Will McIntosh - Soft Apocalypse

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.

“Just tell him you had a personal tragedy, and you’ll have to do it another time,” I suggested. Charles seemed like the last thing Ange needed to worry about right now.

She stopped walking, stared at her sandals. “I don’t think so.” She hugged me briefly. “He picked the wrong day to crawl up my ass.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll see you later,” she called as she headed up Drayton.

Blood sloshed inside the water gun as I turned and headed in the opposite direction.

Behind a wrought-iron gate, a middle-aged man in an expensive power-suit supported a girl in her early teens who was vomiting onto an azalea bush in full bloom. The man was saying “Oh no” over and over. The vomit began to turn pink. I moved on.

I needed to disappear for about twelve hours. That wasn’t a problem; I had a lot of work to do in the store.

“What did you do to him?” I asked Ange, sitting on the edge of her bed. She was lying on the bed, one leg canted, staring out the window.

“I beat him,” she said.

“You hit him?”

She nodded absently. “Repeatedly. I think he probably had to go to the hospital, but I didn’t stick around to find out.”