Soft Apocalypse

by Will McIntosh

  I filled the others in.

  “They’ve got to get out of there,” Ange said. “Sooner or later the mob will get in, and they’ll kill everyone.”

  “There’s no way out!” Sophia said, her voice hitching. She’d heard Ange.

  We’d used the sewers, and so had Cortez. The gated communities must use the same sewers as the rest of the city, if nothing else. “I think I know a way. I’m going to have Cortez call you and guide you out. You remember Cortez?”

  She did. “Jasper, thank you for thinking of me,” she said before she hung up. I called Cortez. He promised to get her out. He told me not to worry. I fought back tears, glad I’d called Sophia.

  “There they are!” Jeannie said, pointing. Up ahead, Sebastian was sitting on the rail. He shimmered a little in the afternoon heat.

  When Sebastian spotted us he ran to meet us, laughing, his arms spread for hugs. “Look, a little good luck.” He pointed ahead. Good luck, indeed. We were near the perimeter of Savannah’s rhizome barrier—ahead of us lay a wall of bamboo, broken only by scattered pines. But a train had been through recently, slicing away the bamboo that had grown in the tracks. As I watched, a dozen people hurried up a ridge from the roadway and fled along the tracks. We would make good time as long as the trains kept running. They’d better keep running—they were the only transport in and out of Savannah.

  “Where are we going?” I asked no one in particular.

  “We should head to Athens,” Sebastian said. “They’re establishing a communal setup there—cutting edge, very cool. Most of the smaller towns are grown over, and all the cities are going to end up like Savannah if they haven’t already.”

  “This all part of the master plan?” I asked.

  “We are the master plan, Jasper,” Sebastian said, clapping my back and giggling. The Zen virus bastard always had a koan ready.

  “I always wanted to be a master plan,” Colin said.

  “Remember what they taught us in fifth grade?” Sebastian said, holding up a finger. “We can be anything we want, if we work hard enough and believe in ourselves.”

  “They really taught us that horseshit, didn’t they?” Ange said.

  “Hold on,” I said, still looking at Sebastian. “I really want to know: did you expect the bamboo to spread like this?”

  He chuckled. “No. No one expected this. But nothing works exactly the way you planned, and it’s still probably better than the alternative.” Sebastian started walking toward the tracks, and the rest of us followed.

  “What exactly was the alternative?” Jeannie asked.

  “World war. Countries will always choose war over starvation if forced to choose.”

  He made it sound like he and his egghead friends had a crystal ball. The bamboo screw-up made it clear that they didn’t know half as much as they thought they did. It hadn’t slipped past me that for the first time Sebastian had inserted the word “probably” into his claim that the bamboo was helping rather than hurting.

  “That’s all well and good,” I said, “but is anyone planning to fix the royal fuck-up that this bamboo has turned into?” I asked.

  “People are working on it. It’s a tough problem, though—the bamboo is engineered to be resistant to herbicides, and even if you can design an effective herbicide, the root systems are engineered to disconnect after a time, so you can only kill a tiny cluster at a time.”

  “Wow, look at that girl run!” Colin said, pointing.

  Deirdre was sprinting toward us with her head down. Dread, and a little lust, washed over me at the sight of her. She glanced up, spotted us, and immediately slowed to an easy walk. She was wearing plain old shorts and a t-shirt. It was so un-Deirdre-like to see her dressed down. There were more people on the tracks behind her—more refugees fleeing the chaos. We wouldn’t be lonely.

  By the time Deirdre reached us she wasn’t even breathing hard.

  “So let’s get the fuck out of here,” she said by way of greeting, and walked right past us. We hoisted our packs.

  Deirdre. Sophia. It was as if my past was collapsing in on me.

  “I’d forgotten how charming she was,” Colin said as we followed her into the narrow tunnel cut in the bamboo. “I don’t understand why you broke up with her.”

