That was the last time we saw each other.
And now I think that fake smile is the dark, glistening one overfull with teeth.
Turning my head back down the hall, my eyes snagged on the wet new tag across lockers, A Pox on Yo Lips. Gravity still pulling down lines of the paint.
We’d shared portions of a dream. Grandma Lucille, I know what you’d say.
To share a dream like that…I’m with you. Can’t believe that’s coincidence. No such thing as luck.
How did you go, Mr. E? Did you walk out into the gray of that morning before the sky evolved that awful blue? Choke and fall in your bedroom, public radio pledge drive purr looping? You and that hot, barren wife of yours, are you lying in your house together now, she in your too-big T-shirt, you caught mid-shave and shirtless, the spumed white hardened? Or did you both get that holy-rolling look on your faces and then do it together in a gleeful improv suicide pact? Did you seek out a high place from which to leap? Or something more local and brutal?
The way you dragged your finger pad along the edge of my page.
Ah, hell.
“You okay, Kev?”
I plopped down to ward off vertigo. I breathed. Bass said, “It’s going to be okay. It’ll get better. The shock is wearing off, reality settling in. I figure we got to push through it or we’ll never make it.”
With his bottom lip pooched out, he bobbed his head to these general terms like one might a funeral litany.
We made quick work of it then, tossing the stones off of her—clack! clack!—lifting her stiff, heavy, bug-riddled body into the back bed of the Bronco next to her husband. Somehow, loading the Flemings into the Bronco made us feel like maybe the world could be cleaned up, if not literally every body interred, at least we could envision the old world coming back. We extrapolated from these moments the rebirth of the world as we knew it.
I got the shovel from the garage.
The earth came up easily in the place Mr. Fleming had described in his note. Two guys digging, our breath visible fog in the chilling evening, silence but for the sniffing and the breathing and the scratch of the shovel and the sound of loosed dirt landing in a pile.
We made one hole. It wasn’t six feet, but deep enough. I got in the hole which came up to my waist and pulled them in. I hated to see how they lolled and flopped. Once they were both in, I situated them side by side and then we covered them without words, as this is the oldest of human tasks and no annotation was needed.
At night it began to rain. The patter comforted us, this sound of the world still living. Kodie opened a window. When we finally got in bed together, I flipped on the recorder.
I erased our conversation, most of it being too far away to hear. She whispered and cried, said she felt she was dying. Her fever spiked again and I nursed her all night, barely slept. Her coughing became so intense that she couldn’t stop for minutes at a time. We had to sit up. I brought her green tea nuked in the microwave. I thought of Bass’s mom as I did it, how he used to do this when her asthma got bad. Kodie could hardly speak. The worst of it was just before dawn, when she said, “I take it back.” She had grabbed my wrist hard and searched my eyes frantically, hers toggling back and forth between mine as mine did hers, neither of us able to alight on the other’s gaze. “Will you do the same for me as you did for your neighbors?”
At dawn, the wheeze slackened. She slept propped up with her mouth agape. I let her sleep. After a night like that, she can do what she wants. Though we have so much to do, all I want to do is take care of her, my Eve of the new world.
Though I erased this night’s conversation,15 I remember uttering, “please, God, don’t let her die” at dawn. The agnostic in the foxhole didn’t last long.
I’ll say it again now, in case she’s alive. God? Please don’t let Kodie die.
There. A little supplication can’t hurt.
Frankly, it’s why I’m even doing this book. Because now I think God might really be there and that I’m meant to do this. If I feel I’m meant to do this, then there must be meaning.
For I was feeling stronger as all around me grew weak.
Obvious with Kodie, but I also saw it in the oncoming gauntness of Bastian’s face. His shoulders slumped and he wheezed. They’re winding down like windup toys having lost the kinetic energy twisted into them.
I’m being wound up. Stayed up with Kodie all night long and yet I feel no fatigue.
