Soft Apocalypse

by Will McIntosh

  There was a constant cracking. The cracking seemed to rise and fall, louder, then softer, but that may have been in my head. The long, narrow, striped leaves added a dry rustling whisper to the cracking when the wind blew.

  It was hard for me to think of the bamboo as something beautiful, but I had to admit, it was beautiful in its way. There were a few birds and squirrels and other little animals around—most of the animals seemed to have died out, but there were some, if you watched. There were also lots of small plants, especially where the bamboo didn’t grow too thickly.

  I spotted a clump of senna growing in the shade of a cherry tree along the bank of a little stream. I squatted and plucked it.

  “What are you doing?” Bird asked, squatting next to me.

  I wasn’t sure how to describe it to her. “I collect herbs that you can use as medicine.” I held the senna in my palm so she could see it. “This is a laxative—it helps you go to the bathroom.”

  Bird scrunched her eyebrows, then turned away, evidently unimpressed.

  When we camped for the night I called Ange. I told her I was on an herb expedition, and I told her about the tribe, but I didn’t tell her about Bird, or Tara Cohn. Maybe Ange would bump into Cortez and he would tell her, but they didn’t socialize much, and I guessed Cortez might not tell anyone about it.

  I described the tribe, though, and Ange laughed and said it sounded like I’d joined a cult, and that my ass would be back in my apartment in two days, when I was tired of playing Tarzan and needed a fucking shower.

  It was a “one-night” camp, which meant we found a reasonably open spot, put our shit down, sat on the ground, and we were camped. A few people went off to forage. Bird took my hand and led me a little ways off, and pulled me down into a bed of fallen bamboo leaves to make love.

  It was obviously not her first time. Her breath was bad, but she wasn’t all that interested in kissing anyway. It felt good and natural, having sex in the wilderness with this sweet, easygoing girl.

  When we rejoined the tribe, no one looked at us like we’d done something wrong. No convoluted moral code, no guilt. They weren’t playing at this, I realized. It was like they didn’t know how to think about things the way most people thought about them.

  Dinner was wild onions and blackberries, and canned corn beef. There wasn’t much of it, but I ate without complaining. I didn’t want to play the role of soft city boy. I was a city boy, but I wasn’t all that soft. It wasn’t my first time sleeping outside, or eating whatever scraps could be gathered.

  After dinner, people lounged around while Sandra, the white-haired skeleton of an old lady, told a story. I recognized the story—it was a bastardized version of an old movie from the late 0s, King of Our Engine. Good flick, so-so in story form.

  I wondered what was in the garbage bag Bird had been carrying. I grabbed it and pulled it over to me. I was starting to get the hang of this place: you didn’t ask permission to use other people’s stuff, you just took it if you wanted it. They were true socialists, way more than my old tribe, which had shared food and energy, but not personal belongings. These people barely had any concept of personal belongings. I untied the bag and peered inside, instantly recognizing the contents.

  Bamboo shoots, with black-and-white-striped stalks, the roots wrapped tightly in burlap. I closed the bag, suppressing a smirk. I’d never seen this variety before, but I would never forget the day that Sebastian pulled shoots much like these from his bag of tricks in Ange’s living room. I knew what they were for, even if I didn’t know why this tribe had them. I couldn’t ask Bird about them now, because the old lady was still telling her story, so I sat cross-legged and listened.

  A little girl, two or three years old, came over and sat in my lap. She threw her head back and looked up at me, grinning. I ruffled her hair. She giggled. You couldn’t tell whose kids were whose—they wandered from person to person like they were happy orphans, and it occurred to me that I had no idea if any of these people were Bird’s parents or brothers and sisters.

  When the story was finished, I thought I’d start up a conversation. “So how long have you been doing this?”

  “What?” said the strong-looking guy Cortez had approached in the park that first day.

  “Living in the wilderness, not living in houses.”

  “Most of us a long time, a few a shorter time,” Sandra piped in. “The children, their whole lives. We don’t talk about our city lives much. We prefer happy stories.” She didn’t sound pissed off at me for bringing it up, just matter-of-fact.

  “So why do you visit the cities at all?” I asked.

