The Late Bloomer

by Falkin, Mark;

  Johnny’s voice: “Your stomach sounds like an old Slavic woman trying to get out of bed.” He stepped out in front of me from the side aisle. I audibly gulped.

  It’s a couple of miles from Rebecca’s, at least. How in the hell…?

  We stood at an impasse—trust, for the moment, gone.

  “Why’d you run off with them?”

  “Did I…?”

  “I didn’t bring you here, Johnny.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so confused.” His tone was flat.

  “Will you stay with me? Help me?”

  He looked over his shoulder. Held his head. Stepped to me and hugged me.

  He slipped to his knees, grabbed my legs, and I rubbed his hair. We remained there for a few moments, him quietly sobbing, my flight-or-fight impulses receded. Sobbing and Muzak.

  He peered up, his chin quivering. “We’re still going to be okay, right? You and me?”

  I couldn’t say anything else but, “Yeah, J. We’ll be okay.” He stood up. “We just have to find out what’s what out there, wrap our heads around it, and come up with a plan.”

  He just blinked at me. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “Why is this happening, Kevin?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think there’s a reason. I don’t think reason has anything to do with it. It just is.”

  “What is?” His eyes red, his nose wet.

  “I think . . .” and I struggled with saying this because it sounded so final. “I think it’s the end of the world, J. As we’ve known it, anyway.”

  I could see in Johnny’s face that he wondered why I was here, why Kodie. He stared at me, blinkless. Looking into his face, I envisioned that wave fetching upriver.

  He fell out of his trance when I spoke again. “I think, at least for tonight, as long as we have power, we need to keep food close to us at home.”

  “We staying there?”

  “Why fly off half-cocked until we know more? We should, at least for tonight, until things settle and we can think.” Johnny furrowed his brow, pursed his lips and nodded.

  Now I took him in. He wore army pants I’d gotten him at the Army Surplus for his birthday and a Run DMC T-shirt from the Fun Fun Fun Fest we went to together, just us. My band friends had become real douches by then, about the time I started hanging out with Bass. We ditched them and watched the music together without the head-up-your-ass selfie-posting and tiny talk that goes on.

  I heard a bang, maybe a wooden pallet, back at the loading area. Johnny and I looked at each other, arms full of fruit. We quietly put them in the basket. Just around the corner stood the stainless steel doors with rubber trim leading to the cold storage rooms and the loading area behind the building. That’s where the sound came from.

  “Hello?” I called out. We listened to dead air. “Hello?” Louder this time, taking a step forward. In the resounding quiet, I felt the prickles of panic. “Real quick, let’s go back and see if the girls are all right,” I whispered to Johnny. We loped back to the front. Johnny fell behind. Kodie saw me and I flashed a questioning thumbs-up. She nodded to me with a surprised look on her face, a smile even—what? I shook my head, mouthed nothing.

  No time to dwell, I turned and redirected Johnny back past the imported oddities, the dewy organic delicacies. When we got to our cart, something felt wrong, like the air had just been displaced and we were arriving in the wake of its disturbance. Up ahead I saw the stainless steel doors swaying.

  “Look.” Johnny pointed to the cart. Still attached to a banana bunch lay exposed the meaty inside of one having been peeled, and a bite taken. The white inside a red apple framed by teeth marks.

  Among the oranges sat a brown, fist-sized stone. I stared at it vacantly. My mind capered in a corner of my skull somewhere. Johnny dug it out and held it in one hand, feeling its weight. Once I blinked out of my stare, I asked rhetorically, “What in the hell?”

  To lighten the mood, Johnny took the stone and placed it on the SKU scale. The digital numbers blurred to a stop at a little over a pound and a half. He dialed in a number he saw in front of him, the Vidalia onions, and out came the barcoded sticker. He tore it out and pressed it onto the smooth stone, put it in a plastic bag, spun the bag so it twisted up a straight line to be tied and knotted.

  “Nice work.” I patted the gun at my ribs. “C’mon.”

