Soft Apocalypse

Chapter 7 SMITHEREEN SONATA

From our seats in the upper deck the players looked like tissues dropped in the grass, yet it was so quiet I could hear the shortstop scuff his foot on the infield dirt, smoothing an invisible divot.

I fished for a peanut. Even the crackle of the cellophane bag seemed loud, as if we were in a movie theater. I half-expected someone to shush me as I cracked the peanut under my thumb, peeled off the top half of the shell, popped one red-skinned peanut into my mouth, reached over and fed the second to Ange. She closed her lips over my fingers, grinned when I glanced over at her. Lately Ange had been way more affectionate than she’d ever been before. We’d been through so many waxes and wanes; at times I’d felt certain that we had drifted so far apart we would never again be more than acquaintances who’d once been close, but we always seemed to drift back into our not-quite-dating netherworld. I’d long ago given up thinking about the possibility of a real relationship, squashed any romantic feelings I had for Ange so that what I felt for her was a (somehow workable) mix of lust and brotherly affection.

The pitcher wound, threw a high fastball. The lanky batter swung and missed, and the inning was over. No one clapped. The Macon Mets took the field, and the pitcher began his warmup tosses.

“Whatever that shit is in the atmosphere, it sure makes the sunsets pretty,” Ange said.

“Mmm,” I said. The sun was setting over the left field fence; the clouds were a gorgeous pastel of pink, peach, indigo, violet.

On the first pitch the Sand Gnat batter yanked the ball into the right field corner. The right fielder took a few listless steps after it, then gave up. He squatted on his haunches and watched it roll. He covered his face in his hands as the ball rolled to a stop on the warning track. The center fielder trotted over to him, put a hand on his shoulder, said something. The right fielder shook his head.

The batter trotted to second base and stopped, probably figuring that’s where he would’ve ended up if the play had been made. Winning didn’t mean as much with so many people dying.

“His family was in D.C. All dead,” the man in the row behind us said. I glanced back at him. His face and neck were a swirl of burn scars, and his right arm ended in an uneven stump. A China War veteran, probably.

“Shame. I’m surprised he’s playing,” An older man beside the scarred man said.

I wanted to tell them to shut the hell up. I didn’t want to think about D.C. That’s why I was at a baseball game instead of watching fucking CNN.

“I wonder if the people who killed the president had propped him in the chair for effect, or if he died in the chair,” Ange said.

“I bet they propped him there,” I said.

CNN kept replaying the video of the president in the oval office, behind his desk, his head rolled back, his tongue huge and black like he’d choked trying to swallow a tire. He’d been a Republican; the vice president had been a Democrat. That was supposed to change things. The man on the videotape they kept showing on CNN was neither a Republican nor a Democrat, but he claimed to be in charge. Or not in charge. It was hard to understand him because he talked fast and used a lot of Jumpy-Jump slang. The newscasters weren’t sure anyone was in charge. They looked scared. The streets of D.C. were a madhouse, and some of the other big cities didn’t seem far behind.

It wasn’t clear whether the teams were going to finish the game. The managers and umps were standing near the first base coach’s box, arms folded across their chests, talking.

Over the left field wall, there was a flash, and a hot boom. People in the stands screamed, leapt to their feet. The ballplayers sprinted for the dugouts, looking back over their shoulders at the explosion, which was a good thirty blocks away. It looked like an expanding rainbow of colors, like ripples in a candy pond.

I looked at Ange. “Shit,” she said.

It could be anything—chemical, biological, nuclear, or an accident at a crayon factory.

We waited for most of the stampeding crowd to exit, figuring their panic could kill us as easily as chemical weapons, then we fled.

The streets were filled with the sound of breaking glass and shouting, which was not unusual. There was something else, though—a thrumming that registered deep in my stomach, like the beating of drums. Mortar fire, or maybe tanks, far away. Closer, we heard the pop of gunfire, which was also not that unusual, only there was more of it than usual.

Screams rose from the direction of Waters Avenue, cutting through the other noises. Ange’s phone rang.

“You guys okay?” Ange said. I could hear Colin’s voice in the phone. “Shit,” Ange said. She turned to me. “Your building’s on fire.”

I started running.

“Hold on. It’s okay, they’re out, they’re safe,”Ange said. She grabbed my sleeve, slowed me down.

“Jeannie’s okay?” I asked.

“Jeannie’s fine. Baby still on board.”

“Where are they?” I asked, relieved to hear that Jeannie hadn’t lost the baby. With no access to a doctor, her pregnancy was such a tenuous thing.

“Outside your building,”Ange said. She told them we’d meet them there.

We passed a building with red flames licking out of a boarded up window. A siren wailed in the distance. It wasn’t the wah-wah siren of an ambulance, and the police never used their sirens any more—they didn’t want people to hear them coming.

“I already called the fire department,” an old guy standing on the sidewalk said, seeing us peruse the flames as we hurried by.

“You called the fire department?” I said.

“They’re on their way.” Purple veins blossomed on the guy’s cheeks and nose. He was probably a drinker, passing dull nights in his apartment sipping moonshine while he watched old TV shows where cops solved crimes and firemen ran into burning buildings to save crying babies.

We picked up our pace. “They’re bad news. Get away while you still can,” I shouted back.

The crack of gunfire and the booming of explosions was everywhere. Something was happening.

A baritone honking announced the big red truck before it careened around the corner. It was crawling with firemen, their faces painted red, their helmets festooned with illustrations. The truck was immaculate, the polished chrome blinding in the sunlight.

We cut into an alley. It was packed with homeless, milling around, looking ready to bolt if they could only figure out which direction to go. I thought of our apartment burning with all of my possessions in it. I didn’t have much to lose, but when you don’t have much, it sure hurts to lose what you have.

The pop-pop of gunfire was constant. Crowds of people were running in every direction. A helicopter roared overhead, just above roof level. In the east, where the explosion had been, the horizon glowed red—it looked as if everything in that direction was on fire now.

We spilled out onto Drayton. A tight cluster of Civil Defense guys with machine pistols rounded the corner and headed in our direction. We ducked into a doorway, stared at the bricked pavement until they passed. I had no idea what the rules were, what might get us shot, who might do the shooting. I struggled to understand, to put a label on this thing that was happening. It was a war, the city was at war—that was clear. But wars had two sides, and this had twenty sides, or fifty, or maybe no sides.

