Soft Apocalypse

Chapter 6 STREET HERO

"Slow your roll, Slinky, we ain’t walking you down,” Cortez shouted as Slinky’s skinny, cheekless ass disappeared around the red brick corner. I always felt out of place around Cortez’s street friends. They weren’t bad guys, it was just that we were so different.

There was a touch of gray in the newly grown mustache that Dice kept licking, yet he still acted like he was twenty, his arms splayed as he walked on the balls of his feet like a gangster. Slinky had long, greasy hair and always wore a faded baseball cap. Somehow Cortez could easily straddle my world and these gritty streetballer types, but I couldn’t.

“Hey, appears we got us some buckwilders,” Slinky said, pointing out a couple sitting in the back seat of an old Toyota parked across Broughton. It didn’t look like they were buckwilding to me; they were just sitting, the woman with her arm around the guy’s shoulder.

Slinky scampered over, giggling, and peered in the window, his hands cupped around his face to block the glare.

“Shit!” he screamed, leaping away from the car like he’d burned himself, pulling on the mask dangling around his neck.

“What is it?” Cortez asked, pulling on his own mask and squatting to look in the window for himself. I followed suit.

The guy was dead. His jutting tongue was swollen to three times its normal size, his sinuses and adenoids bulging like water balloons under his skin. Some sort of designer virus.

The woman had it too—she looked like a basset hound. Her eyes were closed, her breathing labored. She was just sitting with her man, waiting to die, practicing good virus etiquette with the windows cranked up tight in the blistering heat. It broke my heart to see it, but there was nothing I could do. I was no doctor. There were no doctors downtown, period, even if I had that kind of cash.

“C’mon,” Dice said. He tried to resume his cool-walk, but it had lost much of its bounce.

We cut through Madison Square, which was right near Cortez’s apartment house. Twenty or thirty vagrants were making a camp in the square. I’d never seen such destitute people in my life. You couldn’t even call what they were wearing rags—more like patches, pieces of material stitched together, half the time not even covering the spots that people typically covered. There was a teenage girl running around topless. She was probably good-looking, but it was hard to tell because she was so filthy. I felt for them; I’d been in their shoes (although they weren’t actually wearing any shoes).

They were chopping low-hanging branches off the Live Oaks and leaning them against the base of the Revolutionary War monument to make lean-to shelters.

“That kills me,” Cortez said. “Makes me sick to my stomach, seeing that beautiful square corrupted like that.”

“Somebody should call the berries on them,” Slinky said, snickering.

“They’d have to be hacking limbs off babies before the public police would come,” Dice said, glancing at Cortez to get some appreciation for his wit.

A skeleton of an old lady was pulling Spanish moss off branches to fire the cooking pots. It was upsetting to see the trees molested like that. The Live Oaks were the only beautiful thing we had left. The moss was what gave Savannah its particularity; I loved the way it made the trees look like they were melting.

“I’m gonna go talk to them,” Cortez said. He pulled his Eskrima sticks out of his sock, tucked them into the front of his pants, probably so they’d be nice and visible. Displaying exotic weaponry likely gave people pause. Most people probably knew to stay away from a guy carrying Eskrima sticks (unless they had a gun), because if someone is carrying Eskrima sticks, chances are they know how to them use them. Cortez did know how to use them.

Dice glanced down at the sticks. “You anticipating blood and guts?”

“I just want to have a talk. I can’t put up with this desecration.”

We crossed the street and wandered along the brick walkway, through the center of the camp. When we hit the end of the square Cortez doubled back, probably expecting someone to tell us to get lost, but they just went on doing what they were doing. Finally, Cortez approached the biggest and strongest guy.

“Ho,” the guy said, smiling and nodding.

“Where you coming from?” Cortez asked, hands on hips. I hovered behind him with Dice and Slinky.

“Bamboo forests to the West,” the guy said, pointing. He had a peculiar accent; bamboo sounded like bumpoo. His beard was so shaggy you could barely see his mouth, his skin leathered from too much sun.

“You mean the sacrifice zone past Rincon and Pooler?” Cortez asked.

“I don’t know towns. West. Good hunting there.”

“Good hunting? What the fuck do you hunt in the bamboo?” Dice asked. Slinky laughed.

As if on cue, there was a squeal in the grass behind us. A squirrel twisted on the ground, a little wooden arrow jutting from its side. The topless girl ran to it, squatted, and brained it with a half-brick. She picked it up by the tail and took it to a steaming pot.

“Shit, that’s just odious,” Slinky said, lips pulled back from his big square teeth.

The guy just shrugged. “What’s those?” he asked, pointing at Cortez’s Eskrima sticks.

“Weapons,” Cortez said. He pulled them out and assumed a karate pose. He launched into a display, filling the air with blurry sticks, sometimes veering decidedly close to the vagrant. The guy flinched, but kept smiling. When he finished, the guy dropped his hands back to his sides and nodded vaguely.

I think Cortez had figured on a circle of spectators, a little shock and awe, and I was guessing he felt a little stupid now, because no one had stopped to watch.

“You mind taking it easy on those branches?” Cortez said to the guy, still breathing hard, wiping sweat from his eyes.

The gypsy squinted, shook his head like he didn’t understand.

“The tree branches, would you mind not cutting them?”

“It won’t kill the trees,” he said.

“No, but it looks bad, and we live here.”

The guy stared up at the trees, then back at Cortez like he was whacked.

