STREET HERO

Will McIntosh

Illustrated by Chris Nurse

Will McIntosh’s original story in this sequence, ‘Soft Apocalypse’ (issue 200), was shortlisted for both the British Science Fiction Association and the British Fantasy Society awards for best short story of 2005. He also has a story in the current issue of our sister magazine Black Static. By day, Will is a psychology professor in the USA.

“Slow your roll, Slinky, we ain’t walking you down,” I shouted as Slinky’s skinny, cheekless ass disappeared around the red brick corner.

Did everyone who talked street talk think in perfect TV news anchorman English, I wondered, or was it just me? I also wondered if other people thought about shit like this, or whether I was some sort of street philosopher.

I glanced at Dice; he was licking the edges of his newly-grown mustache, which he’d been doing nonstop since he grew the fucker. It didn’t appear that he was wondering about anything at all, but how did I know he wasn’t working Euclidian geometry problems behind those beady eyes?

“Hey, appears we got us some buckwilders,” Slinky said, pointing out a couple sitting in the back seat of an old Toyota parked across Broughton. Didn’t look like they were buckwilding to me; they were just sitting, the woman with her arm around her man’s shoulder.

Slinky scampered over, peered in the window, his hands cupped around his face to block the glare. “Shit!” he screamed, leaping away from the car like he’d burned himself, pulling on the mask dangling around his neck.

“What is it?” I asked, pulling on my own mask and squatting down to look in the window for myself. The dude was dead. His jutting tongue was swollen to three times its normal size, his sinuses and adenoids bulging like there were water balloons under his skin. Some sort of designer virus, for sure.

The woman had it too—she looked like a basset hound. Her eyes were closed, her breathing labored. She was just sitting with her man, waiting to die, practicing good virus etiquette with the windows cranked up tight in the blistering heat. Broke my heart, but there was nothing I could do. I was no doctor, I was a street philosopher.

“C’mon, Hooper said the executions were gonna start around ten,” Dice said. Most of the time execution rumors turned out to be bogus anyway, I didn’t see the hurry.

We cut through Pulaski Square, right near my apartment house. Twenty or thirty vagrants were making a camp in the square. I’d never seen such des-titute people in my life. You couldn’t even call what they were wearing rags—more like patches, pieces of material stitched together, half the time not even covering the spots that need covering. There was a teenage girl with her tits just hanging. She was probably good-looking, but she was so filthy the sight didn’t turn me on in the least. All the men had bum-beards and long hair, probably crawling with bugs.

They were chopping low-hanging branches off the live oaks and leaning them against the base of the Monument to make lean-to shelters.

“That kills me,” I said. “Makes me sick to my stomach, seeing that beautiful square corrupted like that.”

“Somebody should call the berries on them,” Slinky said, snickering.

“They’d have to be hacking limbs off toddlers before the public police would come correct,” Dice said, glancing at me to get some appreciation for his wit.

A skeleton of an old lady was pulling Spanish moss off branches to fire the cooking pots. This display was giving me indigestion. That moss was what gave Savannah its particularity; I loved the way it made the trees look like they were melting.

I pulled my Escrima sticks out of my sock, tucked them into the front of my pants where they’d be nice and visible. Experience has taught me that just displaying exotic weaponry causes people to give pause. Any asshole, no matter how stupid, knows to stay away from a guy carrying Escrima sticks or nunchuks. Chances are if you’re carrying them, you know how to fucking use them. And I do know how to fucking use them.

Dice glanced down at the sticks. “You anticipating blood and guts?”

“I just want to have a talk. I ain’t going to put up with this desecration.”

We crossed the street and wandered along the brick walkway, through the center of their camp. When we hit the end of the square, we doubled back, expecting someone to challenge us, tell us to get lost, but they just went on doing what they were doing. Finally, we approached the biggest and strongest guy.

“Ho,” he said, smiling and nodding.

“Where you coming from?” I asked, hands on hips so he could get a good look at the sticks. Dice and Slinky hovered behind me.

“Bamboo forests to the West,” he said, pointing. He had a peculiar accent; bamboo sounded like bumpoo. His beard was so shaggy I could barely see his mouth, his skin leathered from too much sun.

“You mean the sacrifice zone past Rincon and Pooler?”

“I don’t know towns. West. Good hunting there.”

“Good hunting? What the fuck do you hunt in the bamboo?” Dice and Slinky laughed.

As if on cue, there was a squeal in the grass behind us. A squirrel twisted on the ground, a little wooden arrow jutting from its side. The girl with the bare tits ran to it, squatted, and brained it with a half-brick. She picked it up by the tail and took it to a steaming pot.

“Shit, that’s just malodorous,” Slinky said, lips pulled back from his big square teeth.

The guy just shrugged. “What’s those?” he asked, pointing at my Escrima sticks.

Now we were getting somewhere.

“Weapons,” I said, pulling them out and assuming an offensive pose. I launched into Su Ki Kai kata, filling the air with blurry sticks, sometimes veering decidedly close to the vagrant. He flinched, but kept on smiling. I expected the other vagrants to stop what they were doing and watch, but only my mates watched. When I finished, the guy dropped his hands back to his sides and nodded vaguely.

I had figured on a circle of spectators, a little awe in their eyes, and I felt pretty fucking stupid now, the way they’d ignored me.

“You mind taking it easy on those branches?” I said to the guy, still breathing hard, wiping sweat from my eyes.