We cut down another alley, past people hiding behind a green dumpster. Others stared down at us from the safety of open windows in locked apartments. Above them, on the roof, were flocks of boys with guns.

Ange’s phone rang again. “Where are you?” she said, plugging her free ear.

“It’s Sebastian,” Ange said to me. “He says we need to get out.”

“Out of the city?”

Ange nodded.

“But Jeannie’s eight months pregnant!”

Sebastian said something. Ange held up a finger. “Okay, see you there.” She hung up.

“He said we don’t have a choice, things are going to get bad.”

I thought of what that economist in the wheelchair had said three years ago, during our speed-dating session. It’s not going to turn around; it’s going to get worse, and then it’s going to collapse completely.

Sebastian was going to follow the railroad tracks out of town. That made sense, to get off the roads, but the thought of the railroad tracks sickened me. It reminded me of our tribe days.

A woman screamed in one of the apartments above us. She screamed again, forming the outline of a word. It sounded like “help.” She screamed a third time, and this time it was clear she was calling for help.

Ange called Jeannie back and got them moving in our direction.

“I should warn Ruplu,” I said. We made the two-block detour to Abercorn Street, and turned the corner into an inferno. Flames roared over the roofline of the Timesaver. Ruplu was nowhere to be seen. I called him.

“It’s gone, Jasper,” he said. “Everything we worked for is gone.”

“I know. I’m so sorry.” I spotted Colin and Jeannie up ahead, raised my hand. They waved back. “Listen, we’ve been told by our scientist friend that we need to get out of the city. It’s not going to be safe here.”

There was a long silence on the other end. “Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure, yes. This guy has friends in Atlanta. They say things are going to get very bad.”

“All right, then. Thank you, friend.”

I suggested he and his family meet up with us, but Ruplu said if he needed to leave, his uncle had a little boat, and they would head down the coast to stay with relatives in Saint Augustine. That seemed like a good plan.

We joined up with Colin and Jeannie and headed toward Thirty-eighth Street.

My phone rang: I recognized the number, but I couldn’t connect it with a face. I answered it, too breathless to do more than gasp in lieu of a hello. We’d stopped running and were hugging the edge of doorways.

“I need you,” Deirdre said. She was crying. A tingle of shock ran up my balls.

“I can’t,” I said.

“You can’t what?” she said. “I don’t know where to go. There’s nobody…” she trailed off, crying. It was an angry, outraged crying.

“I can’t get to you. I’m not home,” I said. “We’re leaving.”

“I’m coming with you.” I didn’t respond.

“Please!” she added.

“Who is it?” Jeannie asked.

I covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “Deirdre. She wants to come.”

“Oh Christ! No. No way,” Jeannie said.

“What can she bring?” Colin said. It was a shock to hear Colin put it so bluntly. If you bring a keg, we’ll invite you to our party. But given the situation I guess he saw no choice but to be pragmatic. I’ve heard a lot of people say that having a child changes you.

We were crossing Thirtieth Street. We had to step over a body stretched across the sidewalk, covered with bloody bullet wounds.

“What can you bring if we let you come? Do you have money?”

“Three thousand,” Deirdre said. “A gun. Two kils of energy.”

I turned to Colin. “Money, gun, energy.” He nodded, and so did Ange. Jeannie cursed.

“Tell her to bring water filters if she has any,” Colin said.

“Get to Thirty-eighth Street,” I said into the phone. “Follow the railroad tracks east out of town until you catch up with us. Bring water filters if you have any. We’ll move slowly, but you’d better move your ass, because we won’t move slowly for too long.”

“I’m coming,” Deirdre said. “Fuck you,” she added before hanging up.

We jogged as fast as Jeannie could, through a roiling tide of people fleeing in every direction, past looters climbing into shattered store windows, past tanks rumbling down Habersham Street. Eventually we stopped running and hugged the edge of doorways, trying not to be noticed. We cut through an alley and had to step over three bodies, probably dragged from a car that was bent around a telephone pole. One had been shot in the eye, an old black woman.

There was a long burst of gunfire nearby.

“Oh jeez,” Colin said. A block away, on Lincoln Street, men with automatic weapons were executing dozens of people kneeling, hands behind their heads, in front of an apartment building.

We turned into another alley, behind Liberty, and ran headlong into four soldiers in MOP suits and gas masks. Federal government soldiers. The cavalry had arrived. With the president dead, I wondered who they were taking orders from. The VP? The secretary of defense?

“Let’s go,” one of them said, motioning with a gun “you’re being evacuated.

“Evacuated where?” Ange asked.

“Move,” the soldier said.

We were taken a block over and directed into a section of Bull Street that had been barricaded with cyclone fencing topped with spirals of silver barbed wire. There were thousands of people milling around inside the fence.

We sat on the edge of the sidewalk, in the shade.

“I’m going to go up front and see what’s happening,” Colin said. “Stay here.”

People were standing quietly, in bunches. “We’ll be safe soon,” someone said nearby. A mother was stroking her crying child’s hair. She lurched forward suddenly and vomited into the sewer grate between her feet. The people nearest scurried away, giving her a wide buffer. The woman barely noticed; she was staring between the rusted iron bars of the sewer, into the wet darkness below.

Colin came back at a trot. “I don’t like this. They’re separating people into groups—old people in one, one for younger men, another for younger women, a fourth for anyone who doesn’t speak English.”

“Why would they do that?” I asked. My pounding heart made me think that the answer was something awful, and that maybe deep down I knew what it was.

“None of the answers that make sense are good things,”Ange said. We had to get out.

We walked the perimeter, trying not to raise suspicion, looking for a way out. Up the street in Forsyth Park, three big semis were pulling out, one after the other to form a convoy.

“I think there are people in there,” I said. “I think the young males are being conscripted into the Army.”

The holding pen we were in was thinning as people were sorted into categories and disappeared through a gate at the front, near the park. Soon we’d be corralled toward the front, and then Colin and I would be separated from Ange and Jeannie.

We finished our walk back near the woman who’d vomited. She hadn’t moved; her head was still hanging over the sewer.

The sewer.

I retrieved a mangled bicycle handlebar from a trash heap. “Guys, stand so you’re blocking me from the soldiers’ view.” I pried open the manhole in the center of the street. “Come on.” I climbed down the slimy rungs of a ladder. Ange was right behind me, her red sneakers in front of my nose.

We waded down the main sewer tunnel through ankle-deep effluence. A dozen others had followed us, but they were lagging behind and keeping to themselves.

