American Apocalypse Read online

  The conversation with Carol left me amazed: Nobody seemed to give a damn. The guy I had killed was an unemployed real-estate agent and a Cub Scout leader who was forced to resign, even though the charges against him had been dropped. Until a few days ago he was just another Car Person who called a parking lot home. No one, when interviewed, had anything good to say about him. The kid never did come up in the conversation. Carol did say that whoever had removed the guy from the population had done a lot of people a favor. Hearing that from her made me feel a lot better inside, especially when she added that they should have dragged him behind his car for a couple miles before killing him.

  I think she knew, but she wasn’t going to ask me straight out. What was really interesting was that when the body was found, so was my trowel. The crowd that had gathered around the body had noticed it before the cops showed up. When the cops bagged the trowel, some wit in the crowd had yelled out, “The gardener did it!” I liked that; I liked thinking of myself as “The Gardener.” What does a gardener do? He weeds the plants and flowers of invasive species. I think child molesters qualify as invasive.

  I have to admit to an unhealthy liking of the Batman movies when I was growing up. After my conversation with Carol I actually spent time thinking about possible costumes, or as I preferred to call them “uniforms.” Uniforms sounded much more dignified, even when it was only me that I was holding the conversation with. But I could not get past the image of me on the Batbike: cape fluttering in my slipstream, as I pedaled furiously somewhere “on a mission.” That was a little too insane, even for me. So I gave up on the uniform idea, although from then on I mentally referred to my wheels as the Batbike. Too bad it was green. But if I squinted, and it was the right time of day, it did look black.

  I wanted to do something with my life other than just scrounge a living from the crumbs of a society that never had much use for me anyway. I had grown up a throwaway. I had never mattered enough to anyone to protect. Hell, it was a big deal for Mom to remember to feed me. I knew firsthand what it felt like to be prey, in my case, prey for Mom’s latest boyfriend to beat on after he got drunk. I would stay quiet and out of sight until he’d eventually turn on her. Mom had a talent for picking out a certain kind of asshole and then slowly driving him insane until he snapped. Sometimes they would come find me to beat on. Other times I would try to distract him from beating on her and take the blows instead. I had been helpless in a world where everyone was bigger, stronger, and knew more than me. I may have gotten older and bigger, but not much else had changed. Except now I had a secret, a powerful secret that made everything feel so much better. But at the same time it felt wrong, too. I went back and forth in my head arguing the different sides. In one corner I had “Why care?” with “Fuck them all” pacing in the opposite corner and “Never again” off in a third.

  I didn’t really like Why care? He was a whiner who just wanted to find someplace safe to hide away and eventually die in. Fuck them all was angry—very, very angry—a burning red violence that alternated between intense flaring heat and smoldering. He wanted to hurt people, any and all people; I knew once he started it wouldn’t stop until he was killed. Never again was the hardest to see and promised nothing immediately. The only promise he offered was that I could get myself to a place where I no longer had to be a victim. The price was I had to do my best to protect those around me with what I learned. It turned out to be a simple choice: good wolf or bad wolf. Carol made the decision for me: When the memory of her face floated up into the three-way conversation, Fuck them all lashed out, and I couldn’t live with that. I really did love her. I squeezed him out, a growing intense pressure that was trying to take me over from the inside, and I boxed him up and never opened that box again.

  Three months went by and the Gardener killing was old news. The level of violence had increased exponentially. It was like one day a switch had flipped and people began not to give a damn. People were just angry. Angry at what they had lost; angry that no one was coming to help them; angry that it had not gone away—that every morning when they got up, nothing had changed. When it had changed overnight, it was almost always for the worse.

  What really bothered people was that it was unequal: It was as if a bomb had dropped, but had only blown up some people. It made some folks crazy that their old friends and neighbors could still go to the mall, eat in restaurants, and watch the game on their digital HDTVs. It just wasn’t fair, goddamn it! If they had to suffer, well, then other people should also. So they began making people suffer—sometimes by stealing something, other times by using sharp objects, even sometimes through the most bizarre forms of torture. But most of the time, people just sat around and hated and envied.

  I spent the next three months adjusting. I also bought a new garden trowel and a sharpening stone from a hardware store. They did not have them in black—they were all green or stainless. I was beginning to resign myself to the fact that the black color scheme was not going to work out. Then again, I thought with a touch of humor, if I’m going to call myself The Gardener, having everything in black sends a mixed message. I decided green was good.

  The weapons issue was something I wasted a lot of time thinking about. I was handicapped by two things: I knew nothing about weapons and I had no money—at least not big money. That’s what you need to buy a gun. I also had no idea how I was going to become a good wolf. Right now, if I was honest with myself, all I had was a bark; my bite was not anything to scare a lot of these people with. Some of them were better armed than the police. I had stumbled onto my first encounter by accident—or fate, if you believe in that. I couldn’t really expect to stumble into another situation where I’d get a chance to trowel another molester. I figured the only thing I had working in my favor was that I didn’t care if they had to die to get my point across.

