[Note: I do not own World War Z or the Zombie Survival Guide. They are the property of Max Brooks and Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Don't sue me.]

[This fic is rated M for coarse language and because, hey, it's a fucking zombie story.]

[Oh, and I preemptively apologize to any Canadians that this chapter may offend.]

QUEBEC CITY, QUEBEC, CANADA

[The historic Citadelle de Québec looms over the city and the St. Lawrence River, affording an excellent defensive position from which to spot and battle incoming hordes. It served as the headquarters of the Assemblée nationale du Québec for the duration of the war, and remains a major tourist destination for Canadians, with the benefit of being located within blocks of the historic Chateau Frontenac. It is here that I meet Philippe Desjardin, a short, mustached detective for the Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police force, and a veteran of the defense of Québec.]

This city we're in, Québec City, you could not find a better defensive location in North America if you tried. First of all, it's freezing. You've heard the old saying, right? "Canada's not a country, it's winter"? Well, this is what they meant. Even before the war we usually got our first snow in October, and by the end of winter – defined here as "late April" – we'd have shoveled our way through over three meters of snow in a normal year. Throw the Zombie Ice Age on top of that, and that meant that in la Ville de Québec we only got three months of warm weather on average. And if you got up in Saguenay, that became two. I don't think they ever saw a major outbreak up there.

Second, we had enough electricity for everything we could possibly need. When la Panique hit we got 90% of our power supply from the dams that Hydro-Québec had built up north. That was on top of all the natural resources we could dig out of the Nord-du-Québec and Labrador. We weren't like you guys in the US, who got most of their electricity from burning fossil fuels. When we lost our oil, our coal and our gas, sure, it hurt, but even before you factor out the initial dead during la Panique, we still had enough power to keep every house and factory in Québec lit so long as the lines stayed up. That was the main problem – maintaining and repairing thousands of miles of high-tension power lines. The 2016 ice storm took out power for nearly the entire province. Took over half a year to repair them all. We nearly lost Sherbrooke that June. Sherbrooke, merde, now that was certainly not our most shining moment.

Third, Québec City had walls. You probably saw some of them coming into this town. The Europeans like to go on about how North America didn't have any castles or fortresses… if so, then what the hell was Québec City? We still had our walls from the colonial era, we didn't tear 'em down and build over them like you did to your historic landmarks, and the moment la Panique hit we were restoring them to their original purpose. It was like that little Welsh town Conwy on steroids. We moved our entire government into la Citadelle – the French didn't call it that for nothing, you know – and turned Vieux-Québec into a fortress.

Fourth, we never had our version of Yonkers. Other countries did – the Koreans had Incheon, the Mexicans had Guadalajara. But our nation was practically attached to America at the hip. Many of us lived close enough to the border to get your TV over the air, and most of our cable and satellite companies carried American news networks. We were able to learn from your mistakes at Yonkers, see what not to do – the infection took longer to spread here thanks to our long winters, so by the time we reached the stage where something like Yonkers could have happened, we had already seen it happen to the largest, most powerful army on Earth.

There was that too; we didn't have the globetrotting, high-tech military force that you did. The whole F-35 debacle shook us out of that mentality. Our army was geared for peacekeeping and Arctic patrols, lots of infantry and transports, not a lot of armor. There were a few people before the war even saying that we should get rid of our main battle tanks and replace them with Stryker IFVs. I remember before the war, most Americans mocked us as a bunch of bleeding-heart pacifists who couldn't fight a "real" war like you guys had been doing. Probably 'cause we harbored all your draft dodgers during Vietnam. Well, that turned out to be a godsend once we all saw firsthand how much good all your tanks, rockets, fighters and E-war gear did against the undead.

[Philippe snorts in derision.]

So after la Panique was through, our armed forces were in a fair bit better shape than your own. Beaten bloody, yes, but at least we still had an army.

And finally, there was Canadian bilingualism. What one must understand before examining Canada's actions during the Zombie War is that it was, and still is, essentially two peoples in one nation. Everything that was done in English had to be done in French as well. Road signs, public documents, product labels, everything was bilingual. Our laws served as the model for how you dealt with the large Latino minority in your safe zone. [The American safe zone contained many of the areas with the largest concentrations of Spanish speakers in the country.] And our bilingualism extended all the way to Ottawa's response to the living dead.