Striped sunlight filtered through sewer grates intermittently. Far ahead was a brighter area; harsh engine noises echoed down the pipe from there.

I turned right, into a smaller pipe where we had to bend at the waist.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Ange asked.

“No idea,” I said. “I just want to put some distance between us and those soldiers.”

“You think we can we take this all the way to Thirty-eighth?” Jeannie asked.

That was a great idea. If there was another juncture I could turn left and follow Drayton six blocks to Thirty-eighth.

We found the juncture and turned left. The tunnel ahead seemed to be partially blocked. As we drew closer, we could see that it was blocked by a pile of bodies. We pressed along the damp concrete wall as we went around the pile. There were a dozen or so bodies heaped in a twisted tangle. They looked to be Civil Defense. Above them, light filtered in along the edges of a steel grate.

“The federal soldiers must have killed them,” Ange said.

“Help me,” a face buried in the pile whispered. A woman, strands of her hair spilling over a booted foot. Her mouth was caked in white foam and blood. One of her arms jutted from under the leg of a hairy man. Her hand opened.

Jeannie grasped it, staring at the pile of bodies on top of the woman.

“I’m sorry, we can’t,” she said. She squeezed the woman’s hand. We hurried on, the woman’s pleas fading in the distance.

I counted six blocks, then climbed a ladder and strained to unseat the manhole cover. The first thing that came into view was a street sign: Thirty-eighth.

We crossed Thirty-eighth and hit the tracks, scurrying like roaches fleeing the bathroom light. The tracks cut through back yards and vacant lots. As we reached each intersecting street we sprinted across. Sebastian had chosen well—there wasn’t much going on around the tracks. We passed an abandoned loading dock surrounded by heaps of rusting kitchen appliances. Families were ducked down among them, hiding.

“Are there other people we should call and offer to let them come with us?” I asked. Most of our friends had their own families, their own housemates.

“Cortez?” Colin said.

Cortez. I hadn’t seen him in six months, since the night of the killing.

“He’s big and tough, and we can trust him,” Colin said.

“Yeah,” I said. I called Cortez.

He was way ahead of us, already on I-16. He’d traveled the last thirty blocks out of the city in a sewer. He agreed to swing back and meet us on the tracks outside the city.

“Good call,” I said to Colin as I hung up. I’d felt a rush of affection when I heard Cortez’s voice. Yeah, it would be good to have him with us.

We walked on, watching for Sebastian, gravel crunching underfoot.

“We should call Sophia,” Jeannie said. The name jolted me; it must have registered on my face. “She was good to us when we needed help, we should see if she needs our help now.”

Colin looked at me and shrugged. “Do you remember her number?”

Of course I remembered her number. I took a deep breath and punched it in, put the phone to my ear, listened to the ring as if it were the cry of some mythical beast.

“Hello?” That unmistakable island lilt.

“Sophia, it’s Jasper.”

Pause. “How’re you? It’s been a long time.”

“Alive,” I said. “Are you all right? We’re leaving the city. We wanted to see if you needed help.”

She said they were barricaded in their condo in one of the gated communities. Their police force was in a pitched battle, trying to repel gangs storming the walls.

They were barricaded. Hopes I hadn’t even felt welling up were dashed. And now that I was conscious of them, I felt like a sick bastard for hoping that her husband had left her, or died.

I filled the others in.

“They’ve got to get out of there,” Ange said. “Sooner or later the mob will get in, and they’ll kill everyone.”

“There’s no way out!” Sophia said, her voice hitching. She’d heard Ange.

We’d used the sewers, and so had Cortez. The gated communities must use the same sewers as the rest of the city, if nothing else. “I think I know a way. I’m going to have Cortez call you and guide you out. You remember Cortez?”

She did. “Jasper, thank you for thinking of me,” she said before she hung up. I called Cortez. He promised to get her out. He told me not to worry. I fought back tears, glad I’d called Sophia.

“There they are!” Jeannie said, pointing. Up ahead, Sebastian was sitting on the rail. He shimmered a little in the afternoon heat.

When Sebastian spotted us he ran to meet us, laughing, his arms spread for hugs. “Look, a little good luck.” He pointed ahead. Good luck, indeed. We were near the perimeter of Savannah’s rhizome barrier—ahead of us lay a wall of bamboo, broken only by scattered pines. But a train had been through recently, slicing away the bamboo that had grown in the tracks. As I watched, a dozen people hurried up a ridge from the roadway and fled along the tracks. We would make good time as long as the trains kept running. They’d better keep running—they were the only transport in and out of Savannah.

“Where are we going?” I asked no one in particular.

“We should head to Athens,” Sebastian said. “They’re establishing a communal setup there—cutting edge, very cool. Most of the smaller towns are grown over, and all the cities are going to end up like Savannah if they haven’t already.”

“This all part of the master plan?” I asked.

“We are the master plan, Jasper,” Sebastian said, clapping my back and giggling. The Zen virus bastard always had a koan ready.

“I always wanted to be a master plan,” Colin said.

“Remember what they taught us in fifth grade?” Sebastian said, holding up a finger. “We can be anything we want, if we work hard enough and believe in ourselves.”

“They really taught us that horseshit, didn’t they?” Ange said.

“Hold on,” I said, still looking at Sebastian. “I really want to know: did you expect the bamboo to spread like this?”

He chuckled. “No. No one expected this. But nothing works exactly the way you planned, and it’s still probably better than the alternative.” Sebastian started walking toward the tracks, and the rest of us followed.

“What exactly was the alternative?” Jeannie asked.

“World war. Countries will always choose war over starvation if forced to choose.”

He made it sound like he and his egghead friends had a crystal ball. The bamboo screw-up made it clear that they didn’t know half as much as they thought they did. It hadn’t slipped past me that for the first time Sebastian had inserted the word “probably” into his claim that the bamboo was helping rather than hurting.

“That’s all well and good,” I said, “but is anyone planning to fix the royal fuck-up that this bamboo has turned into?” I asked.

“People are working on it. It’s a tough problem, though—the bamboo is engineered to be resistant to herbicides, and even if you can design an effective herbicide, the root systems are engineered to disconnect after a time, so you can only kill a tiny cluster at a time.”

“Wow, look at that girl run!” Colin said, pointing.

