The Late Bloomer

by Falkin, Mark;

  Kodie tried getting on their level. She put her hands on her knees and bent forward, curled the hair of the long side around her ear. “Why are we too late?”

  There was a beat of pause, then the children boomed, “they leap from high places with smiles on their faces!” as if such was self-evident. Their brows furrowed, their cheeks flushed. I thought I heard a guttural roil in their throats. If their ears could’ve flattened, they would have. In nature, you know when you’re not wanted.

  I actually felt my eyes dilate with fear. I don’t know how Kodie was being so cool. The agitation in the air, their fear transforming into animosity, was palpable. My mind did the dirty math: twelve little kids, two late teens. They could take us. Yes they could, especially if the not-so-little boy next to me turned his head, clutched my calf, leaned forward and bit into my leg. And then if another one were to dash behind to shut the door…a death room. No one would hear us scream.

  But it wasn’t their number that bothered me. Not quantity, but quality. Their being was one of menace and strength, their might together exponentially greater than the mere sum of them.

  I took a step back, away from the potential biter and into the doorframe. Just in case.

  Kodie, hands on knees, ignored their awful chant and waited for Rebecca to answer. She possessed the patience of the sole schoolmarm, unflappable and resolute. “We know it’s scary, what’s happening. But if we all calm down and work together, it won’t be so scary.”

  Rebecca looked at Kodie like an adult does a politician smiling at you with his hand out, like, Okay, I’ll play along, I like you, you like me, yes yes, you’ll change things. Rebecca’s maybe six years old, and this is the look she gives. “Tell me, Rebecca, why do you say we’re too late? We’ve found you. It isn’t too late.”

  The room became so still it stiffened. The air itself attained a new property, went from gas to a semisolid, encasing us.

  “But it is,” said Rebecca. Her normal little girl’s voice now. A voice that admitted that she was scared.

  “No, Rebecca, it isn’t. We can help.”

  “It is,” she whined and stamped her Mary Janed foot once on the wood floor. She looked down at the floor at her feet like she was sorry. “It is.”

  The little boy right below me shot a glance inside my open shirt, fixed on the gun, then snapped to my face.

  Then Rebecca said, “Too late for you.”

  Behind me, Johnny’s voice. “Hey, Kev.”

  Surprised, not hearing him walking through the house, I spun around.

  “It’s only me, brother. No other,” Johnny said in that dreamy voice.

  “Johnny! Oh, thank God!” Just as I stepped toward him, several small hands pushed me into Johnny. I tripped over his leg into the hall and fell hard. The gun clattered to the wood floor and spun. The door slammed closed. I scrambled up.

  Johnny now held Martin’s gun flat in his palms and regarded it like it were a nonfunctional object. “What are you doing here?”7 His eyes wide as saucers.

  “J, careful with that. Give it to me.”

  He took a step back and turned the gun away from me, hunching a shoulder like he would after dinner shielding me from his dessert. “Hold on,” he said.

  I stood up and looked cross at him. “Johnny, give it back to me now. I mean it. If you don’t, when we find Martin I’m going to tell him.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  Through the door, “—Rebecca? What’s wrong?” Kodie’s concerned voice.

  “My head hurts,” I heard Rebecca whine.

  The knob wouldn’t turn. “Kodie, unlock the door.”

  “Rebecca? Boys and girls, can you help me? Rebecca’s not feeling well.”

  Johnny. “You are too lying.”

  “C’mon. Give it to me.”

  “No.”

  “I’m your big brother and I’m telling you give it to me.”

  “—Kevin?” Kodie’s voice from right behind the door. I could see the shadow of her boots in the inch beneath it.

  “You okay? What’s going on?”

  “Kevin. Hurry.”

  “What? What is it? Can you not unlock the door? Johnny’s out here in the hall and he’s got my gun and he won’t give it back.”

  “Kevin. I need you.” Kodie’s voice shook now. “The door won’t open,” she whispered. The knob toggled back and forth in slow, halting turns. I visualized her back to the door and her turning the knob awkwardly behind her. No sudden moves. If she faced the door and frantically turned and tugged, they’d pounce like vipers.

