Apocalypse for Beginners by Nicolas Dickner Translated by Lazer Lederhendler

envelope stuffed with banknotes.
    “You keep money hidden inside our couch?!”
    “An excellent hiding place, don’t you think?”
    The envelope was two inches thick. It held Hope’s entire savings, representing a year of delivering papers, shovelling snow, pushing lawnmowers and shredding documents at the cement plant. Why hadn’t she opened a bank account? No answer. She resealed the envelope and stashed it away again in the couch’s entrails.
    On the screen, the zombies dragged their feet like sleepwalkers. Growls and blank stares—directing the extras must have been fairly straightforward.
    So here was the surprise of the day: Hope, with all her passion for science, just loved zombie movies. The Randall in her, no doubt.
    “You know what? I always try to spot familiar faces.”
    “Sounds like fun. Look, there’s our neighbour, Mrs. Sicotte.”
    “And that’s Mr. Bérubé, behind the artificial palm tree.”
    “Nice one!”
    “Hey! There’s one who’s barefoot!”
    Hope was right. At the very edge of the screen, a large living-dead man in a striped shirt was walking around with no shoes or socks. A mere detail, but not for Hope. She was obsessed with shoeless characters.
    “What happened to his shoes?”
    “No idea.”
    She moved her toes around in bewilderment. Then she smoothed out the bag of nachos and, grimacing, polished off the pinch of spices and food colouring left at the bottom.
    “It reminds me of pictures of Hiroshima after the bombardment. There were barefoot corpses piled up in the streets. As though they’d lost their shoes in the explosion. Weird, eh?”
    “They may have been wearing sandals.”
    “Good point.”

39. MARCUS WAS HERE
    The sky was saturated with northern lights, a vast turquoise illumination throbbing from the zenith to the horizon in every direction. With a magnetic storm of this magnitude, it would be a miracle if every Hydro-Québec transformer didn’t blow before dawn.
    The municipal stadium was deserted—not a single living dead to be seen. Yet the baseball field was lit up by a dozen sodium floodlights that probably drained as many megawatt-hours as Equatorial Guinea.
    A brand-new sign had been nailed up near the ticket booth:
    SUMMER HOURS
    NO AXESS
    AFTER 11 P.M .
    We went in without bothering about the sign or the hour.
    From a plastic bag that she had brought along Hope pulled out a Mason jar half-filled with a clear liquid.
    “Vodka,” she explained.
    She regularly drew off some of the contents of her mother’s bottles, which she then cut with water (no holds were barred when it came to reducing maternal blood alcohol levels). But on that night, instead of pouring the vodka down the toilet, Hope had decided to hold a tasting session.
    “Purely out of scientific curiosity. I’d like to know what goes on inside Ann Randall’s skull.”
    She unscrewed the lid and took a swig with her nose scrunched up. All for a good cause. She handed me the jar,which I raised to the health of Marie Curie before helping myself to a large gulp—grmmppphlltz!!
    The night’s dew had soaked the bleachers, so we opted for the greasy bench in the dugout. We took turns drinking from the jar at a leisurely pace while we read the graffiti carved into the plywood: “Marcus was here,” “Die Scum” and “Go hang yourself.”
    Using her set of keys, Hope added “17 07 2001.” Sigh.
    I found a bat that had rolled under the bench, so between gulps we swatted pebbles into the stratosphere. The only thing that could be heard on the field was our conversation punctuated with the clack of the wood striking the stones.
    The vodka started to abrade the rough edges of reality. Hope held forth on Mikhail Gorbachev’s first name, Jewish folklore and the end of the Cold War. She sent a pebble flying into centre field and reclaimed the Mason jar, which by now held only a few drops of vodka.
    Appearing out of nowhere, a cat loped across the field. When it caught sight of Hope, it swerved