Will McIntosh
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* * * *
Illustrated by Chris Nurse
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This is Will’s fourth story in Interzone. It is set in the same world as ‘Soft Apocalypse’, which was shortlisted for both the British Science Fiction Association and the British Fantasy Society awards for best short story of 2005. Will has also sold stories to Black Static, Asimov’s, Postscripts, Strange Horizons, CHIZINE and others. He is currently working on a Soft Apocalypse novel.
* * * *
A cop was doubled over, clutching a parking meter, puking on the sidewalk as a half dozen onlookers wearing white virus masks gawked from a safe distance. Ange stopped on the bottom step of her porch, thirty feet away.
The puking went from a trickle to a sudden bursting hydrant gush, then back to a trickle. It was spattered in a six foot swath, steam rising as the hot sidewalk boiled it. The cop made awful guttural sounds when the puking slowed enough, as though his intestines were about to spill onto the sidewalk as well.
“What is it?” a fat, grey-haired woman asked.
The bald guy standing next to her shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s a bad one.” They took a half-step back; the other onlookers followed suit.
Ange watched as the puke turned pink, then red. Gasps and oh my gods from the crowd. The cop’s eyes bulged as the puke lost its thickish chunky quality and became smooth, bright red blood. He dropped to his knees, weaved as blood stained the front of his blue uniform a deep purple, then collapsed to the pavement.
“Jesus,” someone behind Ange muttered as a few final spasms squeezed the cop dry. He lay still, his eyes vacant. In the distance, a siren warbled, growing closer.
Ange turned away. Chair was watching from the porch. A skinny, bald, bow-legged guy in his fifties stood next to him. The guy had a backpack slung over his shoulder, and he was crying. Ange joined them.
The guy gawked at Ange, starting at her toes and slowly climbing to her dark green eyes. “Wow, would I like to make love to you,” he said, wiping tears from his cheek.
Ange fixed him with her best bitch stare. “Yeah, thanks, let me get back to you on that.” The way he said it was so fucking odd she didn’t know how to take it. Not a hint of flirtation, more like he was just stating a fact.
“A new one,” Chair said, motioning toward the cop with his chin. “Got to be engineered. Too quick to be a natural virus.” Ange nodded. Chair sighed, rotated his wheelchair in a tight circle, waited for Ange to open the screen door for him. Chair was wearing shorts, the elaborate black steelwork of his long-nonfunctioning bionic legs exposed. Even Chair was putting vanity aside in the scorching heat. The skinny guy followed Chair in. He walked loose, his arms swinging, like he owned the freaking world, and he now sported a shitass grin apropos of who the fuck knew what.
“Who’s he?” Ange asked Chair as they stepped inside.
“Ange, this is Sebastian. Delivery man from the Science Alliance in Atlanta,” Chair said, raising his eyebrows significantly behind delicate eyeglasses that looked absurd on his mastiff head.
Ange’s heart rate doubled. “Shit, you’re kidding. I had no idea. You don’t look like an eco-terrorist.”
“I don’t feel like an eco-terrorist,” Sebastian said, shrugging.
Ange followed them into the living room. She dropped onto a couch coated with dog hair and swung her legs onto the coffee table, forgetting that one of the legs was broken. It collapsed into a three-point stance. “Shit,” she whispered. Uzi trotted into the room, hopped on the couch next to her, circled a couple of times and dropped like a stone, pushing his ass right up against her.
“You know, the government’s not fucking around,” Ange said. “If you pull something and get caught, we won’t go to jail; the cops’ll just drag us into the street and shoot us.”
“No doubt,” Chair said. “If you don’t agree with what we’re doing, move out.”
“It’s not that I don’t agree—”
“It’s just that the stakes are too high. Yeah, I get it. What’s worth risking your life over, Ange? A couple of billion people are going to die if things stay business as usual. If we can do our part to cut that in half, is it worth the risk?”
“We don’t know for sure that billions of people are going to die.”
“Yeah, we do. For sure.”
“We do,” Sebastian chimed, nodding.
“It’s all based on stochastic models,” she said. “It’s incredibly speculative.”
Chair glared at her. “How many times do scientists have to be right before people give them a little credit? And you of all people, about to get your doctorate, should have some faith in them.” He snared the remote from the arm of the couch, stabbed the power button. CNN came on. The president was having a news conference.
Almost on cue, the TV jingled and a text message scrolled across the bottom of the screen: ange. i want to see you. i’m free monday, tuesday, or thursday for dinner. can we meet one of those nights? albert.
Even the way he phrased things made her want to puke. I want to see you. Like she was his fucking servant, not his doctoral student. The thought of sitting through another dinner with him, of having to put up with his constant jockeying to touch her in seemingly innocent ways—
Chair ignored the message. “They keep warning us, and we just keep carrying on as usual, and things keep getting worse. ‘We have to keep the economy going,’ the president says, while the fucking ocean is lapping at our ankles—”
“Okay, fine. I know the score, I don’t need a lecture.”
The screen door squealed and slammed. “Damn, what happened out there?” Rami breezed into the room, carrying a stack of newspapers. He emptied a different paper dispenser every day—his way of protesting their editorial policies.
As Chair introduced Sebastian to Rami, Ange got up and hovered near the doorway. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be part of this meeting.
“At least they’re doing something,” Rami said when Ange voiced her objections. “When I think of the scientists, I think of people sitting on the sidelines, doing a lot of talking.”
“We’re sick of sitting on the sidelines. We’re taking matters into our own hands,” Sebastian said. He didn’t look like a scientist, either.