  Walking on train tracks is a pain in the ass. The gravel in between the railroad ties is rough and uneven, and the nubs of the cut bamboo didn’t help, so your instinct was to walk on the ties. But they’re never evenly spaced, so you’re constantly adjusting the length of your steps. Every so often I would resolve to ignore the ties, pick up my head and just walk, but my gaze kept drifting down, hypnotized by the ties underfoot, and I’d find myself stutter-stepping again.

  Within an hour we hit patches where the bamboo was growing back through the tracks, and that added to the challenge. And then there were the insects—sand gnats buzzing in my eyes and ears, little dragon mosquitoes biting my ankles.

  “Anybody have insect repellant?” I asked.

  “I do,” Sebastian said, reaching to pull his pack off without slowing. But Deirdre beat him to it, tossing a tube over her head without turning. It landed on the tracks in front of Jeannie, who retrieved it, squeezed a blob for herself, and passed it on to me.

  “Thanks,” I said. No answer.

  For once, I realized it wasn’t hard to understand what Deirdre was feeling. She resented having to ask me for help. She didn’t like asking anyone for help, and our history made it worse. But at the same time, she felt she owed me. So she hated me and felt grateful at the same time.

  We hit a steep bend, and suddenly there was Cortez, lounging in the middle of the tracks, his back propped on an enormous pack.

  “Ladies. Gentlemen,” Cortez said.

  Everyone shouted out and hurried to greet him. More hugs ensued.

  “Is Sophia out?” I asked Cortez as I hugged him.

  “She’s underground. We’re meeting them about five miles ahead.”

  “Hey, I know you,” Deirdre said.

  “I worked for you five, six years ago,” Cortez said, shaking her hand. “Good to see you again.”

  Deirdre looked off toward the tops of the pine trees. “Shall we onward?” she said. She squeezed past Cortez and walked on. The rest of us followed.

  “So what are all those federal troops doing in the city?” I asked Sebastian, since he seemed to know everything.

  “The feds are trying to retain control of the country. Remember last year when all U.S. troops were called home from overseas, after Lake Superior was nuked? That was the first step. The fed has decided we’re at the tipping point, and drastic measures need to be taken to keep us from slipping into chaos.”

  “To keep us from slipping into chaos?” Cortez said. “I think that ship has already sailed.”

  Sebastian gave him a little grunt of a laugh. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that at all.

  “To your left! Your left!” Cortez called to a ragged group ahead of us. A woman carrying a crying baby glanced back, called out to her group in Spanish. They drifted to the right, letting us pass. The tracks allowed us to walk two abreast, but no more; we had to go single-file when we passed someone.

  “Speaking of chaos, did anyone hear about what happened in New York City on Thanksgiving?” Cortez asked.

  “What?” Ange said.

  “Word spread that the parade down Fifth Avenue was going on, for the first time in six, seven years. Thousands of people showed up—moms brought their kids to show them the big floats, everyone was feeling a little hope, a little lift that things were getting better.”

  Cortez bit at one of his fingernails, spit the sliver out. “Then the parade comes. The floats were awful nightmare things, the marchers covered in blood. Some guy was walking holding up a dog’s head with the eyes gouged out. Kids were crying and screaming. The Jumpy-Jumps had put the whole thing together.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Colin said .“I
t sounds like an urban myth. It’s got to be or we would’ve heard about it on TV or the radio.”

  “Maybe, but how much of this shit do you think they’re still putting on the air?” Cortez said. “That just helps the Jumpy-Jumps.”

  Nobody answered.

  We walked in silence, lost in our own thoughts and fears. Colin was half-carrying Jeannie, sweat pouring down his temples. She was awfully pregnant.

  They were leaving me even further behind, I realized, moving on to a different phase of life. The grownup phase. I was stuck in perpetual late-adolescence, going over the same ground again and again.

  All of us were moving backward, I realized. We were homeless nomads again. Everything we had worked for, all of the progress we’d made had been torn from us in a single afternoon. I didn’t even have a jacket, and I’d worn my old sneakers to the game. It had all been so sudden that I couldn’t wrap my mind around all of the implications.

