Soft Apocalypse (22 page)

“I can’t do this,” I said. “Somebody else, please. Somebody do this.” I wasn’t an action guy. Cortez was the action guy—if he was here, he would have done the cutting without breaking a sweat. I’d never cut anything in my life that wasn’t on a dinner plate.

“I don’t want to die,” Bird whimpered. “Please. I don’t want to die.”

With a howl, I cut her. She screamed in agony, bucked violently, trying to break free of the people pinning her down. Like an animal. Blood welled up where I’d cut her, filling the incision and pouring out. “I can’t do this, I can’t do this.”

“How deep is the incision? What do you see inside?” the doctor said, so calm, so far away in his comfortable air-conditioned office.

“I don’t know.” Reluctantly I pulled the skin apart with my thumb and forefinger to see how deep it was. “There’s just red tissue, I can’t see anything.”

“You’re still in muscle. You have to cut again, deeper.”

“Oh, god. Not again.” Tears poured down my cheeks; I was trembling all over like I was freezing cold.

You suck
, Tara Cohn’s voice said inside my head. I sobbed.

“Cut, god dammit. Cut her. Do it now,” the doctor shouted.

I screamed, and kept screaming as I cut, wider and deeper. Bird thrashed, but the fight was bleeding out of her. She seemed only half-conscious, only the whites of her eyes visible.

“What do you see?” the doctor asked.

I pulled on the flap I’d made, and it tore a little wider, exposing something gray and puckered, a fat snake folding in on itself. It was an organ. Christ, it was her liver or gall bladder or something. I described it to the doctor.

“Good boy, Jasper, that’s what you want. That’s the colon. Fish around, find the bottom of it, where it meets the small intestine. You’re looking for a small, tubelike appendage attached to the colon.”

I poked around inside Bird, trying to ignore the moist squishing sound, the blood pouring down her side, dribbling onto the tan bamboo husks that littered the ground.

“I can’t find it,” I said.

“Get your damned hand in there and move the colon around. This isn’t some dainty parlor game. Get your hands bloody.”

I dug, squeezing my fingers between the slimy tubes, pushing one section up with my finger. Behind it was something that looked like a swollen maggot. I described it to Doctor Gabow.

“Cut it off and pitch it away, Jasper.”

I cut it off. Sandra sewed the end of the colon closed while I held the knife over the flame, getting it good and hot. Then I pressed the flat end of it against the wound, to cauterize it and stop some of the bleeding. Bird didn’t flinch as the knife hissed against her insides; she’d passed out somewhere along the way. Sandra held the edges of the wound closed while I sewed. Doctor Gabow explained that someone needed to get to the nearest town and buy antibiotics, or Bird would likely die of infection, and all his good work would go to waste.

People slapped my back as I stumbled out of the camp. I found a quiet copse and collapsed onto my back, staring at the half-moon through the narrow leaves. I felt… strange. Calm. Like a buzzing had turned off in my brain for the first time in years. I held my hand in front of my face, looked at the blood covering it, starting to dry and cake. I’d done it.

I closed my eyes and let myself drift off to sleep, thinking that I’d had enough of the simplicity of the hunter-gatherer life. I wanted to go home.

I caught a whiff of jasmine, waited at a crosswalk as a cluster of men pedaled by on bicycles wearing helmets with built-in gas masks, semi-automatics dangling from their belts.

Across the street, a tattered teal awning read:
Francis McNairy Antiques and Collectibles
. Yeah, right. I’ll trade you my mint condition
Spider-Man
number one for your slightly used bottle of Cool, what do you say?

A block further I could see my house, its porch looking inviting to my aching feet. I put my head down and trekked the final few yards, then plopped into a chair on the porch.

The screen door swung open almost immediately. “How was your trip?” Colin asked, unfolding a mildewed lawn chair and joining me.

“Do I have a story for you,” I said.

“Really?” Colin scooted his lawn chair until it was at a ninety degree angle from mine. “I could use a good story; the TV’s been out for three days.”

I told him the good stuff, where I was the good guy, saving a life.

“So, you’ve decided the right woman for you is a semi-primitive, illiterate teenager with bad breath?” Colin asked when I’d finished.

