“Bass, when you saw your folks…Sorry, man, I’ve got to ask this. Was there any?”
The coffeemaker hissed. “Blood. Cracking lips, but not from the throat. The whole thing seemed very dry. If that makes sense.” He looked off into the corner of the kitchen, his arms crossed and his palms under his armpits. It was that same glazed stare seen in the faces in the photographs of soldiers from the front staring off for a thousand yards. This all happened only twenty-four hours ago yet it seemed ages.
After several minutes of silence as Bass and I drank our coffee, prefaced by a deep sigh which triggered a coughing jag, Kodie said, “I don’t know what to do.” Her forearm still rested over her eyes.
Nobody said anything for a minute or so, which, following that question, was a long time indeed.
“What do we do?” she asked. “This malaise. Shouldn’t we be freaking out?”
I said, “Maybe our survival demands that we don’t do that. We’re in shock, like when you break a bone and it doesn’t hurt so bad at first. If we were to drive around all half-cocked, it’d be dangerous. Maybe this mellowness, not panicking, is part of it.” My pontificating felt as strange as my defense of this course of inaction.
Bass grabbed his wadded dark green T-shirt from the counter, pulled it on, and asked, “What do you want to do about Johnny, Kevin? I’m up for whatever you want to do about it. If you want to go try to find him, I’m with you.”
Heavy, helpless sigh from me. “I mean, where would we start? Johnny’s with all the others. He came back before. But that Simon kid, though, what he said.”
“The boy you talked to at the cemetery? What’d he say? You didn’t tell me.” Kodie started to sit up but didn’t.
“He said to keep Johnny with us. Like it mattered in some big way. And he said that the kids were really scared. They think there’s some monster—”
“—Beast,” reminded Bass, his lips to his mug so that the word came out muffled, steamed and amplified.
“—beast, out there that needs to be fed or it will get them. Feeding this beast is what will bring on what he called the beginning.”
Kodie sat up. She took the thermometer from the coffee table and stuck it under her tongue, clicking it against her teeth. We waited for the beeper to go off. “There. It’s going down. I took something before you got home. I feel better.”
“You took something?” I asked
“In your cabinet. Ibuprofen.” Why hadn’t she mentioned it?
“I think we need to go find where they all are,” Bass said. “Johnny’ll be with them. There’s a hundred thousand kids out there in this city that we can’t see or communicate with. That’s the first step.”
“All right,” I said, up for anybody else to take the lead. My four a.m. train-chasing fatigue burrowed into my bones. “Let’s get a ham radio somewhere. Maybe, just maybe, there’s somebody out there.” We all nodded.
“Walkie talkies,” Kodie said. We all nodded.
“Don’t cost nothin’,” Bass said.
“Sounds like the beginnings of a plan are forming here. The malaise lifts,” I said, smiling. “Kodie, you up for this?”
“I have a choice? I mean, we shouldn’t go out alone or be left alone and we need to make some moves now. Before long the power’s going to go. Yeah, I’ll be okay.”
The rumbling motor and rattling exhaust echoed between my street’s halt houses. “We could just go get another car. A brand-new truck or something,” Bass said.
“An urban assault vehicle.”
“There you go. Like a Suburban. No, a Hummer.”
“Hummer. Yes.”
“How Green Zone of you,” said Kodie from the back seat, still offering her old-world protests.
“Let’s go find out where these kids are first,” Bass said.
“Where to? I mean, where in the hell do we start?” I asked.
“Let’s cruise around, see what we can see.”
“I know it sounds silly, but it’s kids we’re talking about, right? So, the schools, the malls.”
Bass demurred. “Huh-uh. Zilker. Butler.”
Kodie chimed in. “What we were talking about earlier, Kevin. That’s where I think I’ve been seeing them. Down by the river.”
I nodded and looked back at her. “Yeah. And if you’re a kid, would you want to go back to school if nobody made you?”
“Hold on,” Bass said. He put the Bronco into park and chugged in the middle of the street. “You’ve been seeing them? What are you guys talking about?”
