Soft Apocalypse (19 page)

A skeleton of an old lady was pulling Spanish moss off branches to fire the cooking pots. It
was
upsetting to see the trees molested like that. The Live Oaks were the only beautiful thing we had left. The moss was what gave Savannah its particularity; I loved the way it made the trees look like they were melting.

“I’m gonna go talk to them,” Cortez said. He pulled his Eskrima sticks out of his sock, tucked them into the front of his pants, probably so they’d be nice and visible. Displaying exotic weaponry likely gave people pause. Most people probably knew to stay away from a guy carrying Eskrima sticks (unless they had a gun), because if someone is carrying Eskrima sticks, chances are they know how to them use them. Cortez did know how to use them.

Dice glanced down at the sticks. “You anticipating blood and guts?”

“I just want to have a talk. I can’t put up with this desecration.”

We crossed the street and wandered along the brick walkway, through the center of the camp. When we hit the end of the square Cortez doubled back, probably expecting someone to tell us to get lost, but they just went on doing what they were doing. Finally, Cortez approached the biggest and strongest guy.

“Ho,” the guy said, smiling and nodding.

“Where you coming from?” Cortez asked, hands on hips. I hovered behind him with Dice and Slinky.

“Bamboo forests to the West,” the guy said, pointing. He had a peculiar accent; bamboo sounded like bumpoo. His beard was so shaggy you could barely see his mouth, his skin leathered from too much sun.

“You mean the sacrifice zone past Rincon and Pooler?” Cortez asked.

“I don’t know towns. West. Good hunting there.”

“Good
hunting
? What the fuck do you hunt in the bamboo?” Dice asked. Slinky laughed.

As if on cue, there was a squeal in the grass behind us. A squirrel twisted on the ground, a little wooden arrow jutting from its side. The topless girl 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 odious,” Slinky said, lips pulled back from his big square teeth.

The guy just shrugged. “What’s those?” he asked, pointing at Cortez’s Eskrima sticks.

“Weapons,” Cortez said. He pulled them out and assumed a karate pose. He launched into a display, filling the air with blurry sticks, sometimes veering decidedly close to the vagrant. The guy flinched, but kept smiling. When he finished, the guy dropped his hands back to his sides and nodded vaguely.

I think Cortez had figured on a circle of spectators, a little shock and awe, and I was guessing he felt a little stupid now, because no one had stopped to watch.

“You mind taking it easy on those branches?” Cortez said to the guy, still breathing hard, wiping sweat from his eyes.

The gypsy 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.

“No, but it looks bad, and we live here.”

The guy stared up at the trees, then back at Cortez like he was whacked.

“This is a park,” I said. “The reason the trees were planted was to make the park look nice.” I loved those trees, the way their gnarled branches formed shady roofs over the streets. I also loved how tough they were—they survived the climate shifts and chemical dumps, while the crepe myrtles and azalea, the little yellow songbirds, those little green frogs that stuck to windows had mostly died. They had turned brown or blue and rotted. Brown and blue, the real colors of death. Who made black the color of death? Black was the color of night, and the potential of a cool breeze.

“Just don’t cut any more branches, okay?” Cortez turned without waiting for an answer. He turned to Dice and Slinky. “Dudes, I gotta bounce. If I don’t put in a few ticks hauling dirt to the roof for the garden expansion, the old man is gonna toast my biscuits.”

“I thought we were going to the blanket district,” Dice said.

“Another time.”

As Dice and Slinky took off, I waved goodbye to Cortez, but he gestured for me to stay.

“I just didn’t feel like having those guys around right now,” Cortez said when they were out of earshot. “They’re good guys and all, but you can’t really talk to them, you know?”

I nodded. We headed toward his place, hugging along the buildings to stay in the shade as much as possible.

“You know I’m thirty-four years old today?” Cortez said.

“I didn’t,” I said. “Happy birthday.”

“Yeah, thanks. But it’s weighing on me.” He sighed heavily, shook his head. “Thirty-four years old and I’m still beating the sidewalks with my friends like I’m fifteen, sitting in that sauna apartment staring at the TV when we can get a signal, hauling sacks of dirt to the roof to try to keep from starving.”