Deirdre was sprinting toward us with her head down. Dread, and a little lust, washed over me at the sight of her. She glanced up, spotted us, and immediately slowed to an easy walk. She was wearing plain old shorts and a t-shirt. It was so un-Deirdre-like to see her dressed down. There were more people on the tracks behind her—more refugees fleeing the chaos. We wouldn’t be lonely.

By the time Deirdre reached us she wasn’t even breathing hard.

“So let’s get the fuck out of here,” she said by way of greeting, and walked right past us. We hoisted our packs.

Deirdre. Sophia. It was as if my past was collapsing in on me.

“I’d forgotten how charming she was,” Colin said as we followed her into the narrow tunnel cut in the bamboo. “I don’t understand why you broke up with her.”

Walking on train tracks is a pain in the ass. The gravel in between the railroad ties is rough and uneven, and the nubs of the cut bamboo didn’t help, so your instinct was to walk on the ties. But they’re never evenly spaced, so you’re constantly adjusting the length of your steps. Every so often I would resolve to ignore the ties, pick up my head and just walk, but my gaze kept drifting down, hypnotized by the ties underfoot, and I’d find myself stutter-stepping again.

Within an hour we hit patches where the bamboo was growing back through the tracks, and that added to the challenge. And then there were the insects—sand gnats buzzing in my eyes and ears, little dragon mosquitoes biting my ankles.

“Anybody have insect repellant?” I asked.

“I do,” Sebastian said, reaching to pull his pack off without slowing. But Deirdre beat him to it, tossing a tube over her head without turning. It landed on the tracks in front of Jeannie, who retrieved it, squeezed a blob for herself, and passed it on to me.

“Thanks,” I said. No answer.

For once, I realized it wasn’t hard to understand what Deirdre was feeling. She resented having to ask me for help. She didn’t like asking anyone for help, and our history made it worse. But at the same time, she felt she owed me. So she hated me and felt grateful at the same time.

We hit a steep bend, and suddenly there was Cortez, lounging in the middle of the tracks, his back propped on an enormous pack.

“Ladies. Gentlemen,” Cortez said.

Everyone shouted out and hurried to greet him. More hugs ensued.

“Is Sophia out?” I asked Cortez as I hugged him.

“She’s underground. We’re meeting them about five miles ahead.”

“Hey, I know you,” Deirdre said.

“I worked for you five, six years ago,” Cortez said, shaking her hand. “Good to see you again.”

Deirdre looked off toward the tops of the pine trees. “Shall we onward?” she said. She squeezed past Cortez and walked on. The rest of us followed.

“So what are all those federal troops doing in the city?” I asked Sebastian, since he seemed to know everything.

“The feds are trying to retain control of the country. Remember last year when all U.S. troops were called home from overseas, after Lake Superior was nuked? That was the first step. The fed has decided we’re at the tipping point, and drastic measures need to be taken to keep us from slipping into chaos.”

“To keep us from slipping into chaos?” Cortez said. “I think that ship has already sailed.”

Sebastian gave him a little grunt of a laugh. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

I didn’t like the sound of that at all.

“To your left! Your left!” Cortez called to a ragged group ahead of us. A woman carrying a crying baby glanced back, called out to her group in Spanish. They drifted to the right, letting us pass. The tracks allowed us to walk two abreast, but no more; we had to go single-file when we passed someone.

“Speaking of chaos, did anyone hear about what happened in New York City on Thanksgiving?” Cortez asked.

“What?” Ange said.

“Word spread that the parade down Fifth Avenue was going on, for the first time in six, seven years. Thousands of people showed up—moms brought their kids to show them the big floats, everyone was feeling a little hope, a little lift that things were getting better.”

Cortez bit at one of his fingernails, spit the sliver out. “Then the parade comes. The floats were awful nightmare things, the marchers covered in blood. Some guy was walking holding up a dog’s head with the eyes gouged out. Kids were crying and screaming. The Jumpy-Jumps had put the whole thing together.”

“I don’t believe that,” Colin said .“It sounds like an urban myth. It’s got to be or we would’ve heard about it on TV or the radio.”

“Maybe, but how much of this shit do you think they’re still putting on the air?” Cortez said. “That just helps the Jumpy-Jumps.”

Nobody answered.

We walked in silence, lost in our own thoughts and fears. Colin was half-carrying Jeannie, sweat pouring down his temples. She was awfully pregnant.

They were leaving me even further behind, I realized, moving on to a different phase of life. The grownup phase. I was stuck in perpetual late-adolescence, going over the same ground again and again.

All of us were moving backward, I realized. We were homeless nomads again. Everything we had worked for, all of the progress we’d made had been torn from us in a single afternoon. I didn’t even have a jacket, and I’d worn my old sneakers to the game. It had all been so sudden that I couldn’t wrap my mind around all of the implications.

Up ahead, two people were heading the wrong way on the tracks. Her walk was unmistakable: the quick sway of her narrow hips, the short steps, as if she were walking downhill. The energy of it, the eagerness, despite having just hiked two or three miles through a sewer. She waved, started running toward us. Her husband trotted behind, not looking as eager. Ange shouted her name, then Jeannie. They ran ahead. The three of them met in a triple-hug.

I guess I was expecting Sophia to keep her distance from me, out of respect to her husband, but even while she huddled with Ange and Jeannie she was looking past them. She came right to me and hugged me. “How’re you?” she said in my ear. It felt good to be in her arms. Way too good; I felt a familiar tingle of electricity, a fluttering in my stomach.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“For sure, for sure?”

“For sure, for sure,” I replied, an old island saying we’d made our own, long ago. I let go, drifted back as others greeted her, as she and Jean Paul were introduced to Sebastian.

I was suddenly afraid the feelings I’d had for her so long ago would resurface, along with all that pain. It would be easy to do if Ange and Cortez hooked up. It’s easy to fall into unrequited love if it’s the only kind available. I looked hard at Sophia, testing myself, ready to flee inside myself if I felt those feelings blossom. Not too bad, so far. Maybe the Jasper who’d fallen so hard for Sophia was gone—bludgeoned with a shovel, shattered by a gunshot, choked by a cat fetus.

We camped on a trestle, thirty feet above a sluggish stream—high enough that the bamboo couldn’t reach us. The stream wasn’t moving fast enough to generate any energy, and the sun was down, so we kept our ancient solar blanket and river skimmer packed. Cortez pulled a huge hunk of cooked meat wrapped in a plastic bag out of his pack and sliced it up with a scary hunting knife while Sophia and Jean Paul brought out some bread, peanut butter, and cookies they’d manage to grab as they fled. Colin and Jeannie retrieved water from the stream and hooked the water filter to the energy pack. The filters were one thing we hadn’t had in our first stint as nomads that would make this trip a little easier. Ah, progress.

