Soft Apocalypse

by Will McIntosh

  “And when that train gets to Savannah, they’ll fill the empty cars with bodies, and dump them in that dried-out pond,” I said. No one argued. If the government was willing to sink foreign fishing boats to cut down on the competition for food, it was capable of dealing with the illegals pouring over the border by killing them by the trainload.

  When the train had passed we squeezed back onto the tracks.

  I found myself walking beside Deirdre. I hesitated, considered acting like I had something to say to Cortez or Colin and rushing ahead, but it was too late, it would be too obvious.

  “So how’ve you been?” I asked.

  “Swell,” she said. “Just Georgia fucking peachy.” The receding train’s whistle blew in the distance. “It doesn’t appear that you found Ms. Right at that little circle jerk where I bumped into you.”

  “Nope,” I said. I was tempted to point out that she’d been at the same circle jerk, but I thought it best not to pursue that little nugget.

  “Let’s get something straight,” Deirdre said. “Just because you let me join your little gang doesn’t mean I’m going to let you fuck me.”

  “I understand,” I said. “I could never keep up with you in bed anyway. You were too much for me.”

  Deirdre glanced at me, checking for sarcasm. “Damn right.” She smiled. Just a little, just with the edges of her mouth, but it was nice to see.

  “Jasper,” Colin called from behind us. I stopped to wait for him. Deirdre kept walking.

  “I thought you might need rescuing,” Colin said when he caught up.

  “That was an astute assessment. Thank you.”

  “My pleasure,” Colin said. “So, you ever been to Athens before?”

  I nodded. “I was friends with a guy who went to the University of Georgia. Jack Stamps, you remember him?”

  “Sure. Tall guy, curly hair.”

  “I visited him there once. Nice town. Pretty downtown area, right alongside the university campus, which is huge.”

  “I wonder if it’s still intact, or if a lot of it has burned.”

  “Sebastian probably knows,” I said, jerking my thumb toward Sebastian, who was walking alone, chuckling to himself like a mentally ill derelict.

  Colin slowed, tried to work something out of his shoe, then continued. “Shouldn’t we be getting used to all this? Being dirty, not having laptops?” Sweat was pouring down his cheeks, disappearing into three days’ growth of whiskers. There was a hint of white in the whiskers.

  “I think we get used to improvements in our lives,” I said. “I’m not sure we ever get used to having those improvements taken away.”

  “Ever?” he said.

  “Only until we die. Whatever you do, don’t let your kid know how good things used to be.”

  The pine forest opened onto a hot blue sky; up ahead a series of tall grain silos and an octopus of long silver tubes were the first sign that we were close to Statesboro. A flash of red from a stop sign filtered through the bamboo.

  “You know what I miss?” Colin said. “Fat people. I miss variety in the size of people.”

  “Have you noticed that fat women seem a lot hotter than they used to?” I asked.

  “In poor countries fat women have always been hot, because almost no one could afford to get fat,” Ange said.

  Colin and I both glanced over our shoulders. Ange was two paces behind us.

  “Hey, this is top secret guy talk,” Colin said. “Chicks aren’t supposed to hear this.”

  “I promise not to tell any other chicks. I’ll take it to my grave.”

  “Well, all right then, you can listen,” Colin said.

  I spotted a good plant. “Hold on a sec.” I trotted down the embankment, squatted at the base of a hardwood tree and examined the leaves on it.

  “What is it?” Ange called down.

  “Stinging nettle. It’s edible,” I said. I gripped it close to the ground, below its prickly armor, and pulled it.

  “It doesn’t look edible. It looks like a rank old weed.”

  “It’s all in how you cook it.” I carefully folded it into one of my pockets. I’d been focused mostly on medicinal plants, but I could identify the ones that you could eat as well. That knowledge was probably going to come in handy; I didn’t think it would be long before we’d be desperate for food. I’d keep my eyes peeled for pokeweed, dandelion, sorrel, arrowroot, wild onion, mushrooms, along with the medicinals.

