"Just don't cut any more branches, okay?” I turned without waiting for an answer. I figured I'd made my point with the Escrima sticks. Nobody'd watched my performance, but they'd seen it. Word would spread through their shabby ranks that the trees had a champion, a protector. Kilo Orange, champion of the oaks. I liked that.
We soldiered on to Jackson Square, and sure enough there was a crowd gathered, and executions were in progress. The DeSoto Police—'Mayor’ Adams’ thug-force—was conducting them. Three or four other ‘Mayors’ had control over smaller sections of the city. The fed seemed to be completely out of the picture at this point; likely the good Uncle was focusing on keeping control of the big cities. Word was you could still buy sealed brand soft drinks in Atlanta.
A fat police thug with a flat top shoved a targeted gas-gun—the kind with a black mask on the end of the barrel—into the screaming face of an old blue-haired lady while two gasmasked DeSotos held her. The gun squealed; the old lady went stiff as a board, then droppthem against the base of the Monument to make lean-to shelters.
"That kills me,” I said. “Makes me sick to my stomach, seeing that beautiful square corrupted like that."
"Somebody should call the berries on them,” Slinky said, snicker-ing.
"They'd have to be hacking limbs off toddlers before the public police would come correct,” Dice said, glancing at me to get some appreciation for his wit.
A skeleton of an old lady was pulling Spanish moss off branches to fire the cooking pots. This display was giving me indigestion. That moss was what gave Savannah its particularity; I loved the way it made the trees look like they were melting.
I pulled my Escrima sticks out of my sock, tucked them into the front of my pants where they'd be nice and visible. Experience has taught me that just displaying exotic weaponry causes people to give pause. Any asshole, no matter how stupid, knows to stay away from a guy carrying Escrima sticks or nunchuks. Chances are if you're carrying them, you know how to fucking use them. And I do know how to fucking use them.
Dice glanced down at the sticks. “You anticipating blood and guts?"
"I just want to have a talk. I ain't going to put up with this dese-cration."
We crossed the street and wandered along the brick walkway, through the center of their camp. When we hit the end of the square, ed to the cobblestones, twitching and jerking like all the muscles in her body had spasmed at once (which they had).
"Wicked shit,” Dice said with a mix of disgust and excitement in his voice. “She probably figured she was gonna die of a heart ail-ment or something."
White foam gushed out of her mouth, spewing five feet, hissing and steaming on the pavement.
"What the fuck could that old bag have done to deserve that?” I said, pointing. It was sick, standing there watching people get gassed; I knew it, but I did it anyway. I don't know why. Boredom, I guess.
"It's what you say, not what you do,” Dice said.
"True,” I said. “And what you know.” Right now Savannah wasn't a healthy place for overly-educated types, especially the type who wrote articles for the underground rags, or made milk-crate speech-es in the squares.
"The wolves are always at the doors,” Slinky added as the DeSotos picked up the old lady's body, carried it to a flatbed truck, and tossed it on top of a pile of twisted corpses.
"This isn't right! This isn't right!” a dude with out of date two-pocket pants and a button-down shirt shouted from the bunch still waiting to be gassed. A DeSoto chopped him in the neck with the butt of his gun; he fell into the dude in front of him, grabbed hold of him to keep from falling.
I recognized the guy! He'd been a teacher at my school. Mr Swift, my English teacher in 8th grade. He'd been a nice guy, took a liking to me.
He looked toward the crowd. “Somebody help us. Somebody stop this.” Nobody moved.
Then he looked right at me. I looked away.
"Kilo? Please. Help me.” Six, seven years later and he still remem-bered me.
Dice asked me if I knew the guy, and I told him who he was. I wished there was something I could do, but I just stood there, watching them pull people from the little crowd of impromptu con-demned until it was Mr Swift's turn. My heart thudded as I watched, afraid to say anything, not wanting to get added to the line. “This isn't right! Kilo...” Mr Swift shouted as they dragged him out.
He got a face full of the vapors and went into rictus overdrive.
