Soft Apocalypse

by Will McIntosh

  Books reminded me of Ange. She’d always had a book in her hand when she was in grad school. I dug around in anthropology, tossing titles over my shoulder, stacking a few possibilities to the side.

  I picked up a book titled A Field Guide to Medicinal Herbs and Plants of Eastern and Central North America. I opened it at random; the names of the herbs were bolded in the text: Echinacea, Golden Seal, Eucalyptus, Feverfew. In the back were lists of herbs and their medicinal uses. Pain relief. Inflammation. Enlarged prostate. Ruplu was finding it impossible to stock medicine, and no one could manufacture it locally. We hadn’t had any aspirin in two years. I wondered if there was a market for this sort of stuff, or if I could create one? Back in the day, herbal remedies had been sort of a rich yuppie thing, but that was when all you had to do if you had a headache was grab a bottle of Tylenol.

  The last thing I grabbed was Light of the Warrior-Sage, from out of the window display. I liked that phrase, warrior-sage. I found a plastic bag behind the counter, stuffed the books into it, and took off.

  As I turned onto Jefferson Street I caught a whiff of the river. 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.

  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 retreat—a little courtyard surrounded by four-story walls which shaded the tiled floor most of the day. It had been part of a bar many years earlier. I tipped a mattress that was leaned up against a wall, spread my books and lay down to do some reading.

  Mostly I read about medicinal herbs. Some of them grew wild. I imagined making forays out of Savannah to hunt for them in the vast bamboo jungle beyond. I’d have to learn how to prepare them—I knew nothing about herbs, I didn’t know if you dried them, or what.

  My phone jangled. I checked the number, wondering if Maya was

  calling back. No—it was Ange.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey, sweetie! How are you? I was just thinking about how I never

  see you any more. I miss you!”

  The words felt so good. I wanted her to say them over and over. “I miss you, too,” I said.

  “You doing anything right now? Want to hang out?”

  Yes, I did. I asked where she wanted to meet.

  Chapter 6:

  Street Hero

  Fall, 2032 (Two years later)

  "Slow your roll, Slinky, we ain’t walking you down,” Cortez shouted as Slinky’s skinny, cheekless ass disappeared around the red brick corner. I always felt out of place around Cortez’s street friends. They weren’t bad guys, it was just that we were so different.

  There was a touch of gray in the newly grown mustache that Dice kept licking, yet he still acted like he was twenty, his arms splayed as he walked on the balls of his feet like a gangster. Slinky had long, greasy hair and always wore a faded baseball cap. Somehow Cortez could easily straddle my world and these gritty streetballer types, but I couldn’t.

  “Hey, appears we got us some buckwilders,” Slinky said, pointing out a couple sitting in the back seat of an old Toyota parked across Broughton. It didn’t look like they were buckwilding to me; they were just sitting, the woman with her arm around the guy’s shoulder.

  Slinky scampered over, giggling, and peered in the window, his hands cupped around his face to block the glare.

  “Shit!” he screamed, leaping away from the car like he’d burned himself, pulling on the mask dangling around his neck.

  “What is it?” Cortez asked, pulling on his own mask and squatting to look in the window for himself. I followed suit.

  The guy was dead. His jutting tongue was swollen to three times its normal size, his sinuses and adenoids bulging like water balloons under his skin. Some sort of designer virus.

  The woman had it too—she looked like a basset hound. Her eyes were closed, her breathing labored. She was just sitting with her man, waiting to die, practicing good virus etiquette with the windows cranked up tight in the blistering heat. It broke my heart to see it, but there was nothing I could do. I was no doctor. There were no doctors downtown, period, even if I had that kind of cash.

  “C’mon,” Dice said. He tried to resume his cool-walk, but it had lost much of its bounce.

