Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (38 page)

The bus driver, a big-boned woman with red hair and deeply tanned skin, ascended to the cabin in three steps.

"What's goin' on up here?" she asked.

Harold simply stared.

"That guy has the plague," someone said. The bus driver took a step backward.

"He does?" she asked Harold.

"He's sick," Harold said. "But there hasn't been any plague announced by the health board."

"Half of Russia's dead and he says there's no plague," one of the standing men said.

"They say the niggers don't get it no way," another man, of questionable race, said.

"All right, enough of that now," the driver said. "It's a punishable offense to slander race."

"And look at what good it gets us," the elderly man spat.

The driver seemed to consider the senseless sentence.

"I'm going to have to put him off the bus."

"Who?" Harold asked.

"Your friend."

"What for?"

"I got a hundred and fifty passengers on this bus, son. I've never carried even half that. They pulled out the lower seats, they broke the rules by making passengers stand while the bus is in motion. Something's happening. I don't know what it is but I can't jeopardize this whole bus just 'cause the uppers aren't talking."

"I need my trunk," Jamey whined. "I need my trunk."

__________

Getting off of the bus was fairly easy. The driver made Harold pull the trunk out of the top hatch. She told the passengers she was taking the precaution against further infection. No one tried to bar the friends' way. Scared faces of all races witnessed their departure. Harold saw that some of them had scars on their necks and faces, reminders of the striped flu.

"We got to take my trunk, Hair. Everything I got's in there."

"We'll leave it in the trees, J," Harold promised. "We'll leave it in the trees and come back when you're better."

"Where we gonna go?"

"Looks like everybody from Plintheville's leavin'. Look at all them cars and busses comin' on the highway. They're evacuating. They're leaving their houses."

"So?"

"We could hole up in an abandoned house until you get over that cramp." __________

The walk through the woods was the hardest work that Harold had ever done. When he didn't have to drag Jamey he supported his friend's weight. It took them three hours to make it through the woods and hills to a tiny cul-de-sac of homes in what they assumed was Plintheville. Harold left Jamey in the woods and watched one home for over an hour. The whole block seemed deserted, but Harold wanted to make sure. If the world wasn't over he didn't want to wish that it was from some corporate prison cell.

Just before dawn a bright blast lit up the southern sky. When Harold saw the iridescent mushroom cloud he was no longer worried about jail.

__________

Jamey never moved from the couch in the sunken living room where Harold deposited him. He lay there and wasted away like billions of others were doing all across the globe.

For the first day Harold held his friend's hand while watching ITV. Newscasters talked openly about the plague that ghostnet had been broadcasting for days. The pain and bloody stripes were associated with the striped flu. Doctors were saying that it was the secondary phase of the virus. They had known that the virus stayed in the nervous system but had no idea that it would return with such ferocity. The nuclear strikes against New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles were minor news topics compared to the plague.

The disease was 100 percent fatal and everybody got it; everybody but people with at least 12.5 percent African Negro DNA.

For thirty-six hours Harold and Jamey watched the reports. Thousands of bodies were being thrown into rivers and the sea. Roving mobs of black and white ruffians were battling in the streets of the major American cities. Astonished Caucasians who survived the plague realized that there was a sizeable portion of Negro blood in their veins.

One newscaster ran a clip from Chicago's
Electro-Exposé
which showed the towering figure of Cowled Death rising over a white man only to be stymied when the white man pulled open his shirt to reveal the words THE NIG IN ME: 12.5%.

After two days all vid communication went blank.

Harold and Jamey spent the empty hours talking about their lives. Jamey told about his delinquent father and his mother's sister who raised him. Harold thanked Jamey for letting him have Yasmine.

"She woulda gone for you in a minute," Harold told his pain-wracked friend.

"Anything for a friend'a mine," Jamey replied.

__________

"Hey, Hair?"

"What?"

"You think it was God mad at the white man for all the shit we done?"

"No, uh-uh. 'Cause why he wanna kill all the Chinese and Aborigines and Indians down in Peru?"

"I guess. What--"

Jamey died just that quickly. In between spasms, in the middle of a thought. Harold sat there next to his friend trying to figure out how he got there.

__________

Harold covered Jamey with a blanket and left him on the couch. He knew he'd have to bury his friend after a while but he didn't want to lose him yet. He wandered around the sprawling suburban home hoping that it was a clean bomb that the Russians dropped on New York.

The family had been a mother and a father with two sets of twins, boys and girls, and an older sister, all of them blond and fair.

On the second day after Jamey died the wall vid came to life.

"All hail the great XX Y," a voice said, and then the sky-blues artist Silver Rap and his girl partner Cellophane Dream came into view. Silver was wrapped in tight-fitting shiny cloth that resembled old-time aluminum wrap. Cellophane Dream wore a clear material like Yasmine had worn at the Blanklands. Dream had bigger curves than Yas, however. She was a hefty woman with strong bodily features. It was she who addressed the vid.