“It’s not where we expected to be by now, that’s for sure,” I said. “I kept expecting things to improve, and that our opportunities would improve with them.” I had to admit, though—Cortez’s prospects were even bleaker than mine. He had no real job, just a high school education.

“Yeah. I just keep thinking if I’d been born in an earlier time, before you needed boats to navigate the streets of LA and shit, that I could’ve been somebody, could’ve been a legend at something.” He looked at me, maybe waiting to see if I was going to laugh. “I don’t know, a martial arts champion, maybe a major businessman. You know? Now I’m just one step above those gypsies in the park.”

“Hey, you seen this?” An old guy in the doorway of Pinky Masters gestured into the bar. We peered in, saw he was specifically gesturing at the TV. One of those Breaking News Special Reports was on, with flashing red all around the borders of the screen.

“Christ, what now?” I said. We stepped into the bar. Every eye in the place was on that screen.

A guy with a prosthetic eye that was too big compared to his real one shouted at the screen. “Nuke ’em all. What are we waiting for? Take ’em out.”

“What happened?” Cortez asked the old guy at the door.

“They nuked Lake Superior, made all the water undrinkable.”

I felt a falling sensation in my stomach. “Who did?”

“North Korea. They said it’s because we sink their fishing trawlers.”

“They send those giant fishing factories right up our coast, of course we’re gonna sink ’em,” the guy with the bad eye said.

The U.S. Navy sank pretty much any non-U.S. fishing boat they found within two hundred miles of our shores, even though international waters technically started twelve miles out, but I wasn’t going to say that out loud. But hell, the why didn’t matter. Lake Superior had been nuked. I didn’t know what the implications of that were, but I knew it wasn’t good. The biggest body of fresh water in the country, poisoned.

Cortez touched my back. “Unless we’re gonna get drunk, let’s get out of here. I can’t take this right now.”

“I can’t afford to get drunk in a bar,” I said. “Plus, I should get home.”

A dog was dying in the gutter a block from Pinky’s, 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 us, then started to go unfocused. Its little chest stopped rising and falling. Now it would turn blue.

“What next?” Cortez asked, sitting on the curb.

I looked up at the apartment building rising beyond the dog, the rusted black bars on the windows, vinyl siding broken off in places, exposing splintered plywood underneath.

“A few years ago an economist told me things were just going to keep getting worse. She said that when there isn’t enough food and water and energy, everyone will fight over what’s left, and the losers of those fights will get desperate, and will do desperate things. It’s starting to look like she was right.”

“
Starting
to look? Hell, we’ve been fighting for enough to eat for the past eight years.”

He had a point.

Cortez heaved a big sigh. “I can’t stand the thought of going home, facing my old man’s sarcastic bullshit.”

“Well, come on home with me.”

“I can’t. I gotta get this work done.”

Cortez stood, saluted the little fallen dog and walked on, past the row houses with their busted railings and rotting wood, trash piled up on the sidewalk where it’d been thrown out the windows.

I was eager to get home to watch the news and talk to Colin and Jeannie about what was happening. What good did it do anyone to irradiate our water? The U.S. had been doing some ruthless shit around the world that made me awfully uncomfortable, but at least it made sense. Our navy quietly sank fishing boats because that left more fish for us to catch, but they didn’t dump poison in the Pacific to kill all the fish. It was as if entire countries were acting like Jumpy-Jumps.

As we got closer to Cortez’s house we heard that telltale cracking, like ice underfoot or twigs snapping. “
Oh shit
,” I said. We hurried toward the sound, which was also toward Cortez’s place.

It was the yellow variety—not as bad as the green, but worse than the black—and it was coming up right outside Cortez’s apartment house. Some of the stalks were already three feet tall, trembling and popping as they grew. The asphalt in the road was broken into a thousand fragments as nubs of new stalks pushed through. How the hell had it gotten inside the rhizome barrier that’d been sunk around Savannah? That barrier went down ten feet.

Private Civil Defense people (I didn’t recognize their insignia, but this wasn’t my neighborhood) had cordoned off the area. Technicians were at work tearing up the street with road-eaters, trying to set up a rhizome barrier to contain the bamboo before it spread.

