Soft Apocalypse (23 page)

There was a long silence on the other end. “Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure, yes. This guy has friends in Atlanta. They say things are going to get very bad.”

“All right, then. Thank you, friend.”

I suggested he and his family meet up with us, but Ruplu said if he needed to leave, his uncle had a little boat, and they would head down the coast to stay with relatives in Saint Augustine. That seemed like a good plan.

We joined up with Colin and Jeannie and headed toward Thirty-eighth Street.

My phone rang: I recognized the number, but I couldn’t connect it with a face. I answered it, too breathless to do more than gasp in lieu of a hello. We’d stopped running and were hugging the edge of doorways.

“I need you,” Deirdre said. She was crying. A tingle of shock ran up my balls.

“I can’t,” I said.

“You can’t
what
?” she said. “I don’t know where to go. There’s nobody…” she trailed off, crying. It was an angry, outraged crying.

“I can’t get to you. I’m not home,” I said. “We’re leaving.”

“I’m coming with you.” I didn’t respond.

“Please!” she added.

“Who is it?” Jeannie asked.

I covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “Deirdre. She wants to come.”

“Oh Christ! No. No way,” Jeannie said.

“What can she bring?” Colin said. It was a shock to hear Colin put it so bluntly. If you bring a keg, we’ll invite you to our party. But given the situation I guess he saw no choice but to be pragmatic. I’ve heard a lot of people say that having a child changes you.

We were crossing Thirtieth Street. We had to step over a body stretched across the sidewalk, covered with bloody bullet wounds.

“What can you bring if we let you come? Do you have money?”

“Three thousand,” Deirdre said. “A gun. Two kils of energy.”

I turned to Colin. “Money, gun, energy.” He nodded, and so did Ange. Jeannie cursed.

“Tell her to bring water filters if she has any,” Colin said.

“Get to Thirty-eighth Street,” I said into the phone. “Follow the railroad tracks east out of town until you catch up with us. Bring water filters if you have any. We’ll move slowly, but you’d better move your ass, because we won’t move slowly for too long.”

“I’m coming,” Deirdre said. “Fuck you,” she added before hanging up.

We jogged as fast as Jeannie could, through a roiling tide of people fleeing in every direction, past looters climbing into shattered store windows, past tanks rumbling down Habersham Street. Eventually we stopped running and hugged the edge of doorways, trying not to be noticed. We cut through an alley and had to step over three bodies, probably dragged from a car that was bent around a telephone pole. One had been shot in the eye, an old black woman.

There was a long burst of gunfire nearby.

“Oh jeez,” Colin said. A block away, on Lincoln Street, men with automatic weapons were executing dozens of people kneeling, hands behind their heads, in front of an apartment building.

We turned into another alley, behind Liberty, and ran headlong into four soldiers in MOP suits and gas masks. Federal government soldiers. The cavalry had arrived. With the president dead, I wondered who they were taking orders from. The VP? The secretary of defense?

“Let’s go,” one of them said, motioning with a gun “you’re being evacuated.

“Evacuated where?” Ange asked.

“Move,” the soldier said.

We were taken a block over and directed into a section of Bull Street that had been barricaded with cyclone fencing topped with spirals of silver barbed wire. There were thousands of people milling around inside the fence.

We sat on the edge of the sidewalk, in the shade.

“I’m going to go up front and see what’s happening,” Colin said. “Stay here.”

People were standing quietly, in bunches. “We’ll be safe soon,” someone said nearby. A mother was stroking her crying child’s hair. She lurched forward suddenly and vomited into the sewer grate between her feet. The people nearest scurried away, giving her a wide buffer. The woman barely noticed; she was staring between the rusted iron bars of the sewer, into the wet darkness below.

Colin came back at a trot. “I don’t like this. They’re separating people into groups—old people in one, one for younger men, another for younger women, a fourth for anyone who doesn’t speak English.”

“Why would they do that?” I asked. My pounding heart made me think that the answer was something awful, and that maybe deep down I knew what it was.

“None of the answers that make sense are good things,”Ange said. We had to get out.

We walked the perimeter, trying not to raise suspicion, looking for a way out. Up the street in Forsyth Park, three big semis were pulling out, one after the other to form a convoy.

