Soft Apocalypse (31 page)

“I can’t handle any more emotion in my life,” Phoebe said, as if reading my thoughts. “My tank is empty. I can’t handle any more love, no more tearful breakups.”

“Me neither,” I said.

She looked at me with those turtle green eyes. I leaned over and kissed her, lightly, almost not at all. I didn’t intend to do it—I just did, without thinking. To my surprise, Phoebe didn’t protest. To my further surprise, a light spring breeze blew through me, lifting me just high enough to see beyond the despair I’d felt for so long I could barely remember ever feeling anything else.

Neither of us said anything. We headed back as if it hadn’t happened.

On the walk back I realized that in my entire life I’d never had a conversation like the one I’d just had with Phoebe. I hadn’t even been able to talk like that with Ange.

I was staring at a wall of thick kudzu and suddenly realized that there was an entire house hidden in that tangle of green. A wren squeezed into a crack between the slats just below the roofline. Looking further off, I spotted another house.

“Did anyone notice that there are houses right there?” I asked, pointing.

Everyone turned and looked. Phoebe laughed. “I hadn’t noticed.”

We’d spent the night sleeping outside, thirty feet from shelter. I finished rolling up my bedding, stuffed it into the duffel bag I’d salvaged at one house or another.

Phoebe was putting away her knickknacks. Each night we seemed to lay out our bedding a little closer together.

“How did your parents die?” Phoebe asked.

“In the water riots in ’21,” I said. “I don’t know the specifics, just that they were alive before the riots and weren’t after.” I plucked a bamboo shoot off a stalk, twisted it between two fingers. “How did your father die?”

“My mother said he choked on a chicken bone.”

“Wow.” It seemed an anachronistic death. But even with all the awful ways to die these days, I guess some people still choked on chicken bones.

“We should get moving,” Cortez called out.

“Whatever you say, boss,” Colin called back. Cortez gave him a “don’t make me kick your ass” look.

I shrugged on my pack. It felt a little heavier each day we continued on our survivalist diet.

Two men ambled out of the brush. One was dressed head to toe in camouflage, the other in a crisp, white Atlanta Braves baseball uniform. Each cradled an assault rifle in one hand.

“What have we got here?” the guy in camouflage asked. His close-set eyes were nearly hidden by a wiry black beard.

“We’re just passing through,” Cortez said.

“Yeah? To where?” the one in the baseball uniform asked. It reminded me of a Jumpy-Jump outfit. Had the Jumpy-Jumps made it this far out of the city? Anything was possible. He went over and pulled the corner off the tarp we’d tied over one of the big packs that held our community property. He had a meaty bully’s face, the kind of guy who was a second string linebacker on his podunk high school’s football team and never got the girl.

“Savannah,” Cortez replied.

He turned back toward us. “Tell you what—why don’t you all drop those packs?” He looked Phoebe up and down.

I knew this script, I knew where it went even though it had only begun to play out.
Eat this
. I didn’t want the script to play out that way.

With a calmness I never would have imagined I was capable of, I reached back and pulled a pistol out of my belt, aimed it, and started firing.

I just kept pulling the trigger; I hit one man square in the mouth, then shot the other high on the chest, then in the side. They were blown backward like extras in an action movie, their eyes wide with surprise.

The gunshots subsided. There was a moment of stunned silence, then Joel started to cry. My heart was pounding so hard that I could feel blood pulsing in my neck. “Jesus,” Colin said.

The big one, who I’d shot in the chest, was taking ragged, hitching breaths. The other guy had stopped breathing the moment I shot him.

For a change my heart wasn’t pounding from fear—it was pounding with rage. The emotion was pointing outward instead of inward, and that felt good.

“What did you do?” Sophia said, her eyes wide. “We don’t know if they were going to hurt us.” She squatted next to the guy who was still alive.

“They were going to hurt us. You know it and I know it,” I said.

“They may have been soldiers of some sort, or police. They only asked us to drop our packs. You can’t shoot people for that.”

“I’m not letting any more of my friends die,” I said, my voice trembling. “If that means shooting strangers before they let on whether they’re killers or just assholes, fine.”

The guy I’d shot coughed a spray of blood, then made a choking sound.

“Somebody help him!” Sophia said.

