Mom had wandered off. Bass’s parents had tried to. Mr. Fleming’s open window. An overwhelming need to get out? Trying to go somewhere. All the cars we’ve seen on the roadsides are empty. Save for the sexton at Memorial Park, not a single car has had a corpse in it. All keys in the ignition, most doors open, door chimes binging away.
Everything had settled now. The sky wasn’t yesterday’s cobalt and the blustery winds were gone. The sky was low, morning-gray and flickering electric as we headed back out of downtown and up I-35. My eye snagged on a huge blow-up jack-o’-lantern affixed to the top of a strip mall.
On I-35 we saw eighteen-wheelers stopped at the side of the road every fifty yards or so. We stopped at the first three we came to and checked the cabs. Empty. We stood on the shoulder of a flyover looking down at east Austin. No stone piles anywhere on 35 and none could be seen down on the streets below except for the couple I saw in a Fiesta grocery store parking lot.
“What the hell, Kev? Where did the truckers go? All the drivers?”
“Truckers’ve got CBs. Maybe they communicated and went somewhere? No idea.” Specious reasoning. Bass didn’t follow up. Most of our initial questions were rhetorical, WTF? questions.
Went somewhere. That took root in my head. I closed my eyes and my eyelids fluttered. I heard Bass ask if I was okay and though I nodded, what I saw behind my eyes were the dark smiling teeth. Smiling as if pleased that I’d figured something out.
Went somewhere . . .
I opened my eyes and swayed a bit. “Another vision?” Bass asked with true concern and reverence in his voice. He took hold of my elbow to steady me.
I nodded. “It’s so hard to describe. All I can say is that I know many are gathered somewhere.”
In the distance was Mueller’s Park and the bright red Thinkery Children’s Museum. Doubt kids were there thinkering about the old world. “Kids lived,” I mused. “What a ‘kid’ is we’re not sure. Pre-puberty?”
Bass nodded. “Yet we’re still here.”
I pressed my lips together. I looked over his shoulder at the Bronco where Kodie sat in the front. She had put her head back and closed her eyes, clearly not feeling well. “Some adults killed themselves.” In my head the bald man shoots himself in his kitchen, the little squares of windows lighting up in the dark, and the smiling nurse sits atop the fence looking down at me with that wild glamour in her eyes, nodding yes. “I do not get that, but it’s a significant number. Most died like . . .”
“My folks,” Bass said with a raised chin.
“Like them, and like the Flemings, the Lagenkamps. And Rebecca’s dad. The trashman on my street. It was getting him. The people at McBride’s. The white stuff. But, where are they?”
“It’s not like we’ve gone house to house. Maybe they’re all still inside.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Why?” Bass asked.
“Your folks were clearly trying to leave.”
“Yeah, but I think they were reacting to . . .” He caught the emotion in his throat and swallowed. “Going somewhere…That’s not what I saw in their eyes. They were panicking, flailing.” His eyes shined as he staunched tears.
“Okay. My mom walked off somewhere. Martin’s car was gone. I didn’t see a bunch of people walking this morning. But all these trucks and cars. Even this police car over here.” I pointed down the freeway and squinted. “See? The driver door’s open. Empty. These truckers, cops, shift workers, they were driving through the dawn when it happened. All of them, they pulled over, stopped, parked, got up, and walked away. Where? Why?”
I saw whales lined up on beaches. Fires at night. Dancing silhouettes.
I thought I was starting to understand why. “Like the world’s whales, they beached themselves. They went somewhere to die.”
Bass pursed his lips as he measured my conjecture. Mueller Lake winked as a flock of waterbirds took flight from its surface. “All right. So, do we go looking for the kids…or this place the dead went?”
“Kids,” I said, my voice flat. “I’m not sure finding where a bunch of dead people are matters.”
“I’m with you. We need to assess and the biggest assessment to make is to find out where the hell a hundred thousand kids are.”
And that’s when we heard the roaring.
