Soft Apocalypse

in his voice. “She probably figured she was gonna die of a heart ailment or something.” White foam gushed out of her mouth, spewing five feet, hissing and steaming on the pavement.

“What the fuck could that old lady have done to deserve that?” I said, keeping my voice low. It was sick, everyone standing there watching people get gassed.

“It’s what you say, not what you do,” the kid said.

“Yes,” I said. “And what you know.” Right now Savannah wasn’t a healthy place for educated people, especially those who wrote articles for the underground papers, or made milk-crate speeches in the squares.

“The wolves are always at the doors,” the kid added as the DeSotos picked up the old lady’s body, carried it to a flatbed truck, and tossed it on top of a pile of twisted corpses.

“This isn’t right! This isn’t right!” a guy with out-of-date two-pocket pants and a button-down shirt shouted from the group still to be gassed. A DeSoto chopped him in the neck with the butt of his gun; he fell into the guy in front of him, grabbed hold of the guy to keep from falling. I turned to leave, then paused. The guy who’d shouted seemed familiar. I turned back and studied him, trying to think of how I might know him. It had to have been a long time ago.

The guy sniffed—a nervous habit—and suddenly I had it: he’d been a teacher at my high school. Mr. Swift, my English teacher in eleventh grade. That had been a million years ago, in a time when there was always enough food in the refrigerator and you let the crystal-clean water keep running and running out of the tap while you washed your hands. Mr. Swift had been a nice guy, had taken a liking to me. That had been rare. I’d been a quiet student, bright but not at the top of the class, and not ingratiating enough to draw attention from my teachers. Mr. Swift had been the exception—he always seemed to pay special attention to me, and it had felt good.

Mr. Swift looked toward the crowd. “Somebody help us.Somebody stop this.” Nobody moved.

Then he looked right at me.

“I know you. Don’t I? Please.” Thirteen, fourteen years later and he still remembered my face.

“Is he talking to you?” the kid next to me asked.

“I don’t know,” I muttered. I felt awful. There was nothing I could do. If I opened my mouth I could very well end up in line behind Mr. Swift. So I just stood there, too ashamed to simply turn and walk away, watching them pull people from the little crowd of condemned until it was Mr. Swift’s turn.

“This is tyranny!” Mr. Swift shouted as they dragged him out. He got a face full of the vapors.

Poor Mr. Swift. There wasn’t a bad bone in him. The wolves were always at the door—that was the truth.

I left the edge of the crowd, my mood pitch-black. Had I really just been to a dating service? How could there still be dating services when people were being murdered in the streets?

The wave of hopelessness I’d felt at the dating service returned, pounded me so hard that I sank to the curb, pressed my palm on the hot, gum-stained pavement to steady myself. Was this it? Was there nothing ahead, nothing but heat and boredom, viruses and bamboo? Just more and more of this and then everything would collapse completely? What could I do? I forced myself to get up, and moved on.

I accidentally kicked a bony, blue-veined ankle as I stepped around a group of sleeping homeless people spilling out of an alley onto the sidewalk.

“Sorry,” I said. My victim didn’t answer, just drew her ankle under a black plastic tarp that was her home.

I passed the coffee shop, the Dog’s Ear bookstore.

I paused, backtracked to the window of the bookstore. The display was mostly gardening, DIY manuals, cookbooks, but there were a few others: Existential Philosophy: An Introduction, Socialism Revisited, Light of the Warrior-Sage.

Years ago Mr. Swift had told me that whatever I do, keep reading. I’d read in college, but after that I pretty much stopped, except for newspapers. I rarely saw people reading books any more. Maybe I should do some reading, in memory of Mr. Swift.

The bookstore was closed—permanently, by the looks of it. I went into the alley, stepping between people sleeping out the heat of the day, and climbed in a broken bathroom window in the back. The bathroom was beyond odious; the toilet looked like it had been used a hundred times after the water had been turned off.

I hurried into the bookstore, opened the blinds on a side window, and held books up to read the titles by the sunlight streaking through. Most of the dusty books were in heaps on the floor, but they were still pretty much sorted by classification. I didn’t know what I was looking for; I just wanted some way to get Mr. Swift’s voice out of my head.

I gave the store a careful once-over when my eyes had adjusted to the dimness. Rough wooden beams and fat pipes ran the length of the ceiling. Pipes. It blew my mind that they used to be filled with drinkable water.

Books reminded me of Ange. She’d always had a book in her hand when she was in grad school. I dug around in anthropology, tossing titles over my shoulder, stacking a few possibilities to the side.

I picked up a book titled A Field Guide to Medicinal Herbs and Plants of Eastern and Central North America. I opened it at random; the names of the herbs were bolded in the text: Echinacea, Golden Seal, Eucalyptus, Feverfew. In the back were lists of herbs and their medicinal uses. Pain relief. Inflammation. Enlarged prostate. Ruplu was finding it impossible to stock medicine, and no one could manufacture it locally. We hadn’t had any aspirin in two years. I wondered if there was a market for this sort of stuff, or if I could create one? Back in the day, herbal remedies had been sort of a rich yuppie thing, but that was when all you had to do if you had a headache was grab a bottle of Tylenol.

The last thing I grabbed was Light of the Warrior-Sage, from out of the window display. I liked that phrase, warrior-sage. I found a plastic bag behind the counter, stuffed the books into it, and took off.

As I turned onto Jefferson Street I caught a whiff of the river. Even ten blocks away, when the wind was right the stench of dead seafood and ammonia cut right through the city’s default smell of piss on brick.

When no one was watching I pulled open the steel cellar hatch in the sidewalk in front of a burned-out storefront. I ducked down the steep staircase, crossed a damp basement, pushed out another hatch, and popped out into my secret retreat—a little courtyard surrounded by four-story walls which shaded the tiled floor most of the day. It had been part of a bar many years earlier. I tipped a mattress that was leaned up against a wall, spread my books and lay down to do some reading.

Mostly I read about medicinal herbs. Some of them grew wild. I imagined making forays out of Savannah to hunt for them in the vast bamboo jungle beyond. I’d have to learn how to prepare them—I knew nothing about herbs, I didn’t know if you dried them, or what.

My phone jangled. I checked the number, wondering if Maya was

calling back. No—it was Ange.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey, sweetie! How are you? I was just thinking about how I never

see you any more. I miss you!”

The words felt so good. I wanted her to say them over and over. “I miss you, too,” I said.

“You doing anything right now? Want to hang out?”

Yes, I did. I asked where she wanted to meet.

Chapter 6 STREET HERO

Fall, 2032 (Two years later)

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

There was a touch of gray in the newly grown mustache that Dice kept licking, yet he still acted like he was twenty, his arms splayed as he walked on the balls of his feet like a gangster. Slinky had long, greasy hair and