“I think there are people in there,” I said. “I think the young males are being conscripted into the Army.”

The holding pen we were in was thinning as people were sorted into categories and disappeared through a gate at the front, near the park. Soon we’d be corralled toward the front, and then Colin and I would be separated from Ange and Jeannie.

We finished our walk back near the woman who’d vomited. She hadn’t moved; her head was still hanging over the sewer.

The sewer.

I retrieved a mangled bicycle handlebar from a trash heap. “Guys, stand so you’re blocking me from the soldiers’ view.” I pried open the manhole in the center of the street. “Come on.” I climbed down the slimy rungs of a ladder. Ange was right behind me, her red sneakers in front of my nose.

We waded down the main sewer tunnel through ankle-deep effluence. A dozen others had followed us, but they were lagging behind and keeping to themselves.

Striped sunlight filtered through sewer grates intermittently. Far ahead was a brighter area; harsh engine noises echoed down the pipe from there.

I turned right, into a smaller pipe where we had to bend at the waist.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Ange asked.

“No idea,” I said. “I just want to put some distance between us and those soldiers.”

“You think we can we take this all the way to Thirty-eighth?” Jeannie asked.

That was a great idea. If there was another juncture I could turn left and follow Drayton six blocks to Thirty-eighth.

We found the juncture and turned left. The tunnel ahead seemed to be partially blocked. As we drew closer, we could see that it was blocked by a pile of bodies. We pressed along the damp concrete wall as we went around the pile. There were a dozen or so bodies heaped in a twisted tangle. They looked to be Civil Defense. Above them, light filtered in along the edges of a steel grate.

“The federal soldiers must have killed them,” Ange said.

“Help me,” a face buried in the pile whispered. A woman, strands of her hair spilling over a booted foot. Her mouth was caked in white foam and blood. One of her arms jutted from under the leg of a hairy man. Her hand opened.

Jeannie grasped it, staring at the pile of bodies on top of the woman.

“I’m sorry, we can’t,” she said. She squeezed the woman’s hand. We hurried on, the woman’s pleas fading in the distance.

I counted six blocks, then climbed a ladder and strained to unseat the manhole cover. The first thing that came into view was a street sign: Thirty-eighth.

We crossed Thirty-eighth and hit the tracks, scurrying like roaches fleeing the bathroom light. The tracks cut through back yards and vacant lots. As we reached each intersecting street we sprinted across. Sebastian had chosen well—there wasn’t much going on around the tracks. We passed an abandoned loading dock surrounded by heaps of rusting kitchen appliances. Families were ducked down among them, hiding.

“Are there other people we should call and offer to let them come with us?” I asked. Most of our friends had their own families, their own housemates.

“Cortez?” Colin said.

Cortez. I hadn’t seen him in six months, since the night of the killing.

“He’s big and tough, and we can trust him,” Colin said.

“Yeah,” I said. I called Cortez.

He was way ahead of us, already on I-16. He’d traveled the last thirty blocks out of the city in a sewer. He agreed to swing back and meet us on the tracks outside the city.

“Good call,” I said to Colin as I hung up. I’d felt a rush of affection when I heard Cortez’s voice. Yeah, it would be good to have him with us.

We walked on, watching for Sebastian, gravel crunching underfoot.

“We should call Sophia,” Jeannie said. The name jolted me; it must have registered on my face. “She was good to us when we needed help, we should see if she needs our help now.”

Colin looked at me and shrugged. “Do you remember her number?”

Of course I remembered her number. I took a deep breath and punched it in, put the phone to my ear, listened to the ring as if it were the cry of some mythical beast.

“Hello?” That unmistakable island lilt.

“Sophia, it’s Jasper.”

Pause. “How’re you? It’s been a long time.”

“Alive,” I said. “Are you all right? We’re leaving the city. We wanted to see if you needed help.”

She said they were barricaded in their condo in one of the gated communities. Their police force was in a pitched battle, trying to repel gangs storming the walls.

They
were barricaded. Hopes I hadn’t even felt welling up were dashed. And now that I was conscious of them, I felt like a sick bastard for hoping that her husband had left her, or died.

I filled the others in.

“They’ve got to get out of there,” Ange said. “Sooner or later the mob will get in, and they’ll kill everyone.”