Kodie and I sat in silence, each waiting for the other to say.
“Okay. Don’t answer me.” He started to put the truck in gear.
“Poor Bastian,” Kodie mocked. The flirty way she said it stung. “Tell you what. When we’re all done, we’ll go get you a nice new Humvee with a machine gun turret on top. That make it all better?”
Bass nodded childishly, bowed his head but lifted his beseeching eyes to her. “And ice cweam?”
“And ice cweam,” I said, stepping on Kodie’s next line to quash their rapport.
“Guys, shut up,” Kodie said. She toggled her eyes in her head. “I know you don’t care, Kevin, and I understand, but I’ve got to try to find my folks. I can’t just not try.”
Bass nodded. “Let me know where you want to start.”
“My house,” she said. “Hyde Park.”
We started to roll when I noticed the door cracked at the Fleming’s house. The door swung back and forth, an inch out, an inch in. “Hold on a sec,” I said, “I gotta see something real quick.”
“Real quick,” admonished Bass.
I hopped out of the truck and jogged over to the Flemings’ house, stepping around the cairn of stones covering Becky Fleming. I noticed the smell, the rank and the sweet marking the decay. Approaching the door, the smell shifted, then grew.
“There’s no reason in the world why I’ve got to go in here,” I told myself just before I pushed open the door with my toe. “Yet here I am,” I said with my hand over my nose and mouth. The sound the door made creaking open came from somebody pressing play on a spooky sounds CD from the ninety-nine-cent post-Halloween cutout bin. I stepped in, left the door open behind me. I looked back at Bass and Kodie. They faced each other talking, and though distant and obscured, I could make out their bodily attitudes and I burned. They seemed to be arguing.
In the back part of the house, I heard tinny music Mr. Fleming had left on. Leaves had blown in. They scratched underfoot. I walked through the stillness, the wood floors similar to ours creaking under my footfalls. Tiptoed down the gloom of the hallway as if I were sneaking up. The smell intensified. The blinds and curtains of the house were still drawn as they would be at early morning, so by the time I reached the hallway to the bedrooms, I had to flip on the light. The wash of light bared out everything true and awful though I looked only at a plain hallway. Pictures on the wall.
Traipsing through someone else’s house felt wrong and my anxiety at what I would find made me queasy. Though the house was musty and smelling of death, I also felt a current of air running over my skin. Thinking I felt movement in the house, a presence, I drew my gun, held it to my side. I crept down the short hall and my flesh bubbled up over my arms and hands. One hand covering nose and mouth, one holding the glock.
I pushed open the door to the back bedroom. The clock radio played big band. There lay Mr. Fleming, under a partially opened window, dressed in a navy suit and blue tie, polished brown shoes. Last night’s rain had blown in, leaving his hair and jacket wet. The curtains waved.
I stood in the doorway and observed the room for a moment, trying to discern what happened in here other than that Mr. Fleming had died. On his desk was a yellow legal pad, a few pages rolled and tucked back under it, a pen laying on top at an angle that seemed purposeful, resting as it did at a perfe
ct diagonal with the paper’s corners. Something ordered in the chaos, to be noticed. Similarly, Mr. Fleming’s shotgun was at the foot of the bed in a way that made me sure it had been set there carefully. A laying down of arms. Compared to all the others I’d seen, this scene of death seemed to be mindful, staged, Mr. Fleming accepting and ready to go, though I wondered about the window being half open and him right below it. Had he tried to climb out?
Then there was the other thing that made this scene different though my mind hadn’t grasped it when I first came in. He clutched a folded piece of yellow legal pad paper and held it to his chest.
I knelt down and took it from his stiff hand, tearing a swatch off which remained between curled fingers. His face pallid, his eyes looked past me at the ceiling, the inside of his mouth glimmering white, morning light gilding it. His eyes held the yet unnamed combined color of gray and yellow, streaked across with red oxbows exclaiming the brutality of last breaths.
I holstered the glock, clicked off the clock radio, and unfolded the paper to the writing inside. I lifted my T-shirt up over my nose.