“This is a park,” I said. “The reason the trees were planted was to make the park look nice.” I loved those trees, the way their gnarled branches formed shady roofs over the streets. I also loved how tough they were—they survived the climate shifts and chemical dumps, while the crepe myrtles and azalea, the little yellow songbirds, those little green frogs that stuck to windows had mostly died. They had turned brown or blue and rotted. Brown and blue, the real colors of death. Who made black the color of death? Black was the color of night, and the potential of a cool breeze.

“Just don’t cut any more branches, okay?” Cortez turned without waiting for an answer. He turned to Dice and Slinky. “Dudes, I gotta bounce. If I don’t put in a few ticks hauling dirt to the roof for the garden expansion, the old man is gonna toast my biscuits.”

“I thought we were going to the blanket district,” Dice said.

“Another time.”

As Dice and Slinky took off, I waved goodbye to Cortez, but he gestured for me to stay.

“I just didn’t feel like having those guys around right now,” Cortez said when they were out of earshot. “They’re good guys and all, but you can’t really talk to them, you know?”

I nodded. We headed toward his place, hugging along the buildings to stay in the shade as much as possible.

“You know I’m thirty-four years old today?” Cortez said.

“I didn’t,” I said. “Happy birthday.”

“Yeah, thanks. But it’s weighing on me.” He sighed heavily, shook his head. “Thirty-four years old and I’m still beating the sidewalks with my friends like I’m fifteen, sitting in that sauna apartment staring at the TV when we can get a signal, hauling sacks of dirt to the roof to try to keep from starving.”

“It’s not where we expected to be by now, that’s for sure,” I said. “I kept expecting things to improve, and that our opportunities would improve with them.” I had to admit, though—Cortez’s prospects were even bleaker than mine. He had no real job, just a high school education.

“Yeah. I just keep thinking if I’d been born in an earlier time, before you needed boats to navigate the streets of LA and shit, that I could’ve been somebody, could’ve been a legend at something.” He looked at me, maybe waiting to see if I was going to laugh. “I don’t know, a martial arts champion, maybe a major businessman. You know? Now I’m just one step above those gypsies in the park.”

“Hey, you seen this?” An old guy in the doorway of Pinky Masters gestured into the bar. We peered in, saw he was specifically gesturing at the TV. One of those Breaking News Special Reports was on, with flashing red all around the borders of the screen.

“Christ, what now?” I said. We stepped into the bar. Every eye in the place was on that screen.

A guy with a prosthetic eye that was too big compared to his real one shouted at the screen. “Nuke ’em all. What are we waiting for? Take ’em out.”

“What happened?” Cortez asked the old guy at the door.

“They nuked Lake Superior, made all the water undrinkable.”

I felt a falling sensation in my stomach. “Who did?”

“North Korea. They said it’s because we sink their fishing trawlers.”

“They send those giant fishing factories right up our coast, of course we’re gonna sink ’em,” the guy with the bad eye said.

The U.S. Navy sank pretty much any non-U.S. fishing boat they found within two hundred miles of our shores, even though international waters technically started twelve miles out, but I wasn’t going to say that out loud. But hell, the why didn’t matter. Lake Superior had been nuked. I didn’t know what the implications of that were, but I knew it wasn’t good. The biggest body of fresh water in the country, poisoned.

Cortez touched my back. “Unless we’re gonna get drunk, let’s get out of here. I can’t take this right now.”

“I can’t afford to get drunk in a bar,” I said. “Plus, I should get home.”

A dog was dying in the gutter a block from Pinky’s, flies buzzing around its eyes, its lip pulled back in a death snarl. It was a puny thing, mostly ribs. The eye facing up fixed on us, then started to go unfocused. Its little chest stopped rising and falling. Now it would turn blue.

“What next?” Cortez asked, sitting on the curb.

I looked up at the apartment building rising beyond the dog, the rusted black bars on the windows, vinyl siding broken off in places, exposing splintered plywood underneath.

“A few years ago an economist told me things were just going to keep getting worse. She said that when there isn’t enough food and water and energy, everyone will fight over what’s left, and the losers of those fights will get desperate, and will do desperate things. It’s starting to look like she was right.”

“Starting to look? Hell, we’ve been fighting for enough to eat for the past eight years.”

He had a point.

Cortez heaved a big sigh. “I can’t stand the thought of going home, facing my old man’s sarcastic bullshit.”

“Well, come on home with me.”

“I can’t. I gotta get this work done.”

Cortez stood, saluted the little fallen dog and walked on, past the row houses with their busted railings and rotting wood, trash piled up on the sidewalk where it’d been thrown out the windows.

I was eager to get home to watch the news and talk to Colin and Jeannie about what was happening. What good did it do anyone to irradiate our water? The U.S. had been doing some ruthless shit around the world that made me awfully uncomfortable, but at least it made sense. Our navy quietly sank fishing boats because that left more fish for us to catch, but they didn’t dump poison in the Pacific to kill all the fish. It was as if entire countries were acting like Jumpy-Jumps.

As we got closer to Cortez’s house we heard that telltale cracking, like ice underfoot or twigs snapping. “Oh shit,” I said. We hurried toward the sound, which was also toward Cortez’s place.

It was the yellow variety—not as bad as the green, but worse than the black—and it was coming up right outside Cortez’s apartment house. Some of the stalks were already three feet tall, trembling and popping as they grew. The asphalt in the road was broken into a thousand fragments as nubs of new stalks pushed through. How the hell had it gotten inside the rhizome barrier that’d been sunk around Savannah? That barrier went down ten feet.

Private Civil Defense people (I didn’t recognize their insignia, but this wasn’t my neighborhood) had cordoned off the area. Technicians were at work tearing up the street with road-eaters, trying to set up a rhizome barrier to contain the bamboo before it spread.