  The local police presence had noticeably declined, at least where I was. A lot of the wooded areas came under the domain of the county park police. By now, due to budget cuts, there were probably not more than six officers. Three of those were management, which meant there really were no more patrols.

  Hired security patrolled some of the business parks and their lots, making themselves the bane of the Car People’s existence. But as buildings emptied out, so did the money to pay security. The local county police had also been decimated by budget cuts. That and having their pension plans evaporate did not exactly inspire aggressive policing, especially when health benefits became a joke. The state police never were around and the federal alphabet agencies could care less. You couldn’t justify their budgets rousting homeless people. So what began to happen was a pulling back of the basic services we all had taken for granted: Fire, police, road maintenance—all that became concentrated where the core of surviving taxpayers were. There were no walls or signs; no one made an announcement—it just happened.

  Money was the liquid that kept so much of this urban area alive. I had hit the street about two years into the money drought and the tips of suburbs were starting to die. I think the hardest thing for me to adjust to, other than a lack of hot showers, was loss of the Internet. The Internet had been such a huge part of my life that it wasn’t until it was gone that I realized what a gaping hole had been left behind, worse than losing Tiffany—much worse. I realized now: I was addicted to the entire high-definition, make-believe world that I could step into and where I could lose myself—or become someone else. Hell, it had taken me forever to make first lieutenant playing Battlefield 2142. Now it was gone.

  It was hard enough to get Verizon to come out and install DSL, more so when the only address you could give was the third group of trees behind parking lot B. You know, the one where Fidelity had its offices. Not that Verizon could be counted on to show up anyway, even during the best of times. Word was that one of the clans had someone good enough to splice fiber. They were planning to open an underground Internet café inside an empty four-story office building and entrance was going to be restricted to people
they knew or needed.

  There was also the FedEx/Kinko’s option, but that was expensive. They were also gone not long after I found my way to the street. I did find that free wireless was available at McDonald’s for a while; there were a few other places like that and I rotated among them. I had hung on to my laptop. Well, actually, I had liberated it from the job when I heard that there was going to be a department meeting one Friday.

  A lot of stuff flowed out of the departments when a Friday meeting was scheduled; I wondered why management didn’t catch on. It took me a while to figure out that they probably didn’t care. They were too busy looting on a scale we couldn’t imagine. So I had not lost complete connection with the outside world, but wireless was limited, and I could not sit and surf for hours like I used to, let alone play Battlefield. It balanced out since I needed the time to keep myself fed and semi-clean. When I wasn’t doing that, I was scouting out new safe places to sleep. It was becoming more and more difficult as the number of people being pushed into the streets increased. Even still having a roof over your head didn’t mean you could afford to put food on the table. At the same time the various resources that had fed us were getting more sporadic; they could no longer get regular funding.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SKIZZER

  Curiosity had me searching on my laptop for news about my encounter with the Fat Man. I had done my best to gut that fat bastard in the short amount of time I had. I’d already promised myself that next time I would make sure I would not be so rushed.

  More and more my laptop felt like an anchor. I couldn’t let it out of my sight because it was the only thing I owned that was worth anything. Yet, for the life I was leading now it was practically useless.

  I had a wireless card so I was usually able to find a hot spot. I could get e-mail, but I found that I didn’t really have anyone to e-mail. That was a bit of a depressing realization. For a while, I kept in touch with some of the people I had worked with—none of them were getting hired. I would apply for tech jobs online and get the standard automatic response. I tried retail, wait staff, and I applied for a CFO position—I didn’t even get an auto response for that one.

  The only place that was hiring was the armed forces recruiting center. I admit it was somewhat tempting, but I hated getting sunburned. Also, I was not too thrilled about coming home missing a body part. Word was also that the government was planning a huge troop reduction; so gradually, I quit looking.

  I had a list of blogs that I kept up with for information. Some were local, and others were economic. My favorite was Calculated Risk, a blog I liked because it gave me a glimpse at the shitstorm that was beginning to rain down upon the rich and poor alike. The stories posted on CR described the decline of industry after industry, but the comments section with its variety of regulars and trolls told the human side of how it was changing everything. Looking back, I read it for the comments. The entertainment and insights they gave included dry, black humor with a sort of “all in it together” feeling. Other days I would read it and feel like they were all living in a world that was farther away from me than Mars.

  As I lost the enthusiasm for the job search I found other ways to make money; I had to. I could get a free meal, but when I got food poisoning from one, I needed money to pay for aspirin and something to stop the runs. The money from Fat Man’s wallet went faster than I had hoped. I had my unemployment checks, which were automatically deposited. That sucked at first, since I was overdrawn, and the bank simply ate my initial check and part of the second.

  One of my former coworkers, Dustin, hooked me up with a loose collection of people who specialized in relieving failing businesses of inventory. My laptop made its hassle worthwhile just by my getting that one e-mail. Employees would let us know when the end was near for their employer. We would arrange a time to bring a truck or trucks to the loading dock, where someone would meet us. Depending on what the company did to make its money, they would decide who and what was needed. Sometimes it was just strong backs and hand trucks. Other times they wanted people with a clue about computers. Even a company that didn’t do anything productive, at least from what I could see, would still have goodies for us.