“You know I’m in,” Rami said. “So what’s in the bag?”
“I have two deliveries for you.” Sebastian unzipped his backpack. Uzi trotted over, stuck his nose into the pack and snuffled, probably hoping it was filled with bacon.
“Uzi, get your butt over here,” Ange said. Uzi just wagged his tail.
Sebastian pulled something from the pack with a flourish, held it between thumb and forefinger. He was giggling. There was something definitely wrong with this guy. “Bamboo root,” he said. It was a cone-shaped tannish nub, crowned with four or five tiny lemon fingers, reaching skyward. “It’s engineered to spread like crazy. It can push through concrete, blacktop, anything. It’s fast—you won’t believe how fast.”
“Nature taking back its territory by force. I like it,” Rami said. “The authorities will suspect the Jumpy-Jumps. It’s got their whimsical sensibility.”
“But without the sick surprise at the bottom of the box,” Chair said.
“We want to coat the entire southeast with it, in one coordinated attack, to bring commerce to a grinding halt. We’ll plant it at night, in places where it will cause maximum disruption—busy roads, shopping plazas, tourist attractions. We need to slow things down, clog the roads so vehicles can’t operate, keep the military busy, slow the violence in the streets. This stuff will have them pulling their hair out.”
Ange went over and sat on the arm of the couch. “Could that stall food transport? People might starve.”
“It could make transport difficult, but people shouldn’t literally starve. Some may.”
“That’s pretty fucking cold,” Ange said.
“Depends on how you look at it. Are a few thousand lives lost now worth saving a few million later?”
“What’s the other delivery?” Chair asked.
Sebastian smiled wide, spread his arms. “You’re looking at him!”
Chair frowned. “You’re the other delivery?”
Sebastian nodded.
“So what can you do?” Rami asked.
“It’s not what I can do, it’s what I carry. In my blood.” He fished around in his backpack, pulled out a plastic bag attached to a thin tube. He pressed the end of the tube against the crook of one elbow, demonstrating that it was for drawing blood. “It’s called Doctor Happy, and it’s guaranteed to take the fight out of anyone infected with it.”
* * * *
It was scorching hot by afternoon, and they couldn’t afford the juice to cool the place, so they moved to the canopied roof with a boom-box, cranked up some Necrobang, and planned their first Doctor Happy infection party.
While Sebastian bled himself, Ange helped embed short pins in the leather fingerpads of some VR gloves that Rami sometimes wore as a tech-dude fashion statement. Including Chair and Rami, Ange counted eleven members of the infection gang. She knew most of them.
She was still uneasy about this; the whole thing smelled so much like a Jumpy-Jump operation. The plan was to spread the virus pretty much at random, trying to target males, and anyone who looked pro-business or pro-government, when possible. Sticking those who would benefit most from the virus—gang types, political leaders, police—was deemed too risky. She made it clear that she would work as a spotter, making sure no cops caught on to what they were doing, but wouldn’t help infect. She felt guilty about not being a team player, and when Chair met her eyes, she thought she saw masked disappointment.
As they worked and planned, Sebastian kept them focused on the big picture: they were engineering a softer landing for the impending collapse. He kept reassuring them that the secret cabal of Nobel Prize winner-types who were calling the shots knew what they were doing.
Rami broke out a quart of home-brewed grain alcohol and passed it around. When the boom box reached a particularly breezy song, Ange and a few others broke loose.
Chair nodded to the beat, watching people who had movable limbs with only a hint of envy. “Carpe diem,” he shouted over the music, “but never forget that we’re partying on the fucking Titanic.” He took a long swig from a soiled plastic cup.
Were things really going to get worse? Ange didn’t want to believe it, but it was hard to ignore police puking blood on the sidewalk in front of your house. On TV and in the papers, the assumption was that things would get better soon, that the stock market would recover, the Jumpy Jump movement would be crushed, the war with China would end, that we’d get a grip on melting icecaps without dramatic changes to our ‘way of life’. But there’d already been supersized changes to Ange’s way of life. She missed air conditioning, daily showers, eating anything she wanted at any time.
Pouring sweat, semi-buzzed, they hit the sidewalk market on Barnard Street, where the crowds were packed tight, and hopefully too focused on the deadly-serious business of buying food and clothes and video games to notice pinpricks.
Rami led the way, winding through the crowds so naturally. He stopped to examine a table of sorry-looking pistols locked in a glass display case, then turned and bumped into a guy in an expensive suit, grabbing the guy’s shoulders as if to steady himself. His timing was perfect; the guy didn’t even flinch from the stick.
Others weren’t so smooth. Junie tapped a potato vendor on the shoulder, as if seeking his attention to ask a question. The vendor jerked, spun around to face her when the needle stuck him. When he saw Junie had nothing in her hand, he relaxed. She asked her potato question, and he answered impatiently and turned back around.
The real trick was reloading the pin with blood. They had to get it only on the pin head, not on their gloves. Leaving bloody smudges on people was not advisable; people would rather have a rat on them than someone else’s bodily fluids. They all seemed to be doing well, though, getting at the uncapped vials of Sebastian’s blood hidden in their pockets.
Once Rami got comfortable, he played his bumping trick on a few cops and soldiers, despite what they’d agreed. It went off without a hitch. The guy was fearless.
The victims would suffer mild flulike symptoms for a day or two, then they would feel extremely peaceful and happy for the rest of their lives. Hooray for them.
* * * *
Albert stood as she approached the table, opened his arms for the obligatory grope-hug, sporting a grin he probably thought was dashing or sophisticated. She steeled herself as he wrapped his arms around her and rubbed both hands up and down the back of her arms.