The death that has come comes slowly for us late bloomers. Just like in my story. There’s still enough kid in us, ersatz Peter Pans, and the death is stymied, but would it be denied?
Kodie and I had been going down the street, house by house, breaking and entering, filling the bathtubs. Her breathing had cleared and she had energy for the task. Many of the doors we came to were unlocked, but a few times we busted in through a window.
Entering each was harrowing. The interiors mausoleum-still, the dim window-lit spaces. Kodie, ever hopeful, insisted on calling out hello? each time. Her call echoed through the halls and empty rooms.
It got to where we did two at a time, she in one, me in the other, filling. I filled the tubs in the houses that had corpses. I didn’t linger around them much, tried to pretend they weren’t there, whistling while I worked to keep the creep from settling on the back of my neck. Of course, the more you ignore, the more the feeling back-builds within and soon I was sensing movement in other rooms. Thought I’d heard a shuffling, a creek of wood, a groan. I’d turn off the water and stop whistling to listen.
Oh, the silence of the world sucks to behold, dear reader.
Each of the ten or so we saw died of the white save one. The ones that died of the white were all on the floor, usually near an unlatched door or open window. A kitchenette chair knocked over. Everyday things scattered on the floor—stacked mail, breakfast cereal, toothbrush and paste—from the last throes.
I took the houses with corpses. You knew from the porch. The one suicide was a block over from my house, a house smaller than ours and painted fire-engine red. On the entry wall hung a still spot-lit painting of a melodramatic Old West winter scene—two cowboys and a Native American guide bent against the wind on horseback, oceanic tundra all around. I got up close to it and saw that the paint had become alligatored on the canvas. I couldn’t make out the signature at the corner. On the entry table were pictures of two men in various loving poses, wearing suits, tuxes, matching turtleneck sweaters. In one they held a small dog you knew was yappy as hell. The men were in their sixties, I’d guess. The house was in no disarray and the décor was contempo and clean if not breathtaking. That is, other than the cowboy painting from the mid-1800s. Seeing it spot-lit like in a gallery; that did take my breath. My mind vaulted to all the world’s art, the museums which had become themselves still-lifes, white emergency lights pulsing in their corridors.
The guy I found was in the kitchen. Several drawers were open and a few implements strewn on the floor from his riffling. The man wore a robe but it was open and splayed under him. He lay nude and spread-eagled in his remodeled midcentury-modern kitchen, a cone of light from the stove focusing on the gash across his throat from ear to ear. The wound had blackened and puffed to something like a rotten eggplant, one made so deep that the blood had simply fallen out onto the floor. The entire kitchen was a kidney-shaped tarry sea stilled by air, gravity, and time. A huge and expensive Japanese kitchen knife was stuck in the middle of the blood, an artifact in amber. The smell and the sight made me catch puke in my mouth and my eyes water. I thought I was getting used to it, a blasé veteran. Not quite.
I suppose I’ll always be shocked by death, the look of it on faces. Then all was still so…fresh, everything, even the outside air, smelling like a slaughterhouse town gone ripe.
I’d taken the painting off the wall and carried it with me under my arm from house to house, leaning it against porch steps next to
uncarved pumpkins. Kodie didn’t even question it.
It became rote work. We made entry, I’d clear the house to make sure it was safe, and then she’d flip on the lights and start filling. I’d check back, next two. As the tubs filled, my eyes would glaze over at the rushing water and I’d think about how it all used to be and how was it going to be. As the waterlines crawled skyward, I saw great dark stinking pits and they were filling with bodies.
Those visions felt like my summerdreams, which I sort of lied to Mr. E about. I lied in that I didn’t tell him I was having them every night, the exact same one, only our clothing and the clouds changing, and every one had the MoPac train coming down the track we were on at the end, trapping us on the trestle. The kids would see us if we ran or jumped. We froze. Dream ended. My heart pounding as my eyes whipped open.
