A year. Yo Wen would be distraught, but she was tough as nails, and Chien Ru would help her through it.
He passed his friend Han squatting beside his little truck, which was stacked high with collapsed cardboard boxes. He waved, and Han waved back.
He wondered if Han would care that he was now a murderer. How strange. Who would have guessed? But he suspected if his grandfather were alive, he would approve. And the more he thought about it, maybe the government hadn’t won this time. They could throw him in jail, but they couldn’t resurrect Lin. Jian was free to marry, and Ch’an’s pop rating was sky-high after his friends watched him help Hai murder his Video Mother. Who knew, maybe they would even allow him to attend his son’s wedding.
Street Hero
“Slow your roll, Slinky, we ain’t walking you down,” I shouted as Slinky’s skinny, cheekless ass disappeared around the red brick corner.
Did everyone who talked street talk think in perfect TV news anchorman English, I wondered, or was it just me? I also wondered if other people thought about shit like this, or whether I was some sort of street philosopher.
I glanced at Dice. He was licking the edges of his newly-grown mustache, which he’d been doing nonstop since he grew the fucker. It didn’t appear that he was wondering about anything at all, but how did I know he wasn’t working Euclidian geometry problems behind those beady eyes?
“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. Didn’t look like they were buckwilding to me; they were just sitting, the woman with her arm around her man’s shoulder.
Slinky scampered over and peered in the window, his hands cupped around his face to block the glare. “Shit!” He leaped away from the car like he’d burned himself, pulling on the mask dangling around his neck.
“What is it?” I pulled on my own mask and squatted to look in the window for myself. The dude was dead. His jutting tongue was swollen to three times its normal size, his sinuses and adenoids bulging like there were water balloons under his skin. Some sort of designer virus, for sure.
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. Broke my heart, but there was nothing I could do. I was no doctor, I was a street philosopher.
“C’mon, Hooper said the executions were gonna start around ten,” Dice said. I didn’t see the hurry. Most of the time execution rumors turned out to be bogus anyway.
We cut through Pulaski Square, right near my 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 need covering. There was a teenage girl with her tits just hanging. She was probably good-looking, but she was so filthy the sight didn’t turn me on in the least. All the men had bum-beards and long hair, probably crawling with bugs.
They were chopping low-hanging branches off the live oaks and leaning them 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, snickering.
“They’d have to be hacking limbs off toddlers before the public police would come correct.” Dice glanced 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 desecration.”
We crossed the street and wandered along the brick walkway, through the center of their camp. When we hit the end of the square, we doubled back, expecting someone to challenge us, tell us to get lost, but they just went on doing what they were doing. Finally, we approached the biggest and strongest guy.
“Ho,” he said, smiling and nodding.
“Where you coming from?” I asked, hands on hips so he could get a good look at the sticks. Dice and Slinky hovered behind me.
“Bamboo forests to the West,” he said, pointing. He had a peculiar accent; bamboo sounded like bumpoo. His beard was so shaggy I could barely see his mouth, his skin leathered from too much sun.
“You mean the sacrifice zone past Rincon and Pooler?”
“I don’t know towns. West. Good hunting there.”
“Good hunting? What the fuck do you hunt in the bamboo?” I asked. Dice and Slinky laughed.
As if on cue, something squealed in the grass behind us. A squirrel twisted on the ground, a little wooden arrow jutting from its side. The girl with the bare tits 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 malodorous,” Slinky said, lips pulled back from his big square teeth.
The guy just shrugged. “What’s those?” He pointed at my Escrima sticks.
Now we were getting somewhere.
“Weapons.” I pulled them out and assumed an offensive pose. I launched into Su Ki Kai kata, filling the air with blurry sticks, sometimes veering decidedly close to the vagrant. He flinched, but kept on smiling. I expected the other vagrants to stop what they were doing and watch, but only my mates watched. When I finished, the guy dropped his hands back to his sides and nodded vaguely.
I had figured on a circle of spectators, a little awe in their eyes, and I felt pretty fucking stupid now, the way they’d ignored me.
“You mind taking it easy on those branches?” I said to the guy, still breathing hard, wiping sweat from my eyes.
He 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.
“It looks bad.”
He stared up at the trees, then back at me like I was whacked. Suddenly I wanted to concave this guy’s skull. I loved those trees, the way their gnarled branches formed shady roofs over the streets. And how tough they were—they survived the climate shifts and chemical attacks while the crepe myrtles and azalea, the songbirds, those little green frogs that stuck to windows, they all died. They turned brown or blue and rotted. Brown and blue, the real colors of death. What moron made black the color of death? Black’s the color of night, and the potential of a cool breeze.
“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 dropped 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. “She probably figured she was gonna die of a heart ailment 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. 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 speeches 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 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 remembered 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 condemned 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. I pressed my palm on the hot, gum-stained pavement.
Was this it? Twenty-four years old, and I was still beating the sidewalks with my mates like I was fifteen, sitting in that sauna apartment 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, the 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, 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, I should keep reading. Educate myself. I hadn’t done it, unless you count martial arts magazines and the newspaper. Maybe 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 showoff, 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 so I could 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.
Once my eyes had adjusted to the dimness, I looked around the place. Rough wooden beams and fat pipes ran the length of the ceiling. 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 liked 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 surrounded 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 hun
t 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. Maybe 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 Savannah? That barrier went down ten feet.
Private police (I didn’t recognize their insignia, but new forces were being established every day) had cordoned off the area. Technicians 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.
Futures Near and Far Page 9
