Soft Apocalypse

by Will McIntosh

  I didn’t understand what was happening; it sounded like they were interrogating people, but not giving them a chance to answer.

  The priest walked passed me, went to the person next to me—a black guy in his forties. I strained to listen to what he was asking the guy. If I knew what the questions were, maybe I could figure out the right answer, the response that would convince him not to kill me.

  Part of me knew there were no right answers. This was just how they did it, to make it more awful.

  I risked glancing around, to see if I might be able to run for it. The alley was long and desolate. They would have plenty of time to shoot me before I reached cover.

  “How many graves are in Saint Bonaventure Cemetery?” the priest asked.

  “I don’t… please, don’t kill me,” the black guy said.

  The priest walked away. He came back a moment later carrying a bucket.

  He stopped beside me.

  “How many graves?” he asked. His mouth was close to my ear, his breath tickling my neck.

  I wanted to tell him he’d made a mistake, that he had been questioning the guy next to me. He poured the bucket over my head. It stank—it was piss, or sewage.

  He took a step back, looked me up and down. “Where do you live?” he asked.

  “East Jones Street,” I said quickly. I was relieved to know the answer. I wanted to cooperate. I craved his approval.

  He raised the gas gun, held it to the side of my nose.

  “How many steps is it from here to the Oglethorpe Mall?”

  “I don’t know what the right answer is.”

  “Are you ready to die?”

  “I don’t want to die.”

  The blast from the gas gun was coming. He was almost finished with the precursors, then he would push the black mask on the end of the gun over my face and pull the trigger. I tried to think of some way to stretch it out, to get him to ask me more questions, to switch to someone else, even if only for a moment. I didn’t want to die. Through my terror I found myself trying to grasp that this was real. There would be a very painful few moments of dying, and then my life would end.

  “Eat this.” He held a plastic lid up to my face. There was a stringy, slimy, whitish thing on it, with lidded eyes, little arms curled in toward a torso. It was a fetus, maybe a rat fetus, or a cat. I lifted it off the lid with my tongue, and I ate it. It was horrible; it was chewy and slimy. I bit what may have been the head, and felt fluid squirt across my tongue. I swallowed dramatically, so he’d know that I’d done what he told me.

  “How many cats prowl this city?”

  “I’m not sure,” I whimpered.

  He smacked me in the back of the head, hard. “Run away now,” he said. “We’re not killing mice in rags today.”

  I was running before his words fully registered, my shoulders pulled toward my ears, waiting to feel bullets rip into my back. I sprinted out of the alley, turned down the street with the rush of wind in my ears and a horrible taste in my mouth. I was making some sound as I ran, a sound I didn’t recognize and before this moment wouldn’t have believed was within my vocal range.

  A few blocks away I spotted two police officers on horseback. I waved and shouted to get their attention.

  “They’re killing people, behind an art gallery!” I pointed back up Abercorn.

  “Where?” a female officer asked.

  I pointed. “Three blocks up, I think, then right—”

  “That’s not our jurisdiction.”

  “No, but three men with guns are lining people up in an alley and shooting them! Right now!”

  “Get lost,” the officer said. She made a clicking sound, kicked her horse in the ribs. In a nonchalant tone she picked up the thread of whatever conversation they’d been having when I interrupted.

  I looked back over my shoulder, heard distant gunshots. What could I do to help those people who’d only gone to look at art? Nothing. I could do nothing. I could save myself.

  I was afraid to go back for my bike, so I ran as long as I could, then I walked. As I got close to home I stopped at a table set up in the alley off Drayton and bought a bottle of home brew with my three dollars. The guy didn’t ask why I was shaking so badly, or why I stank of piss. The alcohol washed some of the rancid taste out of my mouth.

  Colin and Jeannie weren’t home. I didn’t want to be alone; I couldn’t even bring myself to go inside to change, because our apartment was dark and I was afraid. I headed toward Ange’s.