  After a while it dawned on me that we were filling orders for someone. Before we’d go in we would be told what was on the shopping list. The first few jobs were Aeron chairs and laptops. I remember one time the guy that was there, waiting to let us into a small, maybe tensuite business, well, he had a bit of a grudge. We were getting ready to leave and he hadn’t returned, so I was asked to go find him while they finished wrapping the chairs in skins. I found him in what had to be the boss’s office squatting on the desk. He was finishing taking a really rank dump and was wiping himself with photos he’d taken from their frames.

  “Hey! We’re leaving! You coming?”

  He didn’t bother to stop what he was doing. “Yeah, give me two minutes. I haven’t gotten to his wife’s photos yet.” I just shrugged and went back to the guys. He rode in the back with Dustin, who, after we had dropped off the dumper, complained to us about how he had to smell shit the entire ride back.

  I found a chance one night to ask the guy running the latest job about something that had me puzzled. He called himself Skizzer, and as far as I could tell he was still living the lucky life of an Earth Person. We had recently worked a couple jobs where all they wanted was servers—not just any servers but specific ones, where we had to verify the IPs and domains before shutting them down and hauling them.

  So I asked, “What was up with that?”

  He looked at me coolly for a couple of heartbeats before replying: “Look, why are you doing this?”

  I said, “For the money.” Thinking, Duh, like why else?

  “Yeah, you said you worked IT, right?”

  “Yeah”

  “What’s on a server?”

  I was beginning to get a glimmer of where he was going with this. “Data,” I said.

  “Yep. Look, dude, I don’t really know for sure, but this isn’t our first job. Either someone wants the data or someone wants to make sure that data is no longer available. Either way we get paid, right?” He gave me a lame “we’re comrades here” punch on the arm.

  I gave him back what he wanted: “Right.”

  “So let’s do this and get out of here.”

  I grinned and went back to downing the server. This was going to be a profitable night for us and I got extra for my IT skills. I was already thinking about how I could increase my personal profit on the side. I had noticed a Cisco CRS-1 router over in the corner. After tonight I was going to have to talk to the clan that was putting together the Internet cafe. They would love to have something like this. Money was nice, but what I really wanted was a secure living space and access to fiber. I missed online gaming a lot. In that alternate reality I wasn’t a loser. I was a sought-after squad leader who never had to worry about how old his food was.

  The Cisco deal worked out nicely, and part of my payoff was a roof over my head. After the Asian clan guys verified that the router worked and that I knew how to do IT configuration, they welcomed me enthusiastically to the clan and gave me directions to my place to live. I headed for my new home fairly happy with my life. My new home was a room all to myself in an old motel. I knew where it was; I just had never actually been there before. In another life I had driven past it a thousand times: The Anchorage Motel. It was old and the entrance was built to resemble a ship’s bridge—at least that’s how it looked to me. Funny, it took me a while to connect the name Anchorage to the whole ship design scheme; I kept thinking of Alaska. At least when I figured it out, it wasn’t the result of asking someone in front of a group of people.

  Pedaling over to the clan motel I had to keep an eye on oncoming traffic. Some people got a kick out of seeing how close they could come to you. They probably scored themselves extra points if you went into a ditch trying to get out of their way. They would pass a regular biker dressed in spandex and shi
ny helmet and then, out of nowhere, swerve to get you. We were juicy targets because of the amount of baggage we had attached to our bikes—all that baggage said expendable. They treated you as if you had a sign reading Go ahead and hit me! No one will give a shit—which was pretty much true. It was like they figured good riddance, eliminating another tax burden and a potential threat to their person and their society.

  While pedaling I thought about things—amazing how much idle time the brain has for processing when there isn’t an iPod pumping noise into it. Clueless people who thought they could wander around the streets with an iPod cranking lost, at a minimum, the iPod.

  It’s like I was told when I traded mine for cash to a guy on corner:

  “So, you decided to smarten up.”

  I must have looked at him puzzled. He looked at me pityingly, “You ever spend any time downtown in the hood?”

  I nodded, of course, although I never had. I still had no clue where he was going with this. “Yeah, you don’t see any brothers walking around with these jammed in their ears. You got to be able to hear who is coming up on you. In the jungle you don’t see any deaf animals that live.” He had it turned on and was checking the playlist. “Not bad, but I am still going to have to wipe it.” I winced a bit inside when he paused at my Paris Hilton single. He didn’t say anything. What could I tell him? I thought she was hot once upon a time.

  Afterward, I thought about how much my vocabulary had changed since I’d become “self-employed.” I thought about the Tower of Babel; Americans pretty much spoke the same language. Yeah, there were the various slangs of different subcultures. The difference was that the new subcultures, embryonic as they were then, were beginning to become full-on cultures—in some areas, the dominant ones. It was still years off, but I could see it happening in front of me. The clans spoke a language with a lot of loan words from online. They were usually the tech-literate ones without too much emotional damage. The Tree People had their own slang that reflected their living conditions. The rest of the homeless had their own language. It was generally spoken only by them, and most of their conversations were held with themselves.