Cortez’s place was inside the perimeter. Inside the sacrifice zone. His father owned the place—Cortez had been born there—and just like that, they were letting the bamboo have it.

“There’s my old man,” Cortez said, sounding utterly defeated. His father was standing in a crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk. He was shaking his head, making angry gestures at no one in particular.

“No way this made it through the barrier,” he said when we were within earshot. “Goddamned biotech punks carried it in and planted it, I’m telling you. Or terrorists—damned Jumpy-Jumps.”

Cortez and I nodded. Let his dad go on thinking it was some adolescent bio-tinkerer who’d originally loosed the bamboo to impress his friends. I didn’t know how the bamboo had jumped the barrier, but I knew it wasn’t biotech punks who’d set it loose in the first place, and so did Cortez.

“You seen Edie or Pat yet?” Cortez asked. They lived in the apartment next door, or used to.

“Nah,” his father said. He walked off without another word.

“Do you have a place to stay?” I asked Cortez.

He was staring glassy-eyed at the apartment. He was in serious need of a shave. “That fucking bamboo. It’s coming back to bite my ass good.”

“I wonder if it’s actually doing any good. It didn’t stop North Korea from nuking Lake Superior, but who knows? Maybe this whole city would be dust without it.”

“I don’t know about that, but one thing I do know—if I find out who planted this patch right in my back yard, he’s gonna be one sorry son of a bitch.”

“I’m glad it wasn’t me,” I laughed. “So, do you have a place to stay? Want to crash with us?”

“Hey, thanks, J—I appreciate it.”

Colin met us on the porch. “Did you see what happened?”

“About Lake Superior? Yeah,” I said.

“Did you see what happened to North Korea?” Colin asked.

We picked up our pace. “No, what?”

Colin held open the screen door, nodded a greeting to Cortez. “It’s gone.”

The news was showing aerial images of a silent, smoldering city. The gray, twisted wreckage reminded me of a heavily used ash tray.

“They bombed all the major cities and military installations. Some North Korean troops surged into South Korea, and they’re still fighting, but that’s it, besides survivors in the countryside.”

I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad. None of my friends seemed to know either. It was a relief, but it was scary. I couldn’t imagine what those survivors were experiencing right now.

The red News Alert banner flashed at the bottom of the screen. “We’re just now receiving this update,” a blonde anchorwoman said. “It has been confirmed by sources within the Pentagon that all U.S. troops currently serving overseas have been ordered back to U.S. soil.”

Their military analyst, a bald colonel with no right arm, explained that the military trained for this sort of mobilization, that it even had a name: Operation Repatriation. The troops would destroy any large weapons they couldn’t take with them, then they would be readied to deploy across the U.S. to reestablish order if that became necessary.

“I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not,” Colin said, “assuming they’re really deployed.”

“They can’t be worse than the police or the Civil Defense goons,” I said.

“Maybe we’ll find out,” Cortez said.

Cortez slept in the kitchen, between the counter and the table, because my bed was in the living room and he said he didn’t want to crowd me. By the time I woke, he was gone—he’d left a note saying he was going to salvage what he could from his apartment, and would see us later.

After breakfast I wandered into Pulaski Square, where the tribe was still camped. They had so few possessions: machetes, cooking pots; one kid was clutching an old action figure. From what I could see, no one was in charge. Most of them were sprawled on the lawn dozing; a group of older men were playing some sort of gambling game that involved tossing carved stones.

“Where is your friend with the sticks?” I turned; it was the topless girl. Her accent was like the man we’d talked with yesterday—she pronounced Ws like Vs.

“He’s at home,” I said. I didn’t figure it was worth trying to explain all of the nuances in that statement.

“Was he playing a game with them?” She made a strange, scrunchy facial expression, almost like she wasn’t aware other people could see her face.

“It wasn’t a game. They’re weapons, for protection.”

She made a grunting sound that I took to mean she understood. I glanced at her chest. I couldn’t help it, her breasts were right there. Her nipples were puckered, her areolas as big as silver dollar pancakes.

“Why doesn’t he just have a gun?”

I opened my mouth to answer, then saw that she was grinning. I laughed, and she laughed with me. We stood there looking at each other, only I realized after a moment that she wasn’t looking at me, she was looking off over my shoulder. I turned to see what she was looking at. It was the bamboo outbreak.

She smiled, suddenly looking almost like any city girl.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“I guess you could say that.”

It occurred to me that these people were like modern hunter-gatherers. A few years ago I’d watched part of an old documentary about a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa. These people were so much like them—they loved nature, no one seemed to be in charge, they kept moving and seemed to live almost totally off the land. I wondered if they’d been out in the woods since my tribe had been out there. That would be eight years, a long time to be wandering around in the woods.

“Hey, Jasper!” It was Cortez, jogging toward us. He waved briefly to the girl and then pulled me aside.

“Remember yesterday when I told you that I felt aimless, that I didn’t know where my life was going?” He didn’t wait for me to reply—he was excited, talking at high-speed. “Now I know. I found this book on your shelf…” He fumbled in his pack, pulled out a softcover book. It was Light of the Warrior-Sage, one of the books I’d salvaged from the abandoned bookstore after seeing Mr. Swift executed. I’d never gotten past the first chapter. Cortez shook the book. “This book showed me my path.” He leafed through it, opened to a page he’d dog-eared, and read:

“The warrior-sage keeps a silent quest in his heart. This quest keeps him vital, lubricates his mind and spirit, keeps him poised and alert in the luminosity of his soul. His quest is selfless, for the warrior-sage recognizes that the boundary between self and world is illusion, that alleviating the suffering of the world and alleviating the suffering in his own heart are one and the same.”