We sat along the edge of the trestle, our feet hanging over the edge, and ate dinner. And lunch, for that matter.

“What is this?” I asked Cortez as I worked to dislodge a piece of meat jammed between my back teeth.

“Just eat it,” he said, his voice low.

“I just like to know what I’m eating,” I said.

He sighed. “Dog, okay? You’re eating dog.”

“Okay.” I was hungry enough that dog was fine. I just wanted to know. “Thanks.”

Below us, oil glistened on the black water.

“It sucks to kill a dog,” Cortez said.

An image flashed in my mind, of Cortez holding out food, luring a dog to him, then cutting its throat, then butchering it. I hadn’t realized he’d gotten that destitute since losing his place. “I bet it does.”

“It sucks to kill anything,” he added.

“Yeah,” I said. I knew what he was referring to.

“Boy, what I wouldn’t do for a moist towelette,” Colin said to no one in particular, wiping his greasy fingers on bamboo stalks.

When it got dark we lay in the tracks, our asses and elbows dangling over the stream between the ties.

“Somebody tell Deirdre to turn off her music,” Colin said. “She’s had it on for half an hour.”

Deirdre was on her back, eyes closed, her arms cradling the back of her head. From ten feet away I could hear the buzzing of her music pod.

“Deirdre,” Cortez called. Then again, louder. Deirdre didn’t flinch. Cortez dragged himself up, went and tapped Deirdre on top of her head.

“What?”

“We need you to turn off the music. We’ve got to conserve our energy.”

“Fuck you, I brought most of it.” I recognized the music bleeding out of Deirdre’s earphones. It was her own.

“I know you did,” Cortez said, “but when you’re part of a tribe, everything is community property. We all take care of each other.”

Deirdre sighed loudly. “Fine.” She rammed the pod into her pack.

“Is anyone’s phone working?” Ange asked.

“Nope,” Colin said after a pause. “Ours is dead. Nothing.”

Cortez had a radio. Most of the stations were off the air, but a few were still broadcasting. While we prepared to travel, we listened to a report. New York was in flames. Seattle was in flames. Los Angeles and a few other cities were under the control of federal troops, but elsewhere federal troops were battling various warlords, gangs, corporate entities, police, and fire departments that had claimed control of territory ranging from city blocks to entire states. General Electric had claimed ownership of a chunk of upstate New York and declared it a sovereign nation. At least that’s what the radio said. They didn’t sound all that certain. The feds had announced that all males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five should report for military duty. Evidently it was written somewhere that they were allowed to do that during an emergency. The radio guy sounded more certain about that.

“Let’s be ready to move in about ten minutes,” Cortez announced. “Statesboro’s about twenty miles. It would be nice to make it there by tonight.” He turned to Jean Paul. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but it would be safer if you changed clothes.”

“What’s wrong with my clothes?” Jean Paul asked. He was wearing a green designer jogging suit.

“You don’t look poor. It’s best if we look like we have nothing worth killing us for.”

“Excuse me, but who exactly put you in charge?” Jean Paul said, balling his fists on his hips. The immature part of me perked up, hoping Jean Paul would make the mistake of provoking a fight, which he would lose badly. The mature part of me knew it was every tribe member’s job to make sure there was peace and harmony within the tribe.

“We did,” I offered. “Not exactly in charge, I guess, but he chairs the ‘keep us alive’ committee.”

“He’s also in charge of wardrobe,” Colin added.

Jean Paul didn’t look at us. He just pulled off the jacket and squatted next to his pack, muttering something under his breath as he dug through it.

As we trudged forward, the ties glided by beneath our feet, the bamboo giving the illusion that we were moving briskly. Occasionally there were breaks and patches in the bamboo; these were usually filled with groups of refugees. As we passed them, many begged for food. In some places an entire half-acre might be relatively bamboo free, but for the most part it was omnipresent.

“So,” Cortez asked, joining me. “You got a girlfriend these days?”

I laughed at the absurdity of the question, given our current situation. Cortez grinned. He was clearly trying to lighten me up a little.

“No, not really. How about you?”

“I’m taking a break. A spiritual celibacy fast.”

“Really? Why’s that?” That would mean he was out of the Ange business, at least for the time being.

He struggled for words. “A lot of reasons, I guess. One of them you know about.”

“Yeah. Can’t say I’ve been feeling very romantic myself these days. But I’m also tired of being alone, you know?”

“Yeah.”

Up ahead, Sebastian shouted. He, Colin, and Ange had stopped. They were eyeing a huge trailer park buried ass-deep in bamboo.

“What is it?” I called. Sebastian waved us on. He wasn’t smiling for a change.

Then I noticed the smell.

I’d seen a lot of dead bodies—everyone who doesn’t live in the elite enclaves has—but I’d never seen anything like this. There were thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands. Men, women, children, filling a dried pond between the tracks and the trailer park, a tangle of arms and legs and faces and muddy clothes, the occasional bamboo shoot pressing up between them.

“They all look Latino,” I said.

Sophia’s eyes went wide when she got in sight of them. She put her hand over her mouth and began sobbing. Jeannie put a gentle hand over Sophia’s eyes and led her away.

“Foreigners, probably,” Ange said. “People don’t take kindly to strangers competing with them for food when there isn’t enough to go around.”

“I don’t think locals did this—not this many people.” I thought of the holding pen we’d recently escaped, how they’d separated out the foreigners.

As if on cue, a train whistled in the distance. We pushed into the bamboo and waited.

The engine was rigged with a long, low, V-shaped blade, like a snow plow for bamboo. The cars rumbled by, drowning out all other sound. Federal troops armed to the teeth stood on top of many of them. There must have been a hundred cars.

“Supplies for the troops, coming from Atlanta,” Sebastian said. “That’s where the closest push packages are stored.”

“Push packages?” Colin asked.

“That’s what the military calls them—packaged supplies for troops, stored for years for just this sort of occasion. Each one might contain upward of a million bottles of water, a hundred thousand MREs, generators and fuel to run them, tents, everything the well-dressed soldier might need.”

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

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

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

“So how’ve you been?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That was an astute assessment. Thank you.”

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

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

“Sure. Tall guy, curly hair.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Ever?” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is it?” Ange called down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a long pause. I glanced back, wondering if he’d heard me.

