Whales

In the twenty-four hour Tim Hortons coffee shop at the corner of Wonderland Road and Brown Street in London Ontario, people watched the news on a forty-two inch 2011 RCA flat screen television set with two broken pixels.

The TV was silent, so as not to disturb customers, and the newscasts were accompanied by delayed and often misspelled subtitles. On a slow day, the employees would watch the news while they wiped a counter top, or emptied a trash can, squinting at the white words as they appeared and disappeared, perpetually too early or too late.

According to CNN, scientists were investigating reports of significantly larger and more aggressive species of dolphins inhabiting the Saint Lawrence River, whom boaters could apparently summon only by playing Stevie Wonder albums.

Over the last few months, there had been an increasing number of strange incidents involving animals on the news. First there was the discovery of an elusive pack of dire wolves in a remote forest in Costa Rica. Researchers were thrilled to find what they had long believed to be an extinct species. Then there were the giant sloths found living in the Andes. The mass unexplained disappearance of many marine animals from aquariums around the world. The flying snakes who appeared to be trying to cross the Pacific Ocean. The bioluminescent raccoons turning up in New York City.

Around the world, animals had become bolder, and somehow more organized. There was a giant king crab in Laos who resided in a dark and ancient temple, where the locals allegedly prayed to it and appeased it with offerings of ducks, goats, and small children. A pair of huge alligators in Florida forced a golf course out of business when they ate an elderly couple and their dog.

In Canada, however, the wildlife had remained polite.

People turned their noses up at the incidents South of the Border, knowing Americans had it coming, what with their attitude problem and all.

“They don’t have proper animal control laws down there, for one thing,” said Bill Thornton, a divorced grandfather of five, last Thursday, to his friend Steve Singh, while they sat and drank coffee at their usual table at the Wonderland-Brown Tim Hortons.

“In Canada, we respect nature,” the Prime Minister had said, during a televised press conference, to enthusiastic applause.

On the chain restaurant’s forty-two inch 2011 RCA flat screen TV, the subtitles had proclaimed:

IN CANDA
WEIR IS SPECK 
NEIGH SURE.

A young guy named Kyle passed a grilled cheese sandwich and a medium double double through the Tim Hortons drive-thru window.

Jae, who worked part time while he did an English degree at the university, was working at Cash Register 2. He watched the muscles of Kyle’s back tighten and flex as he reached out the small window.

Kyle was one of only four male employees at their store, and while he was certainly not Jae’s usual type, he was more or less the only one who talked to him. Kyle was kind of a dumb jock but he had a quick, nice smile and he wasn’t pushy.

Kyle liked Jae. Jae was quiet and mostly a secret. He was the only other employee who regularly watched Game of Thrones.

As they sometimes did on a slow day, Jae and Kyle were discussing important things — namely Tyrion Lannister’s hair in the books versus Tyrion Lannister’s hair on the show — when the walls and the glass windows of the Tim Hortons momentarily shook, as though registering a tremor, and then stopped.

“What was that?” Sandia asked from Cash Register 1.

“Kinda felt like an earthquake, maybe,” said the man who was first in line, as he glanced up from the debit machine he was using to pay for a ten pack of Timbits.

A gust of wind ripped through the donut shop, and the double doors swung open and shut momentarily.

“Look.”

Customers crowded by the window. They looked up into the sky. A hundred metres above them, intermingled with the soft grey rainclouds, was a pod of flying whales.

The pod’s largest member was roughly the size of the Hindenburg.

“Oh my God,” said Bill Thornton, his coffee cup stopping inches from his mouth as he gaped at the unlikely scene.

Someone pointed to the far side of the parking lot where a single orca whale propelled itself through the air. It appeared to be both weightless and heavy, moving with purpose and ease. It swam just above the road, defying gravity, reason, and traffic laws. Several cars at the intersection smashed into one another as they swerved to avoid the low-flying whale.

Sirens sang in the distance.

Within seconds, all the customers in Tim Hortons had their cell phones out. Some seemed only able stare into their phones’ screens blankly, as if looking for answers.

Kyle let the Birthday Cake Timbit in his gloved hand drop and roll silently across the floor.

People fleeing their cars or the exposure of the sidewalks flocked to take shelter inside Tim Hortons, but the whales moved fast. Soon an entire pod of orca whales circled, with threatening precision, above the parking lot, herding people inside. As if they had planned it, they began to rush the glass windows, bashing into them. Glass cracked. People began to panic.

As Kyle stared, slack-jawed, at the orcas storming the glass in front of him, a whale rammed its black and white head through the open drive-thru window, smashing in the brick wall around it. The whale’s mouth was a bloodstained cavern, lined with dozens of sharp yellow teeth. It made a loud, alien clicking sound, before bowling Kyle over and seizing him in the serrated grip of its mouth.

Kyle screamed. It was an agonizing, inhuman sound. He tried to free himself from the grip of the whale’s powerful jaws, but the whale shook Kyle back and forth like a fresh seal, then threw him into the glass pastry case.

