Soft Apocalypse (8 page)

“But I’m not rich,” Ruplu interrupted. “My family lives in a six-room house, nine of us. This store doesn’t make that much.”

I swept loose chips of glass wedged under the beverage cases that long ago used to be refrigerated. “I know, but they don’t understand that. They don’t want to understand it. They wanted what was inside your store, so it becomes a handy excuse.”

I stopped at the puddle of blood. Both the broom and the mop would only smear the blood. I looked around, spied a busted bag of kitty litter on a low shelf. I retrieved the bag and poured it over the blood. Poor Amos. He probably didn’t even get a chance to draw his gun. I realized now that he was just for show, that when someone really wanted to rip off the Timesaver, all it took was a few sweeps from an assault rifle.

“I pay the local Civil Defense people eight hundred dollars a month to protect the store,” Ruplu said, piling cases of soda that the thieves had not had time to cart away. “Do they offer to make reparations when I tell them my store was shot up while it was supposed to be under their protection? No. They just remind me that my next eight hundred is due in four days.”

“I think Civil Defense is starting to be more of a problem than a solution in this city,” I said.

“I think you’re right. And they’re not my only problem.” Ruplu sat on the stack of soda cases. “Every week, there’s less and less merchandise I can get delivered. No more coffee. Pepsi doesn’t distribute this far south starting in November. No aspirin in months.” He shrugged his helplessness. “What can I do?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “Maybe you should look into making deals with locals to sell their things—peanuts, preserves, home-made blankets, things like that.”

Ruplu nodded, thinking. “The problem is locating these people and arranging all these separate deals. It takes all the time just to run the sales end.”

“I could work on that end—”

Ruplu shook his head. “I can’t afford to pay you for that many more hours,” he said.

“Pay me whatever, or nothing,” I said. “This job saved my life; I’m grateful to you, I’ll do anything I can to help your store be successful.”

I thought Ruplu was going to cry. He clapped me on the shoulder, gulped back tears.

“You are my good friend,” he said. “All right. If I make money from business you find me, I share some with you. Okay?”

“Sounds good,” I said. We shook hands.

Ruplu clapped me on the shoulder again, and I got back to work.

I felt a little taller as I swept. I didn’t want to feel too tall, because a man had died here this morning, but I couldn’t help but feel some hope rising. This could be a door opening for me, a chance to do more than count change into people’s palms. If I could help Ruplu, I knew he’d give me my fair share of the profit. I could become sort of a limited partner.

My head was spinning from the last twenty-four hours. I felt great and awful, exhausted and exhilarated. Afterimages of Ange in the shower were superimposed with the priest feeding me from a beverage lid. Now the puddle of blood where Amos had fallen swirled with this opportunity. I guess I needed to take my joys where I could find them, and the hell with the notion that it was selfish to be happy amidst suffering. There was always suffering.

Chapter 3:
Rock Star

Winter, 2027 (Three years later)

P
ulaski Square was uncharacteristically crowded with teens and tweens and early twenty-somethings. They reminded me of pigeons, the way they milled aimlessly on the lawns and brick walkways, as if hoping to happen upon something interesting—a pizza crust or an errant cheese doodle. “Think she’s coming?” an acne-stricken kid said to his friend through a neon purple virus mask.

His friend, who had stripes of lamp black above and below his eyes to match his black mask (who could keep up with the pointless shit that passed for current teen fashion?), shrugged.

“Who’s supposed to come?” I asked.

“Deirdre,” the kid with the lamp black said. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his sleeve pocket.

“Who’s Deirdre?” “Flash singer. The best.” He lit the cigarette, pulled his mask up to his forehead, took a puff, blew smoke into the Spanish Moss hanging overhead in an “Ain’t I so cool” way. “It’s going around there’s gonna be a flash concert here.”

“Oh,” I said. That I could probably do without. I nodded, the cool dudes nodded back, and I continued through the crowd.

“Jasper!”

I turned. “Cortez!” I pushed through the crowd to get to him, grabbed him in a bear hug. “Shit, I can’t believe it! I didn’t know you were back in the city.”

“Yeah, about six months now,” Cortez said, clapping me on the shoulder. He was dressed in a black t-shirt, black puffed pants. His head was shaved.