I shook my head, blew out a long breath. “I just needed some affection. She offered, and I took her up on it.” I stared off toward the far end of the porch, at a weight-lifting bench that had been abandoned by some previous tenant. Padding jutted from the rotting vinyl fabric. We should really throw the damned thing out.

Then again, it added a certain character to the porch. I felt a sudden wave of affection for our crappy little apartment, and the people I shared it with. It was good to be home.

Chapter 7:
Smithereen Sonata

Spring, 2033 (Six months later)

F
rom our seats in the upper deck the players looked like tissues dropped in the grass, yet it was so quiet I could hear the shortstop scuff his foot on the infield dirt, smoothing an invisible divot.

I fished for a peanut. Even the crackle of the cellophane bag seemed loud, as if we were in a movie theater. I half-expected someone to shush me as I cracked the peanut under my thumb, peeled off the top half of the shell, popped one red-skinned peanut into my mouth, reached over and fed the second to Ange. She closed her lips over my fingers, grinned when I glanced over at her. Lately Ange had been way more affectionate than she’d ever been before. We’d been through so many waxes and wanes; at times I’d felt certain that we had drifted so far apart we would never again be more than acquaintances who’d once been close, but we always seemed to drift back into our not-quite-dating netherworld. I’d long ago given up thinking about the possibility of a real relationship, squashed any romantic feelings I had for Ange so that what I felt for her was a (somehow workable) mix of lust and brotherly affection.

The pitcher wound, threw a high fastball. The lanky batter swung and missed, and the inning was over. No one clapped. The Macon Mets took the field, and the pitcher began his warmup tosses.

“Whatever that shit is in the atmosphere, it sure makes the sunsets pretty,” Ange said.

“Mmm,” I said. The sun was setting over the left field fence; the clouds were a gorgeous pastel of pink, peach, indigo, violet.

On the first pitch the Sand Gnat batter yanked the ball into the right field corner. The right fielder took a few listless steps after it, then gave up. He squatted on his haunches and watched it roll. He covered his face in his hands as the ball rolled to a stop on the warning track. The center fielder trotted over to him, put a hand on his shoulder, said something. The right fielder shook his head.

The batter trotted to second base and stopped, probably figuring that’s where he would’ve ended up if the play had been made. Winning didn’t mean as much with so many people dying.

“His family was in D.C. All dead,” the man in the row behind us said. I glanced back at him. His face and neck were a swirl of burn scars, and his right arm ended in an uneven stump. A China War veteran, probably.

“Shame. I’m surprised he’s playing,” An older man beside the scarred man said.

I wanted to tell them to shut the hell up. I didn’t want to think about D.C. That’s why I was at a baseball game instead of watching fucking CNN.

“I wonder if the people who killed the president had propped him in the chair for effect, or if he died in the chair,” Ange said.

“I bet they propped him there,” I said.

CNN kept replaying the video of the president in the oval office, behind his desk, his head rolled back, his tongue huge and black like he’d choked trying to swallow a tire. He’d been a Republican; the vice president had been a Democrat. That was supposed to change things. The man on the videotape they kept showing on CNN was neither a Republican nor a Democrat, but he claimed to be in charge. Or not in charge. It was hard to understand him because he talked fast and used a lot of Jumpy-Jump slang. The newscasters weren’t sure anyone was in charge. They looked scared. The streets of D.C. were a madhouse, and some of the other big cities didn’t seem far behind.

It wasn’t clear whether the teams were going to finish the game. The managers and umps were standing near the first base coach’s box, arms folded across their chests, talking.

Over the left field wall, there was a flash, and a hot boom. People in the stands screamed, leapt to their feet. The ballplayers sprinted for the dugouts, looking back over their shoulders at the explosion, which was a good thirty blocks away. It looked like an expanding rainbow of colors, like ripples in a candy pond.

I looked at Ange. “Shit,” she said.

It could be anything—chemical, biological, nuclear, or an accident at a crayon factory.

We waited for most of the stampeding crowd to exit, figuring their panic could kill us as easily as chemical weapons, then we fled.

The streets were filled with the sound of breaking glass and shouting, which was not unusual. There was something else, though—a thrumming that registered deep in my stomach, like the beating of drums. Mortar fire, or maybe tanks, far away. Closer, we heard the pop of gunfire, which was also not that unusual, only there was more of it than usual.

