“I think it might be best if we stopped seeing each other,” I said.
Deirdre’s eyes opened wide with surprise. “What? We’re just having a fucking argument.”
“It’s more than that,” I said, feeling self-conscious about having this conversation in public. I paused while two girls with dyed white hair passed. “We’re just very different. We like different things. We see things differently.”
“Different, huh?”
I nodded.
She stood with her arms folded, staring at the sidewalk. “Fine. Get your skinny ass out of my sight before I cut your throat.”
“No problem,” I said. I turned to go.
“For once I try to do the right thing,” she called after me. “I pick the stable guy, not the bomber dude. And what happens?” It sounded like she was crying, but I didn’t turn to look. I just kept walking.
You’ll overlook a great many flaws in a woman if she’s famous, and has a great body. Actually, either quality alone might lead you to overlook a great many flaws, but together… together she could be a complete psychopath and you might overlook it. Which is what I’d done, and those were my excuses.
“Don’t worry about it. It wasn’t your fault. She was a nut,” Colin said.
“It was my fault, because she was a nut from the beginning. I knew that, and I still shot off my mouth to get her to go out with me.”
A siren screamed in the distance.
“Okay, it is your fault,” Colin said. “But it’s not like you poisoned our dog or something. Lots of people out there are hurting people on purpose.”
“There is that, I guess. I don’t poison people’s dogs.”
“Indeed. A dog-poisoner you’re not,” Colin agreed.
The chains holding the porch swing creaked as I dragged my foot back and forth.
It hadn’t really been about Deirdre’s body, or her fame. It was because she was cool, and the cool girls never liked me. If I had my photos, I could flip to one where I’m in Forsyth Park sitting on my bike. Completely by chance, Minnie Jameson is in the background, sunning herself on a towel. Minnie had been cool. The only time she’d ever talked to me was to ask me to try to buy her cigarettes at Kroger, and when I’d refused, she’d turned up her lip (much the way Deirdre did) and called me pathetic.
“I left all my photos in her apartment,” I said. “If I give you a key, will you go over and get them for me?”
“What if she’s there?”
“That’s why I want you to go. She’d stab me if I knocked on her door and asked for those photos.”
“She’d stab me, too.”
He had a point. I was sick about my photos, though. There was no telling what she’d do with them, and they were the only photos I had from my childhood, from a time when life was normal and everyone had a place to live and an Xbox.
We sat in silence, staring out into the street, listening to the creak of the porch swing, the crickets, and the occasional gunshot.
Chapter 4:
Dada Jihad
Summer, 2029 (Eighteen months later)
A cop was doubled over, clutching a parking meter, puking on the sidewalk as a half-dozen onlookers wearing white virus masks gawked from a safe distance. Ange and I were on the bottom step of her porch, thirty feet away. Ange cursed and turned her head. I kept watching. I didn’t want to, but somehow I couldn’t turn away.
The puking went from a trickle to a sudden bursting-hydrant gush, then back to a trickle. It spattered in a six-foot swath, steam rising as the hot sidewalk boiled it. The cop made awful guttural sounds when the vomiting slowed enough, as though his intestines were about to spill onto the sidewalk as well.
“What is it?” a gray-haired woman asked.
The bald guy next to her shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s a bad one.” They took a half-step back.
The vomit turned pink, then red. There were gasps and “oh my gods” from the crowd.
The cop’s eyes bulged as the puke lost its thickish chunky quality and became smooth, bright red blood. He dropped to his knees, weaved as blood stained the front of his blue uniform a deep purple, then collapsed to the pavement.
“Jesus Christ,” Ange said as a few final spasms squeezed the cop dry. He lay still, his eyes vacant. In the distance, a siren warbled, growing closer.
We went inside. Chair, one of Ange’s housemates, had been watching through the window. A skinny, bald, bow-legged guy in his fifties stood next to him. The guy had a backpack slung over his shoulder, and he was crying. As we came in he swept his shirtsleeve across his eyes and gawked at Ange, starting at her toes and slowly climbing to her dark green eyes.
