The pitcher wound, threw a high fastball. The lanky batter swung and missed, and the inning was over. No one clapped. The Macon Mets took the field, and the pitcher began his warmup tosses.
“Whatever that shit is in the atmosphere, it sure makes the sunsets pretty,” Ange said.
“Mmm,” I said. The sun was setting over the left field fence; the clouds were a gorgeous pastel of pink, peach, indigo, violet.
On the first pitch the Sand Gnat batter yanked the ball into the right field corner. The right fielder took a few listless steps after it, then gave up. He squatted on his haunches and watched it roll. He covered his face in his hands as the ball rolled to a stop on the warning track. The center fielder trotted over to him, put a hand on his shoulder, said something. The right fielder shook his head.
The batter trotted to second base and stopped, probably figuring that’s where he would’ve ended up if the play had been made. Winning didn’t mean as much with so many people dying.
“His family was in D.C. All dead,” the man in the row behind us said. I glanced back at him. His face and neck were a swirl of burn scars, and his right arm ended in an uneven stump. A China War veteran, probably.
“Shame. I’m surprised he’s playing,” An older man beside the scarred man said.
I wanted to tell them to shut the hell up. I didn’t want to think about D.C. That’s why I was at a baseball game instead of watching fucking CNN.
“I wonder if the people who killed the president had propped him in the chair for effect, or if he died in the chair,” Ange said.
“I bet they propped him there,” I said.
CNN kept replaying the video of the president in the oval office, behind his desk, his head rolled back, his tongue huge and black like he’d choked trying to swallow a tire. He’d been a Republican; the vice president had been a Democrat. That was supposed to change things. The man on the videotape they kept showing on CNN was neither a Republican nor a Democrat, but he claimed to be in charge. Or not in charge. It was hard to understand him because he talked fast and used a lot of Jumpy-Jump slang. The newscasters weren’t sure anyone was in charge. They looked scared. The streets of D.C. were a madhouse, and some of the other big cities didn’t seem far behind.
It wasn’t clear whether the teams were going to finish the game. The managers and umps were standing near the first base coach’s box, arms folded across their chests, talking.
Over the left field wall, there was a flash, and a hot boom. People in the stands screamed, leapt to their feet. The ballplayers sprinted for the dugouts, looking back over their shoulders at the explosion, which was a good thirty blocks away. It looked like an expanding rainbow of colors, like ripples in a candy pond.
I looked at Ange. “Shit,” she said.
It could be anything—chemical, biological, nuclear, or an accident at a crayon factory.
We waited for most of the stampeding crowd to exit, figuring their panic could kill us as easily as chemical weapons, then we fled.
The streets were filled with the sound of breaking glass and shouting, which was not unusual. There was something else, though—a thrumming that registered deep in my stomach, like the beating of drums. Mortar fire, or maybe tanks, far away. Closer, we heard the pop of gunfire, which was also not that unusual, only there was more of it than usual.
Screams rose from the direction of Waters Avenue, cutting through the other noises. Ange’s phone rang.
“You guys okay?” Ange said. I could hear Colin’s voice in the phone. “Shit,” Ange said. She turned to me. “Your building’s on fire.”
I started running.
“Hold on. It’s okay, they’re out, they’re safe,”Ange said. She grabbed my sleeve, slowed me down.
“Jeannie’s okay?” I asked.
“Jeannie’s fine. Baby still on board.”
“Where are they?” I asked, relieved to hear that Jeannie hadn’t lost the baby. With no access to a doctor, her pregnancy was such a tenuous thing.
“Outside your building,”Ange said. She told them we’d meet them there.
We passed a building with red flames licking out of a boarded up window. A siren wailed in the distance. It wasn’t the wah-wah siren of an ambulance, and the police never used their sirens any more—they didn’t want people to hear them coming.
“I already called the fire department,” an old guy standing on the sidewalk said, seeing us peruse the flames as we hurried by.
“You called the fire department?” I said.
“They’re on their way.” Purple veins blossomed on the guy’s cheeks and nose. He was probably a drinker, passing dull nights in his apartment sipping moonshine while he watched old TV shows where cops solved crimes and firemen ran into burning buildings to save crying babies.
We picked up our pace. “They’re bad news. Get away while you still can,” I shouted back.
The crack of gunfire and the booming of explosions was everywhere. Something was happening.
A baritone honking announced the big red truck before it careened around the corner. It was crawling with firemen, their faces painted red, their helmets festooned with illustrations. The truck was immaculate, the polished chrome blinding in the sunlight.
We cut into an alley. It was packed with homeless, milling around, looking ready to bolt if they could only figure out which direction to go. I thought of our apartment burning with all of my possessions in it. I didn’t have much to lose, but when you don’t have much, it sure hurts to lose what you have.
The pop-pop of gunfire was constant. Crowds of people were running in every direction. A helicopter roared overhead, just above roof level. In the east, where the explosion had been, the horizon glowed red—it looked as if everything in that direction was on fire now.