He squinted, shook his head like he didn’t understand.

“The tree branches, would you mind not cutting them?”

“It won’t kill the trees,” he said.

“It looks bad.”

He stared up at the trees, then back at me like I was whacked. Suddenly I wanted to concave this guy’s skull. I loved those trees, the way their gnarled branches formed shady roofs over the streets. And how tough they were—they survived the climate shifts and chemical attacks while the crape-myrtles and azalea, the songbirds, those little green frogs that stuck to windows, they all died. They turned brown or blue and rotted. Brown and blue, the real colors of death. What moron made black the color of death? Black’s the color of night, and the potential of a cool breeze.

“Just don’t cut any more branches, okay?” I turned without waiting for an answer. I figured I’d made my point with the Escrima sticks. Nobody’d watched my performance, but they’d seen it. Word would spread through their shabby ranks that the trees had a champion, a protector. Kilo Orange, champion of the oaks. I liked that.

We soldiered on to Jackson Square, and sure enough there was a crowd gathered, and executions were in progress. The DeSoto Police—’Mayor’ Adams’ thug-force—was conducting them. Three or four other ‘Mayors’ had control over smaller sections of the city. The fed seemed to be completely out of the picture at this point; likely the good Uncle was focusing on keeping control of the big cities. Word was you could still buy sealed brand soft drinks in Atlanta.

A fat police thug with a flat top shoved a targeted gas-gun—the kind with a black mask on the end of the barrel—into the screaming face of an old blue-haired lady while two gasmasked DeSotos held her. The gun squealed; the old lady went stiff as a board, then droppthem against the base of the Monument to make lean-to shelters.

“That kills me,” I said. “Makes me sick to my stomach, seeing that beautiful square corrupted like that.”

“Somebody should call the berries on them,” Slinky said, snickering.

“They’d have to be hacking limbs off toddlers before the public police would come correct,” Dice said, glancing at me to get some appreciation for his wit.

A skeleton of an old lady was pulling Spanish moss off branches to fire the cooking pots. This display was giving me indigestion. That moss was what gave Savannah its particularity; I loved the way it made the trees look like they were melting.

I pulled my Escrima sticks out of my sock, tucked them into the front of my pants where they’d be nice and visible. Experience has taught me that just displaying exotic weaponry causes people to give pause. Any asshole, no matter how stupid, knows to stay away from a guy carrying Escrima sticks or nunchuks. Chances are if you’re carrying them, you know how to fucking use them. And I do know how to fucking use them.

Dice glanced down at the sticks. “You anticipating blood and guts?”

“I just want to have a talk. I ain’t going to put up with this desecration.”

We crossed the street and wandered along the brick walkway, through the center of their camp. When we hit the end of the square, ed to the cobblestones, twitching and jerking like all the muscles in her body had spasmed at once (which they had).

“Wicked shit,” Dice said with a mix of disgust and excitement in his voice. “She probably figured she was gonna die of a heart ail-ment or something.”

White foam gushed out of her mouth, spewing five feet, hissing and steaming on the pavement.

“What the fuck could that old bag have done to deserve that?” I said, pointing. It was sick, standing there watching people get gassed; I knew it, but I did it anyway. I don’t know why. Boredom, I guess.

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

“True,” I said. “And what you know.” Right now Savannah wasn’t a healthy place for overly-educated types, especially the type who wrote articles for the underground rags, or made milk-crate speech-es in the squares.

“The wolves are always at the doors,” Slinky 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 dude with out of date two-pocket pants and a button-down shirt shouted from the bunch still waiting to be gassed. A DeSoto chopped him in the neck with the butt of his gun; he fell into the dude in front of him, grabbed hold of him to keep from falling.

I recognized the guy! He’d been a teacher at my school. Mr Swift, my English teacher in 8th grade. He’d been a nice guy, took a liking to me.

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

Then he looked right at me. I looked away.

“Kilo? Please. Help me.” Six, seven years later and he still remem-bered me.

Dice asked me if I knew the guy, and I told him who he was. I wished there was something I could do, but I just stood there, watching them pull people from the little crowd of impromptu con-demned until it was Mr Swift’s turn. My heart thudded as I watched, afraid to say anything, not wanting to get added to the line. “This isn’t right! Kilo…” Mr Swift shouted as they dragged him out.

He got a face full of the vapors and went into rictus overdrive.

Poor Mr Swift. There wasn’t a bad bone in him. The wolves were always at the door, that was the truth, and you needed street balls to keep them at bay.

I didn’t want to see any more, so I told Dice and Slinky I had to bounce—that I needed to put in a few hours hauling dirt to the roof of my apartment house for our security garden, so my old man would stop toasting my biscuits about me not contributing.

There was a dog dying in the gutter outside our apartment house, 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 me, then started to go unfocused. Its little chest stopped rising and falling. Now it would turn blue.

A wave of hopelessness pounded me so hard I sank to the curb, pressed my palm on the hot, gum-stained pavement.

Was this it? Twenty-four years old, and I was still beating the sidewalks with my mates like I was fifteen, sitting in that sauna apartment staring at the TV when we could get a signal, hauling sacks of dirt to the roof to try to keep from starving. There was nothing ahead, nothing but heat and boredom, viruses and bamboo. Then I’d turn blue.