  We cut through Madison Square, which was right near Cortez’s apartment house. Twenty or thirty vagrants were making a camp in the square. I’d never seen such destitute people in my life. You couldn’t even call what they were wearing rags—more like patches, pieces of material stitched together, half the time not even covering the spots that people typically covered. There was a teenage girl running around topless. She was probably good-looking, but it was hard to tell because she was so filthy. I felt for them; I’d been in their shoes (although they weren’t actually wearing any shoes).

  They were chopping low-hanging branches off the Live Oaks and leaning them against the base of the Revolutionary War monument to make lean-to shelters.

  “That kills me,” Cortez said. “Makes me sick to my stomach, seeing that beautiful square corrupted like that.”

  “Somebody should call the berries on them,” Slinky said, snickering.

  “They’d have to be hacking limbs off babies before the public police would come,” Dice said, glancing at Cortez to get some appreciation for his wit.

  A skeleton of an old lady was pulling Spanish moss off branches to fire the cooking pots. It was upsetting to see the trees molested like that. The Live Oaks were the only beautiful thing we had left. The moss was what gave Savannah its particularity; I loved the way it made the trees look like they were melting.

  “I’m gonna go talk to them,” Cortez said. He pulled his Eskrima sticks out of his sock, tucked them into the front of his pants, probably so they’d be nice and visible. Displaying exotic weaponry likely gave people pause. Most people probably knew to stay away from a guy carrying Eskrima sticks (unless they had a gun), because if someone is carrying Eskrima sticks, chances are they know how to them use them. Cortez did know how to use them.

  Dice glanced down at the sticks. “You anticipating blood and guts?”

  “I just want to have a talk. I can’t put up with this desecration.”

  We crossed the street and wandered along the brick walkway, through the center of the camp. When we hit the end of the square Cortez doubled back, probably expecting someone to tell us to get lost, but they just went on doing what they were doing. Finally, Cortez approached the biggest and strongest guy.

  “Ho,” the guy said, smiling and nodding.

  “Where you coming from?” Cortez asked, hands on hips. I hovered behind him with Dice and Slinky.

  “Bamboo forests to the West,” the guy said, pointing. He had a peculiar accent; bamboo sounded like bumpoo. His beard was so shaggy you could barely see his mouth, his skin leathered from too much sun.

  “You mean the sacrifice zone past Rincon and Pooler?” Cortez asked.

  “I don’t know towns. West. Good hunting there.”

  “Good hunting? What the fuck do you hunt in the bamboo?” Dice asked. Slinky laughed.

  As if on cue, there was a squeal in the grass behind us. A squirrel twisted on the ground, a little wooden arrow jutting from its side. The topless girl ran to it, squatted, and brained it with a half-brick. She picked it up by the tail and took it to a steaming pot.

  “Shit, that’s just odious,” Slinky said, lips pulled back from his big square teeth.

  The guy just shrugged. “What’s those?” he asked, pointing at Cortez’s Eskrima sticks.

  “Weapons,” Cortez said. He pulled them out and assumed a karate pose. He launched into a display, filling the air with blurry sticks, sometimes veering decidedly close to the vagrant. The guy flinched, but kept smiling. When he finished, the guy dropped his hands back to his sides and nodded vaguely. />
  I think Cortez had figured on a circle of spectators, a little shock and awe, and I was guessing he felt a little stupid now, because no one had stopped to watch.

  “You mind taking it easy on those branches?” Cortez said to the guy, still breathing hard, wiping sweat from his eyes.

  The gypsy squinted, shook his head like he didn’t understand.

  “The tree branches, would you mind not cutting them?”

  “It won’t kill the trees,” he said.

  “No, but it looks bad, and we live here.”

  The guy stared up at the trees, then back at Cortez like he was whacked.

  “This is a park,” I said. “The reason the trees were planted was to make the park look nice.” I loved those trees, the way their gnarled branches formed shady roofs over the streets. I also loved how tough they were—they survived the climate shifts and chemical dumps, while the crepe myrtles and azalea, the little yellow songbirds, those little green frogs that stuck to windows had mostly died. They had turned brown or blue and rotted. Brown and blue, the real colors of death. Who made black the color of death? Black was the color of night, and the potential of a cool breeze.