Kyle lay still, stunned and mutilated. His legs and torso had been crushed in the whale’s jaws, and his right foot hung uselessly from a few tendons and burst bones. None of it seemed real. All Kyle could think about were scenes from movies. Jaws. Jurassic Park. Saving Private Ryan.

Around him, people screamed, clustered, and ran for the washrooms at the back of the store as three more orcas smashed through the shattering glass windows.

Jae grabbed Kyle by the arms. Kyle’s bloody legs dangled uselessly as Jae started to pull him away from the smashed-in drive thru window, smearing a trail of blood and donut jelly in their wake.

An orca succeeded in breaking through the glass front doors, shattering a festive painting of the Easter Bunny and swerving to maul a woman and her child.

Jae dragged Kyle toward the break room and the back doors.

“Go, go, go, go, go, go,” Kyle urged, like he was losing his mind, and pushed the keys to his Dad’s old white pickup truck into Jae’s palm. They got the back door open, and Jae dragged Kyle behind the store to the nearby truck. Kyle had about forty pounds on him, but Jae managed to hoist his bleeding coworker into the passenger seat before climbing around to the driver’s side.

It was nice weather, and Kyle had left the windows rolled down that morning.

Jae did up his seat belt.

An enormous killer whale, twice the size of the one that had smashed through the drive-thru window, came around the back of the building and Kyle tried desperately to roll the window up all the way.

Jae struggled to get the truck to start. It was old and the engine usually took a few tries.

“Hurry!” Kyle screamed.

“I’m trying!”

The whale maneuvered closer. Out here in the broad light of day, Kyle took in the full terrifying measure of the creature. Its predatory silhouette grew larger in his field of view, the sharp dorsal fin cutting through the air like a sword.

The orca bashed its enormous head into the passenger door, denting it. It hit hard enough that the truck rocked back and forth, dangerously close to toppling.

Jae finally revved the engine to life, and the thing sounded like the guttural growl of some prehistoric creature.

Kyle usually drove with music playing, and the moment the truck started up Chad Krueger’s raspy singing voice belted out:

“ — SHE’S JUST A WOMAN. NEVER AGAIN!”

Jae didn’t care. All Jae cared about was not getting eaten by a flying whale.

The whale hesitated at the strange cacophony coming from the truck and Jae put the car in reverse and backed up fast.

“Shit, shit, shit…” Jae muttered, as he stepped on the gas pedal and sped out of the parking lot, driving over a patch of grass and veering down a side road with the brakes squealing. In the rearview mirror, they watched seven killer whales besiege Tim Hortons.

The carnage faded into the distance.

As Jae drove, Kyle writhed his way out of his brown Tim Hortons uniform shirt and wrapped it around the worst of his two legs to try to quell the bleeding. His shirtless chest was smeared with blood. There were puncture wounds all along his stomach where the whale’s teeth had stabbed into him. He could feel his heart beating. It seemed oddly slow.

Chad Krueger kept singing.

“What the fuck,” said Kyle, in quiet awe. “What the fuck just happened. I mean what the fuck.”

The dashboard clock in Kyle’s Dad’s old pickup truck had a busted LCD screen and displayed to them a representation of time in another dimension. Right now the time was 2 C : L ). Neither of them had a cell phone with them. Neither of them knew where to drive to.

“Okay. Okay. I’ll try to get you to the hospital,” said Jae, and made a sharp turn.

“Okay.”

They were silent for a long time. Chad Krueger kept singing.

Any time they got close to a main road the police had it blocked off, or there was another pileup of smoking cars and people running through the streets. Whales hovered over the city, and not just orcas. High up in the sky loomed a massive blue whale the size of a football stadium. It disappeared into the heavy clouds, like a ship in the mist. In the distance, they could see downtown. Smoke and fire wafted up into the overcast sky.

“Are you in pain or anything?” Jae asked Kyle, as they turned onto a tree-lined road.

“No. Weirdly, no.”

Chad Krueger kept singing.

“…It’s too bad, it’s stupid

Too late, so wrong, so long

It’s too bad that we had no time to rewind

Let’s walk, let’s talk…”

At this point, Jae was desperate. Still, he couldn’t stop gripping the steering wheel, with both hands firmly placed at exactly ten and two.

“Sorry, can you maybe just turn the music down?” Jae asked.

“The volume thing’s broken,” said Kyle. “Sorry. You can’t.”

“Okay.” Jae hesitated. “Look, can you just change it to something else then? Literally anything else.”

“What, you don’t like Nickelback?” Kyle asked, looking deeply affronted. Jae didn’t say anything.

Kyle fumbled with the dials and changed it from his beloved copy of Silverside Up to the radio. They listened in stunned silence to the reports coming in from all over London of whales rampaging through the city, crushing buildings, overturning buses, dismembering people.

“We can’t stay here,” said Kyle. “We’re almost at the highway. Look, let’s just get out of London. Just keep driving away, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Turn there!” Kyle ordered, suddenly.

“It’s a dead end!”

“Just cut through the field. Look. You can get to the 402.”