I’d been meant for more than this. Mr Swift had said I had a great mind, I had raw intellect. If I’d been born in an earlier time, before the world started going to shit, before people learned how to cook viruses in their basements and you needed boats to navigate the streets of Los Angeles, I could’ve been great, I could’ve been a legend at something. A writer, or an inventor. A doctor. Yeah. My patients would pass me in the streets and shake my hand and say “You saved my life.” Now I was just one step above those vermin in the park.

I looked up at my apartment building, the rusted black bars on the windows, vinyl siding broken off in places, exposing splintered plywood underneath. I couldn’t stand the thought of going into that apartment, facing my pop’s sarcastic bullshit. I 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.

Maybe I should claim a gang, make some cheese selling drugs. At least they were doing something. It wasn’t my style, though. All that hierarchy shit, paying props to higher-ups, secret hand signals.

I caught a whiff of the river as I turned onto Jefferson Street. 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.

I stepped around a group of sleeping homeless people, spilling out of an alley onto the sidewalk. I passed the coffee shop, the Dog’s Ear book store.

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.

Mr Swift had told me that even though I couldn’t afford high school, whatever I did, keep reading. Educate myself. I hadn’t done it, unless you count martial arts magazines and the newspaper. May-be I should do it, to honor his memory. It was something, anyway.

The book store was closed. I went into the alley, stepping between the vagrants sleeping out the heat of the day, and kicked in the back door. I used a spinning side kick, even though a shoulder would’ve worked just as well. I’m a show-off, I admit it. Even when no one’s around I show off to myself.

I 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 anyway, just stuff to expand my mind that was not too boring.

I looked around the place once my eyes had adjusted to the dim-ness. Rough wooden beams and fat pipes ran the length of the ceiling. Pipes. Blows my mind that most of the water that filled them used to be drinkable. Not many people know that, but I do. I don’t count ignorance a strength.

I dug around in Anthropology, tossing titles over my shoulder, stacking a few interesting ones to the side. I thought I’d like to learn about peoples.

My buddies would give me shit if they caught me reading, but I could fight better than any of them; that gave me idiosyncrasy credits that I could cash in at the bookstore.

I found some Batman and Detective comics. Old musty ones, probably from the turn of the century, the pages yellow and brittle. I added them to my stack. I could mix them in with the hard stuff as a break.

The last thing I grabbed was Light of the Warrior-Sage, from out of the window. I like that phrase, warrior-sage. I found a plastic bag behind the counter, stuffed the books into it, and I was on my way to higher education.

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 place—a little courtyard sur-rounded by four-story walls which shaded the tiled floor most of the day. Used to be part of a bar, many years ago. I pulled down the mattress that was leaned up against one wall, spread out my books and lay down.

I tried to read Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, but couldn’t get absorbed, so I thumbed through Introduction to Anthropology. A picture caught my eye, because all the women in it had their tits showing, even the old women, which was not particularly exciting but still sort of fascinating to look at. I started reading about the people in the picture.

They were a primitive tribe called the Hazda, that was still alive in Africa when the book was written. They were hunter-gatherers—they wandered from place to place with no home base, eating what they could hunt or gather instead of planting crops. The book said this made them think about the world way different from us. They weren’t too interested in owning things, because they had to carry everything they owned. They didn’t fight, because they didn’t own anything to fight about, and no one was in charge, because there was nothing to be in charge of. They had no appointments to keep, so they didn’t need clocks (not that I had any appointments to keep either), and they loved nature, because they were right in the middle of it all the time.

It occurred to me that the picture caught my eye partially because the women walking around with their tits showing reminded me of the girl in Pulaski Square who had brained the squirrel.

I wondered if those people in the square weren’t just homeless vagrants—maybe they were hunter-gatherers, like the Hazda. May-be they’d gone feral, because of the depression and the die-off. There was something strange about them, that was for sure.

I read all about the Hazda. Later, I’d go back to the square and talk to those people, see if they had fights, or clocks. Set all the pieces in their place. I felt absolutely plush, like lights were turning on inside my head.

I figured that was enough hypothesizing for one day, so I gathered up my gear and headed home. I was ready to haul some dirt.

From a block away I could hear the cracking, like ice underfoot, or twigs snapping. “Oh shit. Oh shit,” I said to no one. I ran.

It was the yellow variety—not as bad as the green, but worse than the black—and it was coming up right outside our apartment house. Some of the stalks were already five feet tall, trembling with energy, cracking and popping as they grew. The asphalt in the road was broken into a thousand fragments as nubs of new stalks pushed through. A fucking bamboo outbreak. How the hell did it get inside the rhizome barrier that’d been sunk around all of downtown Savannah? That barrier went down ten feet. It made no sense.

Private police (I didn’t recognize their insignia, but new forces were being established every day) had cordoned off the area. Tech-nicians were already at work, tearing up the street with road-eaters, trying to set up a rhizome barrier to contain the bamboo before it spread out of control.

Our apartment house was inside the perimeter they were setting up. Inside the sacrifice zone. I’d lived there for ten years, and just like that, they were letting the bamboo have it.

I spotted pop, standing in a crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk. He was shaking his head, making angry gestures at no one in particular. At God probably.

“No way this made it through the barrier,” he said when I was in earshot. “God damned biotech punks carried it in and planted it, I’m telling you. Or terrorists—damned Jumpy-Jumps.”

I nodded. The adolescent bio-tinkerer who’d loosed it—probably to impress his friends—felt it wasn’t getting enough attention, so he hacked it into the safe zone. “You seen Edie or Pat yet?” They lived in the apartment next door. Though not anymore they didn’t.