“Well,” he said as they took a seat at the small, candle-lit table. “Are we going to bullshit, or are we going to get intimate?”
“I thought we could talk about scheduling my defense,” Ange said, ignoring the question. “Did you read the revised draft of the discussion section?”
Albert shook his head. “I haven’t had time. I’ve got my own work to think about. As soon as it’s finished, I’ll send you a copy. I’d like to get your comments.”
That was supposed to make her feel important, that he would deign to seek her opinion of his own lofty work. How had she ever admired this man? How had she not immediately seen through his paper-thin posturing? He was like a silent movie actor, exaggerating the role of professor to the point of caricature. Just looking at him made her skin crawl. His thick lips and nostrils, the professorly grey beard grown to hide his weak little chin.
He took forever to order, quizzing the waitress on what type of tuna they served, listing off the genus and species of the possibilities as if this might jog the waitress’s memory. When he finally finished putting on his ‘see how smart I am’ show and the waitress had escaped, he reached across the table, brushed a wisp of hair out of Ange’s eyes. She wanted so badly to pin that soft little hand to the table with a fork. But she wanted that PhD, and the patent rights for her vertical-weave grass. She wanted it so, so bad.
“I shouldn’t have done that, should I?” Albert said, a naughty boy smile on his face.
“When do you think I can defend?”
He took a deep breath, rubbed his beard thoughtfully with stubby thumb and stubby forefinger. “I really think you need to run a third trial.”
“What?” No. No fucking way. He didn’t just say that.
“Not as elaborate as the first two. If we’re going to get a major corporation interested in marketing the grass, the research has to be impeccable.”
Ange felt like she was going to cry. “But I was hoping to be on the job market in September. I can’t run another study and defend before then.”
“Well, why don’t we discuss it further, after we’ve both had time to process?” He pulled his shiny brown leather satchel (which screamed I am a college professor) into his lap, pulled out his appointment calendar, and laid it on the table. “My wife will be out of town the first half of next week. Why don’t you come over to my place Tuesday night for dinner? I’ve been studying Swedish cuisine, I think you’ll be impressed.”
“Your place?” Ange said.
“Around eight?” Albert said. He stared at her, pen poised to record the appointment.
A realization hit her then, as she stared at Albert’s raised eyebrows, with a certainty bordering on prescience. He wasn’t going to let her defend her dissertation, or allow her to patent and market the grass, which he and the university owned a stake in, until he fucked her. That was his price. Until then, he was going to delay her, and make her sit through a thousand excruciating dinners.
* * * *
Uzi tugged on his leash, panting and wagging his tail, trying to pull her across the street toward Jackson Square and its Live Oaks. He lived to pee on those massive trunks.
“Uzi, no,” Ange said, as if that would phase her semi-retarded dog. She pulled him along the sidewalk, toward Oglethorpe, and the psych department.
There were more people in the park than usual. More adults, anyway. The kids were always there, playing their incomprehensible games, jumping among big colored dots that they laid along the squares and sidewalks in different patterns each time, alternately frowning in concentration and laughing like hell, dousing each other with industrial-strength waterguns, rolling dice the size of baseballs. But now there were also groups of adults, sitting in circles, cooking in pots on open fires. Ange suspected many were infected with Doctor Happy.
Doctor Happy had made the local evening news three days after their party—a strange new virus with symptoms the newscaster described as ‘disorientation, amotivation, and giddiness’. Sebastian said the government wasn’t going to like this virus at all. Authoritarian types are uncomfortable with people altering their consciousness—they’d rather see them vomit blood.
An ultralight helicopter buzzed overhead, casting a drifting shadow on the street. Some rich fuck probably going for a martini at Rooftop Elysium. What she wouldn’t give for a rocket launcher. When she got her PhD, she’d never become one of them. She’d live in a better place, sure, but not gated. But first she had to get the PhD. It meant even more to her than the grass patent. The patent would mean money if they could get a corporation interested, but it wasn’t money she wanted.
For four years she’d dreamed of walking across that stage, her whole family—mom, Cory, grandpa, grandma, and her bitch aunt—all watching as the university president handed her the PhD.
What do you think of your crank-addict loser drug-rehab dropout granddaughter now? She wouldn’t have to say it out loud. It would loom in the air as her friends circled her, calling her doctor. Probably none of them but her mom and Cory would actually show up when she did graduate, but the fantasy worked better when they were all sitting in a row on those metal folding chairs, watching.
It was a shallow reason to want a PhD, and it wasn’t her only reason, but goddammit, she craved that moment.
A Jumpy-Jump lounged on a stoop up ahead, watching Ange approach. He was dressed in a mock-mailman outfit, the u.s. mail shoulder patches executed in ornate calligraphy.
“That’s a big dog for such a little peanut,” he said as she drew near. Ange smiled tightly, kept her pace steady. She’d seen the guy around—he was ethnic, maybe East Indian. Long braided hair. He spoke with the singsong accent that Jumpy-Jump’s had evidently invented out of thin air.
“Where are you and your big dog so urgently needed?” He stood lazily, not exactly blocking the sidewalk, but impeding it. Ange veered into the street, cutting a wide path around him, trying not to walk scared. She hated that she couldn’t walk down the street without having some asshole harass her. Hated it.
“I’m talking to you, don’t disappear me,” he said. He moved to block her path.
Uzi snarled and lunged. Ange held his leash tight; the Jumpy-Jump leaped clear of Uzi’s snapping teeth.
