Free Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh Page B

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