He was living with his dad, working security jobs when he could get them—mostly temp bodyguard stuff for semi-rich guys trying to impress their dates. Turned out he was on a job now—security for the flash concert that was indeed happening.

The rumble of the crowd on the west end of the square rose in pitch.

“Gotta go!” Cortez said. “Stick around, let’s have a beer after.”

So I stuck around.

A scrum of kids began chanting “Deirdre.” It spread, rising in volume. The crowd parted on the other end of the park, and there she was, surrounded by guys in black. Everyone cheered.

Deirdre was small, almost childlike. She was wearing six or seven pink neck rings that accentuated an ostrich-neck, and a black skintight leotard that accentuated enormous breasts. Her eyes bulged a little, her meaty lips formed an eager “o.” She was one of those women who was extremely sexy without being particularly pretty.

The stage was a bunch of two-by-fours on milk crates, hauled in by her roadies, along with amps, portable spotlights, and a generator. Deirdre paced, staring at the ground as they set up.

There was no introduction or anything. The amps squealed to life, there was scattered cheering, and Deirdre hopped onto the little stage and came to life.

Shit, did she come to life.

It wasn’t that she was a great singer—she had a decent voice, sure, but it was her energy that hooked you. Her voice was so
loud
; there was so much raw force behind it that you kept expecting those bulging eyes to explode. She flew around the stage, leaping, spinning, dancing, seeming to defy gravity on her tiny fuel-injected frame.

Her songs were angry and violent. Lots of things blowing up, lots of fucking, lots of death and despair and infidelity. She was a perfect voice for the times.

After every few songs, roadies circulated with plastic buckets, collecting money. Cortez stood beside the stage with the other men in black, his arms folded across his chest, looking all tough. It was strange reconciling this Cortez with the one who’d been part of my homeless band, my tribe, five years ago. He’d put on a good twenty pounds of muscle; though part of that was probably because he was eating more regularly now, and wasn’t walking miles every day.

After Deirdre’s final song, she bowed primly and left the stage to roaring applause. One of the bodyguards pulled off his t-shirt and handed it to her, and she put it on over her leotard. It came down to her knees. They headed off as the roadies gathered the stage and equipment.

Cortez said something to Deirdre as they walked. She nodded, and Cortez broke off and headed toward me, grinning.

“Come on,” he said, “we’re gonna meet them at the after party.”

The after party was at a bar called The Dirty Martini. At least it used to be called The Dirty Martini, before it went out of business. The front picture window was boarded up; the olive green bar, thick with dust and grime, was the only piece of furniture. Kerosene lamps hung from the rafters.

We got ourselves drinks and set up near the bar. Cortez asked if I’d seen Ange around, and I told him we were still in touch from time to time. I hated bending the truth like that, but what would be the point of telling him we’d had a friends-with-occasional-sex thing going for over a year? He might still have feelings for her. I caught him up on Ange’s progress on her Ph.D.

“She ever mention me?” Cortez asked. He saw me hesitate, waved off my answer. “Never mind. She probably still hates me like running pus.”

Their breakup had been about a bunch of little things, though the tipping point had come when Ange was accepted into the biotech doctoral program on a full scholarship, and Cortez didn’t fully embrace the idea. Ange’s take was that Cortez was threatened by it. Cortez said she used an offhanded comment he made about it not seeming practical as an excuse to break up with him. In any case, it hadn’t been the sort where you keep in touch. I knew how that was, and, given that no punches had been thrown in either direction, I didn’t feel a need to take sides. As far as I was concerned there were no bad guys when it came to breakups. Bad guys had guns, and forced you to eat things. I’d tell Ange I bumped into him. I doubted she would care much if Cortez and I became friends again. Ange didn’t seem to care who I was dating, let alone who my friends were. It amazed me how well she could handle the friends-with-sex thing; she never expected anything more from me than a good friend could expect, and she never gave any more, either.

Cortez and I talked about the tribe, about the days when we were even poorer then we were now, about how humiliating it’d been to be homeless, and, finally, about that day, when the tribe had been forced to kill. It had been almost seven years, but I still rode a black wave at the mention of that day.