“Nah,” he said. “What do you got there?” he added, pointing at my books.

“Nothing. Just some books.”

“We got no time for books,” he grumbled, walking off. “Start mov-ing stuff out of there while we can still get through. We’re homeless.” His voice cracked on the last word.

We slept at my uncle Troy’s, two blocks away on East Harris. I slept in the kitchen, between the counter and the table, because there were already three to a bedroom and two in the living room. Three of them were boarders Troy had taken on to help make ends meet. It was hard to sleep with the sound of bamboo snapping and crackling in the distance—like trying to sleep to the sound of rats scuttling around in your ceiling—but it was too hot to close the kitchen window.

In the morning I went back to our place to assess the damage. A sea of yellow stalks waved in the hot breeze, loosely spread in some places, tight as a pack of cigarettes in others. It ended short of Pulaski Square, so the barrier had held.

I wandered into Pulaski Square, where the tribe was still camped, and watched them for a few minutes. They certainly didn’t have many possessions: machetes, cooking pots; one kid was clutching an old action figure doll. From what I could see, no one seemed to be 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 sticks.

I sat on a bench, pulled Light of the Warrior-Sage out of my pack, and opened it at random. The warrior-sage keeps a silent quest in his heart. This quest keeps him vital, lubricates his mind and spirit, keeps him poised and alert in the luminosity of his soul. His quest is selfless, for the warrior-sage recognizes that the boundary between self and world is illusion, that alleviating the suffering of the world and alleviating the suffering in his own heart are one and the same.

A calmness spread through me. I put the book down beside me and stared up into the branches of the oaks, letting the idea wash over me. It was like the words were always inside me, waiting to come out. A warrior-sage—I was a warrior sage.

I picked up the book and started from the beginning.

I learned that the warrior sage spoke only the truth, not because of some arbitrary moral code, because the truth insulated you from falling prey to the rolling mirror, the illusions that coated the world and were always changing. The warrior-sage respected all life. He practiced a quiet dignity; his feet planted firmly on the earth, his vision that of the great eastern sun.

My phone rang.

“Kilo!” It was Dice. “You in there? I was coming to pay a call, and found the terrain no longer to my liking.”

“Props, Dice. You looking to practice some downtown science on this fine day?” I retrieved a Batman comic, flipped through it while we talked about nothing. On the splash page Batman was going Kung Fu on a gang in a back alley while a blonde woman cowered against a concrete wall. He wasn’t saving her from getting gang-banged, was he? That’d be intense for a comic. I’d always liked Batman. He would sure pull a full shift if he were working in these times…

I jumped off the bench. “Dice, I gotta bounce, man, I’ll ring you after.” My heart was racing. All that time honing my martial arts skills, my weapons technique … I’d no idea where it was leading. It was leading to this moment.

I threw a flurry of punches in the air and whooped.

“Where are your sticks?” I turned around; it was the topless girl who could have been hot if she wasn’t sporting that filthy hillbilly look and had better teeth. Her accent was like the dude I’d talked with yesterday—she pronounced W like V.

“I left them at home,” I said. If I could call uncle Troy’s kitchen home.

“What game were you playing with them?” She made a strange, scrunchy facial expression, like she wasn’t aware other people could see her face.

“It wasn’t a game. They’re weapons, for protection.”

She made a grunting noise that I took to mean she understood. I kept glancing down at her chest; I couldn’t help it, her boobs were right there. Her nipples were puckered, her areolas as big as silver dollar pancakes.

“If you see any trouble, let me know. I’m a protector, like the police, only I don’t charge money. I’m a protector for the poor.”

She frowned, like she didn’t understand, then looked off over my shoulder, at the bamboo outbreak. She smiled, suddenly looking almost like any city chick except for her crooked grey teeth.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. Love of nature shit, just like the Hazda. God damn if these people weren’t modern hunter-gatherers.

I dressed all in black, to blend in with the night. No fancy costume. The warrior-sage is humble; he does not seek attention. I strapped a sheathed knife at my calf, Escrima sticks in a pouch at my waist, nine millimeter mule pistol tucked in the big cargo pocket of my otherwise skintight pants. I’d made a mask out of an old T-shirt, but would only wear it when action was immanent.

The sun was setting, the crickets singing in the waning heat. My first night as a crime fighter, my first night as a true warrior-sage. I was excited, yet calm. I felt ten feet tall, all my senses on fire, as I turned off East Harris and cut across Pulaski Square.

The tribe was still there, hunkered down on the lawn in groups of three or four, talking, laughing, sleeping. No TVs, no phones. I waved at the topless girl, who smiled and waved back over-enthusi-astically.

On Broughton I climbed a fire escape and took to the roofs, hopping across the low walls between the attached buildings, out of sight, scanning the streets for crime.

The vagrants were about now that the sun was down. An Asian woman stood on the corner in a faded green felt skirt, looking to turn tricks, her children sitting at her feet playing with bottle caps. One of her arms was nothing but bone and scar tissue; she’d danced with the flesh-eating virus that surfaced back in fifty-five. But she survived it, lucky lady, unlike my mother and a few million others.

A bunch of uniforms were standing outside the boarded-up Lucky 7 mini-casino checking IDs, probably for no reason except to exert their authority.

All seemed well and correct. I exited the roofs into an alley, head-ed down to River Street.

