Soft Apocalypse

by Will McIntosh

  “Yeah. I’d never do it to myself, but still, sometimes I envy the bastard’s peace of mind,” Cortez said as he looked up and down the interstate. He dropped his trash bag and squatted, pulled a garden trowel from his pack and dug a hole in a bald spot. Ange dropped a bamboo root in the hole, pushed dirt around it. Ange had decided to participate fully in this operation; she said it didn’t feel as much like rape as spreading Doctor Happy had. I, on the other hand, was there solely because I was afraid for my friends’ safety, and there was safety in numbers. Plus I didn’t have anything else to do. Colin and Jeannie were having a date night, and no one else was around.

  Cortez poured water over it from an old soda bottle. We headed back toward the on-ramp. It had taken all of thirty seconds.

  “How are you doing with that asshole Charles?” Cortez asked as we walked.

  Ange filled him in on the latest; Cortez looked more pissed with each word. I peppered Ange’s monologue with the occasional “Can you believe it?”

  “You want me to take care of him?” Cortez asked when she’d finished. “I can soften his dick in a hurry.”

  Ange looked tempted. “He deserves to be hurt, but I don’t think that would help. Thanks, but no, I have to do this myself.”

  Cortez looked disappointed. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

  Ange stopped short, holding out her arms. “Shh. Listen to that.”

  We listened. Splitting, popping, crackling sounds lit the air, as if the entire city was built on ice that was giving way. It was an eerie, awesome sound. The other teams had been hard at work.

  “Unbelievable,” Cortez said.

  We headed up Abercorn, under a canopy of oaks that cloaked the sky, as sirens began to compete with the hungry sound of awakening bamboo.

  The effect was breathtaking. Broughton Street, the main retail strip, was completely impassable, choked with bright green bamboo stalks. Just as Sebastian had said, they pushed through the asphalt like it was cardboard.

  The air smelled of blooming azeleas and piss. A group of young Dada wannabes in mock police, cowboy, and FedEx outfits strutted toward us, each sporting his own signature cool-walk. I put my arm across Ange’s shoulder protectively. She smiled; I knew what she was thinking: she had a seventy-pound dog with her, and Uzi had no qualms about putting a hurt on someone, whereas I had once eaten an unidentified fetus, and did all but thank the Jumpy-Jump who fed it to me.

  On Drayton Street two kids, a boy and a girl, were dragging clumps of cut bamboo along the brick sidewalk. They turned into an empty lot between dilapidated buildings.

  “Good job, Emma; good job, Cyril!” an old man said. He stood next to a half-finished bamboo hut, canted but looking impressively sturdy. That was probably Grandpa; Mom and Dad and Grandma were likely dead. This was probably not how Grandpa had planned to spend his retirement.

  In Jackson Square, more bamboo huts and curtains. On Bull, a group of homeless, mixed with cleaner people who were probably Doctor Happy victims, cheered on the bamboo as it chewed up Bull Street and surrounded police headquarters on Victory Drive. Machete-wielding cops and soldiers chopped at the sprouting bamboo in the blazing May heat; another ran a ditch-digger around the perimeter of the outbreak. They looked hot, and pissed off.

  “Very nice, very nice,” Ange said. She was reading a report texted from Sebastian. “And listen to this: a priest in Southside is being charged with spiking the sacramental wine with his Doctor Happy-infected blood. Wonderful.” Ange had clearly drunk the Kool-Aid.

  Some of those infected seemed to feel it was their duty to give it to others—biological evangelists, spreading the word of peace and joy and all-night street parties. Mothers poked their children with bloodstained pins while they slept.

  On Whitaker, a tank was easily tearing through the bamboo outbreak, blazing a trail for troops and shoppers. But there weren’t many tanks in Savannah, and tonight Sebastian and his followers would plant more bamboo.

  The news was now reporting Doctor Happy outbreaks in the northeast and west. There were bamboo outbreaks happening all over the world—China, Europe, South America. I hadn’t realized how large the Science Alliance’s operation was. Sebastian wouldn’t say whether all of these outbreaks had originated with his group in Atlanta, or even whether their group was a cell in a larger group. They had to be part of a larger group, to be able to pull off such a massive stunt.