It came from the direction of the river. We heard it three more times as we drove with windows down. Each time we heard it, we narrowed down its location. We’d angle in on the sound, disagree with each other, the noise repeated, more terrifying each time. The third time we heard it we knew it was the sound of thousands opening their throats, like what you’d hear in a stadium, a big play for the home team, the starting chords of a smash-hit song.
But it had a keening, unhinged pitch to it. Having heard nothing for a day and then to hear this, from a distance—I thought my nerves might melt down.
We heard it again driving up Barton Springs. We were so close now that Bass instinctually slowed down. The dreams and visions had hinted this was the place. The children of Austin had all gathered on the morning after at Butler Park.
Butler was this open green centerpiece to the several cultural structures near Lady Bird Lake. Next to it was the Palmer Arts Center and the Long Center. A place of picnics, running dogs and children, a night-lit fountain, ponds and walking paths and the river curving just beyond. The grand backdrop was the downtown skyline. An idyll. Of course they’d chosen it to be their place of reckoning.
We crept along, ready to bolt. I know it wasn’t just me seeing the potential scene here as we got closer. They’d hear us, stop their noisemaking, turn and come for us as a horde. It wouldn’t take long for their two hundred thousand hands to get at us through the webbed glass.
Yesterday they were disparate and coming together. Now that they were in a hive, their reaction to us might be different. Strength in numbers. Strength in groupthink. You mess with one bee, you might get stung. Go home, put some ice on it. You mess with a hive…
What, we were going to shoot at them, mow them down with the Bronco? Even if we did, there were too many.
Oh, that damned muffler’s hacking, even at this nil speed, was too much. “Kill it, Bass,” I said. “They’re gonna hear us. If we want to see them in their natural state, we’ve got to walk.”
Bass pulled into the Peter Pan Mini Golf at the corner and turned off the truck. We sat in the quiet for a moment, looking at the twelve-foot elfin Peter who, in front of the course’s building, had taken a knee and gazed into the great beyond not unlike the Great Sphinx of Giza, only this Sphinx wore tights and had a droll smile that did nothing to settle our nerves.
Bass: “Okay, let’s roll.”
We exited the Bronco, each having the presence of mind not to slam the doors.
“Let’s go over to that building next to the park there, you know?” I asked.
“Yeah, Dougherty Arts,” said Kodie.
“Let’s see if we can climb up and see what they’re doing.”
“What about Palmer?”
“You think we can slip past them on Barton Springs? It’s wide open there. They’ll all see us and then it’s a footrace. And we’d be treed up there if they saw us. The school’s better.”
We stood at the bus stop across from the Peter Pan. I was scanning around while Bass talked and in my head I heard the MoPac train from last night. Chasing that train had been futile, I’d thought. But now I’m not so sure because the residue of its sound caused my eyes to fall upon the bridge stretching across Barton Springs Road just yards away.
Bass yammered next to me. I slapped him on the chest with the back of my hand—shut up for a sec, I’m thinking. I stared at the yellow sign which read 13ft-7in posted on the bridge across which only trains crossed. This was where the MoPac—the Missouri Pacific Railroad—took a turn through downtown Austin before making its way south. I
t ran right past the park, and from memory I knew it did so under the cover of trees and vines. When the train passed through it was a haunting sound because you couldn’t see it. You just hear it motoring through the trees, the high whine of stressed metal, the thunder of rolling weight. Like a monster in the trees.
A beast, maybe.
“I got it,” I said, my knuckles still brushing Bass’s T-shirt. “Look.” I pointed up.
“Ah,” Kodie said. “Nice. We can scramble up there and look down on them.”
“Won’t they see us?” Bass asked.
I shook my head. “Too many trash trees and ivy. We’ll be able to see them but they won’t see us. I got this, too.” I held up my $1,000 tactical binoculars. “If there’s a problem, we can scoot down and get to the Bronco.”
