We take my dad’s Volvo.

  I want to take us to one of the conservation areas that are littered around this area of the suburbs, but I question which one. I don’t want one that’s too big, too full of mutated animals that we’ll end up in trouble, but I also don’t want one that’s too small and all we’ll find are squirrels or small birds. In the end, we go to one that’s about a fifteen minute drive away, one that I know has a slightly smaller parking lot than some of the others. I hope that means that other cars—other humans—won’t be there.

  The only radio station that is live is an old AM sports channel. It tells us that roughly half of the population is gone. I thought it was more, given the way the Wal-Mart was empty, but the man on the radio explains that in some places, as little as 30% of the population disappeared. In others, up to 80%. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason in why the variation.

  It also tells us that the remaining local government is working towards building a check-in census to see who is still alive, to try to reconnect survivors with friends and family, and—though they don’t actively say this out loud—check in on whatever magic the survivors have developed. Maybe I’m a cynic and making it up, but I think I’m reading correctly between the lines. I doubt this type of mobilization is just for the good of the survivors. The man on the radio says nothing about magic, about powers, about abilities, but I don’t doubt that some have sprung up.

  He says nothing about the mutated animals, either.

  We get to the conservation area and find that there are three other cars parked there. I can see one has its doors left open, the back windshield blasted out, but the other two have no discernible tells. Once we park, I tell Ryder to wait in the car and go out to check. I grab the baseball bat—full-sized, metal, and very solid, that I took from my dad’s old baseball bag in the garage—from where I placed it between the driver’s seat and the door.

  He immediately follows me out of the car.

  “What did I say?” I scold.

  “Your telekinesis can barely hold up a piece of grass and your bat won’t be very good in these close quarters,” he says, surprisingly reasonable. He holds up a fireball. “I might be more use.”

  I sigh. He’s not totally wrong, and there’s a part of me that’s happy for the backup. We approach the first car.

  There’s an upended Tim Horton’s take-out cup on the driver’s seat, the light grey fabric seats with a questionable brown stain. I can see it perfectly: the driver, taking a sip of their coffee before they head onto the trails, suddenly gets poofed, and the coffee cup tumbles down, spilling out on the seat. Twenty-four hours later, the liquid has all been absorbed by the fabric seats, but the colour is unmistakeable.

  “Don’t think he’s going to be bothering us,” Ryder says. I give him credit for being astute.

  The other car has nothing that tells us for sure either way. It’s clearly a woman’s car, with pink fuzzy pom-poms hanging from the rearview mirror and lip gloss in the cup holder. I don’t worry too much, though, since I’m less worried about another woman.

  I spent too many years living downtown. I’m allowed to have prejudices.

  “Can we go in, now?” Ryder whines. I gesture toward the entrance of the trail and he brightens considerably, dashing off.

  The world, as a whole, is too quiet. No cars, no voices, no electricity humming. It gets even eerier when we step into the forest and the trees block out the wind and whatever sounds are still lingering. Instead all we hear is a few birdsongs echoing through the trees. I flinch, worried we’re about to be pelted by mutant beaks, but when that doesn’t happen I let the bat rest comfortably on my shoulder.

  We walk in easy silence down the trail. A few minutes in, a chipmunk crosses the path ahead of us. Ryder and I both scurry into fighting poses, but by the time we do, the chipmunk is long gone.

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  He lets out an uneasy laugh. “Did it just not want to fight or do you think it was still just a regular chipmunk?” he asks.

  “Honestly, I’m wondering the same thing,” I reply.

  “I thought it would be easier finding monsters,” Ryder says, kicking at a downed stick. “The video games always make it so easy.”

  “We’re not in a video game,” I remind him. “We just… have one in our heads. The world out there is still just magical mayhem.”

  “Well, that sucks,” Ryder says.

  I laugh. “Yeah, I guess it does.”

  When I was younger, I played a lot of Pokemon, and the wild Pokemon would just jump out at you when you walked by. I guess some part of me thought it would be as simple as that. Can you tell us where the monsters are? I ask the Game. Just because the world isn’t in a video game, doesn’t mean we can’t still use whatever advantage we have. I expect it to tell me what it told me in the house last night, that it can only scan my immediate area. But instead, in reply, a smattering of tiny red dots crowd the map overlay in the corner of my vision.

