Soft Apocalypse (18 page)

I didn’t tap it, and my tape of neurotic Deirdre-thoughts didn’t start playing. I felt a warm sadness—that was all.

I read somewhere that we choose to date people for reasons that are lost in our personal histories, and we keep making the same choices—the same mistakes—till we figure out why.

The Civil Defense alarm went off while I was walking home. I pulled out my gas mask and flipped it over my nose and mouth in one deft motion, a gunslinger fast on the draw. People raced in-doors—their masks (in a wide variety of colors and styles) and their tight, hunched shoulders made them look like strange chimps.

Six boys in red-brick camouflage ran by clutching short, square weapons that swung from their fists like lunchboxes. I stepped out of their way. Shit, they were recruiting them younger and younger. I had no idea who they worked for—police, CD, Jumpy-Jump, fire department. They were all pretty much the same now—gangs fighting for power.

I walked on, enjoying the sun on my face, the light afternoon breeze. I realized that my mood had shifted—I felt light and empty. I took a deep, easy breath. I fished my phone out of one pocket, the printout of phone numbers for my speed-date matches out of another.

“That was quick,” Maya said.

“I don’t think I can handle the wheelchair; I want to be honest about that and I hope it doesn’t hurt your feelings,” I said. The honking of the alarm went on in the background.

“Okay. Is that what you called to tell me?”

“I just don’t want to waste your time. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I—”

I wanted to tell her that the world was fleeting and beautiful. I wanted to tell her that the white windmills on the roofs of the exhaust-blackened buildings were all turning in unison, and that somehow she was responsible for me seeing this.

“I’d like to ask you to spend some of your time with me. If you give me some of your time, your precious time, I won’t waste it.”

She didn’t answer. I heard a sniffle and thought she might be crying.

“I’m good at that part—the now part,” I added.

I was right, she was crying. It sounded like she was wiping her nose with a tissue. Then I realized that wasn’t possible.

“I think I’ll pass,” she said.

“Fair enough,” I said, both disappointed and relieved.

“I’m looking for someone I can count on. I’ve had enough of casual to last a lifetime.”

So was I. It was the wheelchair. It was dumb in a way, rejecting someone out of hand for being in a wheelchair. I’d never dated someone in a wheelchair, how did I know I wouldn’t be fine with it?

Because I knew. I didn’t want a woman of these times. I wanted Ms. Right.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“No problem.” She hung up.

I stuck my phone in my pocket and headed home.

There was a crowd gathered in Chippewa Square. I peered through the heads into the open space by the statue of Oglethorpe, and felt a sick sinking sensation: they were carrying out executions, right near my home. Six or seven members of the DeSoto Police—the local segment of the Civil Defense that was controlled by “Mayor” Duck Adams—were conducting them. (Three or four other “Mayors” had control over smaller sections of the city, last time I checked.)

A fat DeSoto thug with a flattop shoved a gas gun—the kind with a black mask on the end of the barrel—into the screaming face of an old lady while two other gas-masked 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). Her mouth formed a rictus “O”; her eyes were rolled up, exposing red veins on white.

“Wicked shit,” a kid next tome who couldn’t be more than thirteen said with a mix of disgust and excitement in his voice. “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 lady have done to deserve that?” I said, keeping my voice low. It was sick, everyone standing there watching people get gassed.

“It’s what you say, not what you do,” the kid said.

“Yes,” I said. “And what you know.” Right now Savannah wasn’t a healthy place for educated people, especially those who wrote articles for the underground papers, or made milk-crate speeches in the squares.

“The wolves are always at the doors,” the kid 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 twisted corpses.

“This isn’t right! This isn’t right!” a guy with out-of-date two-pocket pants and a button-down shirt shouted from the group still to be gassed. A DeSoto chopped him in the neck with the butt of his gun; he fell into the guy in front of him, grabbed hold of the guy to keep from falling. I turned to leave, then paused. The guy who’d shouted seemed familiar. I turned back and studied him, trying to think of how I might know him. It had to have been a long time ago.

The guy sniffed—a nervous habit—and suddenly I had it: he’d been a teacher at my high school. Mr. Swift, my English teacher in eleventh grade. That had been a million years ago, in a time when there was always enough food in the refrigerator and you let the crystal-clean water keep running and running out of the tap while you washed your hands. Mr. Swift had been a nice guy, had taken a liking to me. That had been rare. I’d been a quiet student, bright but not at the top of the class, and not ingratiating enough to draw attention from my teachers. Mr. Swift had been the exception—he always seemed to pay special attention to me, and it had felt good.

Mr. Swift looked toward the crowd. “Somebody help us.Somebody stop this.” Nobody moved.

Then he looked right at me.

“I know you. Don’t I? Please.” Thirteen, fourteen years later and he still remembered my face.

“Is he talking to you?” the kid next to me asked.

“I don’t know,” I muttered. I felt awful. There was nothing I could do. If I opened my mouth I could very well end up in line behind Mr. Swift. So I just stood there, too ashamed to simply turn and walk away, watching them pull people from the little crowd of condemned until it was Mr. Swift’s turn.

“This is tyranny!” Mr. Swift shouted as they dragged him out. He got a face full of the vapors.

Poor Mr. Swift. There wasn’t a bad bone in him. The wolves were always at the door—that was the truth.

I left the edge of the crowd, my mood pitch-black. Had I really just been to a dating service? How could there still be dating services when people were being murdered in the streets?

The wave of hopelessness I’d felt at the dating service returned, pounded me so hard that I sank to the curb, pressed my palm on the hot, gum-stained pavement to steady myself. Was this it? Was there nothing ahead, nothing but heat and boredom, viruses and bamboo? Just more and more of this and then everything would collapse completely? What could I do? I forced myself to get up, and moved on.

I accidentally kicked a bony, blue-veined ankle as I stepped around a group of sleeping homeless people spilling out of an alley onto the sidewalk.

“Sorry,” I said. My victim didn’t answer, just drew her ankle under a black plastic tarp that was her home.

I passed the coffee shop, the Dog’s Ear bookstore.

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
.

Years ago Mr. Swift had told me that whatever I do, keep reading. I’d read in college, but after that I pretty much stopped, except for newspapers. I rarely saw people reading books any more. Maybe I should do some reading, in memory of Mr. Swift.

The bookstore was closed—permanently, by the looks of it. I went into the alley, stepping between people sleeping out the heat of the day, and climbed in a broken bathroom window in the back. The bathroom was beyond odious; the toilet looked like it had been used a hundred times after the water had been turned off.

I hurried into the bookstore, opened the blinds on a side window, and held books up to 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; I just wanted some way to get Mr. Swift’s voice out of my head.

I gave the store a careful once-over when my eyes had adjusted to the dimness. Rough wooden beams and fat pipes ran the length of the ceiling. Pipes. It blew my mind that they used to be filled with drinkable water.

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)

"S
low 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.