Will McIntosh - Soft Apocalypse

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.”

“And when that train gets to Savannah, they’ll fill the empty cars with bodies, and dump them in that dried-out pond,” I said. No one argued. If the government was willing to sink foreign fishing boats to cut down on the competition for food, it was capable of dealing with the illegals pouring over the border by killing them by the trainload.

When the train had passed we squeezed back onto the tracks.

I found myself walking beside Deirdre. I hesitated, considered acting like I had something to say to Cortez or Colin and rushing ahead, but it was too late, it would be too obvious.

“So how’ve you been?” I asked.

“Swell,” she said. “Just Georgia fucking peachy.” The receding train’s whistle blew in the distance. “It doesn’t appear that you found Ms. Right at that little circle jerk where I bumped into you.”

“Nope,” I said. I was tempted to point out that she’d been at the same circle jerk, but I thought it best not to pursue that little nugget.

“Let’s get something straight,” Deirdre said. “Just because you let me join your little gang doesn’t mean I’m going to let you fuck me.”

“I understand,” I said. “I could never keep up with you in bed anyway. You were too much for me.”

Deirdre glanced at me, checking for sarcasm. “Damn right.” She smiled. Just a little, just with the edges of her mouth, but it was nice to see.

“Jasper,” Colin called from behind us. I stopped to wait for him. Deirdre kept walking.

“I thought you might need rescuing,” Colin said when he caught up.

“That was an astute assessment. Thank you.”

“My pleasure,” Colin said. “So, you ever been to Athens before?”

I nodded. “I was friends with a guy who went to the University of Georgia. Jack Stamps, you remember him?”

“Sure. Tall guy, curly hair.”

“I visited him there once. Nice town. Pretty downtown area, right alongside the university campus, which is huge.”

“I wonder if it’s still intact, or if a lot of it has burned.”

“Sebastian probably knows,” I said, jerking my thumb toward Sebastian, who was walking alone, chuckling to himself like a mentally ill derelict.

Colin slowed, tried to work something out of his shoe, then continued. “Shouldn’t we be getting used to all this? Being dirty, not having laptops?” Sweat was pouring down his cheeks, disappearing into three days’ growth of whiskers. There was a hint of white in the whiskers.

“I think we get used to improvements in our lives,” I said. “I’m not sure we ever get used to having those improvements taken away.”

“Ever?” he said.

“Only until we die. Whatever you do, don’t let your kid know how good things used to be.”

The pine forest opened onto a hot blue sky; up ahead a series of tall grain silos and an octopus of long silver tubes were the first sign that we were close to Statesboro. A flash of red from a stop sign filtered through the bamboo.

“You know what I miss?” Colin said. “Fat people. I miss variety in the size of people.”

“Have you noticed that fat women seem a lot hotter than they used to?” I asked.

“In poor countries fat women have always been hot, because almost no one could afford to get fat,” Ange said.

Colin and I both glanced over our shoulders. Ange was two paces behind us.

“Hey, this is top secret guy talk,” Colin said. “Chicks aren’t supposed to hear this.”

“I promise not to tell any other chicks. I’ll take it to my grave.”

“Well, all right then, you can listen,” Colin said.

I spotted a good plant. “Hold on a sec.” I trotted down the embankment, squatted at the base of a hardwood tree and examined the leaves on it.

“What is it?” Ange called down.

“Stinging nettle. It’s edible,” I said. I gripped it close to the ground, below its prickly armor, and pulled it.

“It doesn’t look edible. It looks like a rank old weed.”

“It’s all in how you cook it.” I carefully folded it into one of my pockets. I’d been focused mostly on medicinal plants, but I could identify the ones that you could eat as well. That knowledge was probably going to come in handy; I didn’t think it would be long before we’d be desperate for food. I’d keep my eyes peeled for pokeweed, dandelion, sorrel, arrowroot, wild onion, mushrooms, along with the medicinals.

We passed an abandoned warehouse with “ Southern Pecan Company” stenciled on the side, then a green Raco gas station sign advertising unleaded, with the price blank except for the final “9,” and farther away a Shoney’s sign poking out of the wide green sea.

“Looks like your bamboo even took out the bigger towns,” I said to Sebastian.

“It wasn’t the bamboo, it was the gasoline shortage,” Sebastian said. “I know for a fact that Statesboro set up rhizome barriers and cleared the bamboo out of the town at some point, but these towns aren’t self-sustaining; without a cheap way to bridge them with Atlanta or Savannah, they die. Their only hope was to switch over to food production in a hurry, but people think they can ride it out, keep their dry cleaning and tanning bed businesses going until things turn around. Most of the people probably left looking for food and work. When there weren’t enough people to hold back the bamboo…” He made an exploding gesture with both hands.

Sebastian seemed to have an answer for everything, at least when it came to the monsters he and his friends had unleashed. “You know, ever since you started spreading this god damned bamboo, I’ve been wondering something. Why didn’t you engineer it to be edible?”