Soft Apocalypse

Chapter 4 DADA JIHAD

A cop was doubled over, clutching a parking meter, puking on the sidewalk as a half-dozen onlookers wearing white virus masks gawked from a safe distance. Ange and I were on the bottom step of her porch, thirty feet away. Ange cursed and turned her head. I kept watching. I didn’t want to, but somehow I couldn’t turn away.

The puking went from a trickle to a sudden bursting-hydrant gush, then back to a trickle. It spattered in a six-foot swath, steam rising as the hot sidewalk boiled it. The cop made awful guttural sounds when the vomiting slowed enough, as though his intestines were about to spill onto the sidewalk as well.

“What is it?” a gray-haired woman asked.

The bald guy next to her shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s a bad one.” They took a half-step back.

The vomit turned pink, then red. There were gasps and “oh my gods” from the crowd.

The cop’s eyes bulged as the puke lost its thickish chunky quality and became smooth, bright red blood. He dropped to his knees, weaved as blood stained the front of his blue uniform a deep purple, then collapsed to the pavement.

“Jesus Christ,” Ange said as a few final spasms squeezed the cop dry. He lay still, his eyes vacant. In the distance, a siren warbled, growing closer.

We went inside. Chair, one of Ange’s housemates, had been watching through the window. A skinny, bald, bow-legged guy in his fifties stood next to him. The guy had a backpack slung over his shoulder, and he was crying. As we came in he swept his shirtsleeve across his eyes and gawked at Ange, starting at her toes and slowly climbing to her dark green eyes.

“Wow, would I like to make love to you,” he said, not a hint of flirtation in his level tone, as if he were reporting on the weather.

Ange fixed him with her best bitch stare. “Yeah, thanks, let me get back to you on that.”

“A new one,” Chair said, motioning toward the cop with his chin. “Got to be engineered. Too quick to be a natural virus.” Ange nodded. Chair was wearing shorts; I tried not to stare at the elaborate black steelwork of his long-nonfunctioning bionic legs. Even Chair was putting vanity aside in the scorching heat. Chair sighed, rotated his wheelchair in a tight circle. The skinny guy followed him toward the coffee table. His walk was loose, his arms swinging like he owned the freaking world, and he was now sporting a shitass grin.

“Who’s he?” I asked Ange. She shrugged.

“You going to introduce us to your friend?” Ange said to Chair.

“This is Sebastian,” Chair said over his shoulder. He parked across from the sofa and looked at me. “That’s about all I can say in casual company.”

Ange gave him an impatient tisk. “Jasper doesn’t know any local government officials or Jumpy-Jumps, Chair. Don’t be so fucking clandestine.”

“Don’t play it like this is no big deal, Ange. This is fucking clandestine stuff. No offense, but Jasper, you need to go.” He waved me off like a cop directing traffic.

I shrugged, headed for the door. Ange grabbed my t-shirt and tugged. “No, you’re fine. I pay rent here too.” She turned back to Chair, hands on hips. “Look, I’d trust Jasper with my life. Whatever you tell me, I’m going to tell him anyway, so whatever the big secret is, just fucking tell us, will you?”

Chair tapped the arm of his wheelchair with a dirty fingernail that badly needed trimming. “I hope you trust him with your life, and ours too, because that’s what you’re doing.” He nodded tightly. “Fine. Sebastian is a delivery man from the Science Alliance in Atlanta.” He raised his eyebrows significantly behind delicate eyeglasses that looked absurd on his mastiff head.

I’d read about the Science Alliance—an underground group of smart people who’d gone rogue. They were aggressively taking matters into their own hands, trying to tackle some of the world’s many problems. The federal government disliked them almost as much as the Jumpy-Jumps. Suddenly I had doubts about wanting to stay and hear what the guy had to say.

“Shit, you’re kidding,” Ange said. “You don’t look like an eco-terrorist.”

“I don’t feel like an eco-terrorist,” Sebastian said, shrugging.