As Cortez looked up from reading, I was surprised to see that his eyes were filled with tears. “It’s like those words have always been inside me, waiting to come out. A warrior-sage—that’s what I am.”

“Hm.” I nodded, as if I were thinking about what he was saying. It was good to see him so up a day after his house had been bambooed.

Cortez dug back into his pack and retrieved an old Batman comic. “Yesterday I was rereading this. I’ve always admired Batman. I was thinking that the Caped Crusader would sure pull a full shift if he were working in these times, and then it all came together. All this time honing my martial arts skills, my weapons technique… it was all leading to this.”

“To what?” I asked.

Cortez held up a finger. “I’m going to devote myself to helping others. Maybe I can’t stop the Jumpy-Jumps and the CDs on a large scale, but I can stop some crime, at least. At least I can do something.” He gripped my shoulder, spoke almost in my ear. “And I know just where to start. I found out who’s responsible for releasing that bamboo.”

“Really? Who was it?”

Cortez cocked a thumb toward River Street. “There’s a guy who sells drugs and fences stolen merchandise out of an abandoned building on MLK. I found out he also handles bamboo. I checked the place out. It’s a small-time operation. I’m going to straighten them out.”

“I’d love to see that,” I laughed.

Cortez’s eyes got wide. “Hey! Come with me!”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t be a good Robin. I have no crime-fighting skills whatsoever.” I neglected to add that I’m a coward. Before the depression, when battles were fought with words and lawyers, I would have been a much more effective fighter. Fists and guns are not my weapons of choice.

Cortez put an arm around my shoulder. “No, I’ll take care of the enforcement—it would just be nice to have some company. You can just hang.”

I had the impression that Cortez mostly wanted a witness. What’s the point of exacting retribution if no one sees it? “What are you going to do, exactly?”

Cortez waved a dismissive hand. “I’m not gonna hurt anyone. I’ll just confiscate their drugs and bamboo and grind it all under my heel, then tell them they’re closed for business.”

I wanted to say no, but Cortez was giving me this imploring, expectant look, his eyebrows raised. It seemed important to him that I go. It probably wouldn’t entail much risk. I’d watched him dismantle two knife-wielding thugs who were ready for him, and that was years ago—his skills had improved since then, and he’d have weapons of his own this time.

“Sure. Why not?”

Cortez beamed. “I’ll come get you tonight around ten.”

Cortez was dressed all in black. A fat knife was sheathed at his calf, and his Eskrima sticks were in a pouch at his waist.

MLK Drive was bustling now that the sun was down. An Asian woman stood on the corner in a faded green felt skirt, looking to turn tricks, her children sitting at her feet playing with bottle caps. One of her arms was nothing but bone and scar tissue; she’d danced with the flesh-eating virus, but she’d survived it, lucky lady. Cortez’s mother hadn’t been so lucky, along with maybe a hundred thousand others.

A bunch of uniforms were standing outside the boarded-up Lucky 7 mini-casino checking IDs, probably for no reason except to exert their authority.

An old tour trolley, stripped down to wheels and a floor, rumbled by. “Right over there, a particularly bloody stiletto went down,” a red-haired guy in an old navy jacket said into a crackly microphone. “Dude stabbed another dude seven, eight times in the face, till his blade got stuck in the eye socket and he couldn’t get it back out.”

“Where’s the harm in that?” someone shouted from the back of the trolley, a bottle of home brew clutched in his fist. We watched the murder tour roll by.

“Have you ever read that book I borrowed, Light of the Warrior-Sage?” Cortez asked.

“No, I never got around to it. When I have free time I’ve been reading about medicinal herbs.”

“How’s that going? Your apothecary business?”

“It’s going okay. I’m able to stock about two dozen different herbs. I make foraging day-trips into the country.”

“That’s great.”

“Yeah, I enjoy the foraging expeditions. It’s peaceful in the bamboo, and fun to hunt for the herbs, kind of like a scavenger hunt. Once I started selling them people started coming into the store to consult with me about what they should take, you know, for a toothache or to help them get pregnant.”

Two guys stumbled past. “Look at the moon! It’s glowing in the dark!” one of them said, pointing. The other cackled. Stoners shot up with something, probably godflash.

“You making some good cheese?” Cortez asked me.

“Not a lot. People can’t afford to pay much, so if I want to sell it, it’s got to be cheap. Plus it’s Ruplu’s store, so he gets a cut.”

We stopped behind a battered Prius, in front of what was essentially an empty lot with a door and a roof tucked between two buildings. Blackened bricks and heat-tortured steel lay scattered and piled, casting long shadows. “This is it,” Cortez said. “Dude’s name is B-Bob, or something like that.” A tug boat hooted in the distance; overhead a bat flapped mad figure-eights around a lamppost.

I followed Cortez through the doorway, into a big, dark, empty space. In the far corner there was light, created by dozens of candles, their flames burning in a rainbow of colors. B-Bob sat on a stool behind a bruised Formica counter, his back to the brick wall of an adjoining building. A girl leaned up against the wall, arms crossed behind her back, purse dangling from her shoulder, talking to B-Bob.

“She’s got some train wreck going on at her place,” the girl was saying as we approached. I recognized her: Tara Cohn. I’d gone to school with her. She’d hung out with a different crowd, but she’d been okay. Always chewing gum.

“Freeze,” Cortez said. He was holding a gun. Tara shrieked; B-Bob nearly fell back on his stool. Cortez lunged, grabbed the automatic pistol sitting on the counter, stuffed it in his belt.