“We can’t,” I said, not taking my eyes off the man. “He’s dying.”

“What’s happened to you?” Sophia said, tears rolling down her cheeks. Her eyes spoke volumes.
You’re not the man I thought you were. How could I have ever thought I loved you?

“I haven’t been fortunate enough to spend the last ten years behind a gate, guarded by mercenaries. That’s what happened to me.” Jeannie tried to interrupt, to defuse the situation, but I talked over her. “I’ve been terrorized by men like these every day of my life. I had to watch someone I loved be tortured by men like these. That’s what happened to me. Go figure.”

I’d like to think it just came out, that I’m not so eager to win an argument that I would pull out the truth of Ange’s death and thump Sophia with it. But Sophia had just called me a murderer.

“Okay J, calm down,” Cortez said. “Why don’t you give me your gun, okay?” He held out his hand.

I put the gun back in my belt.

I felt a hand on my back. It was Phoebe.

“Come on,” Phoebe said, leading me by the elbow, “let’s take a walk.” I saw Cortez look at Phoebe and nod, telling her that’s what they needed to do to handle the guy who’d clearly lost it, the guy who’d gone all shell-shocked on them. I let her lead me away, down a deer trail, to a wide pond that was mostly dried mud.

There were fissures in the dried mud, long jagged cracks in the parched earth that reminded me of the bark on the Live Oaks that lined the streets in Savannah. I stared at them, feeling like there was some significance there, some symbolic importance that my emotionally exhausted mind couldn’t reach.

“Here,” Phoebe said. I felt her hands slathering insecticide on the back of my neck. I hadn’t noticed any mosquitoes.

“Thank you,” I said.

The receding water had revealed a cornucopia of debris that had been thrown into the pond over the decades: rotted soda cans, bald tires, fishing line, two bicycles, a license plate.

“You okay?” Phoebe asked.

“Yeah,” I said. I walked out onto the dried pond, pulled up one of the bicycles with my toe. It made a sucking sound as it came loose. The brand was still etched in the crossbar: Hard Rock. “Was I wrong? Were they going to walk away in another minute?”

“No,” Phoebe said. “You were right.”

I spotted some bones further out, near the oval of rusty water at the center of the mud flats. They looked like they might be human. I headed back toward Phoebe. “It felt good in a way though, and that scares the hell out of me. It’s like what we were talking about just yesterday. I
have
changed. I’m not who I thought I was.”

Phoebe considered. I was tempted to tell her that her eyes were the color of those little turtles you bought at the pet store, back when there were pet stores, but clearly it was not an appropriate time.

“Maybe the change is temporary,” she suggested. “Maybe you’ve had to bury your true nature for now, because you have no choice.” She nodded, as if she was convinced she was on the right track. “Like a soldier. The soldiers who fought the Nazis didn’t lose their humanity, even though they had to do awful things.”

I kicked at the dry mud. I wasn’t in the mood to see myself as some sort of honorable soldier. The more time that passed, the sicker I felt about the two bodies lying a hundred yards away.

“I don’t know. I think something died in me when they killed Ange. I don’t know what it is, but it sure feels like my humanity, and I don’t think it’s coming back.”

Phoebe’s eyes filled with tears.

“Guys, we need to move!” It was Cortez. There was no mistaking the urgency in his voice. As we raced back toward him, we heard distant voices through the bamboo, maybe a hundred yards away.

We gathered our stuff (Cortez grabbed the two automatic rifles) and headed down the railroad tracks.

We’d gone a few hundred yards when shouts erupted behind us. I glanced back; one of the figures in the clearing raised a pistol and fired a shot that kicked up gravel ten yards short of us. We ran harder.

Another shot rang out. I half-expected to see one of my friends drop on the tracks, but no one did.

“They’re chasing us. Keep running,” Cortez said. I glanced back again. There was no point—Cortez had just informed us that they were coming after us, but I needed to see it for myself, see how fast they were coming, whether it was a half-hearted trot or a hard sprint.

It was a hard sprint. One of them was holding a walkie-talkie to his mouth as he ran, probably alerting a bunch of others, maybe the families of the two guys I’d shot.