Poor Mr Swift. There wasn't a bad bone in him. The wolves were always at the door, that was the truth, and you needed street balls to keep them at bay.
I didn't want to see any more, so I told Dice and Slinky I had to bounce—that I needed to put in a few hours hauling dirt to the roof of my apartment house for our security garden, so my old man would stop toasting my biscuits about me not contributing.
There was a dog dying in the gutter outside our apartment house, flies buzzing around its eyes, its lip pulled back in a death snarl. It was a puny thing, mostly ribs. The eye facing up fixed on me, then started to go unfocused. Its little chest stopped rising and falling. Now it would turn blue.
A wave of hopelessness pounded me so hard I sank to the curb, pressed my palm on the hot, gum-stained pavement.
Was this it? Twenty-four years old, and I was still beating the side-walks with my mates like I was fifteen, sitting in that sauna apart-ment staring at the TV when we could get a signal, hauling sacks of dirt to the roof to try to keep from starving. There was nothing ahead, nothing but heat and boredom, viruses and bamboo. Then I'd turn blue.
I'd been meant for more than this. Mr Swift had said I had a great mind, I had raw intellect. If I'd been born in an earlier time, before the world started going to shit, before people learned how to cook viruses in their basements and you needed boats to navigate the streets of Los Angeles, I could've been great, I could've been a legend at something. A writer, or an inventor. A doctor. Yeah. My patients would pass me in the streets and shake my hand and say “You saved my life.” Now I was just one step above those vermin in the park.
I looked up at my apartment building, the rusted black bars on the windows, vinyl siding broken off in places, exposing splintered plywood underneath. I couldn't stand the thought of going into that apartment, facing my pop's sarcastic bullshit. I saluted the little fallen dog and walked on, past the row houses with their busted railings and rotting wood, trash piled up on the sidewalk where it'd been thrown out the windows.
Maybe I should claim a gang, make some cheese selling drugs. At least they were doing something. It wasn't my style, though. All that hierarchy shit, paying props to higher-ups, secret hand signals.
I caught a whiff of the river as I turned onto Jefferson Street. Even ten blocks away, when the wind was right the stench of dead seafood and ammonia cut right through the city's default smell of piss on brick.
I stepped around a group of sleeping homeless people, spilling out of an alley onto the sidewalk. I passed the coffee shop, the Dog's Ear book store.
I paused, backtracked to the window of the bookstore. The display was mostly gardening, DIY manuals, cookbooks, but there were a few others: Existential Philosophy: An Introduction, Socialism Revisited, Light of the Warrior-Sage.
Mr Swift had told me that even though I couldn't afford high school, whatever I did, keep reading. Educate myself. I hadn't done it, unless you count martial arts magazines and the newspaper. May-be I should do it, to honor his memory. It was something, anyway.
The book store was closed. I went into the alley, stepping between the vagrants sleeping out the heat of the day, and kicked in the back door. I used a spinning side kick, even though a shoulder would've worked just as well. I'm a show-off, I admit it. Even when no one's around I show off to myself.
I opened the blinds on a side window and held books up to read the titles by the sunlight streaking through. Most of the dusty books were in heaps on the floor, but they were still pretty much sorted by classification. I didn't know what I was
looking for anyway, just stuff to expand my mind that was not too boring.
I looked around the place once my eyes had adjusted to the dim-ness. Rough wooden beams and fat pipes ran the length of the ceil-ing. Pipes. Blows my mind that most of the water that filled them used to be drinkable. Not many people know that, but I do. I don't count ignorance a strength.
I dug around in Anthropology, tossing titles over my shoulder, stacking a few interesting ones to the side. I thought I'd like to learn about peoples.
My buddies would give me shit if they caught me reading, but I could fight better than any of them; that gave me idiosyncrasy credits that I could cash in at the bookstore.
I found some Batman and Detective comics. Old musty ones, probably from the turn of the century, the pages yellow and brittle. I added them to my stack. I could mix them in with the hard stuff as a break.
