Will McIntosh - Soft Apocalypse

“Why were you talking to that asshole?” I asked Sebastian. “He threatened Ange and me just half an hour ago, waving a machete at us. If Uzi hadn’t been there we’d probably be lying dead with our throats cut.

“I’ll talk to pretty much anyone.” Sebastian said.

“Well hooray for you.”

He met my sarcasm with a big grin. “If you always keep things amiable you minimize the chance of ending up in the street with your throat cut.”

“Nothing minimizes the chances of getting your throat cut when it comes to Jumpy-Jumps—they’ll happily cut you open and pull your guts out while they sing you a love song.”

Sebastian laughed delightedly. “You almost sounded like a Jumpy-Jump when you said that.”

I smiled. It was difficult to hate the guy too much because of his demeanor. “So, what’s it like? The virus.”

“It’s invigorating.”

“Invigorating? So, you’re happy all the time, and you don’t want to hurt anyone? You’ll even have a friendly chat with a terrorist? It sounds like a lobotomy.”

“Oh, no.” He clasped his hands together and held them to his heart. “It’s the exact opposite of a lobotomy. You glimpse the infinite. Just a glimpse, but that’s enough. If I were cracked open any wider I might go mad—we’re not built to experience all that emptiness.”

“Oh, now I get it. You’re basically on a permanent acid trip.” I gave him the peace sign. “Peace, love, all-is-oneness.”

An ultralight copter buzzed low over the square. Sebastian waited till it passed before answering. “That’s about right, I guess.”

“How did you get infected?” I asked.

“I volunteered.”

“You’re shitting me. You volunteered to be infected with an incurable virus? Why would you do that?”

Sebastian sighed. “My wife and daughter were raped and killed in front of me during the Atlanta gas riots.” He gave me a wan smile, as if he were talking about an old friend he missed. “I was going to hang myself; what did I have to lose?”

How do you respond to something like that? “I’m sorry.” It was all I could think to say.

A tall, scrawny girl hurried past carrying a bucket of water, her body canted to compensate for the weight.

“What did you do in Atlanta?” I asked.

“Research and development. I’m a virologist.” He closed his eyes, turned his face up to the sun. “I led the team that developed Doctor Happy.”

“So what are you doing here? Why aren’t you back there working on other fabulous new viruses?”

He made a face like he’d just bit into something foul. “I don’t want to sit in a concrete room under artificial lights all day. I want to be around people, in the sunlight.”

“Well, if it’s people and sunlight you’re looking for, you came to the right place.”

The night of the bamboo party, Chair and his entourage dressed as homeless people, which basically meant getting a little dirtier than usual, looking a little more hopeless and depressed than usual, and taking along a couple of trash bags of what looked like their belongings. Only instead of just their belongings, the trash bags contained bamboo roots and containers of gray water, wrapped inside belongings.

The crickets were in full stereo as Ange, Cortez, and I crossed MLK and walked up the on-ramp to I-16. Vehicles rumbled past occasionally, the drivers taking no notice of us. It was nice to be invisible; I thought maybe I should haul a bag of shit around with me all the time.

“Do you ever find yourself envying Sebastian?” Cortez asked.

“Shit, no,” Ange said. “I crave a good buzz as much as anyone, but I want to come down after.” There was a slight breeze; it was almost bearable tonight.

“But nothing would ever bother you again. Doesn’t that sound even a little tempting?”

“It’s virus-induced,” I said. “Those little fuckers are doing things to his mind.” We reached the interstate, walked alongside, staying in the weeds well away from the road.

“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.