Collie's leash in her hand, the dog whimpering. Wendy was examining this body when two more sleepers were brought through the door—an eight-year-old girl who had fallen asleep on a swing set and an elderly woman's husband who had fallen asleep on the passenger side of her car while driving to the pet food store. She thought he might have had a stroke.
And then the cord of normalcy snapped. Over the next several hours, Wendy helped catalog perhaps a hundred more sleepers, most of whom had been driven to the hospital by friends or family, owing to overtaxed ambulances. And for every body taken to the hospital there were hundreds if not thousands out there who didn't make it.
Later in the day, the radio broadcasted a plea saying that the hospitals were unable to process any further patients. Nothing was known about this new sickness, nor was any treatment available.
And now the hospital staff are confused and frightened beyond words, but they work on. Wendy reaches the thirty-four-hour mark and is dead on her feet and needs to sleep, yet at the same time she needs to go home—to check on Linus—Linus—as well as to … as well as to … what? Phones are out, cell phones, too.
What is happening is what Karen knows about. This also has something to do with Pam's and Hamilton's stereo dreams. The answer isn't at the hospital. The answer is back at Rabbit Lane.
Stepping over log booms of the dead, she is feeling almost as tired as the day's sleepers. She understands the sleepers and their completelack of fear as they go groggy and lie down wherever the need hits them. Wendy feels the same way, but she knows it's only sleep she needs at the moment, not death.
Linus had dropped her off at work yesterday, her own car being in the shop. She finds that the only transportation alternative available now is walking: Taxis gone; don't know how to steal a car. Walking will take a few hours, but she refuses to hitchhike—even out on Lonsdale all civil decency seems to have evaporated. In the dark, she walks up to the Trans-Canada highway, where cars are traveling at speeds she thought unimaginable. She spots two accidents—either sleepers or leadfoots—but no emergency vehicles attend the scene. Nobody seems to be slowing up, even for a juicy rubberneck, which strikes Wendy as most unusual human behavior. She considers this when, without warning, the Esso station by the Westview overpass explodes like a jet at an air show—bodies like ventriloquist dolls puked into the sky as though in a cartoon or an action-adventure film.