An old tour trolley, stripped down to wheels and a floor, rumbled by on the uneven cobblestone of River Street.

“Right over there, a particularly bloody Stiletto went down,” some redhaireddudeinanoldnavyjacketsaidintoacracklymicrophone. “Dude stabbed another dude seven, eight times in the face, till his blade got stuck in the eye socket and he couldn’t get it back out.”

“Where’s the harm in that?” Slinky shouted from the back of the trolley, a bottle of home-brew clutched in one fist. I stepped behind a telephone pole, watched the murder tour roll by. Tonight I didn’t want to be seen.

I stayed in the shadows, hawking the doors and windows of the bars for signs of trouble.

Around midnight, I sat on a bench overlooking the river, watched detritus float by, hoping someone would try to roll me. Not much likelihood of that; the criminal element didn’t much bother dudes with iron biceps who were armed to the nines.

A tug boat hooted in the distance; overhead a bat flapped mad figure-eights around a lamppost.

I sighed. It was more difficult than I thought to find a crime in progress. If this didn’t work, what then? Hop on the trolley and take the murder tour? Get drunk? Lay pipe with the local sluts? I needed to kick-start my career as a warrior-sage, or I was going to lose heart, sink back into the illusion of the rolling mirror.

Two dudes stumbled past me, one wobbling dangerously close to the dropoff into the river. “Look at the moon! It’s glowing in the dark!” he said, pointing. The other cackled. Stoners shot up with something, probably Soma.

It occurred to me that there was one place I was guaranteed to find a crime in progress. I’d been thinking violent crime, open wounds, but there were subtler crimes that might interest a warrior-sage. I’d done my share of drugs, but selling them, that was no service to the community. I got off my ass. Time to pay a visit to a certain burned-out storefront on Abercorn.

From behind a parked car I surveyed the scene. It was essentially an empty lot, tucked between two buildings, but the tile flooring and some of the fixtures were still intact. Blackened bricks and heat-deformed steel lay scattered and piled, casting long shadows. Weeds jutted through cracks in the floor.

B-Bob sat on stool behind a bruised Formica counter, his back to the brick wall of an adjoining building. A chick leaned up against the wall, arms crossed behind her back, purse dangling from her shoulder, talking to him.

I pulled on my mask, slunk among the piles of debris, blending into the darkness like a cat.

“She’s got some train wreck going on at her place,” the chick was saying as I approached undetected. I recognized her: Allie Cohn. I’d gone to school with her.

When I was so close I could smell Allie’s licorice chewing gum, I stood, brandishing the nine millimeter. “Freeze,” I said.

Allie shrieked; B-Bob nearly fell back in his stool. I lunged, grabbed the automatic pistol sitting on the counter, stuffed it into my belt.

“Take it, take it,” B-Bob said, his hands in the air. “We got no problem.”

“Yeah, we do got a problem,” I said. “I’m the new law in this town. Tell all your buddies that the Warrior-sage is patrolling, and he’s closing down all the candy stores. Put everything out on the table. Now.”

Hands shaking, B-Bob pulled piles of baggies and bright-colored pills out from behind the counter, laid them on top. Then he put his hands back up.

I pushed the drugs into a pile, pulled a little can of lighter fluid from my pocket, and squirted it over the drugs.

“What the fuck? You just going to flunk them all?” Allie asked. B-Bob just stared at the pile, wide-eyed.

“I ain’t no thief,” I said, fishing a matchbook from my pants. “This shit wrecks the city. All you bastards bleeding the block, you just make a bad situation worse. I’m putting a stop to it.”

“I don’t sell to kids,” B-Bob said. “I don’t do no harm, I just help people escape for a little while. It’s the only vacation most people around here can afford.”

I heard a metal click behind my ear.

“Drop the gun,” a voice behind me said.

Real slow, I put my hands up, turned halfway around until I could see the guy. Then I planted a side kick under his armpit, followed by a spinning hook kick that caught him square-on in the jaw and dropped him.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the girl fumble in her purse and pull something out. As I spun to face her she pointed a pistol at me, clutching it in both hands.

“No!” I shouted as she drew a bead. “Put it down!” I pointed my pistol at her. She hesitated, then closed one eye like she was at a fucking rifle range.

I shot her twice in the gut. She grunted, fell back into a sitting position, stared down in disbelief at the blood, which looked black in the dim streetlight.

“You suck,” she said.

“I’msorry.Youshouldhavelistened.Ididn’twanttohurtanyone,” I babbled.

“Bobby,” she whimpered. “I need help. It’s starting to hurt.” She gagged, and a wave of blood poured out of her mouth and down her chin. Bobby squatted beside her, drew her head to his chest.

I ran. I never ran so fast. I stopped not because I was out of breath, but because I couldn’t see through the tears. I stopped in a deserted alley, pulled off the mask, pushed my face against the bricks. My sobs echoed off the walls.

What the fuck had I done? I’d shot Allie Cohn, who used to sit in front of me in biology class. For what? For what reason? I could still hear her, in shock, telling me I sucked, like I’d taken her last french fry or something.

At that moment I couldn’t stand being in my own fucking skin. I wanted to put the gun in my mouth and pull the trigger.

I walked. I stared up at the Spanish moss dripping from the branches of the oaks, the moonlight peering through. I walked until daylight.