A heartbeat later, there were blades all over him, jutting from his belt, his boots; he clutched what looked like machetes in both fists. “You think your big dog can protect you?” There was blood and a ragged gash on his thumb—Uzi had just caught his retreating hand.
Ange dragged Uzi backward. He was barking and snapping, scrabbling to get at the man. When she had him under control, she ran.
“I can fuck you any time I want, little peanut,” the Jumpy-Jump shouted after her. “Right here on the daylight street. Strip off your false security and live in constant fear, where you belong.”
She ran until she reached the psych building, then sat on the marble steps and composed herself.
She was so fucking tired of it, tired of people wielding power, causing her grief just because they could. What the fuck had happened to the police? When she was a kid the police stopped shit like this from happening. Now they just looked out for their own interests.
She tethered Uzi to the bike rack and headed to the department chair’s office.
Dr Stokes, the department chair, listened to her story, nodding sympathetically. By the time Ange had finished, her eyes were blazing with anger.
“That son of a bitch,” Stokes said. She shook her head thoughtfully. “I wish there was something I could do. All I can think of is for you to switch advisors. Of course Albert’s the only neuropsych person left. You’d have to start your dissertation over.”
“You’re shitting me, right?” Ange said.
“I wish I was. I can’t force him to let you defend; department chair is just an administrative position, I don’t have power over other faculty.
“Can’t he be fired for this?” Ange asked.
Stokes shook her head. “He’s tenured. You would have to go through Judicial Affairs to fire him, and there is no Judicial Affairs office any more. Budget cuts.”
“What about the Dean, or the President?”
“You’ve got to be realistic. When buildings are being bombed and politically outspoken faculty disappear in the middle of the night, incivilities just don’t mean much. There aren’t enough resources to deal with the small injustices any more. When was the last time you saw someone getting a speeding ticket?”
“This is not a speeding ticket!”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry.” Stokes stood, walked toward her door in a not-so-subtle hint that the meeting was over. “Switch specialties if he won’t let you finish. Do another dissertation. It’s the only advice I can give you. Or—” She shook her head, reconsidering.
“Or what? Or let him fuck me?”
“That’s not what I was going to say. But it’s an option.” Ange opened her mouth to curse a storm, but Stokes cut her off. “These are dark times, Ange. The streets are anarchy. A doctorate gets you off the streets and into a gated community with private security. The stakes are high. Close your eyes and think of someone else.”
Ange glared razors at her, then stormed off.
She took the long way home, wandering through the shady little squares that dotted downtown Savannah, letting Uzi pee to his heart’s content. At least one of them would get what he wanted today. And he deserved a reward for taking a bite out of that Jumpy-Jump.
The sun was low in the sky, filtering through the twisted, moss-covered branches of the oaks, adding a gold tinge to the red brick path.
She was so close. So fucking close. A two-hour defense, three signatures, and she was a PhD. She could teach at a university, or continue her research for an agro corporation.
Should she just sleep with him? Would it be a one-time thing, or would she have to put out for weeks, until the actual defense. She was so angry she wanted to scream. The whole world sucked ass.
As they approached Jackson Square, Ange stopped short. Sebastian was sitting on a bench in the square, with the Jumpy-Jump who had threatened her an hour earlier. They were laughing like old pals. Sebastian spotted her and waved; the Jumpy Jump turned, smiled.
“Little peanut! Come join us.”
Uzi growled. Ange wrapped his lead around her palm two or three times, then headed toward the bench.
“You two know each other?” Sebastian said as she approached.
“Yes indeed,” the Jumpy-Jump said. He held out a bandaged hand without getting up, looking amused, as if they had shared a joke rather than an altercation. Ange ignored his hand. Uzi let out a rolling growl that went on and on. “We began our song with the wrong note, I fear.” He dropped his hand, stretched out on the bench and sighed contentedly. “So, little peanut, what do you think of our Dada Jihad?”
Ange had read about the Jumpy-Jump movement in the paper. They were mostly poor, no jobs, no access to medical care or welfare since the depression hit, but the actual doctrine was incoherent bullshit. “I understand why you’re angry, but I don’t understand why you kill random people. What do you expect to get out of it?”
“Me?”
“Jumpy-Jumps, I mean.”
“We don’t expect anything.” He shrugged, his eyes twinkling.
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Does anything make sense? It’s all absurd. We’re just unleashing some vicious absurdity to underscore the point.” He stood, made a peace sign. “Sebastian, it was a pleasure.”
Sebastian returned the gesture. “Same here, Rumor.”
“Down is up, and sinners are saints, little peanut,” Rumor said as he turned to leave.
“My name is Ange.”
“Down is up, and sinners are saints, little Ange.”
Uzi barked once as Rumor stood at the edge of the square, waiting for a truck to pass, before sauntering between two abandoned gas hogs and across the street.
“Why were you talking to that asshole?” Ange asked.
“I’ll talk to pretty much anyone.” He reached out and scratched Uzi under the chin. Uzi wagged his tail, licked his slobbering chops. Uzi would talk to pretty much anyone who would rub on him.
“So tell me about your research,” Sebastian said. “Chair tells me your degree is in botanical biotech.”
“I’m not going to work for your friends in Atlanta,” Ange said, glaring at him. “I’d never be able to get a legitimate job once I started down that path.” It didn’t surprise her that Chair had tipped Sebastian off about what Ange was studying. Recruiting for the cause.
Sebastian smiled. “I understand. I’m just curious about what you’re working on.”
“I’ve developed a vertical weave grass. It never has to be mowed, and once it gets established, weeds can’t penetrate the weave, so no need for weed killer.”