“They couldn’t,” he said.

“Bullshit,” I shot back.

“They couldn’t. There has to be some die-back in the population—the resources left on the planet can’t support anything close to the current population.”

“So, you purposely made it inedible?” I stumbled, clutched at a clump of bamboo to keep from falling and fell anyway, the bamboo bending to slow my descent to comic slow-motion. I’d tripped over a curb. Sometimes you didn’t know where the road was until you were on it.

“Welcome to Statesboro,” Sebastian said. “And to answer your question, yes, they did it on purpose. As I’ve been saying all along, one to two billion people are going to die by the time this is over. The idea is to keep it from becoming four or five billion.”

I told Sebastian that the whole thing sounded like demagoguery to me before falling into angry silence.

We passed a guy in a hammock who was either sleeping or dead. He didn’t open his eyes to look at who was passing, so he might have been dead, but he wasn’t sallow or decomposing, so he might have been sleeping.

Ange picked out an old Southern mansion on Main Street for us to squat in for the night. She loved old houses. It had a wide green porch and a massive magnolia tree in the front yard, and it sat in the shadow of the town’s massive water tower, a fat kettle wearing a conical hat resting on five legs.

The front door opened into an ornate living room—gold stuffed chairs with flower patterns, a huge mirror with a rococo gold frame. A table was covered in framed family photos, some of them recent, some ancient. Sometimes it was easy to forget that people had lived entire lives in these houses.

The biggest photo was also the oldest, maybe from the late 1800s. A family of seven were posed outside this exact house. Dad was seated in the center, scowling, hands on knees, in his Sunday best. Two older women, one probably his wife, the other maybe a sister, were seated on either side of him. One woman was holding a book, the other a sorry little bouquet of wildflowers. A row of teenaged children stood behind them. No one was smiling; the two teenaged girls had stark, haunted eyes; the others just looked exhausted.

Most of the color pictures were happy ones: a father with a round belly holding a toddler at the beach; a woman dressed in black regalia accepting a degree; a new bride clutching a colorful bouquet of roses. Everyone looked bright-eyed and ridiculously healthy.

There were only a few recent photos. The people in them looked a lot like the people in the oldest photo, only in color.

“I wish we had a chance to talk. There are so many things I want to say to you.” Sophia said softly. I turned away from the photos to face her. She glanced toward the hallway.

“Maybe we’ll get the chance,” I said, knowing I should discourage any suggestion that something remained between us, but nonetheless dying to know what Sophia might want to say to me.

Cortez put his duffel on the coffee table, then disappeared into the kitchen. He came out clutching eight stemmed glasses and set them around the table.

“Hey guys?” he called. “Everyone?” People filed into the room, and Cortez encouraged everyone to take a seat. He pulled a nearly full bottle of gin from his pack.

“You are a god,” I said as he started pouring. “Where’s Deirdre?”

I called, but got no answer. Two or three others shouted her name, including Sebastian, who sang her name more than called it.

“What you want?” she said. She was standing at the top of the stairs wearing a silk nightgown, munching on a chocolate bar, a bottle of pills in her other hand.

“That’s my nightgown!” Jeannie said.

“Hey, that’s our chocolate!” Jean Paul said.

Deirdre took a big bite of the chocolate. “No, we’re a tribe, so it’s all our stuff. Look at all this great stuff I found stashed in the bottom of people’s packs! Ange even had some Valium to share.”

“You went through our stuff?” Ange said. “You piece of shit.”

“Oh, I’m the piece of shit? I can’t use my own energy because it’s for the tribe to share, but you can have your own little personal stashes of chocolate and drugs hidden in your packs? Fuck you all.” She disappeared down the hall.

“We were going to share that chocolate,” Jean Paul said. “We were waiting for the right time, like Cortez with his gin.”

“You don’t need to explain yourself, we trust you,” Cortez said. “Let’s not let Deirdre poison us. Let’s drink, and have a good time.”

I lifted my glass. “To Cortez, who brought us booze, and dog.”

“To Cortez!” everyone said.

“Dog?” Ange said. “Fuck, were we eating dog?” She took a long swallow from her glass.

We had a good evening. We played a game of Truth or Dare by candlelight, and found out that Cortez had had the most lovers in his life (about forty, he estimated) and Colin had had the least (four—that’s what happens when you married at twenty-six and were a dweeb in high school). We learned that Jeannie thought her best feature was her boobs, and Sebastian thought he had perfect toes.

It felt bad to be laughing and having fun while Deirdre sat alone, listening to us, but three different people (Sebastian, then Cortez, then I) made pilgrimages to her door and implored her to join us. Her answer was the same each time: Fuck you.

Jean Paul didn’t play either. He hadn’t said a word to me since they joined us. He hadn’t even looked at me. I think he’d enjoyed confronting me at that nightclub years ago because he’d been in his element, among his friends. Here, he was the outsider.

When the Truth or Dare game petered out, Jeannie got everyone singing. I felt like a little moonlight and solitude, so I slipped out the back door.

The swimming pool was empty, and filled with bamboo, but there was a concrete patio that must have been poured extra-thick, because the bamboo hadn’t penetrated. I stared up at the sky. I loved the night sky, because the moon didn’t have chipping paint or rust and wasn’t sprouting weeds, and the stars weren’t flickering out due to a lack of power. On the contrary—the stars had been growing progressively brighter as the lights on terra firma went out, and now the night sky was breathtaking. I could see the Milky Way, a spectacular swirl of silver tinged with blue and red.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Sophia said behind me.

I took a sip of gin. “It’s the one thing that gets better as everything else gets worse.”

“For sure,” she said. She moved up to stand beside me. The crickets chirped in the bamboo, their cadence cold, almost mechanical.

“It’s been a long time since I last saw you,” I said. “You haven’t aged at all, it’s remarkable.”

“Thanks. You haven’t either.” I knew that was a kind lie. I’d lost one of my bottom teeth since I last saw Sophia, just for starters. “And actually, I’ve seen you a couple of times since then.”

I looked at her, questioning.

“When you first moved back to Savannah, I found out where you lived from Ruplu’s father,” Sophia said. “Once in a while I would drive past your apartment and watch for you. I saw you a few times, walking to work or going out with your friends.”

“Why didn’t you stop and say hello?” I asked.