  Up ahead, two people were heading the wrong way on the tracks. Her walk was unmistakable: the quick sway of her narrow hips, the short steps, as if she were walking downhill. The energy of it, the eagerness, despite having just hiked two or three miles through a sewer. She waved, started running toward us. Her husband trotted behind, not looking as eager. Ange shouted her name, then Jeannie. They ran ahead. The three of them met in a triple-hug.

  I guess I was expecting Sophia to keep her distance from me, out of respect to her husband, but even while she huddled with Ange and Jeannie she was looking past them. She came right to me and hugged me. “How’re you?” she said in my ear. It felt good to be in her arms. Way too good; I felt a familiar tingle of electricity, a fluttering in my stomach.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “For sure, for sure?”

  “For sure, for sure,” I replied, an old island saying we’d made our own, long ago. I let go, drifted back as others greeted her, as she and Jean Paul were introduced to Sebastian.

  I was suddenly afraid the feelings I’d had for her so long ago would resurface, along with all that pain. It would be easy to do if Ange and Cortez hooked up. It’s easy to fall into unrequited love if it’s the only kind available. I looked hard at Sophia, testing myself, ready to flee inside myself if I felt those feelings blossom. Not too bad, so far. Maybe the Jasper who’d fallen so hard for Sophia was gone—bludgeoned with a shovel, shattered by a gunshot, choked by a cat fetus.

  We camped on a trestle, thirty feet above a sluggish stream—high enough that the bamboo couldn’t reach us. The stream wasn’t moving fast enough to generate any energy, and the sun was down, so we kept our ancient solar blanket and river skimmer packed. Cortez pulled a huge hunk of cooked meat wrapped in a plastic bag out of his pack and sliced it up with a scary hunting knife while Sophia and Jean Paul brought out some bread, peanut butter, and cookies they’d manage to grab as they fled. Colin and Jeannie retrieved water from the stream and hooked the water filter to the energy pack. The filters were one thing we hadn’t had in our first stint as nomads that would make this trip a little easier. Ah, progress.

  We sat along the edge of the trestle, our feet hanging over the edge, and ate dinner. And lunch, for that matter.

  “What is this?” I asked Cortez as I worked to dislodge a piece of meat jammed between my back teeth.

  “Just eat it,” he said, his voice low.

  “I just like to know what I’m eating,” I said.

  He sighed. “Dog, okay? You’re eating dog.”

  “Okay.” I was hungry enough that dog was fine. I just wanted to know. “Thanks.”

  Below us, oil glistened on the black water.

  “It sucks to kill a dog,” Cortez said.

  An image flashed in my mind, of Cortez holding out food, luring a dog to him, then cutting its throat, then butchering it. I hadn’t realized he’d gotten that destitute since losing his place. “I bet it does.”

  “It sucks to kill anything,” he added.

  “Yeah,” I said. I knew what he was referring to.

  “Boy, what I wouldn’t do for a moist towelette,” Colin said to no one in particular, wiping his greasy fingers on bamboo stalks.

  When it got dark we lay in the tracks, our asses and elbows dangling over the stream between the ties.

  “Somebody tell Deirdre to turn off her music,” Colin said. “She’s had it on for half an hour.”

  Deirdre was on her back, eyes closed, her arms cradling the back of her head. From ten feet away I could hear the buzzing of her music pod.

  “Deirdre,” Cortez called. Then again, louder. Deirdre didn’t flinch. Cortez dragged himself up, went and tapped Deirdre on top of her head.

  “What?”

  “We need you to turn off the music. We’ve got to conserve our energy.”

  “Fuck you, I brought most of it.” I recognized the music bleeding out of Deirdre’s earphones. It was her own.

  “I know you did,” Cortez said, “but when you’re part of a tribe, everything is community property. We all take care of each other.”

  Deirdre sighed loudly. “Fine.” She rammed the pod into her pack.

  “Is anyone’s phone working?” Ange asked.

  “Nope,” Colin said after a pause. “Ours is dead. Nothing.”

