Soft Apocalypse

by Will McIntosh

  “Somebody help!” Jeannie cried. She was facing a scrum of onlookers that had formed across the street. None of them moved.

  “Oh shit. What do we do?” Colin said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We have to stop them. We have to.”

  Colin nodded. He was huffing like he was out of breath. “How?”

  Inside, Ange screamed, “Let me go.”

  “Somebody call the police,” Jeannie called.

  “Already did. Five minutes ago,” a teenaged girl said.

  I scanned the street in both directions. Nothing. There was a bark of hoarse laughter inside the house. I took a few quick steps down the driveway.

  “I wouldn’t,” someone shouted from across the street.

  “There!” Jim shouted. A police car was heading toward us. We waved frantically at it; it seemed to be crawling.

  The cruiser’s side window opened. Cool air wafted out. “What’s going on?” a cop in dark sunglasses asked calmly, looking us up and down.

  We all answered at once, pointing at the house. Ange’s screams were muffled, as if someone was holding a hand over her mouth.

  “How many men?” the cop asked.

  “Three,” I said.

  “Armed?”

  I nodded. “At least two rifles. We have to hurry.”

  The cop shook his head. “Three armed men? You think I’m Wyatt Earp or something?”

  “Please. Please officer,” Jeannie said. “We’ll help you.”

  He shook his head again. “You shouldn’t of screwed around with them.” He rolled up the window.

  “Call for backup!” I shouted. The cruiser pulled away. Jeannie pounded on the back of it, pleading for him to stop.

  I looked at Colin. Sweat was pouring down his filthy face. “We have to go in there,” I said.

  Colin nodded. “I know.”

  “What do we have to fight with?” Jim asked. He was standing at my shoulder.

  “Here,” Jeannie said, holding kitchen knives and utensils. I grabbed a black-handled butcher knife, my hand shaking.

  There weren’t enough knives for everyone. Jim grabbed a rusted shovel off the driveway, Edie grabbed a two-pronged barbecue fork out of Jeannie’s outstretched hand.

  “Some should go in the garage door,” Colin said. “We need to hit them all at once.” He looked at me. “We have to do this. We can’t let up.” He looked so scared. I nodded, not sure if I could do it for real. I wished Cortez was here. Cortez was the action guy, we were the sarcastic clowns.

  We ran to the doors. I eased the screen door open, flinching as it squealed, and saw them in there. They were circled around Ange, who was on the dining room table; her shirt and bra were on the floor in pieces. One of the men had her arms pinned, another was tugging her jeans off as she thrashed and screamed. They were grinning, joking, taking their time. A part of my mind kept insisting this was a movie, but the knife felt so real in my sweaty fist.

  The guy with the glasses looked our way and shouted a warning. He grabbed the rifle leaning against the table. I froze in the doorway.

  “Go,” Colin said. I went.

  Jim came crashing through the side door, shovel raised. The guy swung the rifle around just as Jim hit him. The rifle went off, but missed.

  I reached the bald guy just as he got his hand on the other rifle, and stabbed him near the collar bone, felt the knife sink.

  He screamed. I couldn’t believe I’d just stabbed someone. He raised his free hand to ward off the knife and I stabbed again—hard this time—down through his hand, slicing between two fingers. The knife sunk halfway to his wrist.

  They’re so sharp, I thought.

  He shouted something, but I didn’t understand because it was garbled and wet. Edie was behind him, and the barbecue fork was in his back. The guy’s split, bloody hand hit me in the face as he turned. He dropped to one knee, then fell, scrabbling on the floor like a roach sprayed with insecticide.

  I spun and saw Jim slam the shovel down on the back of the struggling war vet’s head. Jeannie was on the vet’s back, trying to hold him down. There were a half-dozen bloody wounds in his back. Both Jim and Jeannie were crying hysterically. Jim brought the shovel down again and the vet lay still.