“Because you asked me to stay out of your life, and I owed you that much.” There were four white plastic lawn chairs around a plastic table on the patio. Sophia pulled one out and sat. “I never got a chance to say how sorry I was for what happened the night I bumped into you at that bar. I wanted to go after you when they threw you out. I felt terrible.”

I chuckled.

“Why are you laughing?” Sophia asked.

“That same night I was dragged into an alley by Jumpy-Jumps and watched them murder a half-dozen people. They held a gas gun to my face, and as far as I can figure the only reason they didn’t kill me was because I was poor.” And then of course there was the part about them making me eat a cat fetus, but I figured I’d skip that.

Sophia looked stricken. “I’m so sorry.”

I shrugged. “It was a long time ago .I laughed because being kicked out of the bar doesn’t really register on the stress meter from that particular evening.” I took another big swallow from my glass.

Sophia stood. “I’d better get back inside.” She left out the obvious: before Jean Paul sees me out here with you. “I just wanted you to know that I never stopped loving you.” She hurried inside, giving me no chance to respond.

I swallowed the rest of my gin, those long-dormant feelings twirling in my stomach. With an effort that felt almost physical, I squashed them. I headed back inside. I got into bed feeling a perfect buzz—not enough to set the room spinning, but enough to kill the existential hum, enough to tuck me in and tell me everything would turn out just fine. Drinking always made me feel better, and made me think nice thoughts.

My door opened with a soft whine, then squeaked shut.

“Hi.” Ange said.

“Hi.”

“Is this okay?” She ran her fingers down my arm.

“Yes. Perfect.”

“I don’t want to be alone right now.”

“Me neither.” I ran my hand over her hip, down her thigh, pushing away pangs of guilt that Sophia might hear us. The guilt was spectacularly stupid—I realized. I owed Sophia nothing. What had been between us was long over, and had been nothing but mist and daydreams to begin with.

“You sure you don’t want to crawl into Sophia’s bed instead? Or maybe Deirdre’s?” She laughed.

“I’m sure,” I said, wondering if she’d seen us on the patio. I kissed Ange’s neck, her jaw. She had an incredible flaring jawline. It was too dark to see the blaze of tattoos that covered her ribs, but I could feel them, making the skin there slicker.

Later, we lay tangled together, dozing. A dream-image of a leering Jumpy-Jump floated into my mind and I jolted, waking Ange. She rubbed my arm, reassuring. It was nice having someone there in the dark when nightmares came.

“It’s kind of amazing how long we’ve been fucking around without screwing up our friendship,” Ange whispered drowsily.

“It’s hard to believe,” I said. “People say it can’t be done, but we proved them wrong.” What would my life have been like without Ange? I didn’t even want to contemplate it. It’s much more bearable to be single and alone when you’re not really alone.

“I’ve always wanted to ask you about something,” I said. “You once said that if a guy didn’t have the nerve to ask you out point-blank, you knew there was no way it could work with him.”

“Mm. I don’t remember, but I can see myself saying that.”

“Hypothetically, if I’d had the confidence to ask you out back then, would you have tried the boyfriend-girlfriend thing with me?”

Ange rolled over, scooted up against the headboard. Outside, a dog was whimpering. “You really want the truth?”

“Yes.”

She folded her arms under her breasts. “You were sweet, and interesting, and fun, but you were too much of a boy. Those are all good traits in a friend, even a fuck friend. But not a boyfriend.”

“Fair enough. I can see that.” I think I’d even seen it then.

For a moment I considered asking Ange if she wanted to try the boyfriend-girlfriend thing now. If I wanted to pursue a relationship with Ange, now was the time to ask. But even as I thought it, I knew I was years too late. Regardless of the sex part, she played the part of the female friend who gave me advice on how to get the girl. She couldn’t also be the girl.

It was more than that, though. When times were good, it was worth the risk to fall in love, because the risk was low. People died of cancer, got hit by cars, but mostly they lived long lives. Now, falling in love was a sucker’s bet. The odds were long, and favored the house.

“You know, I think you’re tied for my best friend in the world,” I said.

“Me too, sweetie.” She took a deep breath, let it out, scooted down and rolled over.

I drifted off to sleep feeling hungry, but good.

I was out of bed and in the hallway before I was awake enough to register that someone was screaming. Deirdre was screaming. Her door flew open and Sebastian ran out, chased by Deirdre, who had a knife. She slashed at Sebastian, cutting his upper arm wide open before he got clear of her and down the stairs. She stopped, crazy with anger. Cortez and I, the first to reach her, kept our distance.

“What happened?” I asked.

“He stuck me with a needle while I was asleep.” Deirdre said, probing a spot on her neck with trembling fingers. “Oh god, I think he infected me with that fucking virus.” She looked past us; there was an awful fear in her eyes. She screamed and charged for the stairs; I ducked into a doorway to let her pass, but Cortez stood his ground. He grabbed Deirdre’s wrist as she went by, and twisted. Deirdre’s feet came out from under her as if by magic; the knife thumped to the floor. Cortez dropped to his knees and wrapped his arms around her from behind as she struggled. I grabbed the knife.

“Calm down, calm down,” Cortez said, but Deirdre went on screaming. Her screams were deafening—it brought back memories of her flash concerts in the squares.

I went downstairs, past the others, who were trying to figure out what the hell was going on, and shoved the kitchen door open. “Did you infect her?” I shouted at Sebastian. He was examining his wounded shoulder. Blood was dribbling off his elbow, splattering on the floor.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. He looked up at me, grinning like a loon. “How could I not? Every minute is excruciating for that poor girl. Can’t you see it? I alleviated the suffering with one pinprick.” He snapped his fingers.

“It’s not up to you!” I said. “You don’t get to decide that for her.”

He shrugged. “I did, though.” A few drops of blood dripped onto the tile floor. Sebastian tisked and shook his head, still smiling. “Don’t worry about it. She’ll thank me in a few hours.”

“You’d better take a walk until we can calm her down.” It was Ange. Sebastian nodded, grabbed a kitchen towel and headed out the back door.

“I’ll kill him,” Deirdre shouted from the next room. “I’ll fucking kill him. I don’t want to be like you!”

“Not good,” Ange said.

“No, not good.” We went into the living room. Cortez had Deirdre in a full nelson.

“Did he really infect her?” Colin asked.

Deirdre grew still and looked at me, eyes wide. When I nodded, she threw her head back and let out a squeal of such terror and anguish that I stumbled backward. Cortez slowly released his grip on her and let her sink to the floor.

I went outside.