  We passed an abandoned warehouse with “Southern Pecan Company” stenciled on the side, then a green Raco gas station sign advertising unleaded, with the price blank except for the final “9,” and farther away a Shoney’s sign poking out of the wide green sea.

  “Looks like your bamboo even took out the bigger towns,” I said to Sebastian.

  “It wasn’t the bamboo, it was the gasoline shortage,” Sebastian said. “I know for a fact that Statesboro set up rhizome barriers and cleared the bamboo out of the town at some point, but these towns aren’t self-sustaining; without a cheap way to bridge them with Atlanta or Savannah, they die. Their only hope was to switch over to food production in a hurry, but people think they can ride it out, keep their dry cleaning and tanning bed businesses going until things turn around. Most of the people probably left looking for food and work. When there weren’t enough people to hold back the bamboo…” He made an exploding gesture with both hands.

  Sebastian seemed to have an answer for everything, at least when it came to the monsters he and his friends had unleashed. “You know, ever since you started spreading this god damned bamboo, I’ve been wondering something. Why didn’t you engineer it to be edible?”

  There was a long pause. I glanced back, wondering if he’d heard me.

  “They couldn’t,” he said.

  “Bullshit,” I shot back.

  “They couldn’t. There has to be some die-back in the population—the resources left on the planet can’t support anything close to the current population.”

  “So, you purposely made it inedible?” I stumbled, clutched at a clump of bamboo to keep from falling and fell anyway, the bamboo bending to slow my descent to comic slow-motion. I’d tripped over a curb. Sometimes you didn’t know where the road was until you were on it.

  “Welcome to Statesboro,” Sebastian said. “And to answer your question, yes, they did it on purpose. As I’ve been saying all along, one to two billion people are going to die by the time this is over. The idea is to keep it from becoming four or five billion.”

  I told Sebastian that the whole thing sounded like demagoguery to me before falling into angry silence.

  We passed a guy in a hammock who was either sleeping or dead. He didn’t open his eyes to look at who was passing, so he might have been dead, but he wasn’t sallow or decomposing, so he might have been sleeping.

  Ange picked out an old Southern mansion on Main Street for us to squat in for the night. She loved old houses. It had a wide green porch and a massive magnolia tree in the front yard, and it sat in the shadow of the town’s massive water tower, a fat kettle wearing a conical hat resting on five legs.

  The front door opened into an ornate living room—gold stuffed chairs with flower patterns, a huge mirror with a rococo gold frame. A table was covered in framed family photos, some of them recent, some ancient. Sometimes it was easy to forget that people had lived entire lives in these houses.

  The biggest photo was also the oldest, maybe from the late 1800s. A family of seven were posed outside this exact house. Dad was seated in the center, scowling, hands on knees, in his Sunday best. Two older women, one probably his wife, the other maybe a sister, were seated on either side of him. One woman was holding a book, the other a sorry little bouquet of wildflowers. A row of teenaged children stood behind them. No one was smiling; the two teenaged girls had stark, haunted eyes; the others just looked exhausted.

  Most of the color pictures were happy ones: a father with a round belly holding a toddler at the beach; a woman dressed in black
regalia accepting a degree; a new bride clutching a colorful bouquet of roses. Everyone looked bright-eyed and ridiculously healthy.

  There were only a few recent photos. The people in them looked a lot like the people in the oldest photo, only in color.

  “I wish we had a chance to talk. There are so many things I want to say to you.” Sophia said softly. I turned away from the photos to face her. She glanced toward the hallway.

  “Maybe we’ll get the chance,” I said, knowing I should discourage any suggestion that something remained between us, but nonetheless dying to know what Sophia might want to say to me.

  Cortez put his duffel on the coffee table, then disappeared into the kitchen. He came out clutching eight stemmed glasses and set them around the table.

  “Hey guys?” he called. “Everyone?” People filed into the room, and Cortez encouraged everyone to take a seat. He pulled a nearly full bottle of gin from his pack.

  “You are a god,” I said as he started pouring. “Where’s Deirdre?”

  I called, but got no answer. Two or three others shouted her name, including Sebastian, who sang her name more than called it.