Or at least, that was the theory. In reality, it extended to the reaction to Ottawa's response to the living dead. The MacKay Plan pretty much called for pulling everything back to BC, the Yukon and Alberta, back to the Rockies like the Americans were doing and trying to hold onto a little extra land while they were at it. It wasn't a plan to save Canada. It was a plan to save the ruling party's constituency and sell out the rest of Canada once again. Two-thirds of Canadians lived in the east, and the only ways to get to the west were either down the Trans-Canada "Highway", a glorified country road that was only two lanes wide for about five hundred miles, or going through fucking Michigan. Ah yes, Michigan. First you had to cross the St. Clair River, after we blew all the bridges and tunnels across the border to stop the millions of American refugees trying to "go north", then you had to go through the millions of infected and undead that got stuck in Michigan as a result. You remember how bad the Battle of Detroit was, don't you? That's why. That was the choice they offered everyone east of Thunder Bay: go through one of the hottest white zones on the continent, or down a two-lane street that was more clogged than a truck stop toilet on Free Burrito Night. They knew damn well that almost nobody was gonna make it west, and they didn't care. As long as Calgary and Edmonton were saved, right?

And how were we gonna get all the soldiers we had in the east all the way west in the middle of the apocalypse? [Before the war, 45% of Canada's military assets were concentrated in Nova Scotia alone.] And to think that they blame us in Québec for what happened in Calgary, for the desperation of all the people who tried to go north into the territories, by "stopping" the soldiers from reaching the front in Alberta. How the hell were they gonna cross five thousand kilometers when they'd run out of gas and all the roads west were impassable thanks to the traffic jams the government had created with their bird-brained "survival plan"? I'm surprised that Canada's still holding together as one nation after the shit they pulled.

You know the exact moment when I realized that the government didn't give a damn about anyone who didn't live in the west and whose vote they didn't own? When they rationalized not supporting any blue zones or holdouts east of Manitoba because they figured that all the American blue zones just over the border would be enough to distract the zombies. Limited resources, they said. The entire point of the plan was supposed to be that our nation would be preserved afterwards, and instead, they sold us out and left us for dead. And in the end, look at what all their effort went to in Calgary.

Oh yeah, Calgary… right on one of the main roads into BC, sitting just in front of the mountain pass that thousands of infected Canadians, and some Americans, were trying to get through… it wasn't our Yonkers, but it was our Denver. No, no it wasn't. Denver was your Calgary. Both of them, big cities on the very edge of the safe zone, populations ballooned by refugees from the east. Festering cauldrons of undeath located exactly where we didn't want them, right in front of us. Couldn't have happened to nicer people.

So how did Québec survive?

The east felt that, if it wasn't gonna get any help from the government, then it was just gonna scrape together its own version of Redeker. Québec had been planning its own survival plan for quite a while by this point. They were doing the same thing in the Maritimes – Newfoundland and Labrador became just Labrador, Nova Scotia pulled up to Cape Breton, New Brunswick moved up into the mountains north of the Miramichi, and all PEI had to do was blow the only bridge to the island and hunker down. Merde, if it weren't for the Maritimes, let's just say the people of Québec would be a hell of a lot slimmer right now. The potato farmers and fishermen of the Maritimes, the unsung heroes of the Canadian front. What we did after the Mackay Plan was implemented was pool our resources and coordinate our efforts. We still had most of the population, most of the industry, and plentiful hydropower, so we had some footing to do this. We also had some help from the New England blue zones – northern Vermont and New Hampshire, Pittsfield and Cape Cod in Massachusetts – who we traded with for some of the surplus food they were growing or catching in exchange for coal, manufactured goods, medicine and other necessities. Most of Ontario was overrun by then, but we still aided what survivor camps we could, like Napanee.

Almost immediately, we acknowledged that saving Montréal was a lost cause. It was the epicenter of Québec's first outbreaks, what with it being the financial center, the site of the province's main airport, and the first big city most New Yorkers and Ontarians saw coming into the blue zone. Worse, it was just like Paris – it had a huge underground city, la Ville Souterraine, the largest underground complex on Earth. It had not just the subways, but also malls, museums, walkways, all connecting most of Montréal's office space, businesses and homes. Any advantage the cold gave us would've been erased in those tunnels, shielded from the winters on the surface. That's why they built that thing in the first place, to spare the Montréalais from having to walk the streets in janvier. Defending Montréal was never once on the table. Even clearing the place out was a horror, trying to save it would've been Yonkers all over again. We evacuated it and sealed off what was left – we were fortunate that our big "death trap" city was on an island unlike Paris. Ditto for Gatineau. It was right next to Ottawa, which saw so many refugees early in the war that it was positively swarming with undead. Evac the uninfected, pull them east. That was our goal.

But couldn't zombies cross the water?