  “There are things we need there, food mostly, and things we need to give to them,” Carl said. He was a fifty-something guy with an overbite. He didn’t have as much of an accent as most of the others, so I guessed he was a recent convert.

  “You trade with them?”

  A couple of people laughed.

  “We give them what they need, we get what we need,” Carl said.

  I smiled and nodded. I understood more than they thought I did, and that felt kind of nice. “Are you speaking in riddles because my ignorance is entertaining, or because you don’t want to tell me? If you don’t want to tell me, you can say so.”

  Some of the smiles faded; a few people picked up weaving projects and other things they were working on.

  Carl tossed a bamboo shoot he’d been whittling at my feet. “We give them these.”

  I picked it up, held it in my palm. “You started the outbreak near the square, didn’t you?” I looked at Bird. She smiled like a gremlin and nodded so vigorously her breasts bounced. I was with the people who had wrecked Cortez’s home. Ironic.

  “Are you working for the scientist in Atlanta?” I asked. “Do you know a man named Sebastian?”

  Carl seemed surprised. “So you know.”

  I flashed a big smile. “I was there for the very first planting.”

  We sat and smiled at each other for a while. Another thing I was learning about these people was that they were comfortable with silence. Long lulls in conversation were not uncommon.

  “We’re not wandering aimlessly, are we?” I asked, finally.

  “We’re heading north,” the big guy said. “To slow things down up there.”

  With a newly engineered variety that thrived further north, clogging the highways and airports, slowing the spread of brand-name products even more. Maybe throwing them back into the Stone Age. I still wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. I had no way of knowing what the world would have been like by now if it wasn’t for the bamboo, and Doctor Happy, and any other disruptions that’d been created that I didn’t know about.

  A week in, I had no idea where we were. We reached the top of what passed for a hill in South Georgia, and there was nothing but bamboo and sandy blank patches and scattered stands of scrub pines as far as I could see in every direction. It would take the tribe months to make their way north (not that I planned to be there that long), but the tribe didn’t seem to be in a hurry. I was filthy, thirsty, and bored. Sand gnats buzzed around my face, relentlessly landing in my ears and the corners of his eyes, but I wasn’t ready to go home yet. Maybe I was doing penance for what I’d done, or maybe I just wanted to prove Ange wrong about how long I could play Tarzan. I turned and waited for Bird. She was dragging, sweating even more than me, her mouth pulled down in a grimace that made her look confused. Usually she was egging me on.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I ate something wrong. I have to poop.” She pulled down her rags and squatted right there. I was getting used to it. I turned and walked a respectable distance. Three guys moseyed past, saying hello to her as she squatted there, her face red from straining.

  Suddenly she turned her head to one side and puked. I ran to her, put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re really sick.” I put my palm on her forehead, and hot as it was outside, it was still obvious she was pulling a fever. “Shit, you’ve got something.” I auto
matically reached to yank my mask over my mouth, but I’d packed it away days ago, and it was way too late in any case if she’d caught anything designer. I thought of the woman with the giant tongue, panting in the car, and my bowels went loose. I turned in the direction of the guys vanishing into the bamboo. “Hey! She’s sick! Call a stop.”

  They called, and the call repeated, further away each time.

  “I have something that will help with the nausea.” I wrapped my arms around Bird’s waist to help her to the ground. She cried out in pain, like I’d stuck an arrow in her, and grabbed her stomach, low, on the right side.

  Appendix. As soon as I saw her grab thats pot, I knew. I had nothing in my pouches to help that.

  The tribe was gathering, a few at a time.

  “We need to find a doctor! She’s got appendicitis.” It had never occurred to me to wonder what would happen if I fell and fractured my skull while I was out here.

  “There are no towns near here. No doctors,” an old guy missing his front teeth said.

  “Well what do we do?” I asked. Bird was whimpering in pain.

  “Nothing to do,” Sandra said, shrugging. “We’ll camp here till Bird’s strong enough to walk, or till she dies.”

  “I don’t want to die,” Bird said.

  I needed a consult. I pulled out my phone, dialed the Phone Doctor number. A recorded voice prompted me to type in my credit code. Wincing at the thought of what this would cost, I did.