"The day has come and the day has gone," she intoned. "Good-bye white brothers and hello to our African home."

The camera switched focus and XX Y stood on a column that was at least ten feet high. He was a dark-skinned black man with blue-gray hair combed straight back. His features were broad and heavy. His eyes were bright and a little insane.

"The day of the white man is over. By his own hand he created a doomsday device designed to kill you and me. I say you and me because that's all that's left, you and me and the few who received the antidote. We have recovered the files of the so-called National Security Department and have learned that the International Socialist Party, that foul and racist crew, had paid geneticists in MacroCode Russia to develop a gene virus that would target the black race. But the mighty gene fooled 'em." XX grinned with a perfect set of white teeth. "Yes, she fooled 'em. She said, 'I will not prey upon myself. I will not obey your insane plan.'

"They broke into immunization centers around the world when they realized that the striped virus was infecting their own. Some white children will survive because of this. Other so-called whites bear the sign saying THE NIG IN ME.

"Some of you say we should finish the job that they started. That we should kill every last blue-eyed devil. But I am not so inclined. I am not the evil slayer. I do not set myself up as God. Most of the world needs burying. And some running dogs need to pay for their crimes."

The speech went on for hours. Harold sat with the stink of his friend's rotting corpse, not because he was enthralled, but because he was lonely. Lonely for lost Jamey and Yasmine. Lonely for the world that he moved in. He wondered if those dancers on the Sixtieth Street pier saw the flash of the bomb for an instant before they died.

6

Harold spent days in the abandoned house at the end of the cul-de-sac. There were lights and power because that neighborhood ran off an array of solar panels placed upon a nearby hill. XX Y was the only show in the world. He ranted as much as six hours a day. He entered into long harangues against the old society. He pleaded to the so-called whites who had survived because of the quantity of African blood in their veins.

"Accept your blood, brothers," he crooned. "Blood brothers, that's us . . ."
Bleep, bleep.

". . . soon the arks of Africa will arrive on our shores. The colonized and enslaved motherland will come to reclaim us. Do not fight them. Do not deny your heritage. Embrace the new world order."
Bleep, bleep.

Harold became aware of the tiny electronic alarm. It had been sounding for hours. It was his ID-chip. The small display on the chip was mostly garbage. The date was a line of happy faces. The time was a row of eights. But there was a valid return number, eighteen digits long. Harold at first thought that it might be a trick of XX Y to find and draft all living black people into his World Africa Army. But when he decided to take a car and see the world for himself, Harold entered the number into the Gales' kitchen vid. When he was greeted by the aged image of his father he was stunned and saddened.

"Pop," he whispered.

"Hey, baby boy." It was his nickname before his ninth birthday. "I thought you got it in New York," Clarence Bottoms said. "I been pagin' you for a week."

Harold had nothing to add. He hadn't even thought of calling his father.

"How is it up there where you are, son?"

"It's only me around here."

"That's good. We been fightin' a war down here."

"Where are you?"

"Florida. They got four groups down here. Two Spanish-black armies, a white--or so-called--group, and then there's the American blacks. Fightin' over groceries, guns, and women. Fightin' over control of the utilities and right-of-way in the streets."

"Fighting?" Harold said. "Blacks fighting each other?"

"Not everybody's fightin'. Not even most of us. But it only takes a few fools with guns to mess it up for everybody.

"I found your mother. I came down here lookin' for her and damn if I didn't find her. We gonna sneak outta Dade County in a few days and make it up to St. Louis."

Harold was still wondering why he hadn't called anyone.

"My friends all died, Pop," Harold said. "Yasmine and Jamey."

"White kids?"

"I guess."

"Don't worry, Harold. Come meet us at Rand's farm in St. Louis. We can start over." __________

Harold found the keys to the Solaro in the Gales' garage. He filled five bags with canned and freeze-dried food. He had twelve five-gallon containers of water. He carried it all out to the car and loaded up. Then he sat behind the wheel in the cool darkness of the garage, looking at a wall covered with hanging hand tools.

He turned the key and grabbed the steering wheel, but had no idea of how to drive the car. He cried hysterically for six or seven seconds and then stopped. Climbing out of the car he walked out of the garage and headed for the Gales' front door.

"Hey, nig!" a man's voice shouted.

Harold turned to see three swarthy-looking white men. They were dressed in fancy suits decorated at the knees and elbows with brightly colored scarves.

One man raised a pistol.

Harold ducked and ran. All around him branches, windows, and even the walls of the Gales' home exploded from the charged shells that the so-called white men loosed.

Harold went through the house and out the back window, into the woods and was gone. There was a rhythm to his footfalls and his body through the trees. When Harold realized that he had escaped death, he began to laugh.

The world had started over.