  There was a party raging in Pulaski Square. Twenty or thirty revelers were pounding on drums and trash cans while others circled them, doing some sort of square dance, hooking arms with each other. There were also at least two couples having sex right in the open. Opposite the square three cops stood on the sidewalk in front of a drug store, automatic weapons dangling from their fingers.

  I caught a glimpse of movement on the roof above where the cops were lounging: hands, dropping something. A white oval plummeted, hit the sidewalk with a splat right at the cops’ feet. Blood spattered everywhere. A blood-bomb? That was a new twist. It drenched the cops, the sidewalk, the side of the building. The cops lifted their weapons, pointed them all over, looking for an assailant. Then they seemed to notice that they were covered in blood. They wiped frantically at their eyes and lips, looking scared as shit.

  Shouts and laughter erupted from the crowd of partiers. The square dance dissolved; some of the revelers trotted toward the cops.

  “Welcome to reality!” someone shouted.

  A lanky guy wearing nothing but a loincloth that looked like a diaper ran up to one of the cops and patted him on the shoulder as others crowded around, cheering.

  The cop pressed his automatic weapon into the lanky guy’s gut, and fired. The guy staggered backward. Before he hit the pavement the other cops were spraying gunfire into the looming crowd. Screams lit the air; people crumpled, slammed into each other in the frenzy to escape.

  “No!”Ange and I shouted simultaneously. Ange moved toward the melee; I grabbed her elbow and yanked her away, toward cover.

  One cop’s head suddenly snapped back; chips of scalp and brain sprayed on the drug store window. The cop went down as the window shattered. I looked around, trying to figure out who was firing on the cops. I spotted the flash of a muzzle from inside a copse of bamboo half a block behind us.

  Two men stepped out of the bamboo—Jumpy-Jumps, with rifles raised, peering through scopes. The other two cops convulsed, their already blood-soaked bodies blossoming fresh as they fell to the pavement. It wasn’t taking the Jumpy-Jumps long to turn these new developments to their advantage.

  Back home, I showered before joining Colin and Jeannie in the living room to watch the news. We watched footage of hundreds of Jumpy-Jump gunmen swarming the bamboo-choked streets of Chicago, then of a tank firing on insurgents in San Antonio. The Dadas were taking advantage of the chaos, spreading even more chaos.

  What terrified me most were not the images, but the reporters’ voices. The usual calm, even cadence was gone, replaced by shrill, breathless, unpolished descriptions that gave me the feeling that they might drop their microphones and run at any moment.

  “I wonder if Sebastian’s Nobel laureates expected this?” Jeannie said as we watched.

  “The way Sebastian talks, they have it mapped out down to where each body is going to fall.”

  “Let me see the phone,” Jeannie said to Colin, wriggling her fingers. She called Ange and asked her to ask Sebastian if this was all part of the plan. Jeannie pulled her mouth away from the phone. “He says it draws energy away from the large-scale conflicts that are bubbling, and weakens the central government, and that in the long run those are good things.”

  I’d heard this sort of crap before, from politicians. Whatever the results of their policies, they used some sort of tortured logic to argue that it was really a good thing.

  I was struggling to get a sense of whose side I should be on. By nature I tended to favor anyone who took on the establishment. The establishment had proven that it was good at acting l
ike it knew what it was doing, but was utterly incompetent underneath that façade. On the other hand these scientist-rebels seemed to be taking huge risks, treating the world as if it were a giant laboratory. Neither side seemed like a safe bet, and that was disconcerting.

  I drifted off to sleep with my window open, serenaded by the ubiquitous crackle and pop of the bamboo, which drowned out much of the gunfire, and the screams of the night victims.

  By morning, things had quieted considerably. We watched the news reports. The Jumpy-Jumps had melted back into the general population. The bamboo was still spreading.

  The burble of the phone woke me. Our phone was so old that it didn’t play music any more; instead it made a tone-deaf warbling sound.

  “Jasper?” It was Ange; she sounded beyond panic.

  “What happened?” I asked, adrenaline rushing through me, burning away the muddle of sleepiness.

  “Uzi’s gone.”

  “He’s gone? From where?”