  “Andrew Gabow, M.D. How can I help you?” a clean, rested voice said over the phone. I felt a wave of gratitude, just to hear that tone.

  “I’ve got a woman here who I think has appendicitis. We’re way out in the wilderness, there’s no way to get her to a town. What do I do?”

  “Describe her symptoms.”

  I went through them; the doctor asked follow-up questions about the exact location of the pain in her abdomen. He sounded miffed that I didn’t have a thermometer to get Bird’s exact temperature.

  “You’re probably correct—acute appendicitis. I’ll give it to you straight, Jasper—she’s in real danger. You’re not going to carry her out of there in time, and when her appendix bursts, the infection will spread, and chances are she won’t survive. Not out there. Probably not even in a hospital.”

  “What do I do?” I asked.

  “You’ve got one option. Perform surgery on her.”

  “Me?”

  “Whoever in your party has the most medical experience. Is there a nurse with you, a paramedic? Nurse’s aid?”

  I asked the tribe; a dozen heads shook. Shit, half of them probably didn’t know how to read. Most of the rest had probably forgotten.

  “There’s got to be another way,” I said to the doctor. “What about a helicopter?”

  The doctor laughed. “Will that be cash or charge?”

  “Oh god,” I said. I felt like I was separating from my body; I heard my voice saying “oh god,” but it sounded far away, coming from someone else.

  “Build a fire,” Doctor Gabow said. “I’m going to do this for a hundred dollars federal, because you can’t afford what I should be charging, and because I’m a nice guy.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” I said. “Somebody build a fire!” Who was that scared little boy who just yelled that? a calm sliver of my mind asked.

  When the fire had been built, we heated water. I plunged my hands into the pot of scalding water and held them there as long as I could. Then Carla did the same—she was going to assist. Carla put a knife in the water, then held it over the flames before handing it to me. My hand shook so badly I could hardly hold the knife. The children had been moved out of hearing distance. Four people held Bird down, one for each arm and leg. The doctor suggested we put her in a stream to cool her and reduce the bleeding, but there were no streams around.

  “Don’t make the cut too deep,” the doctor said. I had activated the hands-free element on the phone. “About a half inch down, two across. There’s going to be a lot of blood, but don’t worry about that. We’ll handle that later.”

  Tears poured down Bird’s cheeks as I held the knife over the spot we’d washed and doused with moonshine. The knife was shaking so badly it was blurry. I held it there a long time; twice I brought it down just short of Bird’s soft skin, and twice I pulled it back up.

  “Make the cut, Jasper,” the doctor said.

  “I can’t do this,” I said. “Somebody else, please. Somebody do this.” I wasn’t an action guy. Cortez was the action guy—if he was here, he would have done the cutting without breaking a sweat. I’d never cut anything in my life that wasn’t on a dinner plate.

  “I don’t want to die,” Bird whimpered. “Please. I don’t want to die.”

  With a howl, I cut her. She screamed in agony, bucked violently, trying to break free of the people pinning her down. Like an animal. Blood welled up where I’d cut her, filling the incision and pouring out. “I can’t do this, I can’t do this.”

  “How deep is the incision? What do you see inside?” the doctor said, so calm, so far away in his comfortable air-conditioned office.

  “I don’t know.” Reluctantly I pulled the skin apart with my thumb and forefinger to see how deep it was. “There’s just red tissue, I can’t see anything.”

  “You’re still in muscle. You have to cut again, deeper.”

  “Oh, god. Not again.” Tears poured down my cheeks; I was trembling all over like I was freezing cold.

  You suck, Tara Cohn’s voice said inside my head. I sobbed.

  “Cut, god dammit. Cut her. Do it now,” the doctor shouted.

  I screamed, and kept screaming as I cut, wider and deeper. Bird thrashed, but the fight was bleeding out of her. She seemed only half-conscious, only the whites of her eyes visible.

  “What do you see?” the doctor asked.

  I pulled on the flap I’d made, and it tore a little wider, exposing something gray and puckered, a fat snake folding in on itself. It was an organ. Christ, it was her liver or gall bladder or something. I described it to the doctor.