The morning was surprisingly crisp for March. A light breeze rattled the bamboo. Jeannie and Ange were already out there, talking in low tones.

“Sebastian’s got to go,” I said, shaking my head.

“That’s what we were just saying,” Jeannie said. “As soon as he’s physically able, we need to send him packing.”

“What a nut case,” I said. “I think all of these Doctor Happy people are a little off-kilter.” I twirled my finger near my temple. “That virus might make you happy, but it also makes you a little crazy.”

Ange and Jeannie nodded agreement. Inside, Deirdre was sobbing.

“It’s probably not a nice thing to say, but she’s probably better off with the virus, though,” Ange said. “Not that I’m condoning what he did.”

I smiled, kicked my toe against the steel porch rail. Maybe she did, but I still felt a sick dread at the thought of what she was going through in there. It must be terrifying, thinking of that virus racing around in your brain changing the chemistry, changing your personality, the way you think about things.

There was no way we could travel with Deirdre in the state she was in, so we waited. Sebastian kept his distance, lounging on the porch two houses down, his feet propped on the rail, humming, sometimes bursting out laughing for no apparent reason.

I spent some time in my room, some exploring surrounding houses looking for salvage. After five or six hours, the living room had finally grown quiet, so I ventured in to see how Deirdre was doing.

Cortez was still with her; they were sitting on the hardwood floor, a couple of glasses of water beside them. Deirdre was staring at the floor, her eyes wide. Cortez nodded a greeting as I took a seat on the couch.

“How is she?” I asked.

Deirdre looked over at me. “Why are you asking him?” I felt a chill as I looked at her face—her new face. It was nothing like the old one. The belligerent eyes and the withering, sarcastic twist of her mouth had vanished. Instead she was a mix of wide-eyed amusement… and something else. It ran like a ripple just under her skin.

She threw her head back and laughed as if I’d just said something absolutely hilarious. She laughed and laughed, finally subsiding into keening gasps and the occasional giggle.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

Deirdre considered the question, running a hand through her hair. “I feel… just peachy. Like the cherry on top of the sundae. Like the apple of every boy’s eye.” Shepatted Cortez’s calf. “Thanks for being my designated driver.” She stood, twisted at the waist to the right, then the left, like a runner getting loose.

“I think I’ll take a walk,” she said. We watched her saunter out the door.

Cortez and I looked at each other. “Wow,” I said. “She didn’t say ‘fuck’ once.”

“I know. Eerie.”

I followed her out, wondering how one takes a walk when the world is clogged with bamboo. From the vantage point of the empty front stoop I scanned the block. The bamboo was thrashing halfway across the street. The disturbance continued in a crooked line. A giggle drifted on the breeze, just loud enough for me to hear.

It was hard to grasp the notion of a happy, carefree Deirdre. There would be nothing recognizable left of her.

Across the street I spotted her rising out of the bamboo, climbing the ladder on the water tower. She was moving fast, a huge smile frozen on her face, her little legs stretching to reach the rungs.

Cortez joined me on the stoop.

“Where the hell is she going?” I said, pointing.

Cortez spotted her and grunted surprise. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s gonna climb to the top and sing songs about lollipops.”

I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Deirdre! You won’t be able to get down.” I know she heard me, because she paused for a second, but she kept climbing. More tribe members came out, alerted by my shout.

“What is she doing?” Jeannie asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. “She said she was going for a walk. I didn’t understand the old Deirdre, let alone this new one.”

“Deirdre!” I called. “Please come on down.” She was up high now, thirty or forty feet. The top was at least fifty. It made me dizzy just seeing her up that high.

“Deirdre,” Ange shouted, “it’s too high! Come down!” She put her hand over her mouth.

Deirdre reached the top, a narrow catwalk that skirted the bottom of the tank. She reached up, pulled herself onto the catwalk and turned to face out. She was still laughing, her chest and shoulders heaving with the violence of it. At least I thought she was laughing; from this distance laughing and crying would look about the same.

She lifted her leg and swung it over the railing.

“No!” everyone screamed in unison. Everyone but me. My lungs were frozen; my heart had stopped. Deirdre swung her other leg over so that she was sitting on the narrow rail.

She pushed off into empty space.

She looked like a little doll, a doll a naughty little girl had hurled over a railing. Her clothes flapped in the wind as she fell.

I was the first to reach her. She’d landed in a dry drainage canal, on a bank covered with stones. I pulled her head into my arms and held it. The others broke through the bamboo in ones and twos, and cried, or cursed, or asked Deirdre’s lifeless body why.

Sebastian came last, his arm bandaged with white socks.

“Pack up your stuff and get out,” I said.

“She just needed to give it time,” Sebastian said.

“Go,” I screamed.

Sebastian shrugged, turned away. “I’m so sorry,” he said as he disappeared into the bamboo.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Ange. I put my hand over hers and squeezed. Another hand clapped my other shoulder. Cortez.

“Everyone?” It was Colin, shouting from the house. “I think the baby’s coming.”

“Go on,” Cortez said. “I’ll take care of Deirdre.” He gave my shoulder a hard squeeze, then nudged me toward the house.

I pulled myself up, my legs wobbly, and headed toward our temporary home.

Jeannie was on the couch in the living room with Colin kneeling beside her, holding her hand. Colin looked up. “Can you help me?”

I wanted to argue that I didn’t know anything about delivering a baby, but I could see in his expression that he wasn’t asking because he thought I’d be any better at it than anyone else. He just wanted me by his side.

I knelt beside the couch.

Ange grabbed Colin’s wrist, pulled him up, and repositioned him at Jeannie’s head. “Your job is to be up here with your wife. We’ll worry about this end.”

Ange looked at me. “Ready?”

“What do we do?” I asked. I was so disoriented; I needed time to deal with what had just happened.

Ange shrugged. “We’ll figure it out.”

I turned. Sophia was kneeling behind us, her cheeks stained with tears. “Can you and Jean Paul build a fire and boil water?”

“Have you ever done this before?” Jean Paul asked.

“I’ll do it,” Cortez said, glaring at Jean Paul. I hadn’t seen Cortez return.

“Try to find some clean towels, too,” Ange suggested. “If there aren’t any, clean clothes.”

I think we were just lucky. The baby’s head was pointing straight down, and we didn’t have to do much except catch him when he came out.

Colin and Jeannie had a son. I both envied and pitied them. What would it be like, to be sick with worry every minute that something awful is going to happen to your child?