Screams rose from the direction of Waters Avenue, cutting through the other noises. Ange’s phone rang.

“You guys okay?” Ange said. I could hear Colin’s voice in the phone. “Shit,” Ange said. She turned to me. “Your building’s on fire.”

I started running.

“Hold on. It’s okay, they’re out, they’re safe,”Ange said. She grabbed my sleeve, slowed me down.

“Jeannie’s okay?” I asked.

“Jeannie’s fine. Baby still on board.”

“Where are they?” I asked, relieved to hear that Jeannie hadn’t lost the baby. With no access to a doctor, her pregnancy was such a tenuous thing.

“Outside your building,”Ange said. She told them we’d meet them there.

We passed a building with red flames licking out of a boarded up window. A siren wailed in the distance. It wasn’t the wah-wah siren of an ambulance, and the police never used their sirens any more—they didn’t want people to hear them coming.

“I already called the fire department,” an old guy standing on the sidewalk said, seeing us peruse the flames as we hurried by.

“You called the fire department?” I said.

“They’re on their way.” Purple veins blossomed on the guy’s cheeks and nose. He was probably a drinker, passing dull nights in his apartment sipping moonshine while he watched old TV shows where cops solved crimes and firemen ran into burning buildings to save crying babies.

We picked up our pace. “They’re bad news. Get away while you still can,” I shouted back.

The crack of gunfire and the booming of explosions was everywhere. Something was happening.

A baritone honking announced the big red truck before it careened around the corner. It was crawling with firemen, their faces painted red, their helmets festooned with illustrations. The truck was immaculate, the polished chrome blinding in the sunlight.

We cut into an alley. It was packed with homeless, milling around, looking ready to bolt if they could only figure out which direction to go. I thought of our apartment burning with all of my possessions in it. I didn’t have much to lose, but when you don’t have much, it sure hurts to lose what you have.

The pop-pop of gunfire was constant. Crowds of people were running in every direction. A helicopter roared overhead, just above roof level. In the east, where the explosion had been, the horizon glowed red—it looked as if everything in that direction was on fire now.

We spilled out onto Drayton. A tight cluster of Civil Defense guys with machine pistols rounded the corner and headed in our direction. We ducked into a doorway, stared at the bricked pavement until they passed. I had no idea what the rules were, what might get us shot, who might do the shooting. I struggled to understand, to put a label on this thing that was happening. It was a war, the city was at war—that was clear. But wars had two sides, and this had twenty sides, or fifty, or maybe no sides.

We cut down another alley, past people hiding behind a green dumpster. Others stared down at us from the safety of open windows in locked apartments. Above them, on the roof, were flocks of boys with guns.

Ange’s phone rang again. “Where are you?” she said, plugging her free ear.

“It’s Sebastian,” Ange said to me. “He says we need to get out.”

“Out of the city?”

Ange nodded.

“But Jeannie’s eight months pregnant!”

Sebastian said something. Ange held up a finger. “Okay, see you there.” She hung up.

“He said we don’t have a choice, things are going to get bad.”

I thought of what that economist in the wheelchair had said three years ago, during our speed-dating session.
It’s not going to turn around; it’s going to get worse, and then it’s going to collapse completely.

Sebastian was going to follow the railroad tracks out of town. That made sense, to get off the roads, but the thought of the railroad tracks sickened me. It reminded me of our tribe days.

A woman screamed in one of the apartments above us. She screamed again, forming the outline of a word. It sounded like “help.” She screamed a third time, and this time it was clear she was calling for help.

Ange called Jeannie back and got them moving in our direction.

“I should warn Ruplu,” I said. We made the two-block detour to Abercorn Street, and turned the corner into an inferno. Flames roared over the roofline of the Timesaver. Ruplu was nowhere to be seen. I called him.

“It’s gone, Jasper,” he said. “Everything we worked for is gone.”

“I know. I’m so sorry.” I spotted Colin and Jeannie up ahead, raised my hand. They waved back. “Listen, we’ve been told by our scientist friend that we need to get out of the city. It’s not going to be safe here.”