  Johnny knew where. With a set look on his face, he started walking ahead of me carrying the stone by the baggie knot between curled knuckles, the stone swinging idly. I whispered to him to hold up. He lagged, I caught up. We went straight for the metal doors and stood before them, nodded to each other once like in the movies, and I kicked them open, gun drawn.

  We stepped through into the storage room the size of a squat gymnasium. Boxes and pallets and cool fecund air drifted in from far continents. Nobody there. Then came the echoing laughter through the catacombs of boxes and stacked pallets. Johnny snapped, “Hey, would you guys please stop it?” As if he knew them, a fidelity in his voice. “Why don’t you come out if you’re so smart? Come on out.” Johnny’s voice had command in it that I’d never heard him use before. They had numbers so they assumed strength within themselves. But the quiet that followed said they weren’t so confident and had nothing to gain by confrontation. Then, the air no longer held that pregnancy. I was sure they were gone. Johnny stood there stunned as if having been assailed by knowledge.

  “We should go,” he said, looking into the gloom.

  “Why?”

  “We just need to go. Now.”

  “Johnny, they’re gone. They’re just kids.”

  He turned his head slowly to me, up to meet my face. “Okay.” His voice told me he wasn’t convinced but that he’d follow my lead anyway.

  He flung the rock by the baggie knot down the corridor of boxes and pallets. It landed with a crack on the cement and rested there in the murk. We both looked at it as we might bait tossed into calm water we knew teemed under the surface.

  A car horn blared. Its bursts came uneven. Not a car alarm. We realized the coordinates: outside, out front, our car.

  As we ran, I thought I heard a rush of feet in the store running with us, in other parts of the store, as if we were in a footrace to get there. It could have been blood moving through my ears, my breath tearing through my throat hot with panic.

  I was way ahead of Johnny when I got to the door to find my car not surrounded by people with mouthfuls of crystal-spit, but dogs. About ten of them. They were in a group and all wore collars. Domesticated dogs on a grand lark. A mélange of labs and shepherds and pit mixes, save for one little lap dog with long, well-coifed hair. When I bounded out the door, they spazzed and scattered with their tails tucked. They regrouped out in the parking lot and looked at us. The coifed dog yapped. The rest deferred to it, seeming content to let it do the talking.

  I went to the car. “What happened? Why’d you honk?”

  “The dogs,” Kodie said, still leaning over the front seat. She got out, again holding her bat at its middle with one hand. “Dammit, that scared me.”

  “They’re just lost, running around. You scared of dogs?”

  Johnny’s slapping footsteps came to a halt behind me. Kodie’s head snapped to him.

  “No. No, I . . .” Eyes on Johnny, then me, drawing the connection. “I love dogs, grew up with them…”

  “So?”

  “So. That,” she pointed to them. The dogs mingled, panted and watched us discuss them. “That is a pack. A pack of dogs is different. Packs…of anything are dangerous. Of anything.” Do you follow my meaning? her look said.

  “Packs of gum aren’t,” I said.

  “Shut up,” she said as she stepped up and hugged me, looking at Johnny over my shoulder. “I freaked. Sorry. They came careening around that end of the strip straight at
me. That’s what was so weird. Just straight as an arrow.”

  “Did they Cujo the car?” I thought of the little dog in the car in front of the coffee shop, its gnashing and spittle on the glass.

  “They got to the car and then kind of sniffed around. One of them went up to the store door and when it slid open it jumped back. I honked to get rid of them, not to call you. Sorry.”

  “We’re jumpy,” I said. “All nerves, fight or flight. And hungry. Bad combo.”

  I understood her. And it was more than just being jumpy. It’s different now, I thought. Everything takes on a different cast, because the context is radically different. Common things, things we used to associate with good feelings, can seem a threat—children grouped in a room like in any preschool; dogs running with happy tongues flapping—and all the fears we used to experience have been replaced with the terror of the mundane, the things we took for granted, the not-scary things, like one’s brother coming up behind you.

