Soft Apocalypse (13 page)

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.

An old Mickey Mouse coloring book was stuffed in a magazine rack by the woman’s reclining chair. I pulled it out, took a good look of the image of Mickey on the cover, then held the coloring book up and pointed at Mickey. “Here’s what I’d like you to do. Take this book to Mark Parcells at Whitaker Print Shop, and get him to make labels with this picture and ‘Mickey Mouse Honey’ on them. The honey will sell much better that way.”

“Oh,” the woman said, sounding less than enthused. “But isn’t that a copyright violation?”

I chuckled, shook my head. “Disney isn’t going to bother you, I promise.” Ah, the good old days, when Disney had the time and energy to sue people for selling unlicensed products.

If there was any bright side to The Decline (as the media often referred to it), it had to be the neutering of corporate America. Back in the old days they were such a huge presence; today it took all of their energy and resources just to produce their products and get them onto store shelves.

Pleased to have secured another product for the store, I headed home. If I’d been able to whistle worth a damn, I might have whistled.

Bull Street was almost deserted in the afternoon heat. From an open second-floor window, an old woman with no front teeth stared at me, her mouth curled in suspicion. She reminded me of my great aunt, who had believed for the last ten years of her life that I and all the rest of her relatives were trying to kill her.

Two blocks ahead, a woman turned the corner and headed in my direction. It was Deirdre.

I bolted into the doorway of an abandoned storefront. Why I was hiding, I couldn’t say. Deirdre still had all of my childhood photos (assuming she hadn’t burned them). I should have confronted her, maybe twisted her little arm behind her back until she told me where they were. Instead I did my best to fold into the crack between the door and the boarded-up window.

What had she done with my photos? Sometimes I still lay awake wondering. There had been no cut-up pile greeting me when I finally built up the nerve to use my key to sneak into her place while she was out. No charred corners mixed with the ashes in the fireplace (showing a tantalizing hint of a sneaker; the ornament-laden branches of a Christmas tree…). They were just gone. Did she toss them in a dumpster? Did she still have them? I missed them to my bones. I had no proof now, that I had a past, that I’d once been a child. I never would have guessed it would hurt so much to lose them. Evidently Deirdre had.

Deirdre strutted past, oblivious to my cowering form. I was not afraid of her, I told myself. I just didn’t want to deal with her. I waited a couple of minutes, then went on my way, still thinking about her.

At home I found Colin and Jeannie parked in front of the TV, watching the news. We might as well ditch the remote—our TV was always tuned to MSNBC. With times so dark there was always something new, always people dying. Egypt was systematically exterminating the population of the rest of Northern Africa. Why? Because the population of Northern Africa ate. Fewer people meant less competition for food and energy, and Egypt had the biggest guns. Bad as it was in the U.S., some other parts of the world were turning into nothing but giant concentration camps and killing fields. It was both mesmerizing and depressing.

I took a deep breath and turned away from the TV. I would have liked to go to sleep, but Colin and Jeannie were sitting on my bed watching TV, so I went into their room to do a little bookkeeping for the store.

“I have to say, Cortez was a natural,” Ange said. “He’d stop to look at a table of sorry-looking pistols, then turn and bump into some guy in an expensive suit, grabbing the guy’s shoulders like he was steadying himself. The guy didn’t even flinch from the stick. He was slapping people on the back, even pulled it off with a couple of cops and soldiers.”

Uzi tugged on his leash, panting and wagging his tail, trying to pull Ange across the street toward Jackson Square and its Live Oaks. “Uzi, no,” Ange said, as if that would faze him. He lived to pee on those massive trunks.

“You want me to take a turn?” I offered, knowing she didn’t. Ange shook her head. “Are we talking regular U.S. soldiers from Fort Stewart, or those private mercenary guys?” I asked.

“Regular. He’s not suicidal.”

There were more people in the park than usual. More adults, anyway. The kids were always there, playing their incomprehensible game, jumping among big colored dots laid along the squares and sidewalks, alternately frowning in concentration and laughing like hell, dousing each other with industrial-strength water guns, rolling dice the size of baseballs. Now there were also groups of adults, sitting in circles, cooking in pots on open fires, laughing their heads off. They were infected with Doctor Happy.

Doctor Happy had made the local evening news three days after Chair and Sebastian’s infection party. They called it a strange new virus that results in “disorientation, amotivation, and giddiness.” Sebastian had said the government wasn’t going to like this virus at all. Authoritarian types are uncomfortable with people altering their consciousness—they’d rather see them vomit blood.

An ultralight helicopter buzzed overhead, casting a drifting shadow on the street. Probably some rich jerk going for a martini at Rooftop Elysium.

“What I wouldn’t give for a rocket launcher,” Ange said, her neck craned.

“Maybe you’ll have one of your own once you get your Ph.D.,” I laughed. “At the very least you’ll be able to live in a gated community.”

Ange glared at me. “I’d never become one of them. I’d live in a better place, sure, but never in one of those obnoxious gated fortresses.” Ange kicked a soda can out of her way. “It doesn’t matter anyway, because I’m not getting my Ph.D.”

I stopped in my tracks. “What?”

She let her head loll back until she was staring at the sky. “I had that meeting with Charles, my thesis advisor. A
dinner
meeting, of course. At the Pink House.”