  “Just don’t cut any more branches, okay?” Cortez turned without waiting for an answer. He turned to Dice and Slinky. “Dudes, I gotta bounce. If I don’t put in a few ticks hauling dirt to the roof for the garden expansion, the old man is gonna toast my biscuits.”

  “I thought we were going to the blanket district,” Dice said.

  “Another time.”

  As Dice and Slinky took off, I waved goodbye to Cortez, but he gestured for me to stay.

  “I just didn’t feel like having those guys around right now,” Cortez said when they were out of earshot. “They’re good guys and all, but you can’t really talk to them, you know?”

  I nodded. We headed toward his place, hugging along the buildings to stay in the shade as much as possible.

  “You know I’m thirty-four years old today?” Cortez said.

  “I didn’t,” I said. “Happy birthday.”

  “Yeah, thanks. But it’s weighing on me.” He sighed heavily, shook his head. “Thirty-four years old and I’m still beating the sidewalks with my friends like I’m fifteen, sitting in that sauna apartment staring at the TV when we can get a signal, hauling sacks of dirt to the roof to try to keep from starving.”

  “It’s not where we expected to be by now, that’s for sure,” I said. “I kept expecting things to improve, and that our opportunities would improve with them.” I had to admit, though—Cortez’s prospects were even bleaker than mine. He had no real job, just a high school education.

  “Yeah. I just keep thinking if I’d been born in an earlier time, before you needed boats to navigate the streets of LA and shit, that I could’ve been somebody, could’ve been a legend at something.” He looked at me, maybe waiting to see if I was going to laugh. “I don’t know, a martial arts champion, maybe a major businessman. You know? Now I’m just one step above those gypsies in the park.”

  “Hey, you seen this?” An old guy in the doorway of Pinky Masters gestured into the bar. We peered in, saw he was specifically gesturing at the TV. One of those Breaking News Special Reports was on, with flashing red all around the borders of the screen.

  “Christ, what now?” I said. We stepped into the bar. Every eye in the place was on that screen.

  A guy with a prosthetic eye that was too big compared to his real one shouted at the screen. “Nuke ’em all. What are we waiting for? Take ’em out.”

  “What happened?” Cortez asked the old guy at the door.

  “They nuked Lake Superior, made all the water undrinkable.”

  I felt a falling sensation in my stomach. “Who did?”

  “North Korea. They said it’s because we sink their fishing trawlers.”

  “They send those giant fishing factories right up our coast, of course we’re gonna sink ’em,” the guy with the bad eye said.

  The U.S. Navy sank pretty much any non-U.S. fishing boat they found within two hundred miles of our shores, even though international waters technically started twelve miles out, but I wasn’t going to say that out loud. But hell, the why didn’t matter. Lake Superior had been nuked. I didn’t know what the implications of that were, but I knew it wasn’t good. The biggest body of fresh water in the country, poisoned.

  Cortez touched my back. “Unless we’re gonna get drunk, let’s get out of here. I can’t take this right now.”

  “I can’t afford to get drunk in a bar,” I said. “Plus, I should get home.”

  A dog was dying in the gutter a block from Pinky’s, 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 us, then started to go unfocused. Its little chest stopped rising and falling. Now it would turn blue.

  “What next?” Cortez asked, sitting on the curb.

  I looked up at the apartment building rising beyond the dog, the rusted black bars on the windows, vinyl siding broken off in places, exposing splintered plywood underneath.

  “A few years ago an economist told me things were just going to keep getting worse. She said that when there isn’t enough food and water and energy, everyone will fight over what’s left, and the losers of those fights will get desperate, and will do desperate things. It’s starting to look like she was right.”

  “Starting to look? Hell, we’ve been fighting for enough to eat for the past eight years.”

  He had a point.