  “What you want?” she said. She was standing at the top of the stairs wearing a silk nightgown, munching on a chocolate bar, a bottle of pills in her other hand.

  “That’s my nightgown!” Jeannie said.

  “Hey, that’s our chocolate!” Jean Paul said.

  Deirdre took a big bite of the chocolate. “No, we’re a tribe, so it’s all our stuff. Look at all this great stuff I found stashed in the bottom of people’s packs! Ange even had some Valium to share.”

  “You went through our stuff?” Ange said. “You piece of shit.”

  “Oh, I’m the piece of shit? I can’t use my own energy because it’s for the tribe to share, but you can have your own little personal stashes of chocolate and drugs hidden in your packs? Fuck you all.” She disappeared down the hall.

  “We were going to share that chocolate,” Jean Paul said. “We were waiting for the right time, like Cortez with his gin.”

  “You don’t need to explain yourself, we trust you,” Cortez said. “Let’s not let Deirdre poison us. Let’s drink, and have a good time.”

  I lifted my glass. “To Cortez, who brought us booze, and dog.”

  “To Cortez!” everyone said.

  “Dog?” Ange said. “Fuck, were we eating dog?” She took a long swallow from her glass.

  We had a good evening. We played a game of Truth or Dare by candlelight, and found out that Cortez had had the most lovers in his life (about forty, he estimated) and Colin had had the least (four—that’s what happens when you married at twenty-six and were a dweeb in high school). We learned that Jeannie thought her best feature was her boobs, and Sebastian thought he had perfect toes.

  It felt bad to be laughing and having fun while Deirdre sat alone, listening to us, but three different people (Sebastian, then Cortez, then I) made pilgrimages to her door and implored her to join us. Her answer was the same each time: Fuck you.

  Jean Paul didn’t play either. He hadn’t said a word to me since they joined us. He hadn’t even looked at me. I think he’d enjoyed confronting me at that nightclub years ago because he’d been in his element, among his friends. Here, he was the outsider.

  When the Truth or Dare game petered out, Jeannie got everyone singing. I felt like a little moonlight and solitude, so I slipped out the back door.

  The swimming pool was empty, and filled with bamboo, but there was a concrete patio that must have been poured extra-thick, because the bamboo hadn’t penetrated. I stared up at the sky. I loved the night sky, because the moon didn’t have chipping paint or rust and wasn’t sprouting weeds, and the stars weren’t flickering out due to a lack of power. On the contrary—the stars had been growing progressively brighter as the lights on terra firma went out, and now the night sky was breathtaking. I could see the Milky Way, a spectacular swirl of silver tinged with blue and red.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Sophia said behind me.

  I took a sip of gin. “It’s the one thing that gets better as everything else gets worse.”

  “For sure,” she said. She moved up to stand beside me. The crickets chirped in the bamboo, their cadence cold, almost mechanical.

  “It’s been a long time since I last saw you,” I said. “You haven’t aged at all, it’s remarkable.”

  “Thanks. You haven’t either.” I knew that was a kind lie. I’d lost one of my bottom teeth since I last saw Sophia, just for starters. “And actually, I’ve seen you a couple of times since then.”

  I looked at her, questioning.

  “When you first moved back to Savannah, I found out where you lived from Ruplu’s father,” Sophia said. “Once in a while I would drive past your apartment and watch for you. I saw you a few times, walking to work or going out with your friends.”

  “Why didn’t you stop and say hello?” I asked.

  “Because you asked me to stay out of your life, and I owed you that much.” There were four white plastic lawn chairs around a plastic table on the patio. Sophia pulled one out and sat. “I never got a chance to say how sorry I was for what happened the night I bumped into you at that bar. I wanted to go after you when they threw you out. I felt terrible.”

  I chuckled.

  “Why are you laughing?” Sophia asked.

  “That same night I was dragged into an alley by Jumpy-Jumps and watched them murder a half-dozen people. They held a gas gun to my face, and as far as I can figure the only reason they didn’t kill me was because I was poor.” And then of course there was the part about them making me eat a cat fetus, but I figured I’d skip that.