Ange dropped onto the couch and swung her legs onto the coffee table, forgetting that one of the table legs was broken. It collapsed into a three-point stance. “Shit,” she whispered. Uzi trotted into the room, hopped on the couch next to her, circled a couple of times and dropped like a stone, pushing his ass right up against her. I sat next to Uzi. The couch was coated with dog hair

“You know,” I said. “If you pull something and get caught, you won’t go to jail; the cops’ll just drag you into the street and shoot you.”

“No doubt,” Chair said. “The stakes are high.”

“The potential costs are high,” I persisted. “I don’t get how the benefits match those costs. What do you think you’re going to accomplish?”

“The benefit is saving two billion lives, maybe three. Is that worth risking your life? About four billion people are going to die if things stay business as usual. If we can do our part to cut that in half, is it worth the risk?”

“We don’t know for sure that billions of people are going to die,” Ange said.

“Yeah, we do,” Chair said. “For sure.”

“We do,” Sebastian chimed, nodding.

“It’s all based on stochastic models,” Ange said. “It’s incredibly speculative.”

Chair glared at her. “How many times do scientists have to be right before people give them a little credit? And you of all people, about to get your doctorate, should have some faith in them.” He snared the remote from the arm of the couch, stabbed the power button. CNN came on. The president was having a news conference. The president always seemed to be having a news conference; I couldn’t imagine when he had time to run the country, or what was left of it.

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.

I passed two guys wearing CD armbands—Civil Defense. Everywhere you looked they seemed to be popping up, and every other blank concrete surface either had a poster encouraging you to volunteer, or a stencil of their logo—an eagle in flight, carrying a rat in its claws. The rat was supposed to represent the Jumpy-Jumps, and criminals of every ilk, but more and more it seemed the substantial fee Ruplu was paying the CD protected Ruplu from the CD itself, not the so-called bad guys.

The honey woman shook my hand with both of hers. She was old—eighty at least. I was pretty sure the sundress she wore had been made out of old curtains. She took me to the roof of her house, which had a three-sided corner dormer with a steep peaked roof, hugged by an ancient red brick chimney.

I didn’t know anything about bees and wasn’t particularly interested in learning about them, but the woman gave me an enthusiastic, long-winded dissertation on beekeeping and her hives. Afterward we went down to her living room to talk about the details. She said she could supply about thirty jars a week during the season. I held the sample jar she had given to me up to the light streaming in through the curtainless picture window. Little chips of honeycomb, dust, and even what looked to be a bee’s wing were suspended in the golden goo. It still made my mouth water, but I’d found that people would pay way more for things that looked mass-produced.

An old Mickey Mouse coloring book was stuffed in a magazine rack by the woman’s reclining chair. I pulled it out, took a good look of the image of Mickey on the cover, then held the coloring book up and pointed at Mickey. “Here’s what I’d like you to do. Take this book to Mark Parcells at Whitaker Print Shop, and get him to make labels with this picture and ‘Mickey Mouse Honey’ on them. The honey will sell much better that way.”

“Oh,” the woman said, sounding less than enthused. “But isn’t that a copyright violation?”

I chuckled, shook my head. “Disney isn’t going to bother you, I promise.” Ah, the good old days, when Disney had the time and energy to sue people for selling unlicensed products.

If there was any bright side to The Decline (as the media often referred to it), it had to be the neutering of corporate America. Back in the old days they were such a huge presence; today it took all of their energy and resources just to produce their products and get them onto store shelves.

Pleased to have secured another product for the store, I headed home. If I’d been able to whistle worth a damn, I might have whistled.

Bull Street was almost deserted in the afternoon heat. From an open second-floor window, an old woman with no front teeth stared at me, her mouth curled in suspicion. She reminded me of my great aunt, who had believed for the last ten years of her life that I and all the rest of her relatives were trying to kill her.

Two blocks ahead, a woman turned the corner and headed in my direction. It was Deirdre.