The last thing I grabbed was Light of the Warrior-Sage, from out of the window. I like that phrase, warrior-sage. I found a plastic bag behind the counter, stuffed the books into it, and I was on my way to higher education.
When no one was watching I pulled open the steel cellar hatch in the sidewalk in front of a burned-out storefront. I ducked down the steep staircase, crossed a damp basement, pushed out another hatch, and popped out into my secret place—a little courtyard sur-rounded by four-story walls which shaded the tiled floor most of the day. Used to be part of a bar, many years ago. I pulled down the mattress that was leaned up against one wall, spread out my books and lay down.
I tried to read Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, but couldn't get absorbed, so I thumbed through Introduction to Anthropology. A picture caught my eye, because all the women in it had their tits showing, even the old women, which was not particularly exciting but still sort of fascinating to look at. I started reading about the people in the picture.
They were a primitive tribe called the Hazda, that was still alive in Africa when the book was written. They were hunter-gatherers—they wandered from place to place with no home base, eating what they could hunt or gather instead of planting crops. The book said this made them think about the world way different from us. They weren't too interested in owning things, because they had to carry everything they owned. They didn't fight, because they didn't own anything to fight about, and no one was in charge, because there was nothing to be in charge of. They had no appointments to keep, so they didn't need clocks (not that I had any appointments to keep either), and they loved nature, because they were right in the middle of it all the time.
It occurred to me that the picture caught my eye partially because the women walking around with their tits showing reminded me of the girl in Pulaski Square who had brained the squirrel.
I wondered if those people in the square weren't just homeless vagrants—maybe they were hunter-gatherers, like the Hazda. May-be they'd gone feral, because of the depression and the die-off. There was something strange about them, that was for sure.
I read all about the Hazda. Later, I'd go back to the square and talk to those people, see if they had fights, or clocks. Set all the pieces in their place. I felt absolutely plush, like lights were turning on inside my head.
I figured that was enough hypothesizing for one day, so I gathered up my gear and headed home. I was ready to haul some dirt.
From a block away I could hear the cracking, like ice underfoot, or twigs snapping. “Oh shit. Oh shit,” I said to no one. I ran.
It was the yellow variety—not as bad as the green, but worse than the black—and it was coming up right outside our apartment house. Some of the stalks were already five feet tall, trembling with energy, cracking and popping as they grew. The asphalt in the road was broken into a thousand fragments as nubs of new stalks pushed through. A fucking bamboo outbreak. How the hell did it get inside the rhizome barrier that'd been sunk around all of downtown Sav-annah? That barrier went down ten feet. It made no sense.
Private police (I didn't recognize their insignia, but new forces were being established every day) had cordoned off the area. Tech-nicians were already at work, tearing up the street with road-eaters, trying to set up a rhizome barrier to contain the bamboo before it spread out of control.
Our apartment house was inside the perimeter they were setting up. Inside the sacrifice zone. I'd lived there for ten years, and just like that, they were letting the bamboo have it.
I spotted pop, standing in a crowd that had gathered on the side-walk. He was shaking his head, making angry gestures at no one in particular. At God probably.
"No way this made it through the barrier,” he said when I was in earshot. “God damned biotech punks carried it in and planted it, I'm telling you. Or terrorists—damned Jumpy-Jumps."
I nodded. The adolescent bio-tinkerer who'd loosed it—probably to impress his friends—felt it wasn't getting enough attention, so he hacked it into the safe zone. “You seen Edie or Pat yet?” They lived in the apartment next door. Though not anymore they didn't.
"Nah,” he said. “What do you got there?” he added, pointing at my books.
"Nothing. Just some books."
"We got no time for books,” he grumbled, walking off. “Start mov-ing stuff out of there while we can still get through. We're homeless.” His voice cracked on the last word.
We slept at my uncle Troy's, two blocks away on East Harris. I slept in the kitchen, between the counter and the table, because there were already three to a bedroom and two in the living room. Three of them were boarders Troy had taken on to help make ends meet. It was hard to sleep with the sound of bamboo snapping and crackling in the distance—like trying to sleep to the sound of rats scuttling around in your ceiling—but it was too hot to close the kitchen window.
