looked up and down the interstate. He dropped his trash bag and squatted, pulled a garden trowel from his pack and dug a hole in a bald spot. Ange dropped a bamboo root in the hole, pushed dirt around it. Ange had decided to participate fully in this operation; she said it didn’t feel as much like rape as spreading Doctor Happy had. I, on the other hand, was there solely because I was afraid for my friends’ safety, and there was safety in numbers. Plus I didn’t have anything else to do. Colin and Jeannie were having a date night, and no one else was around.
Cortez poured water over it from an old soda bottle. We headed back toward the on-ramp. It had taken all of thirty seconds.
“How are you doing with that asshole Charles?” Cortez asked as we walked.
Ange filled him in on the latest; Cortez looked more pissed with each word. I peppered Ange’s monologue with the occasional “Can you believe it?”
“You want me to take care of him?” Cortez asked when she’d finished. “I can soften his dick in a hurry.”
Ange looked tempted. “He deserves to be hurt, but I don’t think that would help. Thanks, but no, I have to do this myself.”
Cortez looked disappointed. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
Ange stopped short, holding out her arms. “Shh. Listen to that.”
We listened. Splitting, popping, crackling sounds lit the air, as if the entire city was built on ice that was giving way. It was an eerie, awesome sound. The other teams had been hard at work.
“Unbelievable,” Cortez said.
We headed up Abercorn, under a canopy of oaks that cloaked the sky, as sirens began to compete with the hungry sound of awakening bamboo.
The effect was breathtaking. Broughton Street, the main retail strip, was completely impassable, choked with bright green bamboo stalks. Just as Sebastian had said, they pushed through the asphalt like it was cardboard.
The air smelled of blooming azeleas and piss. A group of young Dada wannabes in mock police, cowboy, and FedEx outfits strutted toward us, each sporting his own signature cool-walk. I put my arm across Ange’s shoulder protectively. She smiled; I knew what she was thinking: she had a seventy-pound dog with her, and Uzi had no qualms about putting a hurt on someone, whereas I had once eaten an unidentified fetus, and did all but thank the Jumpy-Jump who fed it to me.
On Drayton Street two kids, a boy and a girl, were dragging clumps of cut bamboo along the brick sidewalk. They turned into an empty lot between dilapidated buildings.
“Good job, Emma; good job, Cyril!” an old man said. He stood next to a half-finished bamboo hut, canted but looking impressively sturdy. That was probably Grandpa; Mom and Dad and Grandma were likely dead. This was probably not how Grandpa had planned to spend his retirement.
In Jackson Square, more bamboo huts and curtains. On Bull, a group of homeless, mixed with cleaner people who were probably Doctor Happy victims, cheered on the bamboo as it chewed up Bull Street and surrounded police headquarters on Victory Drive. Machete-wielding cops and soldiers chopped at the sprouting bamboo in the blazing May heat; another ran a ditch-digger around the perimeter of the outbreak. They looked hot, and pissed off.
“Very nice, very nice,” Ange said. She was reading a report texted from Sebastian. “And listen to this: a priest in Southside is being charged with spiking the sacramental wine with his Doctor Happy-infected blood. Wonderful.” Ange had clearly drunk the Kool-Aid.
Some of those infected seemed to feel it was their duty to give it to others—biological evangelists, spreading the word of peace and joy and all-night street parties. Mothers poked their children with bloodstained pins while they slept.
On Whitaker, a tank was easily tearing through the bamboo outbreak, blazing a trail for troops and shoppers. But there weren’t many tanks in Savannah, and tonight Sebastian and his followers would plant more bamboo.
The news was now reporting Doctor Happy outbreaks in the northeast and west. There were bamboo outbreaks happening all over the world—China, Europe, South America. I hadn’t realized how large the Science Alliance’s operation was. Sebastian wouldn’t say whether all of these outbreaks had originated with his group in Atlanta, or even whether their group was a cell in a larger group. They had to be part of a larger group, to be able to pull off such a massive stunt.