  Sophia looked stricken. “I’m so sorry.”

  I shrugged. “It was a long time ago .I laughed because being kicked out of the bar doesn’t really register on the stress meter from that particular evening.” I took another big swallow from my glass.

  Sophia stood. “I’d better get back inside.” She left out the obvious: before Jean Paul sees me out here with you. “I just wanted you to know that I never stopped loving you.” She hurried inside, giving me no chance to respond.

  I swallowed the rest of my gin, those long-dormant feelings twirling in my stomach. With an effort that felt almost physical, I squashed them. I headed back inside. I got into bed feeling a perfect buzz—not enough to set the room spinning, but enough to kill the existential hum, enough to tuck me in and tell me everything would turn out just fine. Drinking always made me feel better, and made me think nice thoughts.

  My door opened with a soft whine, then squeaked shut.

  “Hi.” Ange said.

  “Hi.”

  “Is this okay?” She ran her fingers down my arm.

  “Yes. Perfect.”

  “I don’t want to be alone right now.”

  “Me neither.” I ran my hand over her hip, down her thigh, pushing away pangs of guilt that Sophia might hear us. The guilt was spectacularly stupid—I realized. I owed Sophia nothing. What had been between us was long over, and had been nothing but mist and daydreams to begin with.

  “You sure you don’t want to crawl into Sophia’s bed instead? Or maybe Deirdre’s?” She laughed.

  “I’m sure,” I said, wondering if she’d seen us on the patio. I kissed Ange’s neck, her jaw. She had an incredible flaring jawline. It was too dark to see the blaze of tattoos that covered her ribs, but I could feel them, making the skin there slicker.

  Later, we lay tangled together, dozing. A dream-image of a leering Jumpy-Jump floated into my mind and I jolted, waking Ange. She rubbed my arm, reassuring. It was nice having someone there in the dark when nightmares came.

  “It’s kind of amazing how long we’ve been fucking around without screwing up our friendship,” Ange whispered drowsily.

  “It’s hard to believe,” I said. “People say it can’t be done, but we proved them wrong.” What would my life have been like without Ange? I didn’t even want to c
ontemplate it. It’s much more bearable to be single and alone when you’re not really alone.

  “I’ve always wanted to ask you about something,” I said. “You once said that if a guy didn’t have the nerve to ask you out point-blank, you knew there was no way it could work with him.”

  “Mm. I don’t remember, but I can see myself saying that.”

  “Hypothetically, if I’d had the confidence to ask you out back then, would you have tried the boyfriend-girlfriend thing with me?”

  Ange rolled over, scooted up against the headboard. Outside, a dog was whimpering. “You really want the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  She folded her arms under her breasts. “You were sweet, and interesting, and fun, but you were too much of a boy. Those are all good traits in a friend, even a fuck friend. But not a boyfriend.”

  “Fair enough. I can see that.” I think I’d even seen it then.

  For a moment I considered asking Ange if she wanted to try the boyfriend-girlfriend thing now. If I wanted to pursue a relationship with Ange, now was the time to ask. But even as I thought it, I knew I was years too late. Regardless of the sex part, she played the part of the female friend who gave me advice on how to get the girl. She couldn’t also be the girl.

  It was more than that, though. When times were good, it was worth the risk to fall in love, because the risk was low. People died of cancer, got hit by cars, but mostly they lived long lives. Now, falling in love was a sucker’s bet. The odds were long, and favored the house.

  “You know, I think you’re tied for my best friend in the world,” I said.

  “Me too, sweetie.” She took a deep breath, let it out, scooted down and rolled over.

  I drifted off to sleep feeling hungry, but good.

  I was out of bed and in the hallway before I was awake enough to register that someone was screaming. Deirdre was screaming. Her door flew open and Sebastian ran out, chased by Deirdre, who had a knife. She slashed at Sebastian, cutting his upper arm wide open before he got clear of her and down the stairs. She stopped, crazy with anger. Cortez and I, the first to reach her, kept our distance.