  Colin and Carrie and Ange were staring down at the third guy. The plastic hilt of a steak knife was buried in his throat, in that spot where you give people tracheotomies. There was a spray of blood across Colin’s face. There was blood everywhere. The TV, which was playing a DVD of some stupid comedy, was splashed with it. The bricks on the fireplace were speckled with it. A framed picture of a clean-cut family was lying on the floor, drenched in it.

  We ran, past the dumbfounded stares of neighbors gathered on the sidewalk in front of the house.

  “I keep thinking of Lord of the Flies,” I said as we walked.

  “We didn’t have a choice,” Colin said. His wavery tone was not terribly convincing.

  Jeannie was taking it the hardest. She cried and cried. Her eyes looked haunted.

  No animal instinct had taken over as we stormed that house. We had remained a bunch of scared suburban college graduates doing the last thing in the world we could ever imagine doing. We have to get tougher, Jeannie had said a million years ago. Well, we were tougher. Hooray for us.

  My phone jingled; a rope of adrenaline ripped through me, clearing my sinuses and sending my heart racing.

  I’m sorry. I know you asked me not to. Have news! Call me? Miss you so much.

  Can’t. Not right now.

  The phone jingled again within seconds.

  Pls meet me? Pls? It’s important.

  I was aching to see her, but I couldn’t face her. I couldn’t tell her what we’d done.

  Another time. Soon.

  A moment later, it jingled again.

  And then again.

  I need to see u!

  We arranged to meet.

  I read the messages over a few times, the way I always read Sophia’s messages, looking for nuances I might be missing, drinking in every last scrap of meaning. Then I put the phone away.

  I don’t have much of a poker face. Before I’d even gotten in her car I was crying. She held me close, waited while I told her between sobs.

  She told me we’d had no choice, that we’d done the right thing. She said she would have gone in with us to save Ange if she’d been there. But she hadn’t been there; she hadn’t stabbed people while they screamed. There was so much distance between intent and action. I’d had no idea how much until I had to act.

  The screensaver in my mind no longer held a picture of a beautiful smiling Sophia, it held a screaming man, his hand sliced between two fingers, nearly to the wrist.

  “I have a job interview arranged for you in Savannah. It’s not much, just working in a convenience store, but it’s a start.” She was so remarkably clean, her clothes so crisp and new.

  “I can’t leave my tribe,” I said. “They need me now; we need to stick together.”

  “No,” she said, pulling me to her, holding me tight. “You have to come to Savannah. You can help them more that way. You can get an apartment and they can all stay with you and look for jobs.”

  You can get an apartment. Not “we.” Three’s a crowd, after all.

  “I can’t leave them now.”

  “How will any of you ever get out of this if you refuse to ever separate?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She pressed the interview information into my hand. “Just go to it.”

  I took my phone out of my pocket and held it out. “I’ll always love you, Sophia. Always.”

  Fresh tears rolled out of her dark eyes. “No. I don’t want it.”

  “I can’t answer it any more.”

  “So don’t answer it.”

  I kissed her, long and deep, and for the first time since we’d been in that movie theater, she let me. Then I got out of her car and headed into the woods to find my tribe.

  So don’t answ
er it, she’d said. But I knew I would. If she called, I’d answer.

  There was a cypress swamp below the tracks, trees with roots like melting wax, branches draped in Spanish moss. I threw the phone in a high arc. It ricocheted off a tree and splashed in the brown water.

  Chapter 2:

  Art Show

  Fall, 2024 (Eighteen months later)

  The buttery-sweet smell of the candy bars made me a little nuts as I stacked them in the wire receptacles near the register. I fantasized about squatting behind the counter, out of sight of Amos the Enforcer, and scarfing a few down. But I couldn’t afford to lose my job, and besides, I couldn’t steal from Ruplu. Weird as it was to have a nineteen-year-old boss, the guy was gold, and I owed him for hiring me. Plus my momma taught me not to steal.

  Having so many different colorful packages in my line of sight hurt my brain after a while. Racks of chips and crackers, gums and sodas, cigarettes and beer, energy packs and water filters, magazines, 3-D porn—there was barely a square foot of blank space for my eyes to rest on.

  Amos stared out the window, arms folded, pistol tucked into his belt.