“Wow, would I like to make love to you,” he said, not a hint of flirtation in his level tone, as if he were reporting on the weather.
Ange fixed him with her best bitch stare. “Yeah, thanks, let me get back to you on that.”
“A new one,” Chair said, motioning toward the cop with his chin. “Got to be engineered. Too quick to be a natural virus.” Ange nodded. Chair was wearing shorts; I tried not to stare at the elaborate black steelwork of his long-nonfunctioning bionic legs. Even Chair was putting vanity aside in the scorching heat. Chair sighed, rotated his wheelchair in a tight circle. The skinny guy followed him toward the coffee table. His walk was loose, his arms swinging like he owned the freaking world, and he was now sporting a shitass grin.
“Who’s he?” I asked Ange. She shrugged.
“You going to introduce us to your friend?” Ange said to Chair.
“This is Sebastian,” Chair said over his shoulder. He parked across from the sofa and looked at me. “That’s about all I can say in casual company.”
Ange gave him an impatient tisk. “Jasper doesn’t know any local government officials or Jumpy-Jumps, Chair. Don’t be so fucking clandestine.”
“Don’t play it like this is no big deal, Ange. This is fucking clandestine stuff. No offense, but Jasper, you need to go.” He waved me off like a cop directing traffic.
I shrugged, headed for the door. Ange grabbed my t-shirt and tugged. “No, you’re fine. I pay rent here too.” She turned back to Chair, hands on hips. “Look, I’d trust Jasper with my life. Whatever you tell me, I’m going to tell him anyway, so whatever the big secret is, just fucking tell us, will you?”
Chair tapped the arm of his wheelchair with a dirty fingernail that badly needed trimming. “I hope you trust him with your life, and ours too, because that’s what you’re doing.” He nodded tightly. “Fine. Sebastian is a delivery man from the Science Alliance in Atlanta.” He raised his eyebrows significantly behind delicate eyeglasses that looked absurd on his mastiff head.
I’d read about the Science Alliance—an underground group of smart people who’d gone rogue. They were aggressively taking matters into their own hands, trying to tackle some of the world’s many problems. The federal government disliked them almost as much as the Jumpy-Jumps. Suddenly I had doubts about wanting to stay and hear what the guy had to say.
“Shit, you’re kidding,” Ange said. “You don’t look like an eco-terrorist.”
“I don’t feel like an eco-terrorist,” Sebastian said, shrugging.
Ange dropped onto the couch and swung her legs onto the coffee table, forgetting that one of the table legs was broken. It collapsed into a three-point stance. “Shit,” she whispered. Uzi trotted into the room, hopped on the couch next to her, circled a couple of times and dropped like a stone, pushing his ass right up against her. I sat next to Uzi. The couch was coated with dog hair
“You know,” I said. “If you pull something and get caught, you won’t go to jail; the cops’ll just drag you into the street and shoot you.”
“No doubt,” Chair said. “The stakes are high.”
“The potential costs are high,” I persisted. “I don’t get how the benefits match those costs. What do you think you’re going to accomplish?”
“The benefit is saving two billion lives, maybe three. Is that
worth risking your life? About four billion people are going to die if things stay business as usual. If we can do our part to cut that in half, is it worth the risk?”
“We don’t know for sure that billions of people are going to die,” Ange said.
“Yeah, we do,” Chair said. “For sure.”
“We do,” Sebastian chimed, nodding.
“It’s all based on stochastic models,” Ange said. “It’s incredibly speculative.”
Chair glared at her. “How many times do scientists have to be right before people give them a little credit? And you of all people, about to get your doctorate, should have some faith in them.” He snared the remote from the arm of the couch, stabbed the power button. CNN came on. The president was having a news conference. The president always seemed to be having a news conference; I couldn’t imagine when he had time to run the country, or what was left of it.