  The pattering of water behind a wrought-iron gate caught my attention. I stopped and peered through the gate at a perfectly manicured garden. The shrubs were trimmed in perfect arcs; there was an oval reflecting pool in the center. In the pool was a statue of a woman perched on the edge of a fountain, drinking, sharing the flow with birds in flight. It was so calm, so beautiful. I would have given anything to spend an hour in there.

  I kept going, swigging from my bottle every few steps.

  When I reached Ange’s house I pounded on the door with the flat of my fist.

  Chair, the guy in the wheelchair, opened it. He called to Ange. She took one look at me, shouted my name, and burst forward, tilting off-balance. She’d been drinking, too.

  “What happened? Are you all right? Are you hurt?” She touched my arms, my sides, looking for wounds. I didn’t know how to describe what had happened. I did, but I didn’t know how to make it not sound humiliating. I felt like I’d been raped.

  Ange led me to the bathroom, past roommates trying not to stare, which was worse than if they’d stared. She reached behind the shower curtain and turned on the water. I got in, still dressed, and splashed water on my face. The water at my feet was sewer brown as it slid down the drain.

  “Do you want to tell me what happened? It’s okay if you don’t,” Ange said from outside, her words a little slurred.

  I ran my fingers through my filthy hair. “I stopped at an art opening uptown,” I began. I unbuttoned my shirt with trembling plastic fingers, peeled it off and let it drop.

  “Go ahead, honey,” Ange said. “I know it was bad. You’ll feel better when you tell it.”

  I told it. I gagged and almost vomited when I got to the part about being forced to eat the fetus. I opened my mouth to the precious water, let it spray my gums and teeth, then rinsed and spit.

  The shower curtain drew back, and Ange stepped in. She was naked.

  She pressed her face into my neck.

  “This is just a thing, okay?” she said. “A little distraction. Just some grown up fun. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  We stumbled out of the tub, letting the water dribble onto the ancient Formica, our legs moving in step like slow-dancers. We fell onto Ange’s mattress soaking wet.

  Maybe it’s shallow and male, to be able to set aside something awful because a woman takes off her clothes, to forget that retching death-gag echoing through the alley and instead focus on erect nipples. I don’t care. It worked. Ange transformed those first hours from hellish to tolerable.

  And I think it worked like an aspirin administered right after a heart attack, minimizing the long-term damage. There was going to be damage—no one sees what I saw and walks away clean—but Ange slipped an aspirin under my tongue just when I needed it most.

  I knew it would cost us later. Some women know they can’t do the friends-with-sex thing without getting emotionally attached. Other women think they can do it, but they really can’t. That’s it—all women fit into one of those two categories. But I wasn’t totally opposed to the possibility of it turning into more than friends-with-sex, so maybe it would turn out okay, for a while, at least. Right then I didn’t care.

  I dragged myself out of Ange’s bed at six a.m., feeling the grit of old wood under my feet. I’m not good at mornings. The dog-eared posters covering Ange’s walls were not quite perceptible in the hint of gray light filtering through the blinds.

  Ange rolled over, opened her eyes.

  “I have t
o get to work,” I whispered.

  She nodded, took a big breath and let it out. “You doing okay?”

  “I’m good,” I said. I got out of bed, headed for the door.

  “Bye, sweetie. I love you, but I don’t love you.”

  “I love you, but I don’t love you, too,” I said. I considered kissing her goodbye, decided that was a bad idea, and slipped out.

  Two of Ange’s roommates—Chair and an Indian guy named Rami—were in the living room, hunched over the coffee table, which was covered with charts and notes. Chair blocked my view of the table, gave me a look that made it clear I should keep moving. They always seemed to be working, but they didn’t seem to be students. I had no idea what they did. I needed to remember to ask Ange what these guys were doing.

  I walked in the street; it was easier than navigating the homeless asleep on the sidewalks, hugging their possessions.