And why would that be a problem for us? It wasn't like they were crossing a still lake. The St. Lawrence is a big damn river, about as wide as the lower Mississippi; many of them got swept out to sea before they could touch us. That's another thing that kept us safe – we had that big damn river separating us from the cities to the south. Boston, Halifax, New York, there must've been millions of zombies coming out of those places. But between that, the cold, the mountains in northern New England, and the big blue zones surrounding us, I'd venture to say that most of them never reached Québec. Not only were we able to hold nearly all the land within Québec south of the river and coordinate with the Maritimes, but we even sent some aid to the blue zones in New England and the Adirondacks – that slowed 'em down even more – and we effectively controlled Aroostook County after the US government pulled out. Note to Washington: Aroostook County is Canadian now. Just get over it.

The refugees sure crossed the river, though. I think about a million and a half people made it into Québec from points south and west. [A slight exaggeration. The 2021 census, taken near the end of the Zombie War, puts Québec's population at 4.5 million, of whom only 1.2 million had lived outside the province before the war.] That presented a problem for us. Not materially; we'd lost enough population during and after la Panique that we had more than enough room, food and water for everyone. No, this problem was cultural. There were about seventy-five thousand Franco-Ontarians and New Brunswick Acadians in the mix, but the vast majority of these refugees came in speaking English, and a lot of locals had issues with that. These people made up a quarter of the population we had at the height of the war, and if you add in the people who spoke English before the war you could understand the fear that some Francophones had. We'd survive the war, they'd say, but would our culture? Two hundred years of preserving our heritage, just for it to become one more casualty of the zombie war. That was when you had the rise of the NFLQ [The Nouvelle front de libération du Québec, taking its name and iconography from an armed Québec separatist group prominent in the 1960s.], harassing and even murdering Anglo refugees. We were forced to clamp down hard.

Anyway, those fears turned out to be mostly unfounded as time wore on. For one, many of those people were gripped by the "northern fever" thanks to the media telling them to go north to escape the zombies. That million and a half figure I gave you? That was just the people who stayed in the safe zones with most of our population, and a great many more didn't stop there. No, some kept going all the way into the Cree country up north. Now that was a fuckup you don't even wanna know about.

Well, that's what I'm here for, right? Please, tell me.

No, I'm serious. You don't wanna know. I spoke to some of those guys and…

You know you're just making me more curious, right?

[Philippe hesitates, then sighs.]

Okay. You win. People who talk about how awful northern Canada was during the war, with the freezing to death and the Donner Party shit, they most likely heard about it from people who went west of here. Northern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the territories, places where the government had pulled out from. That wasn't Québec. A lot of our dams were in the north, so we had to have troops up there out of necessity, defending the dams and the lines running south. We even managed to resettle and retrain some of the "go north" crowd to maintain the plants and the wires. About half the people who came north to Québec generally received aid the first winter. Sure, there were those dumb shits who kept going up into Nunavik and on to fuckin' Baffin Island, but further south it wasn't as bad here as it was to the west. No, we had completely different problems with our north.

We had about twenty five thousand First Nations – mostly Cree, some Inuit – living in the Nord-du-Québec before the war, and hundreds of thousands more in the rest of Canada. Most of them lived in the cities by that point – there actually existed First Nations street gangs out in Saskatchewan – but there were still a lot of traditional hunters, fishermen, your general all-around bushwhackers. Those guys, the "redneck red men" as I like to call 'em, mostly lived up in the north of Canada, up in the territories and on the Canadian Shield. You know, the types of places that the media was telling people to flee to. They weren't as numerous or organized as we were, no, they got outnumbered very quickly. It was about a million First Nations versus some twenty million starving and desperate refugees, and it went about as well as you can expect.

Can you believe an Indian war – a good, old-fashioned game of cowboys and Indians like something out of a John Wayne flick – happening in the 21st century? Well, that's exactly what went on up there, roaming bands of refugees and natives raiding camps and attacking each other on sight, and we didn't find out about it until Yellowknife went dark. We all thought it was an outbreak that took the city. Only after we got to the place did we realize that it was a band of pissed-off Eskimos – sorry, Inuit – that burned that town to the fucking ground. There was also Chibougamau, mon dieu, if it weren't for them running out of ammo we would've lost the town and a critical substation. We were too busy trying to defend the dams and the power lines to take care of the situation. It was just too much empty land to even scout. That shitstorm was half the reason why it took so long for us to clear out the white zones. We needed a Truth and Reconciliation Committee, like what the Souf'ricans had after apartheid, to sort out what had happened. There's still nearly a quarter million Cree, Ojibwa and Inuit that'd love to tell you all about it. Shania's even written a ballad about what went on up north.