  “I tied him to the bike rack and went into the grocery store, and when I came out he was gone.”

  “Is the leash gone too? Did he break it?” I got out of bed, pulled a pair of jeans from the mound of clothes I’d worn yesterday.

  “No, it’s gone too.”

  “He still could’ve pulled loose. He’s probably nearby.”

  “He wouldn’t run away, even if he got loose. Not Uzi.”

  “But he must have,” I said. “Who would steal a big old mutt?”

  Ange started to cry. “I don’t know. But he’s gone.”

  “I’m on my way,” I said. “I’ll bring Colin and Jeannie. We’ll find him.”

  I ran to get Colin and Jeannie. A lost dog—it was the sort of old-fashioned problem you didn’t often get to tackle these days. For a second I pondered the possibility that the bamboo outbreak had stifled food supplies to the point that people were kidnapping dogs and eating them, but that didn’t make sense. There were plenty of strays out there if you wanted to eat dogs, and besides, no one would tangle with a big, mean-looking dog like Uzi.

  “Shhh, shhh, we’ll find him,” I said, my arm wrapped around Ange as we sat on the steps of her house. The sun would be down in a few hours. I knew what Ange was thinking: Uzi would be alone, in the dark.

  An electric wheeming announced that Chair was coming around the corner. Ange stood, stared expectantly at the corner.

  Chair was alone. He looked at Ange hopefully as he rounded the corner; she shook her head no. He pounded the arm of his wheelchair. Sebastian, Colin, Jeannie, and a few others were still out. There was hope.

  “He’s okay,” I said. “There are a thousand strays wandering the streets. No one would take him, he just got loose. We’ll find him.”

  Just as I spotted Sebastian, alone, heading toward us, I heard a pitiful whine from the other direction. I snapped my head around, seeking the source. It had come from the square, but there was nothing there.

  I began to suspect it was my imagination, but then I heard it again. Ange heard it, too. She leapt from the stoop, calling Uzi’s name. I was right behind her.

  We spotted him in the street across the square. He was moving slowly, slowly, his head hanging almost to the pavement.

  “Uzi!” Ange screamed. Uzi howled miserably; Ange launched herself toward him. Uzi stopped at the edge of the square. There was something terribly wrong with him. He looked… twisted. As we closed the gap I saw something dangling from his stomach.

  It was a wire.

  I grabbed Ange’s shirt from behind and pulled, shouting for her to wait. She struggled to get free, screamed at me to let go, then she managed to break my hold.

  “Wait!” I shouted, chasing her.

  “What’s wrong with him? What’s wrong with him?” Ange shouted as she wrapped her arms around Uzi’s big head. He licked her face feebly.

  I squatted, examining the wire. “Oh, Christ. Get back! Get away!” I screamed at her.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Ange screamed back.

  Sebastian appeared, wrapped his arms around Ange’s waist and pulled her backward; her feet bounced over the curb and across the grass as she struggled to get free.

  I pushed Uzi; he fell onto his side in a pathetic heap, howling in pain. Ange screamed his name. His underside had been shaved, and there was a long, ragged incision on one side of his belly.

  “Bomb!” I heard myself yell. I wasn’t sure what to do. I wanted to run, wanted to get far away from Uzi, but I couldn’t just leave him there, howling in pain.

  I tore open the incision, pushed my hand inside Uzi and fished around until I felt something hard, something that didn’t belong inside a dog. Ange was screaming at me from across the street, asking over and over what I was doing to him.

  I pulled the bomb out of Uzi, leapt to my feet, and hurled it down the street. A trailing wire spun in the air. The device hit the pavement, bounced twice, then lay still.

  An explosion ripped the air, throwing up fire and dust and chips of asphalt. I was knocked backward. Pebbles rained down on me.

  Then Sebastian was leaning over me, cradling my head. He asked if I was okay. My whole body was throbbing. I looked down at it, afraid there would be some bloody hole in me, but everything looked fine. I turned to locate Ange.

  She was hunched over Uzi, who gave one final, misguided attempt at a lick that missed badly, then twitched and lay still. Ange held his head and rocked him.