“Nice!” Sebastian said. He rubbed on one of Uzi’s ears. Uzi put his head in Sebastian’s lap and closed his eyes. “Of course the trick will be to convince people with lawns to switch over. Anyone who still has a lawn can afford to have it mowed, and sees the waste of gasoline as a status symbol. And all the people who’ve let their lawns go probably can’t afford to plow under a yard full of weeds, reseed, and water. And lawn mower manufacturers won’t like it. They’ll lobby to block your patent. They might even have you killed.”
The words were like spikes. Ange had never considered the political side of things.
“So what’s it like? The virus.” She wanted off of this topic.
“It’s nice.”
“Nice? So, you’re happy all the time, and you don’t want to hurt anyone? You’ll even have a friendly chat with a terrorist? Sounds like a lobotomy.”
“Oh, no. It’s the exact opposite of a lobotomy. You glimpse the infinite. Just a glimpse, but that’s enough. I think if I was cracked open any wider it would be intolerable. We’re not built to experience all that emptiness.”
“Oh, now I get it. You’re basically on a permanent acid trip.” She gave him the peace sign. “Peace, love, all-is-oneness.”
An ultralight copter buzzed low over the square. Sebastian waited till it passed before answering. “That’s about right, I guess.”
“How did you get infected?” Ange asked.
“I volunteered.”
“You’re fucking shitting me. You volunteered to be infected with an incurable virus. Why would you do that?”
“My wife and daughter were raped and killed in front of me during the Atlanta water riots,” he said with a wan smile on his face, like he was talking about an old friend he missed. “I was going to hang myself; what did I have to lose?”
* * * *
The night of the bamboo party, they dressed as homeless, which basically meant getting a little dirtier than usual, looking a little more hopeless and depressed than usual, and hauling a couple of trash bags of belongings with them. Only mostly they were hauling bamboo roots and containers of water, wrapped inside belongings.
The crickets were in full stereo as she and Rami crossed MLK and headed up the on-ramp to i-16. Vehicles rumbled past occasionally, the drivers taking no notice of them. It was nice to be invisible; Ange thought maybe she should haul a bag of shit around with her all the time.
“Do you ever find yourself envying Sebastian?” Rami asked.
“Shit, no,” Ange said. “I crave a good buzz as much as anyone, but I want to come down after.” There was a nice breeze; it was almost bearable tonight.
“But he says that’s not what it’s like. He says he sees things clearer now than he did pre-infection.”
“But it’s virus-induced. Those little fuckers are doing things to his mind.” They reached the interstate, walked alongside, staying in the weeds, well away from the road.
“I don’t know,” Rami said as he looked up and down the interstate, then stopped. They dropped their trash bags and squatted. He pulled a garden trowel from his pack and dug a hole in a bald spot in the weeds. Ange dropped a bamboo root in the hole, pushed dirt around it. She had decided to participate fully in this operation; it didn’t feel as much like rape as spreading Doctor Happy had. Rami poured water over it from an old soda bottle. They headed back toward the on-ramp. It had taken all of thirty seconds.
“How are you doing with that asshole Albert?” Rami asked as they walked.
Ange filled him in on the latest; he huffed and sighed his sympathy.
“You want me to take care of him?” he asked when she’d finished. “I have friends who could soften his dick in a hurry.”
Ange was tempted. He deserved to have thugs hurt him. But as she really thought about it, imagined guys breaking Albert’s teeth or cutting his face with razors on her say so, it felt awful. “Thanks, but no, I have to do this myself.”
“Let me know if you change your mind,” Rami said.
Even before they reached downtown, they could hear it. The air was filled with cracking, splitting, popping sounds, as if the entire city was built on ice that was giving way. The other teams had been hard at work. They headed up Abercorn, under a canopy of oaks that cloaked the sky, as sirens began to compete with the hungry sound of awakening bamboo.
* * * *
The effect was breathtaking. Broughton Street, the main retail strip, was completely impassable, choked with black bamboo stalks. Just as Sebastian had said, they pushed through the asphalt and concrete like it was cardboard. Ange felt like whooping, but didn’t want to draw attention to her and Sebastian.
The air smelled of blooming azaleas and piss. A group of young Dada wannabes in mock police, cowboy, and Fedex outfits strutted toward them, each sporting their own signature cool-walk. Sebastian put his arm across Ange’s shoulder protectively. Ange smiled; she had a seventy pound dog with her, and Uzi had no qualms about putting a hurting on someone, whereas Sebastian cried when someone accidentally stepped on a bug, and apologized to his fucking dinner before eating it. But it was a sweet gesture.
On Drayton Street two young white kids, a boy and a girl, were dragging clumps of cut bamboo along the brick sidewalk. They turned into an empty lot between dilapidated buildings.
“Good job Emma, good job Cyril!” an old man said. He stood next to a half-finished bamboo hut, canted but looking impressively sturdy. That was probably grandpa; mom and dad and grandma were likely dead. Ange imagined this was not how grandpa had planned to spend his retirement.
In Jackson Square, more bamboo huts and curtains. On Bull, a group of homeless, mixed with cleaner people who were probably Doctor Happy victims, cheered on the bamboo as it chewed up the street and surrounded police headquarters on East Broad. Machete-wielding cops and soldiers chopped in the blazing May heat; someone ran a ditch-digger around the perimeter of the outbreak. They looked hot, and pissed off.
“Very nice, very nice,” Sebastian said. He was texting a report to the mother ship in Atlanta while they walked. “And listen to this: a priest in Southside is being charged with spiking the sacramental wine with his Doctor Happy-infected blood. Wonderful.”