Making sure to avoid the beds of spiky poison ivy, within minutes we made it to the top of the incline where the cement braced the receding bridgeworks. Just as we got to the top, the children roared. At what impulse, we hadn’t a clue. We made our way along the track, walled-off by thick foliage.
Down below us about twenty feet, bivouacked into a spot below, a leaning tree was a miniature tent city established by some homeless. Across from this was the back of the Dougherty Arts Center which was covered in colorful graffiti. The one which caught my eye, however, was simply the word scary, rendered in black and lacking artfulness there in the middle of it all above a back door.
At the wall’s corners I noticed two identical tags: a pox on yo lips.
A place we’d never have gone a day ago, this little world behind the wide one; the dead person in one of the derelict tents, the graffiti-caked back wall, the vines which draped a curtain between us and the park.
We saw a small break in the foliage thirty yards ahead. I walked a couple steps ahead. Kodie and Bass drifted behind me. I gave them the hand signal to get low as we walked. From tie to tie we strode like creeping ducks toward the clearing. Even through the scrim of vine leaves we could see the park’s open stretches as we walked. At the front of the park stood Doug Sahm Hill, named after the sort-of-famous Austinite who had a couple of national rock ‘n roll hits in the early sixties. You know, that tired Austin Hippie Hollow Armadillo World Headquarters cosmic cowboy crap we young millennials yawned at. A cement path encircling the hill from bottom to top led to a plaque bearing his name.
We arrived at the break in the foliage. I got low, raised my head above the trestle railing, and peered through the wedge in the green.
What I saw removed my ability to breathe for a moment.
Bass and Kodie came up behind me and I guess our three heads lined up must have looked like some scene out of The Little Rascals, wide-eyed kids peeping over a whitewashed fence.
The entire front half of the park was blanketed with kids. I mean, you couldn’t see grass for a quarter-mile square. They weren’t fidgeting or running around squealing, not even the toddlers. The seven-year-olds, the ten and twelve-year-olds, boys and girls, held the sated, silent infants. Not one cried.
Dear reader, the way they collectively…were.
Words fail.
Their physical attitudes were in no way old world. They stood and watched, every face locked on whatever it was. I couldn’t quite see yet. Something on Doug Sahm Hill. While not rigid soldier-like attention, together they exhibited the quintessence of new world.
Something in them had clicked. Just as something had in the post-pubescent population of the planet—making them explode white from the inside, making them leap from high places into traffic…Something had clicked and they were changed. Though I couldn’t see it in their eyes, and wouldn’t yet for some time, I saw it in the way they moved, or didn’t.
And something else. If all the adults had essentially exploded and died within hours of that dawn, then the opposite had occurred to the world’s children. Something, a big bang, had imploded within them. The outward manifestation of this was their melding. They attained this…this synchronicity. What I mean is they physically moved together. And the way they did made you believe they thought together, too. Like a flock of birds moving in the air, or the way a school of fish suddenly turns and darts as one, responding to some collectively felt stimulus. With no outward communication, they move as one.
This crowd of children rippled. They moved in nauseating undulations.My mind flashed to that most rogue of waves rolling up Lake Austin.
Imagine “the wave” as we know it, like we see at ball games. It was instinctual, autonomic as if of one contiguous organism. One kid moved an elbow and the energy of that moved out in a fan, rippling the crowd like calm water struck by a stone. The energy of one movement dissipated but the next and multitudinous others were ongoing, surging, dying.
The infinite movement of an ocean.
A sight such as this was impossible. It made me cold.
Now I was sure that what had happened was more than an extinction event. It was a leap in evolution. A sea change you could say, to use Mr. Shakespeare’s phrase. The species was different now. Plain as that. What that meant and where things would go, well, I still can’t say, but as I float along talking into this thing to you, I feel they are watching me. Sensing me. Just as we three watched them from the tracks, they watch me from the banks of this river. I cannot see them, hear them. But when I’m floating and talking to you and Mags, I feel them. They send out their waves. I feel them in my head. A delightful throb and whisper and I’m rocked and benumbed in the womb of the world.