  Ryder jumps. “What did you do?” he cries. Guess his map changed, too.

  “I asked the Game to show us the monsters,” I said. “Not that it could do it last night, but I still figured I’d try.”

  “Maybe because we’re not in the house,” Ryder says. Could it really be that simple? He shrugs. “No walls in the way. Come on, Jane!” he calls out, already running toward the cluster of dots.

  What choice do I have? I follow.

  I say a mental Thank you to the Game. If it’s alive in some way, if it’s evolving to suit our needs, then I want to keep it happy.

  The mutated animals—the monsters—are localized in one corner of the conservation area, maybe because that’s where the most wild magic can be found. There’s a small rumble of the ground, the type of magic surge we’ve grown accustomed to that isn’t dangerous, as we cross a brook on a wooden bridge. We pass some invisible demarcation line and I have just enough time to think that the magic rumble was a warning we should have heeded.

  Then pandemonium breaks loose.

  A red squirrel drops onto my head from a tree above, and I shriek as I try to throw it off. It holds on, though, and I scream as a chunk of my hair get ripped out. I drop my bat and use two hands to grab the thing, tiny teeth chomping down on my fingers as it finally dislodges. I toss it up in the air and, with an aim I wouldn’t have thought possible, I throw a punch and the squirrel goes flying.

  I can spare half a second of checking on Ryder—he’s on his knees, holding down a blue jay the size of a parrot, pressing his fireball into its wings—before I get a bird of my own flying at me, a classic American robin with its obvious red chest. But there’s something wrong with its wings, with a weird joint halfway. The mutations are inconsistent and all over the place, and I can’t let myself get curious about what the next round of mutations would mean for these animals. Not when the oversized robin is using its weirdly jointed wings to try to strangle me.

  Because it’s trying to do just that, to get its wings around my neck. Meanwhile, its beak is open and it screams in my face, and all I can smell is blood and moldy fruit. I try not to gag, to vomit all over it, as I let out a scream of my own right back. I hold up my arms in front of me, using them to hold the wings away from my neck, and wish that my telekinesis power was strong enough to lift the bat right off the ground.

  Following Ryder’s lead, I take the bird to the ground.

  I manage to get on top of the bird, using my larger size against it. My baseball bat bumps against my knee. With a deep breath to prepare, I let go of the bird with one hand to grope beside me to grab the bat. I make contact, wrap my fingers around whichever part of it I found, and bring the whole thing over my head and into the bird beneath me.

  I grabbed the wrong side—the fat end that you’re supposed to hit the baseball with—and the lip of the bottom edge slams in the side of the bird’s head, caving in its skull and killing it. I try to pull it out, wanting to hold the bat properly before something else descends on me, but I can’t dislodge it.

  And something to my left makes a battle cry and heads toward me.

  Giving up on dislodging the bird, and with both hands around the fat end of the bat, I swing the whole thing, dead bird included, around and into the fox.

  A fox!?

  In elementary school, I did a project on red foxes and always felt a weird kinship to my redheaded furry brethren after. That feeling goes promptly out the window.

  Between my hands being covered in blood and not having a great grip, and the bird still topping the bat, there’s no serious damage to the fox. It mutated to be twice as large around the middle with shorter, more muscular legs, and it struggles to get back onto its feet. But the blow did knock the dead bird from where it was lodged on my weapon, and as the tipped fox struggles to right itself, I flip the bat back around as elegantly as any MLB player and head back into the fray. A few well-placed smacks with the bat and one golf swing later, the fox is a bloody, dead mess at my feet.

  There’s a pause in a chaos as I feel the very moment my heart shrivels up, the moment the world properly cleaves into a before and an after. This is inhumane. This is unnatural. This is—

  But I don’t get to sit in it. I can’t, not when I look up… and into the eyes of another fat fox, who seems pretty pissed that I just offed its pack-mate.