Some of those infected seemed to feel it was their duty to give it to others—biological evangelists, spreading the word of peace and joy and all-night street parties. Mothers poked their children with bloodstained pins while they slept.
It crawled up Ange’s spine.
On Whitaker, a tank was tearing through the outbreak easily, blazing a trail for troops and shoppers. But there weren’t many tanks in Savannah, and tonight Ange and the others would plant more bamboo.
There was a party raging in Pulaski Square. Twenty or thirty revelers were pounding on drums and trash cans while others circled them, doing some sort of square dance, hooking arms with each other. Ange also saw at least two couples fucking right in the open. Opposite the square three cops stood on the sidewalk in front of a drug store, automatic weapons dangling from their fingers.
Ange caught a glimpse of movement on the roof above where the cops were lounging: hands, dropping something. A white oval plummeted, hit the sidewalk with a splat right at the cops’ feet. Blood spattered everywhere. A blood-bomb—that was a new twist.
It drenched the cops, the sidewalk, the side of the building. The cops lifted their weapons, pointed them all over, looking for an assailant. Then they seemed to notice that they were covered in blood. They wiped frantically at their eyes and lips, cursing, looking scared as shit.
Shouts and laughter erupted from the crowd of partiers. The square dance dissolved; some of the revelers trotted toward the cops.
“Welcome to reality!” someone shouted.
A lanky guy wearing nothing but a loincloth that looked like a diaper ran up to one of the cops and patted him on the shoulder as others crowded around, cheering.
The cop pressed his automatic weapon into the lanky guy’s gut, and fired. The guy staggered backward. Before he even hit the pavement, the other cops were spraying gunfire into the looming crowd. Screams lit the air; people crumpled, slammed into each other in the frenzy to escape.
“No!” Ange and Sebastian shouted simultaneously. Sebastian moved toward the melee; Ange grabbed his elbow and yanked him in the other direction, toward cover.
One cop’s head suddenly snapped back; chips of scalp and brain sprayed on the drug store window. The cop went down as the window shattered. Ange looked all around, trying to figure out who was firing on the cops. She spotted the flash of a muzzle from inside a copse of bamboo half a block behind them.
Two men stepped out of the bamboo—Jumpy-Jumps, with rifles raised, peering through scopes. The other two cops convulsed, their already blood-soaked bodies blossoming fresh as they fell to the pavement.
Sebastian was on his knees. Ange thought he’d been hit in the crossfire, but he was only crying, his face buried in his palms.
* * * *
Back home, Ange showered before joining the others in the living room to watch the news. They watched footage of hundreds of Jumpy-Jump gunmen swarming the bamboo-choked streets of Chicago, then of a tank firing on insurgents in San Antonio. The Dadas were taking advantage of the chaos, spreading even more chaos.
What terrified Ange most were not the images, but the reporters’ voices. The usual calm, even cadence was gone, replaced by shrill, breathless, unpolished descriptions that gave Ange the feeling that they might drop their microphones and run at any second.
“Did your Nobel laureate leaders tell you to expect this?” Ange asked Sebastian as they watched.
“It was one possible scenario that was discussed, yes. It draws energy away from the large-scale conflicts that are bubbling, and weakens the central government. In the long run those are good things.”
Ange got up and went to bed.
She drifted off to sleep with her window open, serenaded by the ubiquitous crackle and pop of the bamboo, which drowned out much of the gunfire, and the screams of the night victims.
By morning, things had quieted down considerably. Ange watched the news reports with the others. The Jumpy-Jumps had melted back into the general population, though the bamboo was still spreading.
“Hey gang,” Chair said, muting the TV. “I’ve got something I want to say. I’ve given this a lot of thought. I’ve decided to join Sebastian and the Doctor Happy contingent.” He pulled a pin and a vial of blood out of his fatigue jacket, lay them on his lap. “I wanted my friends to be here when I did it.”
Ange couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Not Chair. Chair was stronger than any of them. “You’re kidding, right?” she said. “You’re going to give yourself a permanent Valium drip, join the drunks in the square? You’re better than that, Chair.”
Chair flicked a lighter, held the pin over the flame. “I think I’ve earned a little respite. I watched my legs get blown out from underneath me. Got a shiny new pair from the government, who didn’t mention that they wouldn’t pay to keep them working, that the parts would become obsolete. Watched my brother die from the flesh-eating virus.”
He glared up at Ange. “Look at you! None of this has touched you.” He flung the lighter across the coffee table; it bounced, hit her in the knee. “Young, beautiful Ange, worried about getting letters after her name. Believer in the cause, but afraid to make too much of a commitment lest it tarnish her career. Don’t you dare judge me!”
He dipped the pin into the vial, held it up, its tip bright red, then jabbed it into his shoulder, deeper than necessary.
* * * *
Despite the bamboo and the recent unrest, the grocery store miraculously had both coffee and chocolate to salve the burns Chair had inflicted the night before, so Ange felt pretty good as she hit the street.
An old man was shuffling past the electric doors of the grocery store with a shit-eating grin on his face. He saw Ange looking at him, approached her and put a palsied hand on her shoulder.
“I’m 82 years old, and I just realized that everything I’ve believed all my life is wrong!” He said it hard-of-hearing loud, then burst out laughing and continued on his way. Likely off to join his comrades in the square. Ange turned to untie Uzi from the bike rack.
Uzi was gone.
“Uzi?” she called, looking up and down the street. She shouted his name in rising volume. No way, he wouldn’t run away even if he got loose. Not Uzi. But he must have—who would steal her big old mutt? She ran to the corner, a plastic bag of groceries bouncing off her thigh, and looked up and down the cross street. Nothing. Bamboo choked Whitaker two blocks north, but Uzi certainly wouldn’t go into that tangle.