“Take it, take it,” B-Bob said, hands in the air. “We got no problem.”

“Yeah, we do got a problem,” Cortez said to B-Bob. “Put everything on the table. Now.”

Hands shaking, B-Bob pulled piles of baggies and bright-colored pills out from behind the counter, laid them on top. Then he put his hands back up.

Cortez pushed the drugs into a pile, pulled a little can of lighter fluid from his pocket and squirted it over the drugs.

B-Bob stared at the pile, wide-eyed. “What the fuck? You just going to flunk them all?”

“I ain’t no thief,” Cortez said, fishing a matchbook from his pants. “Where’s the bamboo? I want that too.”

“What bamboo? I don’t got no bamboo.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” Cortez said.

“I just hold it to pass on to somebody once in a while. I don’t got none right now.”

“Well, your fucking bamboo cut up the wrong guy’s home,” Cortez said. “All you bastards bleeding the block, wrecking this city. This is my home, god dammit.”

“I don’t sell to kids,” B-Bob said. “I don’t do no harm, I just help people escape for a little while. It’s the only vacation most people around here can afford.”

I heard a metal click. “Drop the gun.” It was a man’s voice, behind Cortez.

Cortez put his hands up slowly, turned halfway around. Before I understood what was happening, he planted a side kick under the guy’s armpit, followed by a spinning hook kick that caught the guy square in the jaw and dropped him. He was so fast—I couldn’t believe it.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Tara fumbling in her purse.

“Look out!” I shouted at Cortez. He spun to face Tara as she pointed the pistol at him, clutching it in both hands.

“No!” Cortez shouted as she drew a bead. “Put it down!” He pointed his pistol at her. Tara hesitated, then closed one eye like she was at a fucking rifle range.

Cortez shot her twice in the stomach.

She grunted, fell back into a sitting position, stared down in disbelief at the blood, which looked black in the dim streetlight.

She looked up at Cortez. “You suck.”

“I’m sorry,” Cortez said. “Why didn’t you listen? I didn’t want to hurt nobody.”

I was swimming in a dream world. I couldn’t wrap my mind around what was happening.

“Bobby,” Tara whimpered. “I need help. It’s starting to hurt.” She gagged; blood leaked out of her mouth and down her chin. Bobby squatted beside her, drew her head to his chest.

Cortez grabbed me by the arm and yanked. I stumbled, almost fell. “Run,” he said. I let him jerk me along as I looked back at the seemingly frozen scene of B-Bob holding Tara to his chest, until the doorway flashed by around me, and the scene was snuffed out.

“Run!” Cortez shouted. I ran. I’ve never run so fast.

I finally stopped not because I was out of breath but because I couldn’t see where I was going through the tears. I stopped in a deserted alley, pushed my face against the bricks. Cortez leaned up against the wall across from me, then slid to a sitting position, his head dangling between his knees. He sniffed.

What had we done? We’d shot Tara Cohn, who used to sit in front of me in biology class. For what? For what reason? She’d told Cortez he sucked, like he’d taken her last French fry or something.

“She might be okay, we don’t know,” Cortez said, his voice thick from crying.

“She’s not okay,” I said.

I turned and stared out of the alley, into a square a block away, at the Spanish moss dripping from the branches of the oaks, the moonlight peering through. “I think I need to be alone for a while. Will you be okay?”

Cortez nodded. “I’m sorry I got you into this. I’m so sorry.”

“I know,” I said. I couldn’t look at him. I walked off.

I walked until daylight. I didn’t want to go home and have to explain what had happened when Colin and Jeannie saw my face. By morning I’d stopped crying, but I still felt so twisted inside that it was hard to take a full breath.

I found myself thinking about the other killing, when we’d stabbed the men who were trying to rape Ange. That had been a more understandable killing—a noble murder, almost. We hadn’t felt noble, and I still had occasional nightmares about it, but I never regretted it. I would regret Tara’s death every day for the rest of my life.

I wandered into Madison Square. The primitive tribe was breaking camp. The girl waved when she saw me. I realized I hadn’t even asked her name, like she was an animal not worth that courtesy. This morning she looked strong and certain, like she was the one who had it right, who knew how to live, and I was the clueless one. “I don’t know your name,” I said, trying to smile.

“Bird,” she said.

“Jasper.”

“I like you,” she said, staring at the ground, looking like a fifteen-year-old with a crush. It occurred to me that I didn’t know she wasn’t fifteen, though I suspected she was more like twenty. It felt good to have someone say something nice to me just then.

“I like you, too,” I said. I blinked tears away.

“Why don’t you come with me?”

“I can’t,” I said. She nodded, let her shoulders drop in disappointment.

It occurred to me that I could go if I wanted to. I imagined myself in the bamboo, hunting for herbs and roots, sleeping under the stars, maybe not sleeping alone. That would be nice. Why couldn’t I just go for a week or two, maybe a month? No guns, no viruses, nothing to think about. Noble savagery. The urge to flee, to get out of the city, was overwhelming.

“Could I come for a little while, maybe a few weeks? Would that be all right? I can’t come for good.” I didn’t understand these people’s culture, and didn’t want to mistakenly give her the impression we were getting married or something.

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“Would they let me?”

“Would who let you?” Bird asked.

“Your… people. Who would I ask?”

Bird shrugged, squinted. “Why would you ask anybody?”

No one was in charge. What a refreshing concept.

Two naked kids ran between us, giggling, one chasing the other.

“I’d like to come with you for a while,” I said. Bird squealed with excitement, jumped up and down.