Anyway, got a bit sidetracked there. Back to what I was saying about this place. Most people don't realize how powerful a force assimilation can be. I think there were studies in the prewar US that showed that most second- and especially third-generation Latino immigrants spoke English as their primary language, even in places that offered services in Spanish. That's what it was like in Québec. Anglophones were always a firm minority of the population no matter what those fearmongers said. By the time V-A Day was declared, most of these people were almost as fluent in Québec French as they were in English. They still spoke English with their families and Anglo friends, but to interact with the broader society they needed a working knowledge of French. It's the dilemma seen so often in immigrant communities: integrate into the surrounding culture and lose your ties to your heritage, or hold onto your own culture and cut yourself off from your neighbours?

There was a book written by that horror writer from Maine – yeah, he was one of the refugees, I even have his autograph – about this called L'ironie. It's about an American family who flees to Québec and finds their children being absorbed into the native culture and forgetting their roots. The dad in the book was this arch-conservative who had been active in anti-immigration groups before the war, saying that the Mexicans should just assimilate into American culture like immigrants are supposed to, and now his family was being subjected to the very same forces of assimilation that he had once cheered for. It's a bestseller among the "New Acadians", those Americans from the East Coast who lived in Québec during the war. If you go to Boston or New Jersey, you can still hear the French influence in the local accents, brought back by the New Acadians after the war. Ever hear a New York cabbie shout "tabarnac!" in a fender bender? I did when I was leaving the Yonkers Memorial Station to see my in-laws. One of the funniest things I heard in my life. Vermont and Maine are even mulling bilingual laws from what I've heard.

There's still about a quarter million of them living here in Québec. You know those new eco-friendly hydro plants that don't dam up rivers? It was a New Acadian who designed them. High school honor student before the war. Came up here, got a job with Hydro-Québec, designed a ton of those plants for us, liked it up here, stayed here even when her parents went back home, and now she's my wife.

[Philippe turns to a woman sitting at a nearby bench and calls over to her in French. She runs over to Philippe and has a seat by him. They are wearing matching wedding rings.]

Sir, I'd like you to meet my wife Deirdre Sullivan.

[Deirdre reaches out to shake my hand. She has curly strawberry-blonde hair and horn-rimmed glasses, and stands a head taller than her husband. She speaks in a hybrid of a Queens and Québec accent.]

Nice to meet you, ma'am.

It's nice meeting you, too.

[She points out at the long structures running along the banks of the St. Lawrence.]

See those things? I designed them. I was always fascinated by the old industry in New England, how it was the old industrial heartland even without the big steel mills. They used to make all sorts of things there – shirts, hats, guns, wire, et cetera et cetera. Hell, they used to make things period, before NAFTA and shit like that came along. They didn't need to pump soot into the air to do it, either, they had free-flowing hydro power on every river, creek and stream. That's where I got the idea, from the old water wheels that they had, but way more efficient. Get power from the water without killing fish. Where better to put it to use than in a place as great as here?

[She stops for a second.]

You mind if, just for a bit, I go on a little rant?

Go right ahead.

[She slouches in the park bench and relaxes.]

You know, they used to call these people, the Québécois, the "white niggas of Canada". They'd been shit on for two hundred years, by the British who wanted to turn them into good Englishmen, by the Orangemen, and by the right-wing Western bloc who wished they'd just secede already and take their damn pinko ways with them. Yet through it all, they were some of the proudest Canadians around. To them, this was their country, they were here first, and the Anglos had no right to take their way of life away from them. Do you know what the vast majority of Québécois list their ethnicity as? Not French, but simply "Canadian". The father of Canadian nationalism, Henri Bourassa, was a native of Montréal. He said, why should our boys be dying for the British a continent away? Maybe it's the Irish in me, I don't know, my dad used to support Noraid [An Irish-American activist group that gave financial and material aid, including weapons, to the Provisional IRA during the Troubles.], but I totally understand their grievances. And when Canada's darkest hour came, the Anglos once again tried to screw the Québécois, saying that we should defend Alberta – the open prairie of Alberta – and that it was useless to save Québec.

Well, we see how well that worked out, didn't we? Québec is one of our most vibrant provinces now. We have more people than any other, we have almost half of our industry, we're a global pioneer in alternative energy, and two-fifths of Canadians speak French as a first language. What was it before the war, twenty percent, and falling? Exactly. Toronto, once the heart of Anglo Canada, home of fuckin' Orangemen? Now it's a third Francophone and being rebuilt chiefly by firms out of Québec. If we are indeed the white niggas of Canada, then all I have to say is this:

[Deirdre gives her best impression of the Black Power salute. Philippe gives me an embarrassed look before speaking to me.]

Forgive her, she's rolling.