  I tried it again. It wouldn’t move. I laid a half-assed shoulder into it. Nothing.

  The children muttered together, in unison, low-toned words I couldn’t make out.

  “Kevin…?” Kodie asked with a suggestion of mounting panic. “Jesus, Kevin, help me. Rebecca’s…I don’t know. She’s… oh, now they’re all holding their heads…”

  Then I see Johnny holding the gun by the handle, finger on the trigger. He’s examining it, rubbing the barrel with a finger. He doesn’t have it pointed at me. He’s transfixed, caressing it, lost in its potential.

  I take two quick steps to him, grab his wrist holding the gun, and point it away.

  “Ow . . .” he says. I twist his arm. “Ow, ow, ow. Okay.”

  “Take your finger off.”

  As soon as he removed it, I yanked it from him, flipped the safety back on and shoved it in the holster. Then in my rage I backhanded him across the face and he fell into the wall. He whimpered as I connected with his cheek. He put his palm there.

  “You goddamn listen to me, Johnny. Enough of this shit. Got it?” I tried to mask the fear in my voice with anger but couldn’t get the tremble out of it.

  He slid his hand from his face, leaving a rake of red marks, and smirked. “Got it. Dick.”

  My open hand flew out and popped him again. This time he cried out and it echoed loud in the small hallway. “No. That’s not the answer I need from you. Got it, I said.” My hand stinging, my stance wide, exhaling in nostril flares.

  I just found him and the first thing I do is hit him. Twice.

  Slumped against the wall with a tear line etching his face, he nodded with contrition. He slid down the wall and sat on the floor, head bent between parted knees, his hands clasped behind his neck.

  From right behind the door, Kodie screamed.

  “Get away from the door!” I bellowed.

  I considered using the gun on the door but dismissed that idea as too dangerous. With fear came fight; with that, anger and strength. The door gave to my leg and foot, the jam splintering.

  The advancing children stopped midstride. They’d been coming for Kodie, all but Rebecca who lay on the floor on her back with her arms crossed on her chest and her eyes closed. They looked ready for me to scold them. Then their myriad eyes set on mine, flat and unchanging, eyes of one entity, an enormous insect with dripping tips of poison on a lancing tail hidden behind its bulk.

  I glanced past them at Rebecca and saw her belly swell and recede. Kodie quickly stepped beside me and seized my arm. I remember feeling her nails pressing into my skin, my heart beating there in the little grooves she made.

  The door hung open and swayed a bit on its hinges as the doors of older houses do, the wind moving through the house.

  “You okay?” I asked Kodie as we both tried to win the staring contest with the roomful of children. She nodded in my peripheral vision, gripped my arm that much tighter. Then, like spooked deer at the hissed signal they give, the children flew into motion. Around us they bolted, ran off like water down a sloped plane and laughing in the oblivious tones of recess. They thundered through the house, the floor shimmying on its piers and beams, and they were gone.

  And Johnny with them.

  I
ran through the house to the front door. They’d disappeared like sugar dissipates into hot water.

  Crestfallen then, sighing in the doorway, I didn’t know how I was to find him.

  From the back of the house, Kodie said, “They were coming for me, Kevin.” I jogged back to the bedroom. “Jesus, the loathing in their eyes.”

  “She’s asleep?” I ask, motioning to Rebecca.

  Kodie shrugged. “She was standing there seizing. Hands to her sides in fists. Her eyes rolled back in her head. I thought she might swallow her tongue.”

  “What did the other kids do?”

  “Held their heads. If I’d pushed through them and bent down to help her, I think they would’ve pounced. That’s when I called for you.”

  Rebecca’s abdomen swelled and deflated slow and smooth. I felt her neck for her pulse, lifted an eyelid. Like I’d know what to look for.

  If things weren’t the way they were, we’d’ve called her parents, we’d’ve taken her to the hospital.