Outside, the Bronco’s muffler blatted. Bass honked twice and I heard him yell out to hurry up.
I turned the paper11 around, sat on the edge of the bed, felt the butt of the shotgun at my hip. Mr. Fleming’s script looked harried, the letters jagged, the lines slanted.
Kevin—Just as my time comes upon me, I somehow know you will survive and hope you find this. In fact, I know you will, because of the dreams about you and the young woman I’ve been having this summer. Dreams that were more than dreams. In this knowing about you, I’ve also seen the dark smiling teeth, which I know you’ve seen too, thus I know that you’ll not be staying here for long, so, when you can, before you go, will you please bury my wife and myself at Memorial Park?
I wondered if Bass wanted to bury his folks. Should I waste time trying to find Mom and Martin?
I know it’s a lot to ask. we have purchased (not that the quaint concept of “purchasing” matters much now) two plots in the new section by the far east long road. There is a short young hedge that runs bordering the south of it. The nearest grave is Miller to the north and Parish to the south and Salazar to the east. We picked that spot together, but anywhere in the shade of that little wood would be much appreciated. I’m not so concerned about me, but I cannot bear knowing she’s out in the open like that.
She’s not in the open, I thought. She’s under a pile of rocks.
I’m sorry, stones.
This that’s killed us? You’re asking me, with obsequious genuflection at the doorstep of the learned professor? My best guess is…evolution is too slow. Near-extinction is fast. We’re the keystone species. We’ve not been here long, geologically speaking, but we’ve done a lot of—some would say damage. I don’t see it that way. I don’t think the earth does either. I think we’ve merely pushed Nature into a corner. She’s pushed back here and there, with AIDS, with strains like SARS, Ebola, with melting icecaps. But now i think Nature has given us a hard shove.
What’s done the shoving? Something lodged deep in our DNA code, hiding, waiting for the triggering moment, waiting still and quiet and patient as a snake eyeing the flitting mouse. It’s been waiting there all along, hidden on the dark side of the helix.
I was too overcome when you were at my door, but I did want to tell you that at a little after dawn—house and car alarms starting to go off, the various city emergency vehicles sirens blaring in the far distance— I looked out the window to see the Jenkins kids, three houses down from you, and the Walsh kids who live around the block, all meet in front of the Jenkins’ house. They didn’t talk. That half blind Danny Jenkins kid pulled those coke-bottle eyeglasses off his face and dropped them to the pavement. They silently turned and walked down the street. The children of this world now? The ones you’ve got to somehow contend with and lead? Changed, and changing. Quickly. Drones, lacking free will, living in vast worldwide colonies.
It’s just a guess, but I’m afraid that’s all I’ve got to give.
“Lacking in specificity,” I mouthed to myself in a wet whisper. A dry hank of Mr. Fleming’s bangs lifted in the rising wind coming through the window.
We sure were looking forward to watching you play at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Don’t stop playing. The world will still need its music…and its storytellers, its poets (yes, we all know about your writing; your mother was so proud).
Godspeed, Kevin. It’s your world now~
Kenneth Fleming
I slumped, rounded my shoulders, and sighed. I reread the last lines again about what the world will still need and doubted very much that I should be the one to provide it, that I was worthy of such a thing. The part about my mom being proud made me erupt in wracking sobs which I tried not let consume me but when I did that it got worse. I tried to hold it in and to suck it up.
Sucking it up, the smell of death in the room drew farther back and up into my deep sinuses, and its pungency stung. I smelled the death of this room and knew that the woman who carried me, gave birth to me, cared for me, sang me to sleep, loved me only for who I was and nothing more—she lay smelling somewhere too and it was almost more than I could stand.
Despair kept worming its way into me. The will to survive couldn’t plane the sharp edges of mourning. If I were to find myself alone in this, the fear would drown me just as sure as the white stuff.
I noticed at the bottom of the note, right above where the paper had been torn, a solitary PS. It hung there. He had torn off what came after.