  “How’s it going, Amos?” I said.

  “Just fine. Just fine,” he said without turning his head. Amos wasn’t much on talking. His qualifications for the job seemed to be that he owned a gun and was eager to use it.

  The door jingled. An incredibly skinny woman came in, her hair so white it looked blonde, two fingers clutching a cigarette. She wandered the aisles, whispering to herself. From behind, you could easily mistake her for a girl in her twenties. If you did, her shrunken, wrinkled, toothless face would give you a jolt when she turned around. She walked with the knock-kneed energy of a godflash addict, which she probably was. She grabbed a packet of malted milk balls and brought them to the counter.

  “I’m doing fine,” she said, holding out a five, taking a pull on her cigarette, not noticing that I hadn’t actually asked.

  “That’s good to hear,” I said, handing back her change. Amos watched her go, alert to any sign of a grab and dash.

  Another woman put a box of tampons on the counter, opened her overstuffed purse and dug through it.

  “Twelve seventy-six,” I said. It still felt strange to hear my voice say convenience store cashier things, to watch my hands accept payment and make change from the register. I had figured I was done with these sorts of jobs the day I graduated from Emory.

  The woman gave an exasperated sigh, pulled a couple of things out of her purse and set them on the counter: Wallet. Key ring. Heat Taser. She continued searching.

  “Wouldn’t your money be in the wallet?” I asked.

  She smiled. “You’d think so, but no.” Her bra strap was hanging out of her shirt sleeve. “Um, could you put that in a bag?” she said without looking up.

  It took me a second to get why she was asking me to do what I was obviously going to do in a moment anyway. A seven a.m. purchase of tampons at a convenience store. Emergency. She didn’t relish everyone in the store knowing about her urgent feminine needs. “Oh.” I snared a plastic bag from under the counter and stuffed the tampons into it. “Sorry.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  “Ah!” She handed me a twenty.

  “I guess there are certain items that need to be bagged immediately,” I said as I snared coins out of the till with two fingers.

  “Yes. Tampons, pregnancy kits…”

  “Pornography,” I offered.

  “Good one,” she said, pointing at me. She was pretty in a slightly harsh, Eastern European sort of way. Dirty-blonde hair, her front teeth crooked but white. A little older than me, thirty-three or so.

  I tried to think of something else to say, but my mind was suddenly a vast wasteland. I thought we were flirting. I was pretty clueless when it came to flirting, but I thought maybe we were, and I was dropping the ball.

  “Do you live around here?” she asked.

  “About four blocks away, on East Jones,” I said, silently counting the bills into her hand. “Where do you live?”

  “Southside.”

  “Wow, you’re far from home.” Southside was a good four miles away. Usually I was leery about long-distance relationships, but it was so easy to look into her blue eyes; it felt like I could go hours without blinking if I could just keep looking into them.

  “I was in class. SCAD.”

  The Savannah College of Art and Design. Great reputation, outrageous tuition, no scholarships. Rich girl. I was probably misinterpreting polite kindness for flirtatious interest, given my station in life. I was wearing a name tag, for god’s sake.

  “What are you studying?” I asked.

  “Graphic design. Change of career—I worked in corporate recruiting for ten years.”

  “Interesting.” There was another awkward pause. She hovered, waited for me to say something. The only other customers in the store were puttering in the back, searching for just the right flavor of Gatorade. Amos was staring into the street, watching for marauders.

  “You ever make your way down here at night, to see bands or anything?” I asked. Why not, what did I have to lose?

  “No. Too rough around here at night. I tend to hang out in Southside.”

  “Mmm,” I said. If she knew the question was meant to test the waters, she wasn’t biting.

  “You should come to Southside some time,” she said, shrugging the shoulder that had lost its bra strap.

  “Where would I go, if I came to Southside?”

  She shrugged and smiled. “Snowstorm is fun.”

  “You think you’ll be hanging out at Snowstorm Saturday night?”