  There’d be nothing but horror at the hospital. I refused to go to public buildings, to engage in apocalypse tourism. To see people in hardening scrums soon to fall into a putrid slush.

  We knew our parents were dead. Tracking them down to regard their corpses? To what end, closure? Seeing Grandma Lucille in a puffy casket was horror enough. I couldn’t take a more macabre version of closure. We needed to survive, not mourn remains we’d never find anyway. This is what I argued to Kodie.

  But she wasn’t having it. “I can’t not try.” Rebecca’s head lolled in her lap in the back seat. Kodie gave me a piercing look in the rearview. “I’ll retrace their steps to work, I’ll …I dunno. I’ll go without you.”

  “It’s dangerous to separate.”

  “I don’t care.”

  I sighed and didn’t speak until completing a turn. “Okay. You’re right. Let’s get some supplies first?” She looked at me again in the mirror and assented with a single nod.

  Despite all, the basic drives still moved us. We were getting hungry, and not far off was the prospect of night. The hunger wasn’t that common noon-hour hunger, but deep bodily hunger borne of lack. The energy we’d expended in all this shock had us tapped.

  I fiddled with the radio. No jingles, no music, certainly no news. A lament of static was all.

  I drove us to the HEB grocery store on streets engrained in my psyche but which now seemed foreign. Beyond the flick of a flag, a traffic light changing, a plastic bag rolling like a tumbleweed, only out of the corners of my eyes did I see movement. Dashing like cast-upon fish.

  I flashed to me and my friends as sixth graders throwing water balloons at cars, ducking and hiding, running like hell and laughing until breathless, especially as the victim gave chase. We hid on our bellies under cars and barely breathed.

  These grown-ups, gone forever now, who half-heartedly searched for us, couldn’t remember why they once did these things. They yelled and shook their fists in tirades against youth itself.

  I swerved with unease around more piles of rocks on Lamar Boulevard and in parking lots. The piles like anthills pulsing up from the ground owing to the swelling pressures of spring rains. We all saw them but said nothing. The fear was there, but also: What was there to say about something you cannot yet understand? We listened to the urgency of static and were afraid of what we saw and what we couldn’t yet see. That was all.

  That was how it felt the day of—stunned by silence, numbed by static, confounded by piles of stones, bewitched by twitches in the periphery.

  Oh, man I did not want to go in. No shambling remainders weaved in parking lots. Inside, however…This HEB opened early, so I figured we were due for some bodies.

  Afraid as I was right then, I knew I’d have to buck up if I was going to make it and that I had to make it because I had work to do beyond survival. There was something more for me. Something important. I had begun to feel as if I’d been uniquely spared. It just felt that way. The way you feel love—you can’t explain its exact origins, you just feel it.

  I’d been feeling it, this weirdness, since the summerdreams of June. You know when you have an intense dream and you wake up and the residue of the dream sticks to you for a while? It’s still there in the shower, at breakfast, on the ride to school? And if it’s really strong, maybe even it lasts until lunch? You can’t shake it. It’s like déjà vu. A brain cloud. Something. But then it lifts. It always lifts.

  But this never lifted.

  I had the dreams. The residue didn’t lift. It clung and grew. I thought I was going crazy. I really did. Not a tweakable disorder but like psychotic, I was going over the hills and far away. Hell, maybe I have. Maybe I’m in a sanitarium right now like Holden Caulfield and in time I’ll come out of it. T’was all a bad dream.

  It didn’t lift. I wrote the story The Late Bloomers to try to get it to lift. With the dawnsounds, it grew like mold, enshrouded me.

  The chrysalis dream. The dream of the dream of sleep. The mouth containing the dark smiling teeth curling up at the corners segues between dream scenes. The non-voice issuing from it sounding like glass.

  It grew more intense on the drive down the lane to Rebecca’s house, and now in the parking lot of the HEB.

  It’s even more profound now as I talk to you as I float. Those dark smiling teeth, the sound of hardening glass.

  We parked in front. In the old world, if you did this, you’d be assaulted by honks and within seconds a security guard on a golf cart with a swirling yellow light would arrive.