  On York I passed an emaciated little girl sitting on a stone curb, her chin on her knees, ten feet from a woman selling walnuts out of an old doorless refrigerator tipped on its back. A woman appeared around the corner of Whitaker Street and waved to the little girl. The woman had just swallowed something. She ran her tongue over her teeth, then smiled at her little girl, held out her hand for the girl to grasp.

  I cut through Chippewa Square, rounded the corner onto Liberty, and stopped in my tracks.

  The front of the Timesaver was a sea of broken glass. I broke into a run, flew into the Timesaver and found Ruplu sitting on the counter, staring at his ransacked store.

  “Amos is dead, they’ve already taken him away,” Ruplu said, gesturing at blood streaked across the floor by the window. He turned and looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. He’d probably been there half the night. “Can you work a double shift and help me get things back in order?”

  “As long as you need me, I’m here” I said. Work was just what I needed right now; something to get lost in. I went to the supply closet and pulled out a broom.

  “Can I ask you something? Do you think they did this because I’m Indian?” Ruplu asked.

  “Yes and no,” I said. “People around here hate foreigners, so your store becomes an appealing target. They also hate rich people—”

  “But I’m not rich,” Ruplu interrupted. “My family lives in a six-room house, nine of us. This store doesn’t make that much.”

  I swept loose chips of glass wedged under the beverage cases that long ago used to be refrigerated. “I know, but they don’t understand that. They don’t want to understand it. They wanted what was inside your store, so it becomes a handy excuse.”

  I stopped at the puddle of blood. Both the broom and the mop would only smear the blood. I looked around, spied a busted bag of kitty litter on a low shelf. I retrieved the bag and poured it over the blood. Poor Amos. He probably didn’t even get a chance to draw his gun. I realized now that he was just for show, that when someone really wanted to rip off the Timesaver, all it took was a few sweeps from an assault rifle.

  “I pay the local Civil Defense people eight hundred dollars a month to protect the store,” Ruplu said, piling cases of soda that the thieves had not had time to cart away. “Do they offer to make reparations when I tell them my store was shot up while it was supposed to be under their protection? No. They just remind me that my next eight hundred is due in four days.”

  “I think Civil Defense is starting to be more of a problem than a solution in this city,” I said.

  “I think you’re right. And they’re not my only problem.” Ruplu sat on the stack of soda cases. “Every week, there’s less and less merchandise I can get delivered. No more coffee. Pepsi doesn’t distribute this far south starting in November. No aspirin in months.” He shrugged his helplessness. “What can I do?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “Maybe you should look into making deals with locals to sell their things—peanuts, preserves, home-made blankets, things like that.”

  Ruplu nodded, thinking. “The problem is locating these people and arranging all these separate deals. It takes all the time just to run the sales end.”

  “I could work on that end—”

  Ruplu shook his head. “I can’t afford to pay you for that many more hours,” he said.

  “Pay me whatever, or nothing,” I said. “This job saved my life; I’m grateful to you, I’ll do anything I can to help your store be successful.”

  I thought Ruplu was going to cry. He clapped me on the shoulder, gulped back tears.

  “You are my good friend,” he said. “All right. If I make money from business you find me, I share some with you. Okay?”

  “Sounds good,” I said. We shook hands.

  Ruplu clapped me on the shoulder again, and I got back to work.

  I felt a little taller as I swept. I didn’t want to feel too tall, because a man had died here this morning, but I couldn’t help but feel some hope rising. This could be a door opening for me, a chance to do more than count change into people’s palms. If I could help Ruplu, I knew he’d give me my fair share of the profit. I could become sort of a limited partner.

  My head was spinning from the last twenty-four hours. I felt great and awful, exhausted and exhilarated. Afterimages of Ange in the shower were superimposed with the priest feeding me from a beverage lid. Now the puddle of blood where Amos had fallen swirled with this opportunity. I guess I needed to take my joys where I could find them, and the hell with the notion that it was selfish to be happy amidst suffering. There was always suffering.