Almost on cue, the TV jingled and a text message scrolled across the bottom of the screen:
Ange. I want to see you. I’m free Monday, Tuesday, or Thursday for dinner. Can we meet one of those nights? Charles.
“Oh, god dammit,” Ange howled. “‘I want to see you.’ Like I’m his fucking servant instead of his student.”
Chair ignored the message. “They keep warning us, and we just keep carrying on as usual, and things keep getting worse. ‘We have to keep the economy going,’ the president says, while the fucking ocean is lapping at our ankles and we’ve got troops spread out over six different fronts in a never-ending war—”
“Okay, fine. I know the score, I don’t need a lecture,” Ange said.
The screen door squealed and slammed. “Damn, what happened out there?” Rami breezed into the room, carrying a stack of newspapers. He emptied a different newspaper dispenser every day to protest their editorial policies. These people didn’t make a lot of sense to me. My friends and I were in the “keep your head down and try not to get it cut off” camp of surviving this mess. People like Chair got gassed. I was surprised he was still alive, and it scared the shit out of me that Ange was sharing a house with him and these other would-be rebels.
As Chair introduced Sebastian to Rami, I got up and hovered in the doorway, making it as clear as possible that I wasn’t part of this meeting. I hoped Ange would follow my lead, but she stayed on the couch.
“You know I’m in,” Rami said when he learned who Sebastian was. “So what’s in the bag?”
“I have two deliveries for you.” Sebastian unzipped his backpack. Uzi trotted over, stuck his nose into the pack and snuffled, probably hoping it was filled with bacon.
“Uzi, get your butt over here,” Ange said. Uzi just wagged his tail.
Sebastian pulled something from the pack with a flourish, held it between thumb and forefinger. He was giggling. There was something definitely wrong with this guy. “Bamboo root,” he said. It was a cone-shaped tannish nub, crowned with four or five tiny lemon fingers, reaching skyward. “It’s engineered to spread like crazy. It can push through blacktop, even concrete if it’s not too thick. And it’s fast—you won’t believe how fast.”
“Nature taking back its territory by force. I like it,” Rami said. “The authorities will suspect the Jumpy-Jumps. It’s got their whimsical sensibility.”
“Without the sick surprise at the bottom of the box,” Chair said.
“We want to coat entire urban areas with it, in one coordinated attack, to bring commerce to a grinding halt. We’ll plant it at night, in places where it will cause maximum disruption—busy roads, shopping plazas, tourist attractions.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, taking a couple of steps back into the living room. “How does this save lives? It sounds like you just want to add to the chaos.”
“We need to slow things down,” Sebastian said. “Otherwise the U.S. is six to twelve months away from an exchange of nuclear weapons with at least one other country, probably more, and we’ll be under martial law, and things will get really nasty. So we clog the roads so vehicles can’t operate, keep the military busy, slow the violence in the streets.”
“Couldn’t that stall food transport?” I asked. “People might starve.”
“It could make transport difficult, but people shouldn’t literally starve. Some may.”
“That’s pretty fucking cold,” Ange said.
“Depends on how you look at it,” Chair said. “Are a few thousand lives lost now worth saving a few billion later?”
I wasn’t sure I liked that logic, but I kept my mouth closed. It was clear they weren’t particularly interested in hearing dissenting opinions.
“What’s the other delivery?” Rami asked.
Sebastian smiled wide, spread his arms. “You’re looking at him!”
Chair frowned. “You’re the other delivery?”
Sebastian nodded.
“So what can you do?” Rami asked.
“It’s not what I can do, it’s what I carry. In my blood.” He fished around in his backpack, pulled out a plastic bag attached to a thin tube. He pressed the end of the tube against the crook of one elbow, demonstrating that it was for drawing blood. “It’s a virus called Doctor Happy, and it’s guaranteed to take the fight out of anyone infected with it.”
It was scorching hot by afternoon—hot enough that it would cost a week’s pay to keep the place cool, so they moved to the canopied roof. Other people arrived, mostly young rebellious types with interesting haircuts. One brought a boombox and cranked up some Necrobang. I kept expecting them to boot my ass out, but they didn’t.