There was a party raging in Pulaski Square. Twenty or thirty revelers were pounding on drums and trash cans while others circled them, doing some sort of square dance, hooking arms with each other. There were also at least two couples having sex right in the open. Opposite the square three cops stood on the sidewalk in front of a drug store, automatic weapons dangling from their fingers.
I caught a glimpse of movement on the roof above where the cops were lounging: hands, dropping something. A white oval plummeted, hit the sidewalk with a splat right at the cops’ feet. Blood spattered everywhere. A blood-bomb? That was a new twist. It drenched the cops, the sidewalk, the side of the building. The cops lifted their weapons, pointed them all over, looking for an assailant. Then they seemed to notice that they were covered in blood. They wiped frantically at their eyes and lips, looking scared as shit.
Shouts and laughter erupted from the crowd of partiers. The square dance dissolved; some of the revelers trotted toward the cops.
“Welcome to reality!” someone shouted.
A lanky guy wearing nothing but a loincloth that looked like a diaper ran up to one of the cops and patted him on the shoulder as others crowded around, cheering.
The cop pressed his automatic weapon into the lanky guy’s gut, and fired. The guy staggered backward. Before he hit the pavement the other cops were spraying gunfire into the looming crowd. Screams lit the air; people crumpled, slammed into each other in the frenzy to escape.
“No!”Ange and I shouted simultaneously. Ange moved toward the melee; I grabbed her elbow and yanked her away, toward cover.
One cop’s head suddenly snapped back; chips of scalp and brain sprayed on the drug store window. The cop went down as the window shattered. I looked around, trying to figure out who was firing on the cops. I spotted the flash of a muzzle from inside a copse of bamboo half a block behind us.
Two men stepped out of the bamboo—Jumpy-Jumps, with rifles raised, peering through scopes. The other two cops convulsed, their already blood-soaked bodies blossoming fresh as they fell to the pavement. It wasn’t taking the Jumpy-Jumps long to turn these new developments to their advantage.
Back home, I showered before joining Colin and Jeannie in the living room to watch the news. We watched footage of hundreds of Jumpy-Jump gunmen swarming the bamboo-choked streets of Chicago, then of a tank firing on insurgents in San Antonio. The Dadas were taking advantage of the chaos, spreading even more chaos.
What terrified me most were not the images, but the reporters’ voices. The usual calm, even cadence was gone, replaced by shrill, breathless, unpolished descriptions that gave me the feeling that they might drop their microphones and run at any moment.
“I wonder if Sebastian’s Nobel laureates expected
“The way Sebastian talks, they have it mapped out down to where each body is going to fall.”
“Let me see the phone,” Jeannie said to Colin, wriggling her fingers. She called Ange and asked her to ask Sebastian if this was all part of the plan. Jeannie pulled her mouth away from the phone. “He says it draws energy away from the large-scale conflicts that are bubbling, and weakens the central government, and that in the long run those are good things.”
I’d heard this sort of crap before, from politicians. Whatever the results of their policies, they used some sort of tortured logic to argue that it was really a good thing.
I was struggling to get a sense of whose side I should be on. By nature I tended to favor anyone who took on the establishment. The establishment had proven that it was good at acting like it knew what it was doing, but was utterly incompetent underneath that facade. On the other hand these scientist-rebels seemed to be taking huge risks, treating the world as if it were a giant laboratory. Neither side seemed like a safe bet, and that was disconcerting.
I drifted off to sleep with my window open, serenaded by the ubiquitous crackle and pop of the bamboo, which drowned out much of the gunfire, and the screams of the night victims.
By morning, things had quieted considerably. We watched the news reports. The Jumpy-Jumps had melted back into the general population. The bamboo was still spreading.
The burble of the phone woke me. Our phone was so old that it didn’t play music any more; instead it made a