That’s when Deirdre made her entrance.

She’d changed clothes: from upper thigh to just below her armpits she was wrapped in a continuous strip of black leather. It must have been fifty feet long when it was unraveled. I thought for a moment about what it would be like to unravel it, then allowed reality to kick in. She was out of my league. I’m strictly minor league—double-A, maybe triple-A if I stretch. Deirdre was playing in the majors.

A cadre of fifteen-year-olds circled her, sputtering about how she was pure poison, brilliant, vascular. She passed through them like they were gypsies asking for a handout and made her way to the bar, stopping right near me and Cortez. My stomach did a little somersault, the way it does when you’re near someone famous, which made me feel a little stupid, given that she was a chick who performed on two-by-fours in the park for handouts.

An older guy, kind of short, with shiny shoes that announced he was a rich guy stepping outside the gates to slum, handed Deirdre a plastic cup of the home brew they were serving before she could ask for one.

“She’s okay,” Cortez said, gesturing toward Deirdre. “Pays on time,” he held up his cup, “lets you party when you’re working for her as long as you don’t overdo it. She’s a little wild, but she’s okay.”

Deirdre was asking Mister Shiny Shoes if he had any blow. The guy answered that he didn’t, but he had cash if Deirdre had connections.

Cortez said something to me.

“Good, good,” I answered, trying to listen to Deirdre’s conversation. The guy said that he thought Deirdre was very sexy, and that he wanted to fuck her, and handed her his business card. She took it like it was a dead rat.

“She’s a good singer,” I said to Cortez. When your cognitive capacity is taken up by another task, the words that come out of your mouth tend to border on the inane. The guy was saying how he was good friends with Mayor Addams.

Deirdre ran her tongue along the inside of her cheek as if she was trying to dislodge something trapped between her back teeth, then suggested he go find the mayor and fuck him instead.

“Deirdre!” Cortez said as she broke off from the dumbfounded friend of the mayor. “I want you to meet my good friend Jasper. Jasper saved my ex-girlfriend from being raped by three war vets with rifles. Stabbed them to death with a kitchen knife.”

“Now, that’s interesting,” she said, looking me up and down languidly, hands on hips. “You don’t look like a killer. Is Cortez bullshitting me?”

“I wish he was,” I said. “I’m not particularly proud of it. And it wasn’t just me—there were five of us. And the vets with rifles had their pants around their ankles, and their rifles were leaned up against a china cabinet out of reach.”

“Were they? How brave of you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Maybe I can work as a bodyguard at your shows, in case someone unconscious looks like they may eventually wake up and get out of hand.”

Deirdre burst out laughing. She looked straight into my eyes for a long moment, her eyes sort of sparkling. I struggled not to break eye contact, feeling like it was some sort of test. “I think I’m going to like you.”

My legs had turned to jelly. I was grinning like an idiot and couldn’t think of anything to say.

Music started up, heavy on bass. “Deirdre!” someone called.

“Stick around,” Deirdre said over her shoulder, “I’d like to hear more about you stabbing people.” With her back to us, it was safe to stare.

Cortez and I drank, and bonded, and drank more. Our eyes burned in the blue smoke of hand-rolled cigarettes.

“I should have looked you up before this,” I said. “Funny how you just lose touch with good friends.” “Good friends” was probably a stretch, but the drinks were making me feel all warm and nostalgic.

“Don’t worry about it,” Cortez said, “I could’ve looked you up too. We get caught up in things.”

“Hey! Cortez’s friend!” Deirdre shouted from across the room. “Come party with me!” She waved me over. Cortez gave me a shove in her direction. As soon as I reached her she slid her arm under mine. Suddenly I felt eleven feet tall.

“So what do you do?” Deirdre asked me.

“I manage a convenience store,” I said. It was sort of true.

“Did you keep stabbing the rapists until they were all dead, or did you stop once they couldn’t fight back?”

“They kept fighting back until they were dead. Although I guess at some point they switched from fighting for advantage to fighting not to die.”

Deirdre’s eyes narrowed. “I like that. Do you have a pen?”

“No, I don’t.”

A woman interrupted us. She was tall, with a way-short blue skirt and long, bright magenta hair.