Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh Read Free Book Online Page B

release these things, they should have them sodomized by Clydesdales on national TV,” Colin said without a hint of a smile.
    “Are they saying anything new?” Jeannie asked, gliding out of their bedroom. She stopped to stare at the screen of the old 2-D TV that’d been one of our first purchases after we’d saved enough for rent.
    Colin muted the sound. “Just that it’s not airborne, so masks aren’t any help, and to wash your hands a lot,” Colin said.
    “Have they said any more about Great Britain and Russia?” I asked Colin.
    “No. It’s all about the virus.”
    Since the trade winds had sputtered last fall, the temperatures in Britain had been plummeting, and Britain was not taking kindly to Russia’s decision to suspend all natural gas sales outside their borders. Britain’s navy was cruising up and down Russia’s border, and there had been some skirmishes. Britain had no chance in a war against Russia unless others jumped in, but I guess with tens of thousands of their people freezing to death, they were desperate.
    We’d become total news junkies since getting the TV. Hard not to be when something awful was always going on.
    “Every day it’s something else,” Jeannie said. “I’m so tired of it.”
    “Things have to get better soon,” I said.
    “It’s been years,” Jeannie muttered. She went over to our little kitchen corner, opened the chest that served as a kitchen cabinet, and peered in. “Does anyone mind if I eat a couple of rice cakes and some peanut butter?”
    “No problem,” I said. It probably wasn’t necessary any more, to get an okay before you ate something, but it was a habit from our tribe days that we couldn’t quite shake.
    Colin switched off the TV. “Jasper, what do you think about running the a/c for ten minutes before we go to sleep? Jeannie and I were thinking it would be worth it, to have it cool to get to sleep.”
    I shrugged. “Sounds good to me.” We were getting by; I guess we could afford to buy a little more energy.
    It was a long bike ride to Southside, but I had plenty of time.
    I headed up Bull Street, cutting through the middle of the squares, looking at all the houses that used to be pretty when I was a kid. They called this the Historic District back then; it used to be the most expensive part of Savannah. Now they just called it downtown.
    I tried not to reminisce about my life before things went bad, but sometimes I couldn’t resist. It’s hard to stifle memories when everything around you is heavy with your past. How could I walk down Bolton Street, past the house where I’d grown up, without seeing my dad washing his truck in the driveway? We’d been in Clary’s diner the night I told my parents I was switching my major from business to sociology. There’d been a baseball card store on the corner of Whitaker and York where John Kelly—who’d been my best friend in sixth grade—and I would buy twenty-year-old packs of baseball cards and open them on his stoop, our hands shaking, hoping to pull out a valuable rookie card. It was almost inconceivable now, the luxury of blowing fifteen bucks on a pack of baseball cards, but back then there always seemed to be enough money, an endless flow that just showed up from Mom’s purse, or from doing some easy afterschool job. Looking back, it seemed as if everyone was well-off; even the poorest kids could afford to buy a Big Mac at McDonald’s.
    I stopped, dropped one foot to the pavement at the entrance to one of the alleys that stretched behind every row of houses as the roar and rattle of a muffler announced that a decrepit Volvo was pulling out. An old woman in the passenger seat looked at me, nervous eyes peering behind wire-rimmed glasses, her head bobbing a palsied rhythm.
    The alley was scattered with homeless shelters. That’s what people had taken to calling the big green trash cans stamped City of Savannah that now mostly lay on their sides with people’s feet sticking out of them,