We spilled out onto Drayton. A tight cluster of Civil Defense guys with machine pistols rounded the corner and headed in our direction. We ducked into a doorway, stared at the bricked pavement until they passed. I had no idea what the rules were, what might get us shot, who might do the shooting. I struggled to understand, to put a label on this thing that was happening. It was a war, the city was at war—that was clear. But wars had two sides, and this had twenty sides, or fifty, or maybe no sides.
We cut down another alley, past people hiding behind a green dumpster. Others stared down at us from the safety of open windows in locked apartments. Above them, on the roof, were flocks of boys with guns.
Ange’s phone rang again. “Where are you?” she said, plugging her free ear.
“It’s Sebastian,” Ange said to me. “He says we need to get out.”
“Out of the city?”
Ange nodded.
“But Jeannie’s eight months pregnant!”
Sebastian said something. Ange held up a finger. “Okay, see you there.” She hung up.
“He said we don’t have a choice, things are going to get bad.”
I thought of what that economist in the wheelchair had said three years ago, during our speed-dating session. It’s not going to turn around; it’s going to get worse, and then it’s going to collapse completely.
Sebastian was going to follow the railroad tracks out of town. That made sense, to get off the roads, but the thought of the railroad tracks sickened me. It reminded me of our tribe days.
A woman screamed in one of the apartments above us. She screamed again, forming the outline of a word. It sounded like “help.” She screamed a third time, and this time it was clear she was calling for help.
Ange called Jeannie back and got them moving in our direction.
“I should warn Ruplu,” I said. We made the two-block detour to Abercorn Street, and turned the corner into an inferno. Flames roared over the roofline of the Timesaver. Ruplu was nowhere to be seen. I called him.
“It’s gone, Jasper,” he said. “Everything we worked for is gone.”
“I know. I’m so sorry.” I spotted Colin and Jeannie up ahead, raised my hand. They waved back. “Listen, we’ve
been told by our scientist friend that we need to get out of the city. It’s not going to be safe here.”
There was a long silence on the other end. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure, yes. This guy has friends in Atlanta. They say things are going to get very bad.”
“All right, then. Thank you, friend.”
I suggested he and his family meet up with us, but Ruplu said if he needed to leave, his uncle had a little boat, and they would head down the coast to stay with relatives in Saint Augustine. That seemed like a good plan.
We joined up with Colin and Jeannie and headed toward Thirty-eighth Street.
My phone rang: I recognized the number, but I couldn’t connect it with a face. I answered it, too breathless to do more than gasp in lieu of a hello. We’d stopped running and were hugging the edge of doorways.
“I need you,” Deirdre said. She was crying. A tingle of shock ran up my balls.
“I can’t,” I said.
“You can’t what?” she said. “I don’t know where to go. There’s nobody…” she trailed off, crying. It was an angry, outraged crying.
“I can’t get to you. I’m not home,” I said. “We’re leaving.”
“I’m coming with you.” I didn’t respond.
“Please!” she added.
“Who is it?” Jeannie asked.
I covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “Deirdre. She wants to come.”
“Oh Christ! No. No way,” Jeannie said.
“What can she bring?” Colin said. It was a shock to hear Colin put it so bluntly. If you bring a keg, we’ll invite you to our party. But given the situation I guess he saw no choice but to be pragmatic. I’ve heard a lot of people say that having a child changes you.
We were crossing Thirtieth Street. We had to step over a body stretched across the sidewalk, covered with bloody bullet wounds.
“What can you bring if we let you come? Do you have money?”
“Three thousand,” Deirdre said. “A gun. Two kils of energy.”
I turned to Colin. “Money, gun, energy.” He nodded, and so did Ange. Jeannie cursed.
“Tell her to bring water filters if she has any,” Colin said.
“Get to Thirty-eighth Street,” I said into the phone. “Follow the railroad tracks east out of town until you catch up with us. Bring water filters if you have any. We’ll move slowly, but you’d better move your ass, because we won’t move slowly for too long.”
“I’m coming,” Deirdre said. “Fuck you,” she added before hanging up.
We jogged as fast as Jeannie could, through a roiling tide of people fleeing in every direction, past looters climbing into shattered store windows, past tanks rumbling down Habersham Street. Eventually we stopped running and hugged the edge of doorways, trying not to be noticed. We cut through an alley and had to step over three bodies, probably dragged from a car that was bent around a telephone pole. One had been shot in the eye, an old black woman.
There was a long burst of gunfire nearby.
“Oh jeez,” Colin said. A block away, on Lincoln Street, men with automatic weapons were executing dozens of people kneeling, hands behind their heads, in front of an apartment building.
We turned into another alley, behind Liberty, and ran headlong into four soldiers in MOP suits and gas masks. Federal government soldiers. The cavalry had arrived. With the president dead, I wondered who they were taking orders from. The VP? The secretary of defense?
“Let’s go,” one of them said, motioning with a gun “you’re being evacuated.
“Evacuated where?” Ange asked.
“Move,” the soldier said.
We were taken a block over and directed into a section of Bull Street that had been barricaded with cyclone fencing topped with spirals of silver barbed wire. There were thousands of people milling around inside the fence.
We sat on the edge of the sidewalk, in the shade.