I bolted into the doorway of an abandoned storefront. Why I was hiding, I couldn’t say. Deirdre still had all of my childhood photos (assuming she hadn’t burned them). I should have confronted her, maybe twisted her little arm behind her back until she told me where they were. Instead I did my best to fold into the crack between the door and the boarded-up window.

What had she done with my photos? Sometimes I still lay awake wondering. There had been no cut-up pile greeting me when I finally built up the nerve to use my key to sneak into her place while she was out. No charred corners mixed with the ashes in the fireplace (showing a tantalizing hint of a sneaker; the ornament-laden branches of a Christmas tree…). They were just gone. Did she toss them in a dumpster? Did she still have them? I missed them to my bones. I had no proof now, that I had a past, that I’d once been a child. I never would have guessed it would hurt so much to lose them. Evidently Deirdre had.

Deirdre strutted past, oblivious to my cowering form. I was not afraid of her, I told myself. I just didn’t want to deal with her. I waited a couple of minutes, then went on my way, still thinking about her.

At home I found Colin and Jeannie parked in front of the TV, watching the news. We might as well ditch the remote—our TV was always tuned to MSNBC. With times so dark there was always something new, always people dying. Egypt was systematically exterminating the population of the rest of Northern Africa. Why? Because the population of Northern Africa ate. Fewer people meant less competition for food and energy, and Egypt had the biggest guns. Bad as it was in the U.S., some other parts of the world were turning into nothing but giant concentration camps and killing fields. It was both mesmerizing and depressing.

I took a deep breath and turned away from the TV. I would have liked to go to sleep, but Colin and Jeannie were sitting on my bed watching TV, so I went into their room to do a little bookkeeping for the store.

“I have to say, Cortez was a natural,” Ange said. “He’d stop to look at a table of sorry-looking pistols, then turn and bump into some guy in an expensive suit, grabbing the guy’s shoulders like he was steadying himself. The guy didn’t even flinch from the stick. He was slapping people on the back, even pulled it off with a couple of cops and soldiers.”

Uzi tugged on his leash, panting and wagging his tail, trying to pull Ange across the street toward Jackson Square and its Live Oaks. “Uzi, no,” Ange said, as if that would faze him. He lived to pee on those massive trunks.

“You want me to take a turn?” I offered, knowing she didn’t. Ange shook her head. “Are we talking regular U.S. soldiers from Fort Stewart, or those private mercenary guys?” I asked.

“Regular. He’s not suicidal.”

There were more people in the park than usual. More adults, anyway. The kids were always there, playing their incomprehensible game, jumping among big colored dots laid along the squares and sidewalks, alternately frowning in concentration and laughing like hell, dousing each other with industrial-strength water guns, rolling dice the size of baseballs. Now there were also groups of adults, sitting in circles, cooking in pots on open fires, laughing their heads off. They were infected with Doctor Happy.

Doctor Happy had made the local evening news three days after Chair and Sebastian’s infection party. They called it a strange new virus that results in “disorientation, amotivation, and giddiness.” Sebastian had said the government wasn’t going to like this virus at all. Authoritarian types are uncomfortable with people altering their consciousness—they’d rather see them vomit blood.

An ultralight helicopter buzzed overhead, casting a drifting shadow on the street. Probably some rich jerk going for a martini at Rooftop Elysium.

“What I wouldn’t give for a rocket launcher,” Ange said, her neck craned.

“Maybe you’ll have one of your own once you get your Ph.D.,” I laughed. “At the very least you’ll be able to live in a gated community.”

Ange glared at me. “I’d never become one of them. I’d live in a better place, sure, but never in one of those obnoxious gated fortresses.” Ange kicked a soda can out of her way. “It doesn’t matter anyway, because I’m not getting my Ph.D.”

I stopped in my tracks. “What?”

She let her head loll back until she was staring at the sky. “I had that meeting with Charles, my thesis advisor. A dinner meeting, of course. At the Pink House.”

“Typical,” I muttered. The Pink House was a silk tablecloth, sniff- the-wine-cork place.