  “Possibly,” she said as she slung her purse over her shoulder. She waved, winked, and headed for the door. I was impressed—almost no one can wink without it seeming hokey and contrived, but she pulled it off.

  My nineteen-year-old boss appeared on the sidewalk outside; he and the girl whose name I forgot to ask passed each other in the doorway.

  “Hello, hello,” Ruplu said, grinning as he joined me behind the counter. “All is well?”

  I nodded.

  “Good. It’s payday. How many hours did you put in this week?” He opened the register.

  I never had to remind Ruplu it was payday. “Forty-four,” I said. He counted two hundred forty-two dollars onto the counter. It was amazing, the way the guy trusted me. It was reckless. Lots of people thought they were reckless—fast drivers, kick boxers—but trusting a stranger to tell you how many hours he’d worked, that was truly reckless, and I admired him for it.

  I namaste’d Ruplu and headed for the exit, squeezing the bills inside my pocket and fighting back tears. I tended to cry on payday. The first time Ruplu counted out those bills I blubbered like a babe. A job. My parents would’ve found a way to be proud, even if the job did involve mopping floors and stacking tins of sardines.

  I’d known I was going to miss my parents terribly when they died, but I didn’t realize how I’d miss them. When something interesting happened, one of my first thoughts used to be how I had to call my folks in Arizona and fill them in. They had been omnipresent observers to the unfolding of my life. That day three years ago, when my sister called to tell me they’d been killed in a water riot, it was as if my third eye had been shut. No one was watching over my shoulder any more.

  The street smelled damp and vaguely fecal. It had rained earlier; the people camped on the sidewalks were wet and miserable. Savannah was a magnet, pulling people to its streets clutching filthy blankets and packs filled with whatever they could carry from whichever small town they’d come. It was a relief to no longer be one of them, to be able to bathe occasionally (even if the water was cold), and to change my clothes occasionally (even if the clothes came from the Salvation Army thrift shop). It was nice to be in a place where a professional woman might want to go out with me.

  I cut through Chippewa Square—the center of the universe as far as my life was concerned�
�and passed through the shadow cast by General Oglethorpe’s statue. A little boy was walking along the concrete skirting at the base of the statue, kicking garbage off it in a sort of game. Kids made me nervous—I had no idea what to say to them, didn’t understand their language.

  There are twenty-four town squares in Savannah, most canopied by stands of the Live Oaks dripping Spanish moss—but Chippewa Square had always been special to me. I stopped and sat for a moment on the bench where my parents had gotten engaged thirty years ago—a ritual I’d begun the day I learned that they’d died. Only a few dappled spots of sunlight filtered through the branches of the massive live oaks that canopied the square.

  A pigeon wobbled up to me hopefully, like I might pull out a bag of breadcrumbs. When was the last time anyone had fed a pigeon? How did they still remember that we used to? After a minute it wandered away, pecking at pebbles and popsicle sticks.

  I stood, letting my fingers linger for a moment on the rough wood of the bench. Time to go home. I crossed the street, out the other side of the square, and headed down Bull Street.

  All of the houses on our block were in disrepair, but the one that housed our apartment took the cake. The celery-green plaster on number five East Jones was cracked in places, exposing the original brick beneath. Our iron railing was not as ornate as most in the neighborhood, and it was canted at an angle. A little historical plaque said the house had been built in 1850. The yellowed Neighborhood Watch sign in one of the first-floor windows—replete with silhouette of a cloaked burglar—was a nice touch.

  The screen door squealed when I opened it. Colin was in the living room. “That virus is spreading.” He motioned toward the TV.

  As if Polio-X wasn’t enough, now there was a flesh-eating virus to worry about. From the brief clips of victims on the news, it did not look pleasant, and the only way to treat it was to cut out the infected areas before it spread, which didn’t sound pleasant either.

  “If they ever catch the people who release these things, they should have them sodomized by Clydesdales on national TV,” Colin said without a hint of a smile.

  “Are they saying anything new?” Jeannie asked, gliding out of their bedroom. She stopped to stare at the screen of the old 2-D TV that’d been one of our first purchases after we’d saved enough for rent.