  Chapter 3:

  Rock Star

  Winter, 2027 (Three years later)

  Pulaski Square was uncharacteristically crowded with teens and tweens and early twenty-somethings. They reminded me of pigeons, the way they milled aimlessly on the lawns and brick walkways, as if hoping to happen upon something interesting—a pizza crust or an errant cheese doodle. “Think she’s coming?” an acne-stricken kid said to his friend through a neon purple virus mask.

  His friend, who had stripes of lamp black above and below his eyes to match his black mask (who could keep up with the pointless shit that passed for current teen fashion?), shrugged.

  “Who’s supposed to come?” I asked.

  “Deirdre,” the kid with the lamp black said. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his sleeve pocket.

  “Who’s Deirdre?” “Flash singer. The best.” He lit the cigarette, pulled his mask up to his forehead, took a puff, blew smoke into the Spanish Moss hanging overhead in an “Ain’t I so cool” way. “It’s going around there’s gonna be a flash concert here.”

  “Oh,” I said. That I could probably do without. I nodded, the cool dudes nodded back, and I continued through the crowd.

  “Jasper!”

  I turned. “Cortez!” I pushed through the crowd to get to him, grabbed him in a bear hug. “Shit, I can’t believe it! I didn’t know you were back in the city.”

  “Yeah, about six months now,” Cortez said, clapping me on the shoulder. He was dressed in a black t-shirt, black puffed pants. His head was shaved.

  He was living with his dad, working security jobs when he could get them—mostly temp bodyguard stuff for semi-rich guys trying to impress their dates. Turned out he was on a job now—security for the flash concert that was indeed happening.

  The rumble of the crowd on the west end of the square rose in pitch.

  “Gotta go!” Cortez said. “Stick around, let’s have a beer after.”

  So I stuck around.

  A scrum of kids began chanting “Deirdre.” It spread, rising in volume. The crowd parted on the other end of the park, and there she was, surrounded by guys in black. Everyone cheered.

  Deirdre was small, almost childlike. She was wearing six or seven pink neck rings that accentuated an ostrich-neck, and a black skintight leotard that accentuated enormous breasts. Her eyes bulged a little, her meaty lips formed an eager “o.” She was one of those women who was extremely sexy without being particularly pretty.
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br />   The stage was a bunch of two-by-fours on milk crates, hauled in by her roadies, along with amps, portable spotlights, and a generator. Deirdre paced, staring at the ground as they set up.

  There was no introduction or anything. The amps squealed to life, there was scattered cheering, and Deirdre hopped onto the little stage and came to life.

  Shit, did she come to life.

  It wasn’t that she was a great singer—she had a decent voice, sure, but it was her energy that hooked you. Her voice was so loud; there was so much raw force behind it that you kept expecting those bulging eyes to explode. She flew around the stage, leaping, spinning, dancing, seeming to defy gravity on her tiny fuel-injected frame.

  Her songs were angry and violent. Lots of things blowing up, lots of fucking, lots of death and despair and infidelity. She was a perfect voice for the times.

  After every few songs, roadies circulated with plastic buckets, collecting money. Cortez stood beside the stage with the other men in black, his arms folded across his chest, looking all tough. It was strange reconciling this Cortez with the one who’d been part of my homeless band, my tribe, five years ago. He’d put on a good twenty pounds of muscle; though part of that was probably because he was eating more regularly now, and wasn’t walking miles every day.

  After Deirdre’s final song, she bowed primly and left the stage to roaring applause. One of the bodyguards pulled off his t-shirt and handed it to her, and she put it on over her leotard. It came down to her knees. They headed off as the roadies gathered the stage and equipment.

  Cortez said something to Deirdre as they walked. She nodded, and Cortez broke off and headed toward me, grinning.

  “Come on,” he said, “we’re gonna meet them at the after party.”

  The after party was at a bar called The Dirty Martini. At least it used to be called The Dirty Martini, before it went out of business. The front picture window was boarded up; the olive green bar, thick with dust and grime, was the only piece of furniture. Kerosene lamps hung from the rafters.