“Yeah. It was his usual shit—the grope-hug greeting, reaching over to brush my hair out of my eyes, all the sexual innuendo crap. I asked if we could schedule my defense, and he said no, he thinks I need to run another fucking study. Then he pulls out his appointment calendar and says his wife will be out of town the first half of next week, and why don’t I come over to his place Tuesday night for dinner, to discuss the new study?”

Uzi strained hard on his leash, eager to get moving. We continued walking.

“It suddenly hit me that he’s not going to let me defend my dissertation until I let him fuck me.” She started to say something else but choked up. I waited as she took a few deep breaths and got herself under control. “He’s going to throw one obstacle after another in front of me, make me sit through a thousand excruciating dinners, because that way he has power over me.”

A Jumpy-Jump lounged on a stoop up ahead, watching us approach. Watching Ange, really. He was dressed in a mock-mailman outfit, the “U.S. Mail” shoulder patches executed in ornate calligraphy.

“For four years I’ve been dreaming of walking across that stage, with my whole family—even my bitch grandmother—watching. What do you think of your crank-addict loser, drug-rehab dropout, gypsy granddaughter now, you old bag? I wouldn’t even have to say it out loud. Probably none of them but my mom and Cory would actually show up, but the fantasy works better when they’re all sitting in a row on those metal folding chairs, watching.”

“That’s a big dog for such a little peanut,” the Jumpy-Jump said as we drew near. We kept our pace steady. I’d seen the guy around—he was ethnic, maybe East Indian. Long braided hair. He spoke with the singsong accent that Jumpy-Jumps evidently had invented out of thin air.

“Where are you two and your big dog so urgently needed?” He stood lazily, not exactly blocking the sidewalk, but impeding it. Ange veered into the street, cutting a wide path around him, and I followed her lead.

“I’m talking to you, don’t disappear me,” he said. He moved to block our path.

Uzi snarled and lunged. Ange held his leash tight; the Jumpy-Jump leaped clear of Uzi’s snapping teeth.

A heartbeat later, there were blades all over the Jumpy-Jump, jutting from his belt, his boots. He clutched what looked like machetes in both fists. “You think your big dog can protect you?” There was blood and a ragged gash on his thumb—Uzi had just caught his retreating hand.

I grabbed the leash and helped Ange drag Uzi backward. He was barking and snapping, scrabbling to get at the man. We just kept pulling, retreating the way we’d come, until Uzi finally relented and reversed direction as well.

“I can fuck you any time I want, Little Peanut,” the Jumpy-Jump shouted at our backs. “Right here on the daylight street. Strip off your false security and live in constant fear, where you belong.”

We ran five blocks before slowing.

“I hate that I can’t walk the streets without being afraid. I hate it,” Ange hissed.

“I know,” I said. My heart was still thumping like mad. “What’s wrong with those people? And what happened to the police? Or even the Civil Defense? What happened to their whole thing about taking back the streets?”

“Now they all just look out for themselves,” Ange said. “Just like Charles.”

A street sweeper rumbled along a side street, churning up plywood and cardboard shelters, its whooping alarm warning tenants to get clear or be swept up with their houses.

“Have you complained to the Department Chair about him?”

Ange nodded. “I was there this morning. She says there’s nothing she can do, that I should switch advisors. But Charles is the only botanical biotech person left on the faculty, so I’d have to start my dissertation over in a different area. When I told her I couldn’t afford to start over, because my financial support ended this year, she suggested I let him fuck me.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.

Ange shook her head. “She said when buildings are being bombed and politically outspoken faculty are disappearing in the middle of the night, ‘small incivilities’ don’t mean much.”

“I can guess what you said.”

“I bet you can,” Ange said. She stopped in front of the Savannah College bio building. “This is where I get off.” She waved. “Bye, sweetie.”

I waved back. No public displays of affection. Somehow we’d made it work for four years, the friends-with-sex thing. Probably because neither of us had met anyone, or really wanted to meet anyone at this point. Things with Ange were comfortable and easy. Uncomplicated.