“I need to go get some things. I’ll meet you back here?”

She pointed at the ground. “Right here.”

“Right.” I jogged out of the park, up Whitaker to East Jones.

Colin was on the roof, working in the garden. I told him I was going on an extended herb excursion with the tribe in the square, that I might be gone for a few weeks. I’d done a few overnight jaunts, so he didn’t think too much of it. I didn’t tell him about Tara Cohn. I knew I would eventually, but it was too fresh right now, it would take too much out of me, and I was so tired. My eyelids burned from dirt and tears and lack of sleep.

I packed some toiletries, a change of clothes, two wild herb books. I threw on my collection vest, its pockets like a dozen little drawers in a curio cabinet, and headed to the square.

Back in the square Bird grabbed my arm, led me to a little pile: a cooking pot, bow and arrow, machete, a black plastic bag tied with a string. “These are my things. Can you carry the machete and bow and arrows?”

I nodded, picked them up. Bird grabbed the other things, and we left. Just like that.

By afternoon I was drenched in sweat and exhausted. I hadn’t slept in thirty hours, and I’d been an accomplice to a killing since then.

We reached the foot-high plastic wall that marked the perimeter of the outer rhizome barrier, and pressed into the bamboo. It was like another world. In most places the stalks were so tight that you had to squeeze between them; you chose your path like you were in a maze, trying to look ahead, avoid the areas where you had to hack with the machete, seeking out the more open areas where you could walk normally. It was a perfect distraction, a mindless task that occupied most of my attention.

I liked watching the kids. They navigated the bamboo so effortlessly. Not only were they smaller, but they moved like they were born to it, which they probably were.

There was a constant cracking. The cracking seemed to rise and fall, louder, then softer, but that may have been in my head. The long, narrow, striped leaves added a dry rustling whisper to the cracking when the wind blew.

It was hard for me to think of the bamboo as something beautiful, but I had to admit, it was beautiful in its way. There were a few birds and squirrels and other little animals around—most of the animals seemed to have died out, but there were some, if you watched. There were also lots of small plants, especially where the bamboo didn’t grow too thickly.

I spotted a clump of senna growing in the shade of a cherry tree along the bank of a little stream. I squatted and plucked it.

“What are you doing?” Bird asked, squatting next to me.

I wasn’t sure how to describe it to her. “I collect herbs that you can use as medicine.” I held the senna in my palm so she could see it. “This is a laxative—it helps you go to the bathroom.”

Bird scrunched her eyebrows, then turned away, evidently unimpressed.

When we camped for the night I called Ange. I told her I was on an herb expedition, and I told her about the tribe, but I didn’t tell her about Bird, or Tara Cohn. Maybe Ange would bump into Cortez and he would tell her, but they didn’t socialize much, and I guessed Cortez might not tell anyone about it.

I described the tribe, though, and Ange laughed and said it sounded like I’d joined a cult, and that my ass would be back in my apartment in two days, when I was tired of playing Tarzan and needed a fucking shower.

It was a “one-night” camp, which meant we found a reasonably open spot, put our shit down, sat on the ground, and we were camped. A few people went off to forage. Bird took my hand and led me a little ways off, and pulled me down into a bed of fallen bamboo leaves to make love.

It was obviously not her first time. Her breath was bad, but she wasn’t all that interested in kissing anyway. It felt good and natural, having sex in the wilderness with this sweet, easygoing girl.

When we rejoined the tribe, no one looked at us like we’d done something wrong. No convoluted moral code, no guilt. They weren’t playing at this, I realized. It was like they didn’t know how to think about things the way most people thought about them.

Dinner was wild onions and blackberries, and canned corn beef. There wasn’t much of it, but I ate without complaining. I didn’t want to play the role of soft city boy. I was a city boy, but I wasn’t all that soft. It wasn’t my first time sleeping outside, or eating whatever scraps could be gathered.

After dinner, people lounged around while Sandra, the white-haired skeleton of an old lady, told a story. I recognized the story—it was a bastardized version of an old movie from the late 0s, King of Our Engine. Good flick, so-so in story form.

I wondered what was in the garbage bag Bird had been carrying. I grabbed it and pulled it over to me. I was starting to get the hang of this place: you didn’t ask permission to use other people’s stuff, you just took it if you wanted it. They were true socialists, way more than my old tribe, which had shared food and energy, but not personal belongings. These people barely had any concept of personal belongings. I untied the bag and peered inside, instantly recognizing the contents.

Bamboo shoots, with black-and-white-striped stalks, the roots wrapped tightly in burlap. I closed the bag, suppressing a smirk. I’d never seen this variety before, but I would never forget the day that Sebastian pulled shoots much like these from his bag of tricks in Ange’s living room. I knew what they were for, even if I didn’t know why this tribe had them. I couldn’t ask Bird about them now, because the old lady was still telling her story, so I sat cross-legged and listened.

A little girl, two or three years old, came over and sat in my lap. She threw her head back and looked up at me, grinning. I ruffled her hair. She giggled. You couldn’t tell whose kids were whose—they wandered from person to person like they were happy orphans, and it occurred to me that I had no idea if any of these people were Bird’s parents or brothers and sisters.

When the story was finished, I thought I’d start up a conversation. “So how long have you been doing this?”

“What?” said the strong-looking guy Cortez had approached in the park that first day.

“Living in the wilderness, not living in houses.”

“Most of us a long time, a few a shorter time,” Sandra piped in. “The children, their whole lives. We don’t talk about our city lives much. We prefer happy stories.” She didn’t sound pissed off at me for bringing it up, just matter-of-fact.