I went to the desk and picked up the yellow legal pad and swung over the page tucked behind. The name Warren Jespers PhD UT appeared at the top, but had been crossed out. A false start. A change of mind.
I pulled out the wicker waste basket from under the desk. In it was a neon-green Pearl-Snap beer can, an empty box of shotgun shells, and a wadded ball of yellow paper. I snatched it out like it was Wonka’s golden ticket.
The top of the first page was torn at the angle matching the note I’d just read. There was a second page as well.12
Kevin, I’m reluctant to add this, but I think I should. I had a colleague, my good friend really, at the university, Warren Jespers, who had stopped teaching pre-med biology to work in pure research with UT’s rather hush-hush genome project. It was his project. Warren was brilliant, tenured, and too old but refused to retire. The Board of Regents wanted him to do his thing far away from the spotlight. They had him at this little-known annex off Medical Parkway in a building that couldn’t be any more nondescript. He had a single assistant, my wife.
The other thing she did besides tutor Spanish.
Becky came home last month ashen-faced, asking me to help Warren because he wouldn’t leave the building, he was obsessed. She’d been bringing him food and changes of clothes for a month. This sounds like a mad scientist scenario, but in this case, his madness wasn’t due to some nefarious thing he was building but rather what he’d discovered. To simplify: He discovered an element in a gene which controls our production of an enzyme called monoamine oxidase A (MAOA). In lay terms, this is the evil gene, the makings of psychopaths. This, combined with a genetic kink in serotonin recycling…makes monsters. His theory was that Nature—the gene—alone made evil men and that Nurture is not a factor at all, that the idea of Nurture having significant influence just made us feel better. He had isolated this gene, wrote a paper which was peer reviewed, but not well. As is the fate of most visionaries, nobody took him seriously, so they shuffled him off to that outpost on Medical Parkway to keep him quiet. They patted him on the head and told him to go play. Over there. Way over there. But this alone isn’t what had him obsessed. Once ensconced at his lab on Medical, just down the street from that pub transplanted from Stratford-upon-Avon, he found something else, something that he hadn’t told anybody, not even Becky. He asked me to meet him at that pub, the Draugh
t House, just last week. His face was ashen, too. We sipped our pints in the beer garden. It grew dark. He was stalling. When the group of hipsters next to us got up to leave, he immediately leaned across the table, knocking over his empty glass. This is what he said: “Ken, I’m pretty sure we’re all going to die.” His glass rolled and fell to a crash on the cement. I blinked at him and agreed, Yes, we all do. He proceeded to tell me that linked to the MAOA gene was something else, and for the last month that something else had him working nonstop.
Our circadian rhythm, our bio time clock, it’s like a minor switch at work, he explained. It’s in our genes and it regulates when we get up and when we sleep, among other things. Warren told me he’d found a major switch and that this switch regulated when we die; not just we as individuals, but as a species. “This thing (his word) hides in plain sight like dark matter in space. It’s there, it’s so everything, so everywhere that we geneticists don’t think to see it. We don’t know it’s there, like a fish doesn’t know it’s in water. Genetic science will change,” he said. “It has to. They’ll think I’m crazy, but I’ve got to get the word out on this. Maybe we can reverse this doomsday gene’s mechanism,” he’d said. He needed me to help him because he was sick with a glioblastoma in his head. Ticking. His switch was about to flip. And nobody would believe him. I’m more credible, apparently. I’m on TV all the time. Screens imbue credibility in our world.
When I saw masses of people all over the world clutching their throats on TV this morning, I knew Warren’s warning had merit.
That’s the objective, scientific aspect of this story. What worries me Kevin, what worries all men and women of science, is the unknown. In the old days, the unknown was ascribed supernatural properties. The unknown here is: What triggered this latent, doomsday gene to go into effect around the planet simultaneously this morning? And did it hear me and Warren talking over our pints? Did it become concerned that we humans had stumbled onto something we shouldn’t have and decide to speed things up before we could understand and solve?
As Warren warned, this sounds crazy.
The Late Bloomer Page 14