Truth be told, I was beginning to doubt that I would ever find someone to love in any case. I suspected that the sort of relationship I was looking for just wasn’t possible any more, that it was an artifact from the time when those photographs I missed so much were taken. There was a line drawn in my memory that separated my life before The Decline from my life after. I imagine everyone has that line. Everything else had changed after The Decline; there was no reason to think that love had some special dispensation.

I headed home. The sun was low in the sky, filtering through the twisted, moss-covered branches of the oaks, adding a gold tinge to the red brick path. I felt so bad for Ange. She was so close. A two-hour defense, three signatures, and she had a Ph.D. She could teach at a university, or continue her research for an agro corporation. The stakes were so high. Once upon a time if you didn’t make it into a lucrative career, there were plenty of semi-lucrative alternatives. Now it seemed as if the divide between rich and poor was a chasm. There was no middle class any more. On one side there were the rich—safe and comfortable, living in luxury—and on the other, on our side, it was a challenge just to stay alive.

As I approached Jackson Square, I stopped short. Sebastian was sitting on a bench in the square, with the Jumpy-Jump who had threatened us a half-hour earlier. They were laughing like old pals. Sebastian spotted me and waved; the Jumpy-Jump turned, smiled.

“Little Peanut’s big brother! Come join us.”

I headed toward the bench.

“You two know each other?” Sebastian said as I approached.

“Yes indeed,” the Jumpy-Jump said. He held out a bandaged hand without getting up, looking amused, as if we’d shared a joke rather than an altercation. I ignored his hand.

“We began our song with the wrong note, I fear.” He dropped his hand, stretched out on the bench and sighed contentedly. “So, Mister Peanut, what do you think of our Dada Jihad?”

I’d read everything I could about the Jumpy-Jump movement since that night at the art show. It had started in Detroit, after the Foxtown Massacre, when the police broke up a protest using nerve gas. A Native American street singer named Dada Tanglefoot began preaching a weird mix of anarchism, Zen, and Dadaism that spoke to the people. Tanglefoot was assassinated in quick order, probably on orders from the feds, but her words spread like a virus through the poor and angry neighborhoods. As far as I could tell, the actual doctrine was incoherent bullshit. Maybe Tanglefoot’s teachings had gotten tangled as it passed from person to person.

“I understand why you’re angry, but I don’t think much of killing random people,” I said. “What do you expect to get out of it?”

“Me?”

“Jumpy-Jumps, I mean.”

“We don’t expect anything.” He shrugged, his eyes twinkling.

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“Does anything make sense? It’s all absurd. We’re just unleashing some vicious absurdity to underscore the point.” He stood, made a peace sign. “Sebastian, it was a pleasure.”

Sebastian returned the gesture. “Same here, Rumor.”

“Down is up, and sinners are saints, Mister Peanut,” Rumor said as he turned to leave.

“My name is Jasper.”

“Down is up, and sinners are saints, Jasper.”

Rumor stood at the edge of the square, waiting for a truck to pass, before sauntering between two abandoned gas hogs and across the street.

“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.

On Whitaker, a tank was easily tearing through the bamboo outbreak, blazing a trail for troops and shoppers. But there weren’t many tanks in Savannah, and tonight Sebastian and his followers would plant more bamboo.

The news was now reporting Doctor Happy outbreaks in the northeast and west. There were bamboo outbreaks happening all over the world—China, Europe, South America. I hadn’t realized how large the Science Alliance’s operation was. Sebastian wouldn’t say whether all of these outbreaks had originated with his group in Atlanta, or even whether their group was a cell in a larger group. They had to be part of a larger group, to be able to pull off such a massive stunt.

There was a party raging in Pulaski Square. Twenty or thirty revelers were pounding on drums and trash cans while others circled them, doing some sort of square dance, hooking arms with each other. There were also at least two couples having sex right in the open. Opposite the square three cops stood on the sidewalk in front of a drug store, automatic weapons dangling from their fingers.