  Cortez had a radio. Most of the stations were off the air, but a few were still broadcasting. While we prepared to travel, we listened to a report. New York was in flames. Seattle was in flames. Los Angeles and a few other cities were under the control of federal troops, but elsewhere federal troops were battling various warlords, gangs, corporate entities, police, and fire departments that had claimed control of territory ranging from city blocks to entire states. General Electric had claimed ownership of a chunk of upstate New York and declared it a sovereign nation. At least that’s what the radio said. They didn’t sound all that certain. The feds had announced that all males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five should report for military duty. Evidently it was written somewhere that they were allowed to do that during an emergency. The radio guy sounded more certain about that.

  “Let’s be ready to move in about ten minutes,” Cortez announced. “Statesboro’s about twenty miles. It would be nice to make it there by tonight.” He turned to Jean Paul. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but it would be safer if you changed clothes.”

  “What’s wrong with my clothes?” Jean Paul asked. He was wearing a green designer jogging suit.

  “You don’t look poor. It’s best if we look like we have nothing worth killing us for.”

  “Excuse me, but who exactly put you in charge?” Jean Paul said, balling his fists on his hips. The immature part of me perked up, hoping Jean Paul would make the mistake of provoking a fight, which he would lose badly. The mature part of me knew it was every tribe member’s job to make sure there was peace and harmony within the tribe.

  “We did,” I offered. “Not exactly in charge, I guess, but he chairs the ‘keep us alive’ committee.”

  “He’s also in charge of wardrobe,” Colin added.

  Jean Paul didn’t look at us. He just pulled off the jacket and squatted next to his pack, muttering something under his breath as he dug through it.

  As we trudged forward, the ties glided by beneath our feet, the bamboo giving the illusion that we were moving briskly. Occasionally there were breaks and patches in the bamboo; these were usually filled with groups of refugees. As we passed them, many begged for food. In some places an entire half-acre might be relatively bamboo free, but for the most part it was omnipresent.

  “So,” Cortez asked, joining me. “You got a girlfriend these days?”

  I laughed at the absurdity of the question, given our current situation. Cortez grinned. He was clearly trying to lighten me up a little.

  “No, not really. How about you?”

  “I’m taking a break. A spiritual celibacy fast.”

  “Really? Why’s that?” That would mean he was out of the Ange business, at least for the time being.
/>   He struggled for words. “A lot of reasons, I guess. One of them you know about.”

  “Yeah. Can’t say I’ve been feeling very romantic myself these days. But I’m also tired of being alone, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  Up ahead, Sebastian shouted. He, Colin, and Ange had stopped. They were eyeing a huge trailer park buried ass-deep in bamboo.

  “What is it?” I called. Sebastian waved us on. He wasn’t smiling for a change.

  Then I noticed the smell.

  I’d seen a lot of dead bodies—everyone who doesn’t live in the elite enclaves has—but I’d never seen anything like this. There were thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands. Men, women, children, filling a dried pond between the tracks and the trailer park, a tangle of arms and legs and faces and muddy clothes, the occasional bamboo shoot pressing up between them.

  “They all look Latino,” I said.

  Sophia’s eyes went wide when she got in sight of them. She put her hand over her mouth and began sobbing. Jeannie put a gentle hand over Sophia’s eyes and led her away.

  “Foreigners, probably,” Ange said. “People don’t take kindly to strangers competing with them for food when there isn’t enough to go around.”

  “I don’t think locals did this—not this many people.” I thought of the holding pen we’d recently escaped, how they’d separated out the foreigners.

  As if on cue, a train whistled in the distance. We pushed into the bamboo and waited.

  The engine was rigged with a long, low, V-shaped blade, like a snow plow for bamboo. The cars rumbled by, drowning out all other sound. Federal troops armed to the teeth stood on top of many of them. There must have been a hundred cars.

  “Supplies for the troops, coming from Atlanta,” Sebastian said. “That’s where the closest push packages are stored.”

  “Push packages?” Colin asked.

  “That’s what the military calls them—packaged supplies for troops, stored for years for just this sort of occasion. Each one might contain upward of a million bottles of water, a hundred thousand MREs, generators and fuel to run them, tents, everything the well-dressed soldier might need.”