In the morning I went back to our place to assess the damage. A sea of yellow stalks waved in the hot breeze, loosely spread in some places, tight as a pack of cigarettes in others. It ended short of Pulaski Square, so the barrier had held.
I wandered into Pulaski Square, where the tribe was still camped, and watched them for a few minutes. They certainly didn't have many possessions: machetes, cooking pots; one kid was clutching an old action figure doll. From what I could see, no one seemed to be in charge. Most of them were sprawled on the lawn dozing; a group of older men were playing some sort of gambling game that involved tossing carved sticks.
I sat on a bench, pulled Light of the Warrior-Sage out of my pack, and opened it at random. The warrior-sage keeps a silent quest in his heart. This quest keeps him vital, lubricates his mind and spirit, keeps him poised and alert in the luminosity of his soul. His quest is selfless, for the warrior-sage recognizes that the boundary between self and world is illusion, that alleviating the suffering of the world and alleviating the suffering in his own heart are one and the same.
A calmness spread through me. I put the book down beside me and stared up into the branches of the oaks, letting the idea wash over me. It was like the words were always inside me, waiting to come out. A warrior-sage—I was a warrior sage.
I picked up the book and started from the beginning.
I learned that the warrior sage spoke only the truth, not because of some arbitrary moral code, because the truth insulated you from falling prey to the rolling mirror, the illusions that coated the world and were always changing. The warrior-sage respected all life. He practiced a quiet dignity; his feet planted firmly on the earth, his vision that of the great eastern sun.
My phone rang.
"Kilo!” It was Dice. “You in there? I was coming to pay a call, and found the terrain no longer to my liking."
"Props, Dice. You looking to practice some downtown science on this fine day?” I retrieved a Batman comic, flipped through it while we talked about nothing. On the splash page Batman was going Kung Fu on a gang in a back alley while a blonde woman cowered against a concrete wall. He wasn't saving her from getting gang-banged, was he? That'd be intense for a comic. I'd always liked Batman. He would sure pull a full shift if he were working in t
hese times...
I jumped off the bench. “Dice, I gotta bounce, man, I'll ring you after.” My heart was racing. All that time honing my martial arts skills, my weapons technique ... I'd no idea where it was leading. It was leading to this moment.
I threw a flurry of punches in the air and whooped.
"Where are your sticks?” I turned around; it was the topless girl who could have been hot if she wasn't sporting that filthy hillbilly look and had better teeth. Her accent was like the dude I'd talked with yesterday—she pronounced W like V.
"I left them at home,” I said. If I could call uncle Troy's kitchen home.
"What game were you playing with them?” She made a strange, scrunchy facial expression, like she wasn't aware other people could see her face.
"It wasn't a game. They're weapons, for protection."
She made a grunting noise that I took to mean she understood. I kept glancing down at her chest; I couldn't help it, her boobs were right there. Her nipples were puckered, her areolas as big as silver dollar pancakes.
"If you see any trouble, let me know. I'm a protector, like the police, only I don't charge money. I'm a protector for the poor."
She frowned, like she didn't understand, then looked off over my shoulder, at the bamboo outbreak. She smiled, suddenly looking almost like any city chick except for her crooked grey teeth.
"It's beautiful,” she said. Love of nature shit, just like the Hazda. God damn if these people weren't modern hunter-gatherers.
I dressed all in black, to blend in with the night. No fancy costume. The warrior-sage is humble; he does not seek attention. I strapped a sheathed knife at my calf, Escrima sticks in a pouch at my waist, nine millimeter mule pistol tucked in the big cargo pocket of my otherwise skintight pants. I'd made a mask out of an old T-shirt, but would only wear it when action was immanent.
The sun was setting, the crickets singing in the waning heat. My first night as a crime fighter, my first night as a true warrior-sage. I was excited, yet calm. I felt ten feet tall, all my senses on fire, as I turned off East Harris and cut across Pulaski Square.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #215 Page 13