“Drop your packs,” I said. We couldn’t outrun them carrying fifty pounds each. I shrugged mine off, felt suddenly light as a feather. The others followed suit, but we were still limited to how fast Colin could run carrying Joel. He was cradling Joel’s head so it wouldn’t roll around.

I looked back again. The men were no more than a hundred yards behind us. “They’re gaining,” I said.

“Keep moving,” Cortez said. He pulled one of the automatic weapons off his shoulder and dropped to one knee. A deafening burst of gunfire followed.

I realized I should help him. After all, I was the gunslinger who got us into this catastrophe. I stopped, pulled the pistol out of my belt, realized Cortez was in my line of fire and ran back toward him.

By then the men were gone. Cortez leaped up, looked surprised and somewhat annoyed to see me standing behind him. “I hit one,” he said, breathless. “The others carried him into the bamboo. Come on, I’m guessing they’ll be back.”

We caught up with the rest of the tribe.

“We should get off the tracks,” I said, pointing into the bamboo to the right, the opposite side of the tracks from where our pursuers had gone.

Cortez took one look back, then broke off the track and into the jungle. “Come on.”

We tore through the bamboo. If it hadn’t been so serious, it would have been comical: seven of us running single-file, at times hitting bamboo so thick we had to back up like a seven-car train and seek another way through. Eventually we slowed to a brisk walk, but we kept moving, and no one talked except to suggest a route through the tangle. Joel was crying now—he was probably hungry.

An hour into our flight, long after I’d decided we were safe, we heard a shout behind us, and then an answering shout.

“Shit,” Colin said.

We ran again.

“How can they know which way we went?” Colin asked.

“They must know how to track—broken branches, footprints,” Cortez answered. That was the last of the conversation. It was grueling; my lungs ached, my legs were rubber. Joel cried in earnest in Colin’s arms, his face red with outrage at being jostled so roughly for so long.

We kept running until the light began to wane, then slowed to a walk again.

I heard sniffing behind me, turned to see that Jeannie was crying. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “We lost everything. We’re out here with nothing.”

Nobody responded. I was true, and there was no sugar-coating it, no bright side.

“What now?” I asked.

“I guess we look for shelter,” Colin said.

We were heading in the wrong direction—northwest, away from Savannah.

We walked on, everyone in a black mood, until we came upon a neighborhood choked in bamboo and overgrown with kudzu. It wasn’t so much a neighborhood as a cul-de-sac set with half a dozen duplexes. Cortez kicked down the door of one and we took shelter inside.

“I don’t think we should stay until morning,” I said. “Let’s rest an hour, then keep moving.”

Nobody argued, although nobody agreed either. There were two bedrooms; Cortez suggested the two couples take them while the rest of us rested in the little living room.

We had no bedding, but we found some clothes in the closets and used that. It was growing dark. Phoebe lay along a wall, a half-dozen feet from me, hugging a pile of t-shirts.

“I’m sorry you lost your keepsakes,” I said.

She shrugged. “You can always buy me another postcard the next time we visit a Timesaver.”

“But Sir Francis Bacon…” I meant to strike a jovial tone, but it came out flat.

Phoebe smiled grimly. “Maybe one of the people chasing us will give it to his kid.” She closed her eyes, took a big, sighing breath. There was a ragged cut on her wrist, but it wasn’t too deep. Probably just some thorns.

Exhausted as I was, I couldn’t just drop off to sleep. I felt responsible for the mess we were in. I knew how Sophia felt about what I’d done, but I needed to know if the others thought I’d acted irresponsibly, or even criminally. I got up, knocked on Colin and Jeannie’s door.

Colin had pulled off his shirt and stretched it along the windowsill. Two rows of ribs ran down his back in sharp relief. He didn’t yet look like someone rescued from a concentration camp, but he was getting close.

“Was I wrong?” I asked.

They looked at each other, deciding who was going to tackle the question.

“No,” Colin said. “It was just so…” He struggled for the right words.

“Like I murdered them? Something like that?” I suggested. “But if I’d waited long enough to be sure, I probably wouldn’t have been able to catch them by surprise, and we’d all be dead.”

“No, I agree with you—” Colin said.

If you’d have told me when I was eighteen that one day I would debate whether or not I’d murdered people or shot them in self-defense, I’d have been spectacularly surprised.