Their ocean rocked as they watched the top of Doug Sahm Hill.
We were all bent over with our hands on our knees like we’re about to do the hand jive, standing on a railroad track upon which no train would ever again roll. The day after, they were gathered and waiting for the beginning.
I shivered. My teeth clacked. I had to clinch them to make it stop.
Kodie touched me on my back with her spread palm, still warm with fever. “You okay?” she whispered.
I shook my head slowly. “Just…I don’t know how to even…look at them.”
In my periphery on either side of me, Bass and Kodie nodded sluggishly. Kodie uttered under her breath, “My God. What’s happened to them?”
“Happy Halloween,” whispered Bass. We stared, too scared to move. “What’s happening?” he asked, more to himself than us.
We were a good seventy-five yards away from the crowd’s edge. I wondered if they had already registered our presence. How could they not hear, feel, the Bronco’s blatting muffler, my clacking teeth?
“No sudden moves. No sneezing, nothing,” I said. “Let’s go up a bit to see what’s on that hill.” We did the walk again, tie to tie, for about twenty ties, then resumed our hands-on-knees pose.
What we saw summoned no words from our lips. What came from my throat was an airy low hiss of disbelief.
Maybe a full minute later I whispered, “Jesus Christ,” to myself.
“No pun intended,” Kodie said.
On Doug Sahm Hill were three kids tied to posts. With my $1,000 binoculars I could see they were each bound at the wrists. The posts looked to be four-by-fours, set into what I didn’t know. On top of the hill, not seen from this vantage, was a huge concrete map of Texas, its major cities and its rivers, Austin’s location depicted with a star. Surrounding this map and all along the top of the summit of the hill in a ring were cement benches. Behind was the vista of downtown and the river.
I rolled my finger over the focus dial to crisp the image. The boy in the middle lifted his chin to face the multitude below him. His face held not fear but rather resignation, maybe even absolution.
The face belonged to Simon. I didn’t recognize the other two boys. All their cheeks were wet from tears they no longer shed.
And I thought yesterday was as bad as it got.
My mind felt thrown down a corridor where at the end only madness and bloo
d resides. My mouth watered and I found myself fighting throwing up. Though we were far away enough to need binoculars, the sound of my vomiting would attract attention. There’s no way to vomit quietly. Maybe you can stifle a sneeze, snuff out a cough, but once the gates open on heaving, it’s full, noisy committal.
I held the binoculars but my eyes were closed. I swallowed repeatedly like I’ve done many a time after losing at beer quarters. I got the salty spits and my stomach sent the signal for full throttle evac, but I tamped it enough to speak.
“Simon’s in the middle,” I’d said with pre-vomit slur, salinized spit flooding inside my cheeks. Bass slowly reached for the binoculars and I handed them over.
He looked at me then did a double-take. “You okay, dude? You’re white.”
Kodie touched my elbow. I won the battle with my stomach.
When Bass focused in, he said, “Holy. Shit,” the words over-enunciated, the ‘t’ made with the teeth and breath.
“It’s like they’re being punished. Up on a hill, like Calvary,” whispered Kodie.
This girl…I thought then. I love this girl. She has a shaved head and knows the New Testament. Even in the midst of post-apocalyptic atrocity, puke wanting to geyser from my innards, I’m in love-lust. Indeed, the species shall survive. It’s definitely a go.
“Cavalry?” Bass whispered. “Huh…what now about horses?” He said this absentmindedly, his eyes glued to the lenses, his knuckles white around the binoculars. He’s having a hard time grasping what it is he is seeing. Their movements you want to say are wrong, profane. You want to look away. Your brain demands that it stop moving like that, yet…you can’t stop staring. It sickened me. Kinda like being seasick.
Never asking for the binocs, Kodie seemed to know not to look directly at it for very long, like one knows not to look at the afternoon sun. Medusa. Your parents having sex.
The Late Bloomer Page 16