  There are no more serial killers or fatal car crashes to fear, and any virus moving between people has its work cut out for it now. But there’s the wind, the children, tall empty buildings with elevators cruising up and down empty. And the night. That primordial fear embedded in the DNA. The great world will spin and the dark would come soon enough.

  “This is your brother?” Kodie asked. “Johnny, is it?” she asked, looking at him and trying to smile.

  “Yeah. And he’s going to stay with us now, aren’t you?” I lifted my eyebrows at him. He nodded sheepishly and waved at Kodie.

  Trying to cheer her up, I said, “Hey, let’s go back in and shop. Get some beers? One of those little kegs?”

  “You think it’s wise to be boozing it up tonight?”

  “Beer’s not booze. How can it hurt? It’ll just be us.”

  “And Johnny.”

  “And Johnny.”

  Kodie said, “And everyone still alive out there, with no police, no army.”

  “You know there’s nobody,” I said.

  “We don’t know this. Let’s go with what we know which is we need to get food, drop it off at your place, and then figure out a way to contact people. Get a CB radio. Go to a radio station and figure out how to broadcast. Something. We need to drive around to see what’s what. We need to try to make contact. We’re alive, so there must be others. We’re just really spread apart.”

  “All right.” I agreed we had to try to establish contact. I couldn’t yet say out loud that reconstructing the old world would be futile. The dark smiling teeth of my summerdreams had such power over me. Whatever they communicated, I believed, though I didn’t want to.

  “What we need to do is settle down,” I continued, “get back and take a breath, eat and think. Let the shock wear off a little. I’m not sure time is of the essence here. What we don’t want to do is make a false move out of panic.”

  Kodie nodded at this. “You’re right.”

  I continued, “Now…I hate to say this, but we do need to get weapons after we get the food here. We can go right up here to McBride’s.” Kodie’s one of the most peaceful and kind people I’d ever known, but she nodded at the concept of acquiring weapons. I wondered if McBride’s had already been raided and stripped bare. I hoped that it had been because that would be evidence of life, of a will to survive existing in others.

  The dogs still hung out, looking at us look at them. The fear of the pack lingered in Kodie’s eyes.

  “Hey, Johnny, see if can you get those dogs to take off. They’re bugging Kodie.”

  Pleased to be of use, Johnny started walking in the direction of the dogs. The sitting dogs stood. All watched him with their ears perked, frozen, and they stayed that way until Johnny had claimed half the distance to them and put his hands up in the air like a monster coming to get them. He lifted his hands and he roared and they ducked and bolted across Lamar, which on any other day would have plowed them all to pieces. They sprinted down the street toward Medical Parkway. I could still see them as they veered left like track dogs, heads bobbing, neck and neck toward the hospital.

  There were bodies at McBride’s Guns. My guess is that when the smartphones resting on nightstands in pitch-black rooms concussed with texts and calls, lots of people ran down to the gun store to stock up, and then whatever was to befall them—the white stuff, suicide—befell them.

  These piles over the bodies, these cairns, were the same shape and size as the others we’d seen. Just enough stone and debris to cover the corpse, forming a pyramidal shape. Johnny walked up to the suicide. I could tell he wanted to remove a rock to see, but he thought better of it. They had come, they had piled on the stones but didn’t take the gun away, just an artifact of the old world to be left alone.

  Inside was different. Ron, by the name tag, lay on his back between displays, the white hardened into something that looked like crystal. If it wasn’t issuing from a man’s throat, and if Ron didn’t have his eyes locked on the ceiling as if his doom resided there, I’d even say it was beautiful, something you’d see behind glass in a dark room with a single spot on it. We found four more, all men. Over in knives, one had knocked over a display and a few switchblades had sprung open upon impact. He had died of the white. So had another, also an employee, lying behind the long counter with racks of guns lining the wall. Bullets were all around him on the floor and up on the glass counter.

  Another guy sat slumped over, his head on the meat of his outstretched arm, his back against the industrial shelving. The halo of splatter on the boxes next to him spoke plainly, as did the Browning .22 on the floor a few feet from him.