By morning I’d stopped crying, but I still felt so twisted up inside it was hard to take a full breath. I wandered into Pulaski Square. The tribe was breaking camp. The girl waved when she saw me, and I realized I hadn’t even asked her name, like she was an animal not worth that courtesy. This morning she looked strong and certain, like she was the one who had it right, who knew how to live, and I was the clueless dink. “I don’t know your name,” I said, trying to smile.

“Bird,” she said.

“Kilo.”

“I like you,” she said, staring at the ground, looking like a fourteen-year-old with a crush. It occurred to me that I didn’t know she wasn’t a fourteen-year-old, but it felt so good to have someone say something nice to me just then that I didn’t care.

“I like you, too,” I said. My eyes teared; I blinked the tears away.

“Why don’t you come with me?”

“I…” I was going to tell her I couldn’t, but then I saw myself in the bamboo forest, hunting, sleeping, raising children with Bird, teaching them to survive. No more guns, no more viruses, nothing to think about. Noble savagery. “Would they let me?”

“Would who let you?” Bird asked.

“Your … peoples. Who would I ask?”

Bird shrugged, squinted. “Why would you ask anybody?”

No one in charge. I forgot.

Two naked kids ran between us, giggling, one chasing the other.

“I’d like to come with you,” I said.

Bird squealed with excitement, jumped up and down. She grabbed my arm, led me to a little pile: a cooking pot, bow and arrow, machete, a black plastic bag tied with a string. “These are our things. Will you carry our machete and bow and arrows?”

I nodded, picked them up. Bird grabbed the other things, and we left the square. Just like that.

We hiked out of Savannah. By afternoon I was drenched in sweat and exhausted. I hadn’t slept in thirty hours, and I’d shot a girl since then, probably killed her.

We reached the foot-high plastic wall that marked the perimeter of the outer rhizome barrier, and pressed into the bamboo. It was like another world. In most places the stalks were so tight that you had to squeeze between them; you chose your path like you were in a maze, trying to look ahead, avoid the areas where you had to hack with the machete, seeking out the more open areas where you could walk normally. The kids had an easier time of it; not only were they smaller, but they moved like they were born to it, which they probably were.

There was a constant cracking, like ice breaking all around. The cracking seemed to rise and fall, louder, then softer, but that may have been in my head. The long, narrow striped leaves added a dry rustling whisper to the cracking sound when the wind blew.

It was hard for me not to think of the bamboo as a rat-plant, something repulsive, but I had to admit it was beautiful in its way. There were birds and squirrels and other little animals everywhere—they seemed to be right at home. I’d thought most of the animals had died out, or almost, but they seemed to be thriving here.

When we camped for the night I called my old man. He told me I was a fucking moron, that it sounded like I’d joined a cult, and my ass would be back on his doorstep when I got tired of playing Tarzan and needed a fucking shower. Great guy, my pop.

It was a ‘one-night’ camp, which meant we found a reasonably open spot, all put our shit down, sat on the ground, and we were camped. A few people went off to hunt. Bird took my hand and led me a little ways off, and we screwed for the first time. She was pretty good—it was obviously not her first time. Her breath was bad, and by then I guess mine was too, so I didn’t kiss her much. But it felt good and natural, fucking in the wilderness, and no one in the tribe looked at me like I’d done something wrong when we rejoined them. No religion bullshit, no guilt.

They weren’t playing at this. It was like they didn’t know how to think in the regular way anymore.

Dinner was rank: squirrel, bird, wild onions and blackberries, but I ate without complaining. I wasn’t gonna play the role of soft city boy. After dinner, people cut themselves bamboo stalks and scraped out the sugar from inside (I guess that was dessert) while Sandra, the white-haired skeleton of an old lady, told a story. I recognized the story—it was a bastardized version of an old movie from the thirties, King of Our Engine. Good flick, so-so in story form.

I wondered what was in the garbage bag Bird had been carrying, so I grabbed it and pulled it over to me. I was starting to get the hang of this place; you didn’t ask permission to use other people’s stuff, you just took it if you wanted it. They were like communists. I untied the bag and peered inside. It was filled with little bamboo shoots, with black and white striped stalks and gold-colored leaves, the roots wrapped tightly in burlap. What the hell? I’d never seen this variety before. Maybe that’s why Bird had taken them, because they were unique and attractive? I couldn’t ask Bird now, because I didn’t want to talk while the old lady was telling her story, so I sat cross-legged and listened. A little girl, two or three years old, came over and sat in my lap. She threw her head back and looked up at me, grinning, and I ruffled her hair. She giggled. I couldn’t tell whose kids were whose—they wandered from person to person like they were happy orphans.

When the story was finished, I thought I’d start up a conversation. “So how long have you been doing this?”

“What?” said the strong-looking guy we’d approached in the park that first day.

“Living in the wilderness, not living in houses.”

“Most of us a long time, a few a shorter time,” Sandra piped in. “The children, their whole lives. We don’t talk about our city lives much. We prefer happy stories.” She didn’t sound pissed off at me for bringing it up, just matter-of-fact.

“So why do you visit the cities at all?” I asked.

“There are things we need there, and things we need to give to them,” Carl said. He was a fifty-something guy with a weak chin. He didn’t have as much of an accent as most of the others, so I guessed he was like me, a convert.

“You trade with them?”

A couple of people laughed.

“We give them what they need, we get what we need,” Carl said.