She called Chair, who promised to call Rami and Sebastian and fan out to look for Uzi. Then she started searching, street by street.
* * * *
“Shhh, shhh, we’ll find him,” Rami said, his arms wrapped around Ange as they sat on the steps of their house. The sun would be down in a few hours. Uzi would be alone, in the dark.
An electric wheeming announced that Chair was coming around the corner. Ange stood, staring at the corner, willing that Uzi be the first thing she saw, straining impatiently on his leash because Chair was moving too slow for him.
Chair was alone. He looked at Ange hopefully as he rounded the corner; she shook her head no, and he pounded the arm of his wheelchair. Sebastian and a few of the others were still out. There was hope.
“He’s okay,” Rami said. “There are a thousand strays wandering the streets. No one would take him, he just got loose. We’ll find him.”
Ange spotted Sebastian, alone, heading toward them.
Then she heard a whine coming from the other direction, and snapped her head around, seeking the source. It had come from the square, but there was nothing there. Just as she began to suspect it had been her imagination, she heard it again. Then she spotted him, in the street, across the square. He was moving slowly, slowly, his head hanging almost to the pavement.
“Uzi!” she screamed. Uzi howled miserably; she launched herself toward him. Uzi stopped at the edge of the square. There was something terribly wrong with him—he looked twisted, misshapen. As Ange closed the gap she saw something dangling from his stomach.
It was a wire.
Sebastian reached Uzi first. He squatted, examining the wire. “Oh, Christ.”
“What’s wrong with him? What’s wrong with him?” Ange shouted as she wrapped her arms around Uzi’s big head. He licked her face; his tongue was dry and coarse.
“Get back! Get away!” Sebastian screamed at her.
“What’s wrong?” Ange asked.
“Get her out of here!” Sebastian said. She felt Rami’s arms around her waist. He pulled her backward; her feet bounced over the curb and across the grass as she struggled to get free of Rami’s grasp.
Sebastian pushed Uzi, and Uzi fell onto his side in a heap, howling in pain. Ange screamed his name. His underside had been shaved, and there was a long, ragged incision on one side of his belly. Ange opened her eyes wide, confused about what was happening. It looked as if Sebastian had torn open the incision and was pushing his hand inside Uzi.
A moment later he was up and running, clutching a clump of something. Of what? Of Uzi? Ange’s exhausted mind thought maybe it was a puppy. Sebastian hurled whatever it was down the street. A trailing wire spun in the air. The thing hit the pavement, bounced twice, then lay still.
An explosion ripped the air, throwing up fire and dust and chips of asphalt. Pebbles rained down through a cloud of smoke.
Ange ran for Uzi. She reached him in time to feel his breath on her skin, to see one final, misguided attempt at a lick that missed badly, then he twitched and lay still. She held his head and rocked him, looked over to where Rami was helping Sebastian stand. There were a dozen small spots of blood on Sebastian’s face, but he didn’t look badly hurt.
Ange felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Chair.
“You all right?” he asked.
Ange put her hand over his, clutched it hard. She felt as if someone had thrown her into a deep black hole. She could form no thoughts; there was no room for thoughts alongside the pain.
After a long moment, she kissed Uzi’s nose, gently lowered his lifeless head to the ground, and stood. A crowd had formed in the square. She scanned them, standing at a distance in their white masks. Who? Who?
And then she saw him, her Jumpy-Jump neighbor wearing his fucking mailman outfit and sporting a fucking maskless grin like his horse had just finished first by a fucking nose. A wave of black rage burst through her.
She stormed into the square, pushed through the crowd until she was right in Rumor’s face. “Did you do this?” she screamed. “Did you?”
He shrugged. “Who put these sharks in the water? Hard to say.”
“We’re not your enemy! We’re on your side!”
Ange lunged at him, tearing at his eyes with a clawed hand.
The world spun, a blur of muted evening color. She hit the ground hard, his rough hand pinning her throat. She felt the urge to cough, to gag, but there was no air.
“Unclench those little fists,” Rumor said, his voice ice. “Everyone is my enemy! There are no sides.”
After a terrible long moment, he let go of her throat; air squealed into her lungs as Rumor turned his back to her.
“You’re not going to live long in this world, little peanut,” he said.
Ange struggled to a sitting position as Rami hurried to her. She screamed in rage and lunged to her feet to go after Rumor again, but Rami held her firm. She looked at Uzi, sprawled on the sidewalk, his lips pulled tight in a rictus snarl. Uzi. Who was more innocent in all this than Uzi?
Beyond Uzi, a young boy was laying down colored dots, smiling under his mask, water gun clutched in one hand. The game went on, whatever the tragedy of the moment. He raised his gun, test-squirted a girl standing forty feet away from him. Ange watched the water spurt in a tight, perfect arc...
Ange smiled. “I’m okay, let me go,” she said, her voice calm. Rami let her go. She dug in her pocket and pulled out a twenty as she approached the boy. “I’ll give you twenty bucks for your gun?” she said, holding the bill out between two fingers.
His eyes lit up. “Okay.” He grabbed his gun by the muzzle and held it out to her. Ange gave him the bill, said thanks, and headed inside with the gun.
There was a half bag of blood in the fridge. She emptied most of the water from the gun and poured in the blood. Some of it missed, spilling across her knuckles, and over the plastic base and trigger of the gun. She rinsed her hand and the gun in the sink.