“There’s no way out!” Sophia said, her voice hitching. She’d heard Ange.

We’d used the sewers, and so had Cortez. The gated communities must use the same sewers as the rest of the city, if nothing else. “I think I know a way. I’m going to have Cortez call you and guide you out. You remember Cortez?”

She did. “Jasper, thank you for thinking of me,” she said before she hung up. I called Cortez. He promised to get her out. He told me not to worry. I fought back tears, glad I’d called Sophia.

“There they are!” Jeannie said, pointing. Up ahead, Sebastian was sitting on the rail. He shimmered a little in the afternoon heat.

When Sebastian spotted us he ran to meet us, laughing, his arms spread for hugs. “Look, a little good luck.” He pointed ahead. Good luck, indeed. We were near the perimeter of Savannah’s rhizome barrier—ahead of us lay a wall of bamboo, broken only by scattered pines. But a train had been through recently, slicing away the bamboo that had grown in the tracks. As I watched, a dozen people hurried up a ridge from the roadway and fled along the tracks. We would make good time as long as the trains kept running. They’d better keep running—they were the only transport in and out of Savannah.

“Where are we going?” I asked no one in particular.

“We should head to Athens,” Sebastian said. “They’re establishing a communal setup there—cutting edge, very cool. Most of the smaller towns are grown over, and all the cities are going to end up like Savannah if they haven’t already.”

“This all part of the master plan?” I asked.

“We are the master plan, Jasper,” Sebastian said, clapping my back and giggling. The Zen virus bastard always had a koan ready.

“I always wanted to be a master plan,” Colin said.

“Remember what they taught us in fifth grade?” Sebastian said, holding up a finger. “We can be anything we want, if we work hard enough and believe in ourselves.”

“They really taught us that horseshit, didn’t they?” Ange said.

“Hold on,” I said, still looking at Sebastian. “I really want to know: did you expect the bamboo to spread like this?”

He chuckled. “No. No one expected this. But nothing works exactly the way you planned, and it’s still probably better than the alternative.” Sebastian started walking toward the tracks, and the rest of us followed.

“What exactly was the alternative?” Jeannie asked.

“World war. Countries will always choose war over starvation if forced to choose.”

He made it sound like he and his egghead friends had a crystal ball. The bamboo screw-up made it clear that they didn’t know half as much as they thought they did. It hadn’t slipped past me that for the first time Sebastian had inserted the word “probably” into his claim that the bamboo was helping rather than hurting.

“That’s all well and good,” I said, “but is anyone planning to fix the royal fuck-up that this bamboo has turned into?” I asked.

“People are working on it. It’s a tough problem, though—the bamboo is engineered to be resistant to herbicides, and even if you can design an effective herbicide, the root systems are engineered to disconnect after a time, so you can only kill a tiny cluster at a time.”

“Wow, look at that girl run!” Colin said, pointing.

Deirdre was sprinting toward us with her head down. Dread, and a little lust, washed over me at the sight of her. She glanced up, spotted us, and immediately slowed to an easy walk. She was wearing plain old shorts and a t-shirt. It was so un-Deirdre-like to see her dressed down. There were more people on the tracks behind her—more refugees fleeing the chaos. We wouldn’t be lonely.

By the time Deirdre reached us she wasn’t even breathing hard.

“So let’s get the fuck out of here,” she said by way of greeting, and walked right past us. We hoisted our packs.

Deirdre. Sophia. It was as if my past was collapsing in on me.

“I’d forgotten how charming she was,” Colin said as we followed her into the narrow tunnel cut in the bamboo. “I don’t understand why you broke up with her.”

Walking on train tracks is a pain in the ass. The gravel in between the railroad ties is rough and uneven, and the nubs of the cut bamboo didn’t help, so your instinct was to walk on the ties. But they’re never evenly spaced, so you’re constantly adjusting the length of your steps. Every so often I would resolve to ignore the ties, pick up my head and just walk, but my gaze kept drifting down, hypnotized by the ties underfoot, and I’d find myself stutter-stepping again.

Within an hour we hit patches where the bamboo was growing back through the tracks, and that added to the challenge. And then there were the insects—sand gnats buzzing in my eyes and ears, little dragon mosquitoes biting my ankles.