Sebastian bled himself while others sat hunched over pairs of VR gloves, embedding short pins in the leather fingerpads. Including Chair and Rami, I counted eleven members of the infection gang. I only knew one of them—Cortez—but Ange seemed to know most of them. It didn’t surprise me that Cortez was here. Lately he seemed kind of lost, hungry for some direction. He spent a lot of time hanging out with shady gang types.
Ange watched the operation; she seemed ambivalent, caught in a nether-region between me and Chair. I stepped up behind her. “This whole thing smells like a Jumpy-Jump operation,” I said.
The plan was to spread the virus pretty much at random, trying to target males, and anyone who looked pro-business or pro-government. Sticking those who would benefit most from the virus—gang types, political leaders, police—was deemed too risky.
Ange nodded absently. “I know. But these are the good guys. I feel like I should have faith in them.”
“I don’t have much faith in that guy.” I gestured toward Sebastian, who was bouncing to the beat while he bled through a tube.
“I don’t know what the fuck to make of that Homer.” She folded her arms, blew a damp strand of hair out of her face. “I think I’m going to offer to be a spotter. Watch that no cops catch on to what’s happening.”
I wanted to point out that the getaway driver was no more moral than the guys who robbed the bank, but I knew better than to argue with her.
Rami broke out a quart of home-brewed grain alcohol, the sort that you could buy on any street corner these days, and passed it around. Chair nodded to the beat, watching people who had movable limbs with only a hint of envy. “Carpe diem,” he shouted over the music, “but never forget that we’re partying on the fucking Titanic.” He took a long swig from a soiled plastic cup.
I wasn’t convinced that things were going to get worse. It felt like we had already hit bottom, or were near it anyway. It was hard to ignore police puking blood on the sidewalk in front of your house, but most of the talking heads on TV thought that things would get better soon—that the stock market would recover, the Jumpy-Jump movement would be crushed, the warm wars we were fighting across the globe would end, that we’d get a grip on melting icecaps. Things hadn’t gotten any better over the past five years, but they hadn’t gotten much worse. We just needed to wait it out. Spreading happy viruses and planting voracious bamboo didn’t sound like the right move at all.
“You
two ready to roll?” Cortez put an arm around Ange’s shoulder. It made my jealousy radar jangle, but Ange had told me a dozen times that she wasn’t interested in starting things back up with Cortez.
“I think I’m gonna take a pass,” I said. Cortez shrugged like it was all cool to him. Ange waved, and blew me a kiss.
I headed uptown to Gaston Street, to visit a woman who wanted to talk about selling honey in Ruplu’s store. We tended to work on commission, partly to minimize cash outlay, and partly because when the store was robbed, the losses weren’t all Ruplu’s.
I passed two guys wearing CD armbands—Civil Defense. Everywhere you looked they seemed to be popping up, and every other blank concrete surface either had a poster encouraging you to volunteer, or a stencil of their logo—an eagle in flight, carrying a rat in its claws. The rat was supposed to represent the Jumpy-Jumps, and criminals of every ilk, but more and more it seemed the substantial fee Ruplu was paying the CD protected Ruplu from the CD itself, not the so-called bad guys.
The honey woman shook my hand with both of hers. She was old—eighty at least. I was pretty sure the sundress she wore had been made out of old curtains. She took me to the roof of her house, which had a three-sided corner dormer with a steep peaked roof, hugged by an ancient red brick chimney.
I didn’t know anything about bees and wasn’t particularly interested in learning about them, but the woman gave me an enthusiastic, long-winded dissertation on beekeeping and her hives. Afterward we went down to her living room to talk about the details. She said she could supply about thirty jars a week during the season. I held the sample jar she had given to me up to the light streaming in through the curtainless picture window. Little chips of honeycomb, dust, and even what looked to be a bee’s wing were suspended in the golden goo. It still made my mouth water, but I’d found that people would pay way more for things that looked mass-produced.
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