  Little liberties like this were no consolation. All this freedom, what amounted to a new set of rules we didn’t yet understand, they just made me feel sick for what was gone. Parking here to go in the store and take things unquestioned just reminded me that I loved my mom and that she was dead, and that the whole world was this big dead altered thing.

  I turned off the ignition and braced for that quiet to settle like a cloak of volcanic ash. The sky remained cobalt. I hated it too, its mocking emptiness, the void it prefigured.

  Kodie still held Rebecca in the back seat, stroking her hair now, providing her that succor I couldn’t to her father. I had just gaped at him. God, what a galling sonofabitch I am for standing there with my idiot mouth open, hanging fire. How callow.

  I wondered then: Would I do the same for Kodie if it struck her? It’s wishful thinking, but maybe she’s like me. Maybe we’re goddamned Adam and Eve starting this thing all over again, starting it right.

  Now, that’s a thought.

  Kodie stayed with rosy-cheeked Rebecca in the car, nodding for me to go ahead.

  “You sure?”

  “As long as she’s here, I’m okay, I think. If things get weird, I’ll honk.”

  “You won’t leave her and come in with me?”

  She lifted her bat from the floor of the car and smiled. “One-woman wrecking crew.”

  The automatic doors which were never closed for the all-day traffic were closed now. The door sensed me and slid open. Cool air and the smell of vegetation hit me, as did the Muzak. And I thought Jesus, as soon as I can I’m going to play some real music. Nothing but ad jingles all morning, and now Muzak.

  Nothing on the floor, nothing in disarray. The lights were on, the iced rows remained so. Not a puddle or drip. This HEB isn’t like conventional Midwest grocery stores. This is the upmarket HEB, Central Market. Mom liked to shop here. Martin did not. Too expensive and full of trendy people who made him itch—forty-year-olds in skinny jeans and Ray Bans pushing $2,000 baby strollers branded in umlauted Helvetica. It’s a labyrinth, forcing you through the whole store’s maze so that you’ll buy more.

  Pushing a grocery cart, I bypassed the massive vegetable displays at which Mom would always stop and make us fan out with veggie lists. In the fruit section I picked up a bunch of bananas and dutifully made for the scale so as to weigh it fo
r the price sticker. I put it on the scale then glanced back at the code on the display. I started keying in the SKU number and stopped mid-type as it dawned on me that my weighing and typing was pointless. I smiled, but…free stuff was no world’s end perk. This wasn’t a party. Still isn’t. Floating and terrified, that’s me. That’s us, right, Maggie? You terrified? You were on the ride home, weren’t you? Sorry for that, girl. Okay? I’m sorry. I’m tousling her scruff. She looks over her shoulder, her face drenched in sun and blinks her eyes dolorously at me. Apology accepted.

  I started grabbing. My mind thought in survival terms now. What I needed and how long things might last. Who knew how long we’d have power. I had no idea what went on at the power plants, water management facilities, what to do, how to maintain anything. I didn’t even know where the power facilities were. Internet, gone. The smartphones which had dumbed us down (it’s all up in the cloud!) didn’t work. And if we got a phone book and a paper map and we found the power station, we’d pull a lever and blow ourselves up.

  I panicked a little at these accumulating thoughts. Feeling very claustrophobic in this wide-open, not-so-brave new world.

  Fresh things first. That’s a good call. Get a bunch of fruit and vegetables. Meats. I talked to myself. “If we need to, we can use the fridges next door.” I thought of what we might find in other houses. All the other houses.

  “Why not just leave it here, then? If the power goes out, it goes out everywhere.”

  I had a discussion with myself. Like a madman.

  “Sure. But it’ll be close. And maybe we can get gas-powered generators going. Besides,” and I stopped talking, tried to organize my thoughts.

  “Besides…what?” I stood in the aisle, my mind toggling.

  “Others may be out there and others may come and take more than their share. We need to get what we can when we can.”

  My stomach moaned long and demanding. It echoed. I let out an airy laugh through my nose.