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.
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
“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.