I caught a glimpse of movement on the roof above where the cops were lounging: hands, dropping something. A white oval plummeted, hit the sidewalk with a splat right at the cops’ feet. Blood spattered everywhere. A blood-bomb? That was a new twist. It drenched the cops, the sidewalk, the side of the building. The cops lifted their weapons, pointed them all over, looking for an assailant. Then they seemed to notice that they were covered in blood. They wiped frantically at their eyes and lips, looking scared as shit.

Shouts and laughter erupted from the crowd of partiers. The square dance dissolved; some of the revelers trotted toward the cops.

“Welcome to reality!” someone shouted.

A lanky guy wearing nothing but a loincloth that looked like a diaper ran up to one of the cops and patted him on the shoulder as others crowded around, cheering.

The cop pressed his automatic weapon into the lanky guy’s gut, and fired. The guy staggered backward. Before he hit the pavement the other cops were spraying gunfire into the looming crowd. Screams lit the air; people crumpled, slammed into each other in the frenzy to escape.

“No!”Ange and I shouted simultaneously. Ange moved toward the melee; I grabbed her elbow and yanked her away, toward cover.

One cop’s head suddenly snapped back; chips of scalp and brain sprayed on the drug store window. The cop went down as the window shattered. I looked around, trying to figure out who was firing on the cops. I spotted the flash of a muzzle from inside a copse of bamboo half a block behind us.

Two men stepped out of the bamboo—Jumpy-Jumps, with rifles raised, peering through scopes. The other two cops convulsed, their already blood-soaked bodies blossoming fresh as they fell to the pavement. It wasn’t taking the Jumpy-Jumps long to turn these new developments to their advantage.

Back home, I showered before joining Colin and Jeannie in the living room to watch the news. We watched footage of hundreds of Jumpy-Jump gunmen swarming the bamboo-choked streets of Chicago, then of a tank firing on insurgents in San Antonio. The Dadas were taking advantage of the chaos, spreading even more chaos.

What terrified me most were not the images, but the reporters’ voices. The usual calm, even cadence was gone, replaced by shrill, breathless, unpolished descriptions that gave me the feeling that they might drop their microphones and run at any moment.

“I wonder if Sebastian’s Nobel laureates expected this?” Jeannie said as we watched.

“The way Sebastian talks, they have it mapped out down to where each body is going to fall.”

“Let me see the phone,” Jeannie said to Colin, wriggling her fingers. She called Ange and asked her to ask Sebastian if this was all part of the plan. Jeannie pulled her mouth away from the phone. “He says it draws energy away from the large-scale conflicts that are bubbling, and weakens the central government, and that in the long run those are good things.”

I’d heard this sort of crap before, from politicians. Whatever the results of their policies, they used some sort of tortured logic to argue that it was really a good thing.

I was struggling to get a sense of whose side I should be on. By nature I tended to favor anyone who took on the establishment. The establishment had proven that it was good at acting like it knew what it was doing, but was utterly incompetent underneath that façade. On the other hand these scientist-rebels seemed to be taking huge risks, treating the world as if it were a giant laboratory. Neither side seemed like a safe bet, and that was disconcerting.

I drifted off to sleep with my window open, serenaded by the ubiquitous crackle and pop of the bamboo, which drowned out much of the gunfire, and the screams of the night victims.

By morning, things had quieted considerably. We watched the news reports. The Jumpy-Jumps had melted back into the general population. The bamboo was still spreading.

The burble of the phone woke me. Our phone was so old that it didn’t play music any more; instead it made a tone-deaf warbling sound.

“Jasper?” It was Ange; she sounded beyond panic.

“What happened?” I asked, adrenaline rushing through me, burning away the muddle of sleepiness.

“Uzi’s gone.”

“He’s gone? From where?”

“I tied him to the bike rack and went into the grocery store, and when I came out he was gone.”

“Is the leash gone too? Did he break it?” I got out of bed, pulled a pair of jeans from the mound of clothes I’d worn yesterday.

“No, it’s gone too.”