  You drew one or the other. One was the pitiless choking. The other, overjoyed suicide—the lipsticked nurse on the pedestrian bridge, the bald guy in his yard with his waving. No stones covered the bodies in here.

  Then I got it: in here. The bodies weren’t covered indoors. Why only cover the ones outdoors? I had to get out of there; the tang of blood in the air. I took long fast steps past Kodie and Johnny and made straight for the door.

  Kodie called after me. I put my hand up in the air. I just need a minute.

  I shoved open the glass door and the electronic chime bonged. I sidestepped the cairn in front of it, noticing for the first time the blue leather purse next to it.

  Whatever this was, maybe it was stalking me now, I’d thought. It’s taken me longer than the rest, but maybe that’s because of my late blooming. Just a delay. Now it’s here, come for me.

  My heart thudded at my temples and in my throat so hard that I thought for a moment I might pass out. I thought of the suicides I’d witnessed. Just before they did it, they were ecstatic to be doing it. The rapturous look to them.

  What calmed me down: I didn’t have that.

  Impulsively, I went over to the pile covering a suicide and I tossed off a couple of the rocks. An act of taboo desecration. They were watching from the thickets that ran along Shoal Creek. A multitude of eyes blinking at me behind the wall of green.

  I yelled out toward the green, “We should be piling them in truck beds, burning them in pits! Not covering them up like cat turds in a litter box!” I stood up. “Come out!” I waited. “Come out, come out, wherever you are! Olly-olly oxen free goddammit!” I collapsed to my knees next to the cairn and peered down into the space in it I’d created. Through the stones I could see skin, the crew neck collar of a T-shirt. Couldn’t see the face, and that was probably for the best, given the large kidney-shaped puddle of blood hardening as it continued to swell over the macadam, screening the sky’s racing clouds.

  That moment seemed to freeze for an elastic amount of time. My head buzzed.

  I go back in and we load up with grim resolve like out of an eighties revenge movie montage: crossbows, shotguns, pistols, civilian-grade assault rifles.

  I forced the trunk closed and we all got back into the car now stuffed with a small war’s
worth of groceries and gear.

  “Gotta figure out how to use this thing,” I said, holding up a small black graphite crossbow.

  “Who you plan on shooting?” Kodie sat in the back, Rebecca’s head returned to her lap.

  “Well, like you said, packs are dangerous.” We drove.

  Kodie said, “God, imagine…imagine the rebound of fish in the oceans and rivers, the pollution in the air and water receding, the earth basically healing itself.”

  “Ah, cataclysm as environmental correction.”

  “Just saying.”

  “We’ve definitely peed in our own soup. The whole planet, though? It was here long before we arrived and will go on even after the sun burns out, a cold, indifferent rock, her scarred ocean beds smiling like Buddha.”

  “That’s uplifting.”

  “Doesn’t seem like a day for optimism.”

  All the windows down, the hair on all of our heads, Rebecca’s too, lifting and flowing. Johnny rested an arm on the door, sunning his elbow. He leaned his forehead out to let the wind rush his face, eyes closed. Bliss in that face.

  Not the bliss of the ignorant. No.

  “And what, oh wise one, do you think about all this?” She waved her hand out the window as if she were a real estate agent displaying the available world to me. I felt a missing-Martin pang. “What does an organism do when it becomes infected with, oh, let’s say a bacteria that just grows and grows?”

  I wasn’t taking the bait. I shrugged, looked out my window at the blurring green as we headed back north to the house.

  “It defends itself,” she answered herself. “Sometime during the industrial revolution, the earth realized that it had been infected.”

  Not wanting to get into it, I said, “It doesn’t matter does it? Besides, okay, to your point, the earth doesn’t have standards. It doesn’t feel. The earth is an ever-morphing system. It adapts to the new thing.” I looked at the rearview. Kodie cupped Rebecca’s face with her hand. “I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to apologize for,” she said under her breath, shaking her head with small swivels.