  “Good boy, Jasper, that’s what you want. That’s the colon. Fish around, find the bottom of it, where it meets the small intestine. You’re looking for a small, tubelike appendage attached to the colon.”

  I poked around inside Bird, trying to ignore the moist squishing sound, the blood pouring down her side, dribbling onto the tan bamboo husks that littered the ground.

  “I can’t find it,” I said.

  “Get your damned hand in there and move the colon around. This isn’t some dainty parlor game. Get your hands bloody.”

  I dug, squeezing my fingers between the slimy tubes, pushing one section up with my finger. Behind it was something that looked like a swollen maggot. I described it to Doctor Gabow.

  “Cut it off and pitch it away, Jasper.”

  I cut it off. Sandra sewed the end of the colon closed while I held the knife over the flame, getting it good and hot. Then I pressed the flat end of it against the wound, to cauterize it and stop some of the bleeding. Bird didn’t flinch as the knife hissed against her insides; she’d passed out somewhere along the way. Sandra held the edges of the wound closed while I sewed. Doctor Gabow explained that someone needed to get to the nearest town and buy antibiotics, or Bird would likely die of infection, and all his good work would go to waste.

  People slapped my back as I stumbled out of the camp. I found a quiet copse and collapsed onto my back, staring at the half-moon through the narrow leaves. I felt… strange. Calm. Like a buzzing had turned off in my brain for the first time in years. I held my hand in front of my face, looked at the blood covering it, starting to dry and cake. I’d done it.

  I closed my eyes and let myself drift off to sleep, thinking that I’d had enough of the simplicity of the hunter-gatherer life. I wanted to go home.

  I caught a whiff of jasmine, waited at a crosswalk as a cluster of men pedaled by on bicycles wearing helmets with built-in gas masks, semi-automatics dangling from
their belts.

  Across the street, a tattered teal awning read: Francis McNairy Antiques and Collectibles. Yeah, right. I’ll trade you my mint condition Spider-Man number one for your slightly used bottle of Cool, what do you say?

  A block further I could see my house, its porch looking inviting to my aching feet. I put my head down and trekked the final few yards, then plopped into a chair on the porch.

  The screen door swung open almost immediately. “How was your trip?” Colin asked, unfolding a mildewed lawn chair and joining me.

  “Do I have a story for you,” I said.

  “Really?” Colin scooted his lawn chair until it was at a ninety degree angle from mine. “I could use a good story; the TV’s been out for three days.”

  I told him the good stuff, where I was the good guy, saving a life.

  “So, you’ve decided the right woman for you is a semi-primitive, illiterate teenager with bad breath?” Colin asked when I’d finished.

  I shook my head, blew out a long breath. “I just needed some affection. She offered, and I took her up on it.” I stared off toward the far end of the porch, at a weight-lifting bench that had been abandoned by some previous tenant. Padding jutted from the rotting vinyl fabric. We should really throw the damned thing out.

  Then again, it added a certain character to the porch. I felt a sudden wave of affection for our crappy little apartment, and the people I shared it with. It was good to be home.

  Chapter 7:

  Smithereen Sonata

  Spring, 2033 (Six months later)

  From our seats in the upper deck the players looked like tissues dropped in the grass, yet it was so quiet I could hear the shortstop scuff his foot on the infield dirt, smoothing an invisible divot.

  I fished for a peanut. Even the crackle of the cellophane bag seemed loud, as if we were in a movie theater. I half-expected someone to shush me as I cracked the peanut under my thumb, peeled off the top half of the shell, popped one red-skinned peanut into my mouth, reached over and fed the second to Ange. She closed her lips over my fingers, grinned when I glanced over at her. Lately Ange had been way more affectionate than she’d ever been before. We’d been through so many waxes and wanes; at times I’d felt certain that we had drifted so far apart we would never again be more than acquaintances who’d once been close, but we always seemed to drift back into our not-quite-dating netherworld. I’d long ago given up thinking about the possibility of a real relationship, squashed any romantic feelings I had for Ange so that what I felt for her was a (somehow workable) mix of lust and brotherly affection.