“What the fuck does that mean?” I said. “You speaking in riddles because my ignorance is entertaining, or because you don’t want to tell me? If you don’t want to tell me, just say so.”

Someofthesmilesfaded;afewpeoplepickedupweavingprojects and other shit they were working on.

Carl tossed his half-eaten bamboo shoot at my feet. “We give them these.”

I picked it up, cradled it in my palms.

Shit, I can be slow on the uptake for a guy who’s got so much raw intellect.

“You started the outbreak near the square?” I looked at Bird. She smiled like a gremlin and nodded so vigorously her tits bounced. “Why?”

Everyone looked to Carl. “To slow things down.” He twisted around, cut another length of bamboo stalk, sliced it lengthwise with his hunting knife. “The world is coming apart, in case you haven’t noticed. It’s either gonna come apart hard, or soft. We’re helping to make it soft.”

People nodded as he spoke. Shit, this was sounding suspiciously like some whacked religion. What had I gotten myself into?

“How the hell do you know you’re not making things worse? Excuse me, but I don’t see many economists here, or sociologists, or environmental engineers!”

“No, you don’t. But they pay us to spread their work.”

It took a minute for that to sink in, then my mouth dropped open. “You’re trying to tell me this shit was made on purpose, by educated people, and they pay you to spread it?”

Carl smiled. “Now you know.”

I turned the piece of bamboo over and over in my hands, thinking. Another thing I was learning about these people was they were comfortable with silence. They were happy to sit and eat, or just sit. Long lulls in a conversation were not uncommon.

“We’re not wandering aimlessly, are we?” I asked, finally.

“We’re heading north,” the big guy said. “To slow things down up there.”

With a newly-engineered variety that would thrive further north, clogging the highways and airports, slowing the spread of brand-name products even more. Cutting down on pollution, making it harder for wars to be fought. Maybe throwing us back into the stone age. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

A week in, I had no fucking idea where we were. We reached the top of what passed for a hill in south Georgia, and there was nothing but bamboo and scattered stands of scrub pines as far as I could see in every direction. It would take months for us to make our way north, but the tribe didn’t seem to be in any hurry. I was filthy, thirsty, and bored. Sand gnats buzzed around my face, landing in my ears and the corners of my eyes. I turned and waited for Bird. She was dragging, sweating even more than me, her mouth pulled down in a grimace that made her look stupid and confused. Usually she was egging me on.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I ate something wrong. I have to poop.” She pulled down her rags and squatted right there. I was getting used to it. I turned and walked a respectable distance. Three dudes moseyed past, saying hello to her as she squatted there, her face red from straining.

Suddenly she turned her head to one side and puked. I ran to her, put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re really sick.” I put my palm on her forehead, and hot as it was outside, it was still obvious she was pulling a fever. “Shit, you’ve got something.” I yanked my mask up over my mouth, knowing it was way too late if she’d caught anything designer. I thought of the woman with the giant tongue, panting in the car, and my bowels went loose. I turned in the direction of the guys vanishing into the bamboo. “Hey! She’s sick! Call a stop.”

They called, and the call repeated, further away each time. I wrapped my arms around her waist to help her to the ground. She cried out in pain, like I’d stuck an arrow in her or something, and grabbed her stomach, low, on the right side.

Appendix. As soon as I saw her grab that spot, I knew.

The tribe was slowly gathering, a few at a time.

“We need to find a doctor! She’s got appendicitis.” It had never occurred to me to wonder what would happen if I fell and fractured my skull while I was out here.

“No towns near here. No doctors,” an old guy missing his front teeth said.

“Well what do we do?” I asked. I helped Bird ease herself to the ground. She was whimpering in pain.

“Nothing to do,” Sandra said, shrugging. “We’ll camp here till Bird’s strong enough to walk, or she dies.”

“I don’t want to die,” Bird said.

I needed a consult. I pulled out my phone, dialed the Phone Doc-tor number. A recorded voice prompted me to type in my credit code. I typed in my old man’s.

“Andrew Gabow, MD. How can I help you?” a clean, rested voice said over the phone. I felt a wave of gratitude, just to hear that tone.

“I’ve got a woman here who I think has appendicitis. We’re way out in the wilderness, there’s no way to get her to a town. What do I do?”

“Describe her symptoms.”

I went through them; the doctor asked follow up questions about the exact location of the pain in her abdomen. He sounded miffed that we didn’t have a thermometer with us to get Bird’s exact temp-erature.

“You’re probably correct—acute appendicitis. I’ll give it to you straight, Kilo—she’s in grave danger. You’re not going to carry her out of there in time, and when her appendix bursts, the infection will spread, and chances are she won’t survive it. Not out there. Probably not even in a hospital.”

“What do I do?” I asked.

“You’ve got one option. Perform surgery on her.”

“Me?”

“Whoever in your party has the most medical experience. Is there a nurse with you, a paramedic? Nurse’s aid?”

I asked the tribe; a dozen heads shook in unison. Shit, half of them never learned how to read. Most of the rest had forgotten.

“There’s got to be another way,” I said to the doctor. “What about a helicopter?”

He laughed. “Will that be cash or charge?”

“Oh god, oh god,” I said. I felt like I was separating from my body; I heard my voice saying “Oh god,” but it sounded far away, coming from someone else.

“Build a fire,” Dr Gabow said. “I’m going to do this for a hundred dollars federal, because you can’t afford what I should be charging, and because I’m a nice guy.”

