Will McIntosh - Soft Apocalypse

Almost on cue, the TV jingled and a text message scrolled across the bottom of the screen:

Ange. I want to see you. I’m free Monday, Tuesday, or Thursday for dinner. Can we meet one of those nights? Charles.

“Oh, god dammit,” Ange howled. “‘I want to see you.’ Like I’m his fucking servant instead of his student.”

Chair ignored the message. “They keep warning us, and we just keep carrying on as usual, and things keep getting worse. ‘We have to keep the economy going,’ the president says, while the fucking ocean is lapping at our ankles and we’ve got troops spread out over six different fronts in a never-ending war—”

“Okay, fine. I know the score, I don’t need a lecture,” Ange said.

The screen door squealed and slammed. “Damn, what happened out there?” Rami breezed into the room, carrying a stack of newspapers. He emptied a different newspaper dispenser every day to protest their editorial policies. These people didn’t make a lot of sense to me. My friends and I were in the “keep your head down and try not to get it cut off” camp of surviving this mess. People like Chair got gassed. I was surprised he was still alive, and it scared the shit out of me that Ange was sharing a house with him and these other would-be rebels.

As Chair introduced Sebastian to Rami, I got up and hovered in the doorway, making it as clear as possible that I wasn’t part of this meeting. I hoped Ange would follow my lead, but she stayed on the couch.

“You know I’m in,” Rami said when he learned who Sebastian was. “So what’s in the bag?”

“I have two deliveries for you.” Sebastian unzipped his backpack. Uzi trotted over, stuck his nose into the pack and snuffled, probably hoping it was filled with bacon.

“Uzi, get your butt over here,” Ange said. Uzi just wagged his tail.

Sebastian pulled something from the pack with a flourish, held it between thumb and forefinger. He was giggling. There was something definitely wrong with this guy. “Bamboo root,” he said. It was a cone-shaped tannish nub, crowned with four or five tiny lemon fingers, reaching skyward. “It’s engineered to spread like crazy. It can push through blacktop, even concrete if it’s not too thick. And it’s fast—you won’t believe how fast.”

“Nature taking back its territory by force. I like it,” Rami said. “The authorities will suspect the Jumpy-Jumps. It’s got their whimsical sensibility.”

“Without the sick surprise at the bottom of the box,” Chair said.

“We want to coat entire urban areas with it, in one coordinated attack, to bring commerce to a grinding halt. We’ll plant it at night, in places where it will cause maximum disruption—busy roads, shopping plazas, tourist attractions.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, taking a couple of steps back into the living room. “How does this save lives? It sounds like you just want to add to the chaos.”

“We need to slow things down,” Sebastian said. “Otherwise the U.S. is six to twelve months away from an exchange of nuclear weapons with at least one other country, probably more, and we’ll be under martial law, and things will get really nasty. So we clog the roads so vehicles can’t operate, keep the military busy, slow the violence in the streets.”

“Couldn’t that stall food transport?” I asked. “People might starve.”

“It could make transport difficult, but people shouldn’t literally starve. Some may.”

“That’s pretty fucking cold,” Ange said.

“Depends on how you look at it,” Chair said. “Are a few thousand lives lost now worth saving a few billion later?”

I wasn’t sure I liked that logic, but I kept my mouth closed. It was clear they weren’t particularly interested in hearing dissenting opinions.

“What’s the other delivery?” Rami asked.

Sebastian smiled wide, spread his arms. “You’re looking at him!”

Chair frowned. “You’re the other delivery?”

Sebastian nodded.

“So what can you do?” Rami asked.

“It’s not what I can do, it’s what I carry. In my blood.” He fished around in his backpack, pulled out a plastic bag attached to a thin tube. He pressed the end of the tube against the crook of one elbow, demonstrating that it was for drawing blood. “It’s a virus called Doctor Happy, and it’s guaranteed to take the fight out of anyone infected with it.”

It was scorching hot by afternoon—hot enough that it would cost a week’s pay to keep the place cool, so they moved to the canopied roof. Other people arrived, mostly young rebellious types with interesting haircuts. One brought a boombox and cranked up some Necrobang. I kept expecting them to boot my ass out, but they didn’t.

Sebastian bled himself while others sat hunched over pairs of VR gloves, embedding short pins in the leather fingerpads. Including Chair and Rami, I counted eleven members of the infection gang. I only knew one of them—Cortez—but Ange seemed to know most of them. It didn’t surprise me that Cortez was here. Lately he seemed kind of lost, hungry for some direction. He spent a lot of time hanging out with shady gang types.

Ange watched the operation; she seemed ambivalent, caught in a nether-region between me and Chair. I stepped up behind her. “This whole thing smells like a Jumpy-Jump operation,” I said.

The plan was to spread the virus pretty much at random, trying to target males, and anyone who looked pro-business or pro-government. Sticking those who would benefit most from the virus—gang types, political leaders, police—was deemed too risky.

Ange nodded absently. “I know. But these are the good guys. I feel like I should have faith in them.”

“I don’t have much faith in that guy.” I gestured toward Sebastian, who was bouncing to the beat while he bled through a tube.

“I don’t know what the fuck to make of that Homer.” She folded her arms, blew a damp strand of hair out of her face. “I think I’m going to offer to be a spotter. Watch that no cops catch on to what’s happening.”

I wanted to point out that the getaway driver was no more moral than the guys who robbed the bank, but I knew better than to argue with her.

Rami broke out a quart of home-brewed grain alcohol, the sort that you could buy on any street corner these days, and passed it around. Chair nodded to the beat, watching people who had movable limbs with only a hint of envy. “Carpe diem,” he shouted over the music, “but never forget that we’re partying on the fucking Titanic .” He took a long swig from a soiled plastic cup.

I wasn’t convinced that things were going to get worse. It felt like we had already hit bottom, or were near it anyway. It was hard to ignore police puking blood on the sidewalk in front of your house, but most of the talking heads on TV thought that things would get better soon—that the stock market would recover, the Jumpy-Jump movement would be crushed, the warm wars we were fighting across the globe would end, that we’d get a grip on melting icecaps. Things hadn’t gotten any better over the past five years, but they hadn’t gotten much worse. We just needed to wait it out. Spreading happy viruses and planting voracious bamboo didn’t sound like the right move at all.

“You two ready to roll?” Cortez put an arm around Ange’s shoulder. It made my jealousy radar jangle, but Ange had told me a dozen times that she wasn’t interested in starting things back up with Cortez.

“I think I’m gonna take a pass,” I said. Cortez shrugged like it was all cool to him. Ange waved, and blew me a kiss.

I headed uptown to Gaston Street, to visit a woman who wanted to talk about selling honey in Ruplu’s store. We tended to work on commission, partly to minimize cash outlay, and partly because when the store was robbed, the losses weren’t all Ruplu’s.