Rumor was still outside. He was talking to an Asian woman who seemed thrilled by his attention.
“Rumor,” Ange said as she approached. He turned, dropped his head in a you again? gesture. She raised the water gun.
Rumor laughed like he’d never seen anything so funny. “Are you going to shoot me, little peanut?”
She shot him, right in the face. He went on laughing as he turned his face from the spray, wiped his eyes. He stopped laughing when he saw that his hands were covered in blood.
“I told you, my name is Ange. My dog’s name was Uzi.”
She ran, because he probably had a gun, and it would be 24 to 48 hours before he would lose the will to use it. She crossed the square, bolted up York, jumping over homeless bedding down for the night.
Her phone jingled. She pulled it out; maybe it was one of her friends, cluing her in to Rumor’s pursuit.
No—it was a text message from Albert: ange. we had a dinner date, correct? did you forget?
Fresh rage poured into Ange’s bloodstream. Oh, had he picked the wrong fucking time to crawl up her ass. Smarmy bearded dickhead pervert Albert. Fuck him, fuck the PhD. Fuck everyone.
Blood sloshed inside the water gun as she cut right on Drayton. Why not? A cozy Swedish dinner with Albert. They could have a talk. Only it wouldn’t be about twentieth century literature or Native American mythology.
He opened the door wearing a silk shirt, unbuttoned to the breastbone, exposing his hairy grey chest.
“Well finally!” he said, struggling to look suitably annoyed yet still suave and seductive. Then he seemed to notice that Ange was panting, was dressed in a sweaty T-shirt, was clutching a water gun, and had a wild animal look in her eyes. “Are you all right?”
She brushed past him, into his living room, which was decorated with modern art prints and antique fertility statues with big dicks.
“You’re not going to let me defend unless I fuck you, are you?”
Albert pulled an earnest expression out of his repertoire. “Whatever gave you that idea? There’s no quid pro quo. I admit, I’m very attracted to you, Ange.” He took a step toward her.
She raised the water gun. He looked at it, frowning. No, he didn’t deserve bliss. She dropped it on the couch.
“What’s gotten into you?” he asked.
As she stood there, hating him, it occurred to her that she knew just how to get him.
“Dr Schmid told me how you take out your little mirror in the bathroom before every lecture, making sure your bald spot isn’t showing,” she said. “You’re pathetic, do you know that?”
Albert looked at her, stunned, his beady eyes watering. “I’m not sure why you would want to say that to me. If I’ve offended you in some way—”
“Save it,” Ange said. Her heart was pounding, her hands shaking with rage. “Everyone laughs at you. You’re a joke, especially to the women you think are so impressed by you. Everyone sees through you. I see through you. You’re an ugly, creepy, old man.”
His lip trembled. “I think you should find another advisor.”
She punched him in the mouth.
Then she left him, with his congealing Swedish fucking meatballs and his bleeding mouth. She headed home.
Every few minutes she realized that Uzi wasn’t with her, and for an instant worried that she’d left him tied somewhere, before remembering afresh that he was dead. It hurt every time she remembered.
Behind a wrought iron gate, a middle-aged man in an expensive power-suit supported a girl in her early teens who was vomiting onto an azalea bush in full bloom. The man was saying “Oh no” over and over. The vomit began to turn pink. Ange moved on. She started to cry.
She passed an exhausted-looking woman with a toddler in one arm, a bulging plastic trash bag full of their stuff in the other. Ange looked away, embarrassed that the woman might see her crying. She didn’t cry often.
She thought of what Chair had said to her last night. It had never really touched her before. None of her friends or family had died. It was all around, but it was like a movie. Not real. Stage blood. Actors. Her PhD was real, executions and flesh-eating viruses were not.
Uzi’s blood was real though, and now all the blood was real, and her PhD was not.
* * * *
There was knock on her bedroom door. “Ange?” It was Rami’s voice. She opened the door. He was grinning.
“Come on,” he said, putting an arm across her shoulder, leading her down the hall.
“What?” she said.
“You’ll see.”
Her mother was in the living room, and her brother, and her friends.
“Welcome,” Chair said. He waved her forward, held up a sheet of paper and read from it. “By the powers vested in me by your friends and family, by the laws of reason and logic and justice, and by the Science Alliance, I hereby confer upon you the degree of doctor of philosophy in botanical biotechnology.”
He handed her a rolled document with a little bow.
Tears streaming down her face, Ange opened the document as everyone clapped. It was signed by all of her friends and family—even her grandparents (though not her bitch aunt).
Ange hugged everyone.
“I’m in,” she whispered as she held Sebastian. “I’ll see you in Atlanta.”
She hugged Chair last; he held her and rocked her as she cried and cried.
“There’s one more person who wants to congratulate you,” Chair whispered in her ear.
“Who?”
“Outside. Front door,” he said.
She let him go, and went outside. She froze.
Rumor was sitting on the steps. There was a puppy asleep in his arms.
“Hello, little peanut,” he said. He stood, turned to face her. He was smiling, his eyes glassy with tears. “I can’t undo what I did, but I hope this little one will ease some of your pain.” Gently, he folded the puppy into Ange’s arms. “I’m very sorry.”
He reached into a pocket of the hunting jacket he wore, and pulled out a vial of blood. He pressed it into her palm.
“If you decide to join us, I wish you would use my blood—”
“No!” Ange said. “I don’t want it. I’m never gonna do that.” She pushed the vial back toward him, but couldn’t raise her hand very far because of the puppy.
“Maybe you won’t, but keep it, just in case.” He closed his hand over hers. “Who knows how dark this night will get.”