Cortez’s place was inside the perimeter. Inside the sacrifice zone. His father owned the place—Cortez had been born there—and just like that, they were letting the bamboo have it.

“There’s my old man,” Cortez said, sounding utterly defeated. His father was standing in a crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk. He was shaking his head, making angry gestures at no one in particular.

“No way this made it through the barrier,” he said when we were within earshot. “Goddamned biotech punks carried it in and planted it, I’m telling you. Or terrorists—damned Jumpy-Jumps.”

Cortez and I nodded. Let his dad go on thinking it was some adolescent bio-tinkerer who’d originally loosed the bamboo to impress his friends. I didn’t know how the bamboo had jumped the barrier, but I knew it wasn’t biotech punks who’d set it loose in the first place, and so did Cortez.

“You seen Edie or Pat yet?” Cortez asked. They lived in the apartment next door, or used to.

“Nah,” his father said. He walked off without another word.

“Do you have a place to stay?” I asked Cortez.

He was staring glassy-eyed at the apartment. He was in serious need of a shave. “That fucking bamboo. It’s coming back to bite my ass good.”

“I wonder if it’s actually doing any good. It didn’t stop North Korea from nuking Lake Superior, but who knows? Maybe this whole city would be dust without it.”

“I don’t know about that, but one thing I do know—if I find out who planted this patch right in my back yard, he’s gonna be one sorry son of a bitch.”

“I’m glad it wasn’t me,” I laughed. “So, do you have a place to stay? Want to crash with us?”

“Hey, thanks, J—I appreciate it.”

Colin met us on the porch. “Did you see what happened?”

“About Lake Superior? Yeah,” I said.

“Did you see what happened to North Korea?” Colin asked.

We picked up our pace. “No, what?”

Colin held open the screen door, nodded a greeting to Cortez. “It’s gone.”

The news was showing aerial images of a silent, smoldering city. The gray, twisted wreckage reminded me of a heavily used ash tray.

“They bombed all the major cities and military installations. Some North Korean troops surged into South Korea, and they’re still fighting, but that’s it, besides survivors in the countryside.”

I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad. None of my friends seemed to know either. It was a relief, but it was scary. I couldn’t imagine what those survivors were experiencing right now.

The red
News Alert
banner flashed at the bottom of the screen. “We’re just now receiving this update,” a blonde anchorwoman said. “It has been confirmed by sources within the Pentagon that all U.S. troops currently serving overseas have been ordered back to U.S. soil.”

Their military analyst, a bald colonel with no right arm, explained that the military trained for this sort of mobilization, that it even had a name: Operation Repatriation. The troops would destroy any large weapons they couldn’t take with them, then they would be readied to deploy across the U.S. to reestablish order if that became necessary.

“I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not,” Colin said, “assuming they’re really deployed.”

“They can’t be worse than the police or the Civil Defense goons,” I said.

“Maybe we’ll find out,” Cortez said.

Cortez slept in the kitchen, between the counter and the table, because my bed was in the living room and he said he didn’t want to crowd me. By the time I woke, he was gone—he’d left a note saying he was going to salvage what he could from his apartment, and would see us later.

After breakfast I wandered into Pulaski Square, where the tribe was still camped. They had so few possessions: machetes, cooking pots; one kid was clutching an old action figure. From what I could see, no one was in charge. Most of them were sprawled on the lawn dozing; a group of older men were playing some sort of gambling game that involved tossing carved stones.

“Where is your friend with the sticks?” I turned; it was the topless girl. Her accent was like the man we’d talked with yesterday—she pronounced Ws like Vs.

“He’s at home,” I said. I didn’t figure it was worth trying to explain all of the nuances in that statement.

“Was he playing a game with them?” She made a strange, scrunchy facial expression, almost like she wasn’t aware other people could see her face.

“It wasn’t a game. They’re weapons, for protection.”

She made a grunting sound that I took to mean she understood. I glanced at her chest. I couldn’t help it, her breasts were right there. Her nipples were puckered, her areolas as big as silver dollar pancakes.