“Thank you, doctor,” I said, and started to cry. “Somebody build a fire!” Who was that scared little boy who just yelled that? a calm sliver of my mind asked.

When the fire had been built, we heated water. I plunged my hands into the pot of scalding water and held them there as long as I could. Then Carla did the same—she was going to assist. Carla put my knife in the water, then held it over the flames before handing it to me. My hand was shaking so bad I could hardly hold the knife. The children had been moved out of hearing distance. Four people held Bird down, one for each arm and leg. The doctor suggested we put her in a stream to cool her and reduce the bleeding, but there were no streams around.

“Don’t make the cut too deep,” the doctor said. I had activated the hands free element on the phone. “About a half inch down, two across. There’s going to be a lot of blood, but don’t worry about that. We’ll handle that later.”

Tears were pouring down Bird’s cheeks as I held the knife over the spot we’d washed and doused with moonshine. The knife was shaking so hard it was blurry. I held it there a long time; twice I brought it down just short of her soft skin, and twice pulled it back up.

“Make the cut, Kilo,” the doctor said.

“I can’t do this,” I said. “Somebody else, please. Somebody do this.”

I’d been strutting around Savannah with all my street style, like I was this tough guy, but I was just a worm. I was all posture. I never shot or cut anyone in my life before I shot Allie Cohn. I couldn’t even cut this girl to save her life.

“I don’t want to die,” Bird whimpered. “Please Kilo, please. I don’t want to die.”

With a howl, I cut her. She screamed in agony, bucked violently, trying to break free of the people pinning her down. Like an animal. Blood welled up where I’d cut her, filling the incision and pouring out. “I can’t do this, I can’t do this,” I cried.

“How deep is the incision? What do you see inside?” the doctor said, so calm, so far away in his comfortable air-conditioned office.

“I don’t know,” I pulled the skin apart to see how deep it was. “There’s just red tissue, I can’t see anything.”

“You’re still in muscle. You have to cut again, deeper.”

“Oh, god. Not again.” Tears poured down my cheeks, and I was trembling all over, like I was freezing cold.

You suck, Kilo, Allie Cohn’s voice said inside my head. I sobbed.

“Cut, god dammit. Cut her, do it now,” the doctor shouted.

I screamed, and kept screaming as I cut, wider and deeper. Bird thrashed, but the fight was bleeding out of her. She seemed to be only half-conscious, only the whites of her eyes visible.

“What do you see?” the doctor asked.

I pulled on the flap I’d made, and it tore a little wider, exposing something grey and puckered, a fat snake folding in on itself. It was an organ. Christ, it was her liver or gall bladder or something. I described it to the doctor.

“Good boy, Kilo, that’s what you want. That’s the colon. Fish around, find the bottom of it, where it meets the small intestine. You’re looking for a small, tube-like appendage attached to the colon.”

I poked around inside Bird, trying to ignore the moist squishing sound, the blood pouring down her side, dribbling onto the tan bamboo husks that littered the ground.

“I can’t find it,” I said.

“Get your damned hand in there and move the colon around. This isn’t some dainty parlor game. Get your hands bloody.”

I dug deeper, squeezing my fingers between the tubes, pushing one section up with my finger. Behind it was something that looked like a swollen maggot, I described it to Dr Gabow.

“Cut it off and pitch it away, Kilo.”

After I cut it off, Sandra sewed the end of the colon closed while I held my knife over the flame, getting it good and hot. Then I pressed the flat end of it against the wound, to cauterize it and stop some of the bleeding. Bird didn’t flinch as the knife hissed against her insides; she’d fainted somewhere along the way. I held the edges of the wound closed while Sandra sewed it. Dr Gabow explained that someone needed to get to the nearest town and buy antibiotics, or Bird would likely die of infection, and all my good work would go to waste.

People slapped my back as I stumbled out of the camp. I found myself a quiet copse and collapsed onto my back, staring up at the half moon through the narrow leaves. I felt … strange. Calm. Like a buzzing had turned off in my brain for the first time in years. I held my hands up in front of my face, looked at the blood covering them, starting to dry and cake now.

I had done something. And now that I’d done it once, I thought I could do it again, and that next time my hand wouldn’t shake, and I wouldn’t cry.

A teenaged chick with tear stained eyes peered up through the open steel hatch, into my formerly secret Savannah hideaway. She held a crumpled T-shirt to her cheek; spots of blood had already seeped through it.

“Welcome,” I said, putting away the medical book I’d been reading. No books needed to figure this one out—this one was easy.

“Joey Plano told me you could fix me up. I got no cheese, but I could pay you later, or—”

I held up my hand. “Pay is optional. Maybe later you want to give me something, maybe not. No grief either way. Let me see.”

She came over, sat in the plastic chair facing me, pulled away the T-shirt. A nasty gash; looked like a knife, or a bottle.

“Where’d you get it?” I said, turning to choose a needle and thread.

“My boyfriend.” She started crying. “The son of a bitch. My broth-er’s gonna kill him, gonna cut his balls off and make him eat them.”

“That’ll serve him right, but right now I need you to stop talking and stop crying.” I flicked my lighter, ran the needle over the flame. She reminded me a little bit of Bird, with her mouth all scrunched from crying. I wondered if Bird and her band had made it far enough north to plant their little surprise yet. Hard to know.

“Now I need you to hold still for me. This is gonna hurt.”

I sunk the needle into her cheek; she squealed, but held still.