“So why do you visit the cities at all?” I asked.

“There are things we need there, food mostly, and things we need to give to them,” Carl said. He was a fifty-something guy with an overbite. He didn’t have as much of an accent as most of the others, so I guessed he was a recent convert.

“You trade with them?”

A couple of people laughed.

“We give them what they need, we get what we need,” Carl said.

I smiled and nodded. I understood more than they thought I did, and that felt kind of nice. “Are you speaking in riddles because my ignorance is entertaining, or because you don’t want to tell me? If you don’t want to tell me, you can say so.”

Some of the smiles faded; a few people picked up weaving projects and other things they were working on.

Carl tossed a bamboo shoot he’d been whittling at my feet. “We give them these.”

I picked it up, held it in my palm. “You started the outbreak near the square, didn’t you?” I looked at Bird. She smiled like a gremlin and nodded so vigorously her breasts bounced. I was with the people who had wrecked Cortez’s home. Ironic.

“Are you working for the scientist in Atlanta?” I asked. “Do you know a man named Sebastian?”

Carl seemed surprised. “So you know.”

I flashed a big smile. “I was there for the very first planting.”

We sat and smiled at each other for a while. Another thing I was learning about these people was that they were comfortable with silence. Long lulls in conversation were not uncommon.

“We’re not wandering aimlessly, are we?” I asked, finally.

“We’re heading north,” the big guy said. “To slow things down up there.”

With a newly engineered variety that thrived further north, clogging the highways and airports, slowing the spread of brand-name products even more. Maybe throwing them back into the Stone Age. I still wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. I had no way of knowing what the world would have been like by now if it wasn’t for the bamboo, and Doctor Happy, and any other disruptions that’d been created that I didn’t know about.

A week in, I had no idea where we were. We reached the top of what passed for a hill in South Georgia, and there was nothing but bamboo and sandy blank patches and scattered stands of scrub pines as far as I could see in every direction. It would take the tribe months to make their way north (not that I planned to be there that long), but the tribe didn’t seem to be in a hurry. I was filthy, thirsty, and bored. Sand gnats buzzed around my face, relentlessly landing in my ears and the corners of his eyes, but I wasn’t ready to go home yet. Maybe I was doing penance for what I’d done, or maybe I just wanted to prove Ange wrong about how long I could play Tarzan. I turned and waited for Bird. She was dragging, sweating even more than me, her mouth pulled down in a grimace that made her look confused. Usually she was egging me on.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I ate something wrong. I have to poop.” She pulled down her rags and squatted right there. I was getting used to it. I turned and walked a respectable distance. Three guys moseyed past, saying hello to her as she squatted there, her face red from straining.

Suddenly she turned her head to one side and puked. I ran to her, put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re really sick.” I put my palm on her forehead, and hot as it was outside, it was still obvious she was pulling a fever. “Shit, you’ve got something.” I automatically reached to yank my mask over my mouth, but I’d packed it away days ago, and it was way too late in any case if she’d caught anything designer. I thought of the woman with the giant tongue, panting in the car, and my bowels went loose. I turned in the direction of the guys vanishing into the bamboo. “Hey! She’s sick! Call a stop.”

They called, and the call repeated, further away each time.

“I have something that will help with the nausea.” I wrapped my arms around Bird’s waist to help her to the ground. She cried out in pain, like I’d stuck an arrow in her, and grabbed her stomach, low, on the right side.

Appendix. As soon as I saw her grab thats pot, I knew. I had nothing in my pouches to help that.

The tribe was gathering, a few at a time.

“We need to find a doctor! She’s got appendicitis.” It had never occurred to me to wonder what would happen if I fell and fractured my skull while I was out here.

“There are no towns near here. No doctors,” an old guy missing his front teeth said.

“Well what do we do?” I asked. Bird was whimpering in pain.

“Nothing to do,” Sandra said, shrugging. “We’ll camp here till Bird’s strong enough to walk, or till she dies.”

“I don’t want to die,” Bird said.

I needed a consult. I pulled out my phone, dialed the Phone Doctor number. A recorded voice prompted me to type in my credit code. Wincing at the thought of what this would cost, I did.

“Andrew Gabow, M.D. How can I help you?” a clean, rested voice said over the phone. I felt a wave of gratitude, just to hear that tone.

“I’ve got a woman here who I think has appendicitis. We’re way out in the wilderness, there’s no way to get her to a town. What do I do?”

“Describe her symptoms.”

I went through them; the doctor asked follow-up questions about the exact location of the pain in her abdomen. He sounded miffed that I didn’t have a thermometer to get Bird’s exact temperature.

“You’re probably correct—acute appendicitis. I’ll give it to you straight, Jasper—she’s in real danger. You’re not going to carry her out of there in time, and when her appendix bursts, the infection will spread, and chances are she won’t survive. Not out there. Probably not even in a hospital.”

“What do I do?” I asked.

“You’ve got one option. Perform surgery on her.”

“Me?”

“Whoever in your party has the most medical experience. Is there a nurse with you, a paramedic? Nurse’s aid?”

I asked the tribe; a dozen heads shook. Shit, half of them probably didn’t know how to read. Most of the rest had probably forgotten.

“There’s got to be another way,” I said to the doctor. “What about a helicopter?”

The doctor laughed. “Will that be cash or charge?”

“Oh god,” I said. I felt like I was separating from my body; I heard my voice saying “oh god,” but it sounded far away, coming from someone else.