  With Sebastian’s help I got to my feet, went over to Ange.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  Ange grabbed my hand, clutched it hard. “No.” She kissed Uzi’s nose, gently lowered his lifeless head to the ground, and stood. A crowd had formed in the square. Ange scanned them, standing at a distance in their white masks.

  “You,” she said. Her voice was shaking with rage.

  And then I saw him, our Dada neighbor, wearing his fucking mailman outfit and sporting a fucking maskless grin like his horse had just finished first by a fucking nose.

  Ange stormed into the square with me right behind, pushed through the crowd until she was right in Rumor’s face. “Did you do this?” she screamed. “Did you?”

  He shrugged. “Who put these sharks in the water? Hard to say.”

  Ange lunged at him, tearing at his eyes with a clawed hand. Rumor grabbed her by the throat, spun her around and slammed her to the ground. She hit the ground hard, his hand pinning her throat.

  I launched myself at him. I had no plan, no idea how I could hurt him—I just went for his throat. He cuffed me aside like a mosquito, a blow to my temple that made me see stars.

  “Unclench those little fists,” I heard Rumor say to Ange as I struggled to my knees. He let go of her throat; air squealed into her lungs. Rumor stood, turned his back to us. “You’re not going to live long in this world, Little Peanut,” he said.

  Ange struggled to a sitting position as I crawled over to her. She screamed in rage and lunged to her feet to go after Rumor again, but I held her firm.

  “He’ll kill you without a second thought,” I said. “We can’t fight him head-on, not even if Cortez was here.”

  I looked at Uzi, sprawled on the sidewalk, his lips pulled tight in a rictus snarl. Uzi. Who was more innocent in all this than Uzi?

  I hated feeling so powerless. Once, there would have been police cruisers filling the square, courts to prosecute this bastard, and prisons to put him away. Now, whoever was most willing and able to kill had all the power.

  Beyond Uzi a young boy was laying down colored dots, smiling under his mask, water gun clutched in one hand. The game went on, whatever the tragedy of the moment. He raised his gun, test-squirted a girl standing forty feet away from him. I watched the water spurt in a tight, perfect arc…

  “Chair,” I said, my voice calm. He rolled closer to us. “Stay with her a minute?” Chair nodded.

  I dug into my pocket, pulled out a twenty and approached the boy with the water gun. “I’ll give you twenty bucks for your gun
,” I said, holding the bill between two fingers.

  His eyes opened wide. “Okay.” He grabbed his gun by the muzzle and held it out to me. I gave him the bill, said thanks, and headed inside Ange’s apartment with the gun.

  There was a half bag of blood in the fridge. I emptied most of the water from the gun and poured in the blood. Some of it missed, spilling across my knuckles, and over the plastic base and trigger of the gun. I rinsed my hand and the gun.

  Rumor was still outside. He was talking to an Asian woman who seemed thrilled by his attention.

  “Rumor,” I said. He turned, dropped his head in a “you again?” gesture. I raised the water gun.

  Rumor laughed like he’d never seen anything so funny. “Are you going to shoot me, Little Peanut’s brother?”

  I shot him right in the face. He went on laughing as he turned his face from the spray, wiped his eyes. He stopped laughing when he saw that his hands were covered in blood.

  “My name is Jasper,” I said. “My friend’s name is Ange. Her dog’s name was Uzi.”

  I ran, because it would be hours before he would lose the will to kill me. As I crossed the square, a gunshot cracked, then another. I sprinted up York, jumping over homeless bedding down for the night. I glanced back and spotted Rumor slowing to a walk, the gun at his side. All that weaponry probably made it hard to run.

  “Jasper!” someone called. It was Ange, running like hell through a back alley. She must have cut around on Abercorn. I waited for her, then we ran together until we had put some distance between us and Rumor.

  “Thank you,” she said. She wiped away tears, which were immediately replaced by new ones.

  “I’m sorry. I know it won’t bring him back.”

  She nodded, wiped her nose with the back of her sleeve. “You got him, though. You made him pay.”

  Her phone jingled. She pulled it out, held it close to read a text message.

  “Shit. It’s from Charles: ‘Ange, We had a dinner date, correct? Did you forget?’” Fresh rage poured into Ange’s eyes.