around the borders of the screen.
“Christ, what now?” I said. We stepped into the bar. Every eye in the place was on that screen.
A guy with a prosthetic eye that was too big compared to his real one shouted at the screen. “Nuke ’em all. What are we waiting for? Take ’em out.”
“What happened?” Cortez asked the old guy at the door.
“They nuked Lake Superior, made all the water undrinkable.”
I felt a falling sensation in my stomach. “Who did?”
“North Korea. They said it’s because we sink their fishing trawlers.”
“They send those giant fishing factories right up our coast, of course we’re gonna sink ’em,” the guy with the bad eye said.
The U.S. Navy sank pretty much any non-U.S. fishing boat they found within two hundred miles of our shores, even though international waters technically started twelve miles out, but I wasn’t going to say that out loud. But hell, the why didn’t matter. Lake Superior had been nuked. I didn’t know what the implications of that were, but I knew it wasn’t good. The biggest body of fresh water in the country, poisoned.
Cortez touched my back. “Unless we’re gonna get drunk, let’s get out of here. I can’t take this right now.”
“I can’t afford to get drunk in a bar,” I said. “Plus, I should get home.”
A dog was dying in the gutter a block from Pinky’s, flies buzzing around its eyes, its lip pulled back in a death snarl. It was a puny thing, mostly ribs. The eye facing up fixed on us, then started to go unfocused. Its little chest stopped rising and falling. Now it would turn blue.
“What next?” Cortez asked, sitting on the curb.
I looked up at the apartment building rising beyond the dog, the rusted black bars on the windows, vinyl siding broken off in places, exposing splintered plywood underneath.
“A few years ago an economist told me things were just going to keep getting worse. She said that when there isn’t enough food and water and energy, everyone will fight over what’s left, and the losers of those fights will get desperate, and will do desperate things. It’s starting to look like she was right.”
“
He had a point.
Cortez heaved a big sigh. “I can’t stand the thought of going home, facing my old man’s sarcastic bullshit.”
“Well, come on home with me.”
“I can’t. I gotta get this work done.”
Cortez stood, saluted the little fallen dog and walked on, past the row houses with their busted railings and rotting wood, trash piled up on the sidewalk where it’d been thrown out the windows.
I was eager to get home to watch the news and talk to Colin and Jeannie about what was happening. What good did it do anyone to irradiate our water? The U.S. had been doing some ruthless shit around the world that made me awfully uncomfortable, but at least it made sense. Our navy quietly sank fishing boats because that left more fish for us to catch, but they didn’t dump poison in the Pacific to kill all the fish. It was as if entire countries were acting like Jumpy-Jumps.
As we got closer to Cortez’s house we heard that telltale cracking, like ice underfoot or twigs snapping. “
It was the yellow variety—not as bad as the green, but worse than the black—and it was coming up right outside Cortez’s apartment house. Some of the stalks were already three feet tall, trembling and popping as they grew. The asphalt in the road was broken into a thousand fragments as nubs of new stalks pushed through. How the hell had it gotten inside the rhizome barrier that’d been sunk around Savannah? That barrier went down ten feet.
Private Civil Defense people (I didn’t recognize their insignia, but this wasn’t my neighborhood) had cordoned off the area. Technicians were at work tearing up the street with road-eaters, trying to set up a rhizome barrier to contain the bamboo before it spread.
Cortez’s place was inside the perimeter. Inside the sacrifice zone. His father owned the place—Cortez had been born there—and just like that, they were letting the bamboo have it.
“There’s my old man,” Cortez said, sounding utterly defeated. His father was standing in a crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk. He was shaking his head, making angry gestures at no one in particular.
“No way this made it through the barrier,” he said when we were within earshot. “Goddamned biotech punks carried it in and planted it, I’m telling you. Or terrorists—damned Jumpy-Jumps.”
Cortez and I nodded. Let his dad go on thinking it was some adolescent bio-tinkerer who’d originally loosed the bamboo to impress his friends. I didn’t know how the bamboo had jumped the barrier, but I knew it wasn’t biotech punks who’d set it loose in the first place, and so did Cortez.
“You seen Edie or Pat yet?” Cortez asked. They lived in the apartment next door, or used to.
“Nah,” his father said. He walked off without another word.
“Do you have a place to stay?” I asked Cortez.
He was staring glassy-eyed at the apartment. He was in serious need of a shave. “That fucking bamboo. It’s coming back to bite my ass good.”
“I wonder if it’s actually doing any good. It didn’t stop North Korea from nuking Lake Superior, but who knows? Maybe this whole city would be dust without it.”
“I don’t know about that, but one thing I do know—if I find out who planted this patch right in my back yard, he’s gonna be one sorry son of a bitch.”
“I’m glad it wasn’t me,” I laughed. “So, do you have a place to stay? Want to crash with us?”
“Hey, thanks, J—I appreciate it.”
Colin met us on the porch. “Did you see what happened?”
“About Lake Superior? Yeah,” I said.
“Did you see what happened to North Korea?” Colin asked.
We picked up our pace. “No, what?”
Colin held open the screen door, nodded a greeting to Cortez. “It’s gone.”
The news was showing aerial images of a silent, smoldering city. The gray, twisted wreckage reminded me of a heavily used ash tray.
“They bombed all the major cities and military installations. Some North Korean troops surged into South Korea, and they’re still fighting, but that’s it, besides survivors in the countryside.”
I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad. None of my friends seemed to know either. It was a relief, but it was scary. I couldn’t imagine what those survivors were experiencing right now.
The red
Their military analyst, a bald colonel with no right arm, explained that the military trained for this sort of mobilization, that it even had a name: Operation Repatriation. The troops would destroy any large weapons they couldn’t take with them, then they would be readied to deploy across the U.S. to reestablish order if that became necessary.
“I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not,” Colin said, “assuming they’re really deployed.”
“They can’t be worse than the police or the Civil Defense goons,” I said.
“Maybe we’ll find out,” Cortez said.
Cortez slept in the kitchen, between the counter and the table, because my bed was in the living room and he said he didn’t want to crowd me. By the time I woke, he was gone—he’d left a note saying he was going to salvage what he could from his apartment, and would see us later.
After breakfast I wandered into Pulaski Square, where the tribe was still camped. They had so few possessions: machetes, cooking pots; one kid was clutching an old action figure. From what I could see, no one was in charge. Most of them were sprawled on the lawn dozing; a group of older men were playing some sort of gambling game that involved tossing carved stones.