“Build a fire,” Doctor Gabow said. “I’m going to do this for a hundred dollars federal, because you can’t afford what I should be charging, and because I’m a nice guy.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” I said. “Somebody build a fire!” Who was that scared little boy who just yelled that? a calm sliver of my mind asked.

When the fire had been built, we heated water. I plunged my hands into the pot of scalding water and held them there as long as I could. Then Carla did the same—she was going to assist. Carla put a knife in the water, then held it over the flames before handing it to me. My hand shook so badly I could hardly hold the knife. The children had been moved out of hearing distance. Four people held Bird down, one for each arm and leg. The doctor suggested we put her in a stream to cool her and reduce the bleeding, but there were no streams around.

“Don’t make the cut too deep,” the doctor said. I had activated the hands-free element on the phone. “About a half inch down, two across. There’s going to be a lot of blood, but don’t worry about that. We’ll handle that later.”

Tears poured down Bird’s cheeks as I held the knife over the spot we’d washed and doused with moonshine. The knife was shaking so badly it was blurry. I held it there a long time; twice I brought it down just short of Bird’s soft skin, and twice I pulled it back up.

“Make the cut, Jasper,” the doctor said.

“I can’t do this,” I said. “Somebody else, please. Somebody do this.” I wasn’t an action guy. Cortez was the action guy—if he was here, he would have done the cutting without breaking a sweat. I’d never cut anything in my life that wasn’t on a dinner plate.

“I don’t want to die,” Bird whimpered. “Please. I don’t want to die.”

With a howl, I cut her. She screamed in agony, bucked violently, trying to break free of the people pinning her down. Like an animal. Blood welled up where I’d cut her, filling the incision and pouring out. “I can’t do this, I can’t do this.”

“How deep is the incision? What do you see inside?” the doctor said, so calm, so far away in his comfortable air-conditioned office.

“I don’t know.” Reluctantly I pulled the skin apart with my thumb and forefinger to see how deep it was. “There’s just red tissue, I can’t see anything.”

“You’re still in muscle. You have to cut again, deeper.”

“Oh, god. Not again.” Tears poured down my cheeks; I was trembling all over like I was freezing cold.

You suck, Tara Cohn’s voice said inside my head. I sobbed.

“Cut, god dammit. Cut her. Do it now,” the doctor shouted.

I screamed, and kept screaming as I cut, wider and deeper. Bird thrashed, but the fight was bleeding out of her. She seemed only half-conscious, only the whites of her eyes visible.

“What do you see?” the doctor asked.

I pulled on the flap I’d made, and it tore a little wider, exposing something gray and puckered, a fat snake folding in on itself. It was an organ. Christ, it was her liver or gall bladder or something. I described it to the doctor.

“Good boy, Jasper, that’s what you want. That’s the colon. Fish around, find the bottom of it, where it meets the small intestine. You’re looking for a small, tubelike appendage attached to the colon.”

I poked around inside Bird, trying to ignore the moist squishing sound, the blood pouring down her side, dribbling onto the tan bamboo husks that littered the ground.

“I can’t find it,” I said.

“Get your damned hand in there and move the colon around. This isn’t some dainty parlor game. Get your hands bloody.”

I dug, squeezing my fingers between the slimy tubes, pushing one section up with my finger. Behind it was something that looked like a swollen maggot. I described it to Doctor Gabow.

“Cut it off and pitch it away, Jasper.”

I cut it off. Sandra sewed the end of the colon closed while I held the knife over the flame, getting it good and hot. Then I pressed the flat end of it against the wound, to cauterize it and stop some of the bleeding. Bird didn’t flinch as the knife hissed against her insides; she’d passed out somewhere along the way. Sandra held the edges of the wound closed while I sewed. Doctor Gabow explained that someone needed to get to the nearest town and buy antibiotics, or Bird would likely die of infection, and all his good work would go to waste.

People slapped my back as I stumbled out of the camp. I found a quiet copse and collapsed onto my back, staring at the half-moon through the narrow leaves. I felt… strange. Calm. Like a buzzing had turned off in my brain for the first time in years. I held my hand in front of my face, looked at the blood covering it, starting to dry and cake. I’d done it.

I closed my eyes and let myself drift off to sleep, thinking that I’d had enough of the simplicity of the hunter-gatherer life. I wanted to go home.

I caught a whiff of jasmine, waited at a crosswalk as a cluster of men pedaled by on bicycles wearing helmets with built-in gas masks, semi-automatics dangling from their belts.

Across the street, a tattered teal awning read: Francis McNairy Antiques and Collectibles. Yeah, right. I’ll trade you my mint condition Spider-Man number one for your slightly used bottle of Cool, what do you say?

A block further I could see my house, its porch looking inviting to my aching feet. I put my head down and trekked the final few yards, then plopped into a chair on the porch.

The screen door swung open almost immediately. “How was your trip?” Colin asked, unfolding a mildewed lawn chair and joining me.

“Do I have a story for you,” I said.

“Really?” Colin scooted his lawn chair until it was at a ninety degree angle from mine. “I could use a good story; the TV’s been out for three days.”

I told him the good stuff, where I was the good guy, saving a life.

“So, you’ve decided the right woman for you is a semi-primitive, illiterate teenager with bad breath?” Colin asked when I’d finished.

I shook my head, blew out a long breath. “I just needed some affection. She offered, and I took her up on it.” I stared off toward the far end of the porch, at a weight-lifting bench that had been abandoned by some previous tenant. Padding jutted from the rotting vinyl fabric. We should really throw the damned thing out.

Then again, it added a certain character to the porch. I felt a sudden wave of affection for our crappy little apartment, and the people I shared it with. It was good to be home.