“He still could’ve pulled loose. He’s probably nearby.”

“He wouldn’t run away, even if he got loose. Not Uzi.”

“But he must have,” I said. “Who would steal a big old mutt?”

Ange started to cry. “I don’t know. But he’s gone.”

“I’m on my way,” I said. “I’ll bring Colin and Jeannie. We’ll find him.”

I ran to get Colin and Jeannie. A lost dog—it was the sort of old-fashioned problem you didn’t often get to tackle these days. For a second I pondered the possibility that the bamboo outbreak had stifled food supplies to the point that people were kidnapping dogs and eating them, but that didn’t make sense. There were plenty of strays out there if you wanted to eat dogs, and besides, no one would tangle with a big, mean-looking dog like Uzi.

“Shhh, shhh, we’ll find him,” I said, my arm wrapped around Ange as we sat on the steps of her house. The sun would be down in a few hours. I knew what Ange was thinking: Uzi would be alone, in the dark.

An electric wheeming announced that Chair was coming around the corner. Ange stood, stared expectantly at the corner.

Chair was alone. He looked at Ange hopefully as he rounded the corner; she shook her head no. He pounded the arm of his wheelchair. Sebastian, Colin, Jeannie, and a few others were still out. There was hope.

“He’s okay,” I said. “There are a thousand strays wandering the streets. No one would take him, he just got loose. We’ll find him.”

Just as I spotted Sebastian, alone, heading toward us, I heard a pitiful whine from the other direction. I snapped my head around, seeking the source. It had come from the square, but there was nothing there.

I began to suspect it was my imagination, but then I heard it again. Ange heard it, too. She leapt from the stoop, calling Uzi’s name. I was right behind her.

We spotted him in the street across the square. He was moving slowly, slowly, his head hanging almost to the pavement.

“Uzi!” Ange screamed. Uzi howled miserably; Ange launched herself toward him. Uzi stopped at the edge of the square. There was something terribly wrong with him. He looked… twisted. As we closed the gap I saw something dangling from his stomach.

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.”

Under other circumstances I would have laughed, but this was a somber time. In one day Ange had lost her closest companion and abandoned her greatest hope.

“Every few minutes I realize Uzi isn’t with me, and I worry that I left him tied somewhere,” she said. “Then I remember all over again that he’s gone.”

I nodded, not sure what to say. Maybe nothing needed to be said. Pain has its own half-life; words don’t change that.

There was a knock on Ange’s bedroom door. “Ange?” Chair pushed the door open a crack. “There’s someone here to see you.”

“Who?” she said.

Chair led her down the hall. “You’ve got to see for yourself.” I hopped off the bed and followed.

Ange froze at the front door. I caught up, looked out the open window.

Rumor was sitting on the steps. There was a puppy asleep in his arms. He gestured with his chin for Ange to come out, and, after a moment’s hesitation, she did. I followed. Rumor stood, smiled at me. The smile looked bizarre on his face, because it wasn’t a sneering, sarcastic smile; it was warm, wide, genuine.

“Hello, Little Peanut,” he said to Ange. His eyes were glassy, almost glowing. “I hope this little one will ease some of your pain.” Gently, he folded the puppy into Ange’s arms. “I’m very sorry for what I did.”

Ange didn’t look at the puppy, she just held it, stiffly. I was surprised she didn’t push it back at Rumor. I wanted to. There are situations where an apology and a puppy just aren’t good enough, and to me, this was one of those situations. Rumor didn’t deserve our forgiveness; if it wasn’t for Doctor Happy he’d still be terrorizing us, for no other reason than because he could.

Rumor turned to me. “Thank you.” He bowed his head, turned to leave, then paused. He reached into the pocket of the hunting jacket he wore, and set a vial on the porch railing. It was filled with blood. “If you ever decide to join us, I wish you would use my blood—”

“I don’t want it,” Ange said.

“Maybe you won’t, but keep it, just in case.” He headed down the steps. “Who knows how dark this night will get.”