“I’m going to go up front and see what’s happening,” Colin said. “Stay here.”
People were standing quietly, in bunches. “We’ll be safe soon,” someone said nearby. A mother was stroking her crying child’s hair. She lurched forward suddenly and vomited into the sewer grate between her feet. The people nearest scurried away, giving her a wide buffer. The woman barely noticed; she was staring between the rusted iron bars of the sewer, into the wet darkness below.
Colin came back at a trot. “I don’t like this. They’re separating people into groups—old people in one, one for younger men, another for younger women, a fourth for anyone who doesn’t speak English.”
“Why would they do that?” I asked. My pounding heart made me think that the answer was something awful, and that maybe deep down I knew what it was.
“None of the answers that make sense are good things,”Ange said. We had to get out.
We walked the perimeter, trying not to raise suspicion, looking for a way out. Up the street in Forsyth Park, three big semis were pulling out, one after the other to form a convoy.
“I think there are people in there,” I said. “I think the young males are being conscripted into the Army.”
The holding pen we were in was thinning as people were sorted into categories and disappeared through a gate at the front, near the park. Soon we’d be corralled toward the front, and then Colin and I would be separated from Ange and Jeannie.
We finished our walk back near the woman who’d vomited. She hadn’t moved; her head was still hanging over the sewer.
The sewer.
I retrieved a mangled bicycle handlebar from a trash heap. “Guys, stand so you’re blocking me from the soldiers’ view.” I pried open the manhole in the center of the street. “Come on.” I climbed down the slimy rungs of a ladder. Ange was right behind me, her red sneakers in front of my nose.
We waded down the main sewer tunnel through ankle-deep effluence. A dozen others had followed us, but they were lagging behind and keeping to themselves.
Striped sunlight filtered through sewer grates intermittently. Far ahead was a brighter area; harsh engine noises echoed down the pipe from there.
I turned right, into a smaller pipe where we had to bend at the waist.
“Do you know where you’re going?” Ange asked.
“No idea,” I said. “I just want to put some distance between us and those soldiers.”
“You think we can we take this all the way to Thirty-eighth?” Jeannie asked.
That was a great idea. If there was another juncture I could turn left and follow Drayton six blocks to Thirty-eighth.
We found the juncture and turned left. The tunnel ahead seemed to be partially blocked. As we drew closer, we could see that it was blocked by a pile of bodies. We pressed along the damp concrete wall as we went around the pile. There were a dozen or so bodies heaped in a twisted tangle. They looked to be Civil Defense. Above them, light filtered in along the edges of a steel grate.
“The federal soldiers must have killed them,” Ange said.
“Help me,” a face buried in the pile whispered. A woman, strands of her hair spilling over a booted foot. Her mouth was caked in white foam and blood. One of her arms jutted from under the leg of a hairy man. Her hand opened.
Jeannie grasped it, staring at the pile of bodies on top of the woman.
“I’m sorry, we can’t,” she said. She squeezed the woman’s hand. We hurried on, the woman’s pleas fading in the distance.
I counted six blocks, then climbed a ladder and strained to unseat the manhole cover. The first thing that came into view was a street sign: Thirty-eighth.
We crossed Thirty-eighth and hit the tracks, scurrying like roaches fleeing the bathroom light. The tracks cut through back yards and vacant lots. As we reached each intersecting street we sprinted across. Sebastian had chosen well—there wasn’t much going on around the tracks. We passed an abandoned loading dock surrounded by heaps of rusting kitchen appliances. Families were ducked down among them, hiding.
“Are ther
e other people we should call and offer to let them come with us?” I asked. Most of our friends had their own families, their own housemates.
“Cortez?” Colin said.
Cortez. I hadn’t seen him in six months, since the night of the killing.
“He’s big and tough, and we can trust him,” Colin said.
“Yeah,” I said. I called Cortez.
He was way ahead of us, already on I-16. He’d traveled the last thirty blocks out of the city in a sewer. He agreed to swing back and meet us on the tracks outside the city.
“Good call,” I said to Colin as I hung up. I’d felt a rush of affection when I heard Cortez’s voice. Yeah, it would be good to have him with us.
We walked on, watching for Sebastian, gravel crunching underfoot.
“We should call Sophia,” Jeannie said. The name jolted me; it must have registered on my face. “She was good to us when we needed help, we should see if she needs our help now.”
Colin looked at me and shrugged. “Do you remember her number?”
Of course I remembered her number. I took a deep breath and punched it in, put the phone to my ear, listened to the ring as if it were the cry of some mythical beast.
“Hello?” That unmistakable island lilt.
“Sophia, it’s Jasper.”
Pause. “How’re you? It’s been a long time.”
“Alive,” I said. “Are you all right? We’re leaving the city. We wanted to see if you needed help.”
She said they were barricaded in their condo in one of the gated communities. Their police force was in a pitched battle, trying to repel gangs storming the walls.
They were barricaded. Hopes I hadn’t even felt welling up were dashed. And now that I was conscious of them, I felt like a sick bastard for hoping that her husband had left her, or died.
Soft Apocalypse Page 18