  Cortez heaved a big sigh. “I can’t stand the thought of going home, facing my old man’s sarcastic bullshit.”

  “Well, come on home with me.”

  “I can’t. I gotta get this work done.”

  Cortez stood, 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.

  I was eager to get home to watch the news and talk to Colin and Jeannie about what was happening. What good did it do anyone to irradiate our water? The U.S. had been doing some ruthless shit around the world that made me awfully uncomfortable, but at least it made sense. Our navy quietly sank fishing boats because that left more fish for us to catch, but they didn’t dump poison in the Pacific to kill all the fish. It was as if entire countries were acting like Jumpy-Jumps.

  As we got closer to Cortez’s house we heard that telltale cracking, like ice underfoot or twigs snapping. “Oh shit,” I said. We hurried toward the sound, which was also toward Cortez’s place.

  It was the yellow variety—not as bad as the green, but worse than the black—and it was coming up right outside Cortez’s apartment house. Some of the stalks were already three feet tall, trembling and popping as they grew. The asphalt in the road was broken into a thousand fragments as nubs of new stalks pushed through. How the hell had it gotten inside the rhizome barrier that’d been sunk around Savannah? That barrier went down ten feet.

  Private Civil Defense people (I didn’t recognize their insignia, but this wasn’t my neighborhood) had cordoned off the area. Technicians were at work tearing up the street with road-eaters, trying to set up a rhizome barrier to contain the bamboo before it spread.

  Cortez’s place was inside the perimeter. Inside the sacrifice zone. His father owned the place—Cortez had been born there—and just like that, they were letting the bamboo have it.

  “There’s my old man,” Cortez said, sounding utterly defeated. His father was standing in a crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk. He was shaking his head, making angry gestures at no one in particular.

  “No way this made it through the barrier,” he said when we were within earshot. “Goddamned biotech punks carried it in and planted it, I’m telling you. Or terrorists—damned Jumpy-Jumps.”

  Cortez and I nodded. Let his dad go on thinking it was some adolescent bio-tinkerer who’d originally loosed the bamboo to impress his friends. I didn’t know how the b
amboo had jumped the barrier, but I knew it wasn’t biotech punks who’d set it loose in the first place, and so did Cortez.

  “You seen Edie or Pat yet?” Cortez asked. They lived in the apartment next door, or used to.

  “Nah,” his father said. He walked off without another word.

  “Do you have a place to stay?” I asked Cortez.

  He was staring glassy-eyed at the apartment. He was in serious need of a shave. “That fucking bamboo. It’s coming back to bite my ass good.”

  “I wonder if it’s actually doing any good. It didn’t stop North Korea from nuking Lake Superior, but who knows? Maybe this whole city would be dust without it.”

  “I don’t know about that, but one thing I do know—if I find out who planted this patch right in my back yard, he’s gonna be one sorry son of a bitch.”

  “I’m glad it wasn’t me,” I laughed. “So, do you have a place to stay? Want to crash with us?”

  “Hey, thanks, J—I appreciate it.”

  Colin met us on the porch. “Did you see what happened?”

  “About Lake Superior? Yeah,” I said.

  “Did you see what happened to North Korea?” Colin asked.

  We picked up our pace. “No, what?”

  Colin held open the screen door, nodded a greeting to Cortez. “It’s gone.”

  The news was showing aerial images of a silent, smoldering city. The gray, twisted wreckage reminded me of a heavily used ash tray.

  “They bombed all the major cities and military installations. Some North Korean troops surged into South Korea, and they’re still fighting, but that’s it, besides survivors in the countryside.”

  I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad. None of my friends seemed to know either. It was a relief, but it was scary. I couldn’t imagine what those survivors were experiencing right now.

  The red News Alert banner flashed at the bottom of the screen. “We’re just now receiving this update,” a blonde anchorwoman said. “It has been confirmed by sources within the Pentagon that all U.S. troops currently serving overseas have been ordered back to U.S. soil.”