I found myself walking beside Deirdre. I hesitated, considered acting like I had something to say to Cortez or Colin and rushing ahead, but it was too late, it would be too obvious.
“So how’ve you been?” I asked.
“Swell,” she said. “Just Georgia fucking peachy.” The receding train’s whistle blew in the distance. “It doesn’t appear that you found Ms. Right at that little circle jerk where I bumped into you.”
“Nope,” I said. I was tempted to point out that she’d been at the same circle jerk, but I thought it best not to pursue that little nugget.
“Let’s get something straight,” Deirdre said. “Just because you let me join your little gang doesn’t mean I’m going to let you fuck me.”
“I understand,” I said. “I could never keep up with you in bed anyway. You were too much for me.”
Deirdre glanced at me, checking for sarcasm. “Damn right.” She smiled. Just a little, just with the edges of her mouth, but it was nice to see.
“Jasper,” Colin called from behind us. I stopped to wait for him. Deirdre kept walking.
“I thought you might need rescuing,” Colin said when he caught up.
“That was an astute assessment. Thank you.”
“My pleasure,” Colin said. “So, you ever been to Athens before?”
I nodded. “I was friends with a guy who went to the University of Georgia. Jack Stamps, you remember him?”
“Sure. Tall guy, curly hair.”
“I visited him there once. Nice town. Pretty downtown area, right alongside the university campus, which is huge.”
“I wonder if it’s still intact, or if a lot of it has burned.”
“Sebastian probably knows,” I said, jerking my thumb toward Sebastian, who was walking alone, chuckling to himself like a mentally ill derelict.
Colin slowed, tried to work something out of his shoe, then continued. “Shouldn’t we be getting used to all this? Being dirty, not having laptops?” Sweat was pouring down his cheeks, disappearing into three days’ growth of whiskers. There was a hint of white in the whiskers.
“I think we get used to improvements in our lives,” I said. “I’m not sure we ever get used to having those improvements taken away.”
“Ever?” he said.
“Only until we die. Whatever you do, don’t let your kid know how good things used to be.”
The pine forest opened onto a hot blue sky; up ahead a series of tall grain silos and an octopus of long silver tubes were the first sign that we were close to Statesboro. A flash of red from a stop sign filtered through the bamboo.
“You know what I miss?” Colin said. “Fat people. I miss variety in the size of people.”
“Have you noticed that fat women seem a lot hotter than they used to?” I asked.
“In poor countries fat women have always been hot, because almost no one could afford to get fat,” Ange said.
Colin and I both glanced over our shoulders. Ange was two paces behind us.
“Hey, this is top secret guy talk,” Colin said. “Chicks aren’t supposed to hear this.”
“I promise not to tell any other chicks. I’ll take it to my grave.”
“Well, all right then, you can listen,” Colin said.
I spotted a good plant. “Hold on a sec.” I trotted down the embankment, squatted at the base of a hardwood tree and examined the leaves on it.
“What is it?” Ange called down.
“Stinging nettle. It’s edible,” I said. I gripped it close to the ground, below its prickly armor, and pulled it.
“It doesn’t look edible. It looks like a rank old weed.”
“It’s all in how you cook it.” I carefully folded it into one of my pockets. I’d been focused mostly on medicinal plants, but I could identify the ones that you could eat as well. That knowledge was probably going to come in handy; I didn’t think it would be long before we’d be desperate for food. I’d keep my eyes peeled for pokeweed, dandelion, sorrel, arrowroot, wild onion, mushrooms, along with the medicinals.
We passed an abandoned warehouse with “
“Looks like your bamboo even took out the bigger towns,” I said to Sebastian.
“It wasn’t the bamboo, it was the gasoline shortage,” Sebastian said. “I know for a fact that Statesboro set up rhizome barriers and cleared the bamboo out of the town at some point, but these towns aren’t self-sustaining; without a cheap way to bridge them with Atlanta or Savannah, they die. Their only hope was to switch over to food production in a hurry, but people think they can ride it out, keep their dry cleaning and tanning bed businesses going until things turn around. Most of the people probably left looking for food and work. When there weren’t enough people to hold back the bamboo…” He made an exploding gesture with both hands.
Sebastian seemed to have an answer for everything, at least when it came to the monsters he and his friends had unleashed. “You know, ever since you started spreading this god damned bamboo, I’ve been wondering something. Why didn’t you engineer it to be edible?”
There was a long pause. I glanced back, wondering if he’d heard me.
“They couldn’t,” he said.
“Bullshit,” I shot back.
“They couldn’t. There has to be some die-back in the population—the resources left on the planet can’t support anything close to the current population.”
“So, you
Ange picked out an old Southern mansion on Main Street for us to squat in for the night. She loved old houses. It had a wide green porch and a massive magnolia tree in the front yard, and it sat in the shadow of the town’s massive water tower, a fat kettle wearing a conical hat resting on five legs.
The front door opened into an ornate living room—gold stuffed chairs with flower patterns, a huge mirror with a rococo gold frame. A table was covered in framed family photos, some of them recent, some ancient. Sometimes it was easy to forget that people had lived entire lives in these houses.
The biggest photo was also the oldest, maybe from the late 1800s. A family of seven were posed outside this exact house. Dad was seated in the center, scowling, hands on knees, in his Sunday best. Two older women, one probably his wife, the other maybe a sister, were seated on either side of him. One woman was holding a book, the other a sorry little bouquet of wildflowers. A row of teenaged children stood behind them. No one was smiling; the two teenaged girls had stark, haunted eyes; the others just looked exhausted.
Most of the color pictures were happy ones: a father with a round belly holding a toddler at the beach; a woman dressed in black regalia accepting a degree; a new bride clutching a colorful bouquet of roses. Everyone looked bright-eyed and ridiculously healthy.
There were only a few recent photos. The people in them looked a lot like the people in the oldest photo, only in color.
“I wish we had a chance to talk. There are so many things I want to say to you.” Sophia said softly. I turned away from the photos to face her. She glanced toward the hallway.