We made our way around the entire block, feeling good about our modest progress. We’d excitedly talked about the need for chlorine tabs to throw in the tubs. We’d need to hit the library and do book research on how to do this—how to do everything. In one house a bedside Bible caught my eye. I let the water fill the tub and flipped to the passage Jespers wrote on his whiteboard, Matthew 16:23—Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me. For you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.
It needs you to need it.
Seek you. Seek you.
The static and whine roared through the house. That sound and Bass’s flat-toned imploring drew us into the room. We heard the buzz of static from the street. The front door was open and when we walked in we saw Bass standing in front of the rack of electronics he’d constructed. Top and center sat the ham radio. Bass bobbed his head.
He’d been busy. Before that, he’d set up the solar panels in an array on top of the detached garage to catch westering sun. I marveled.
Bass had connected it all to Martin’s big speakers. He glanced back at us, lifting his eyebrows in acknowledgement. “Whole block’s tubs are filled,” I shouted, backhanding his shoulder. “Hey, kill that for a sec.” He turned it down but the static was still there.
“So, this thing’s going and I’m learning how to use it. Pretty simple, really. Just turn the dial slowly and look for open channels, listen for voices, keep calling out our existence. There’s got to be another group like us out there banging away doing the same thing.” Bass twisted the knob to a clear frequency, lifted the mike, and spoke. “Turn it to the US standard frequency here and…CQ CQ. This is Bastian in Austin Texas USA calling CQ and waiting for a call…”
“Seek you. You say seek you?” I asked.
“No. The letters. C and Q. Just the thing you say. Means we’re calling any amateur radio station out there. There’s all this protocol and codes in this guide that came with it,” Bass held up the thick soft-backed book, “but it’s meaningless now. You guys can do it, too, whenever. Just come over and grab the mike and push this here. I say we leave it open and ping away as often as we can.”
The static compounded the emptiness, hissed how desperate our hope.
“Hey, it’s Halloween,” I said. Lifted chins and attempted smiles. This might be the first Halloween that truly scared us.
“I’m going as a ham radio operator,” said Bass.
“I think Kevin and I already did our trick-or-treating,” said Kodie.
I blurted in higher-octave Peanuts-speak, “I got a pack of gum!”
“I got a rock,” Bass said like a deflated Charlie Brown. We laughed. Well, I only chuckled because when he said that, I thought of stone piles.
That image overwhelmed and so I blurted to dispel the feeling. “Do we hit the road and expose ourselves to God knows what, or stick here?” Silence. “Right now, I think we take safety where we can find it, and stick together. Agreed?”
“This radio’s our hearth and fire. We stay here, I say, for now, for tonight at least,” said Kodie.
“See any reason for us to be searching for some other place to stay? Any place safer?” I put air quotes around safer. “Before we set up any more stuff like this, let’s be clear. I mean, we could go over to Camp Mabry and see what’s what.”
Kodie said, “Not tonight. Safety net’s gone. No police, army, doctors, mommies and daddies. We can’t go roaming around in the dark, not after Butler Park.”
“No,” Bass said. “I see no reason why we’d risk leaving what we know here. I’ve set all this up, you guys have made backup water available. I’ll get the generators going.”
“These first days are triage. Breathing room until…” I shrugged, motioned to the radio.
“Whatever we think of next,” said Kodie.
“Whatever comes next,” I said.
Kodie chortled. “I think we’re good on weapons for now,” she said, nodding at the arsenal against the wall. Bass and Kodie had moved the couch to another wall and arranged everything, the guns and ammo, so we could get to them quickly. We all turned to take in the impressive display.
“Should we go to someplace more fortified, a hotel or something? I dunno….” I said, still spitballing.
Bass answered, “Hate to say it. We’d be trapped up there, if, well, you know—”
“If the hundred thousand kids of Austin decided to turn on us? Is that what you’re trying to say?” Kodie was kind of mad. “We need to stop tiptoeing on eggshells and talk plainly and honestly to each other or we’re never going to make it.” Oddly, she shot Bass a knowing look, which he returned. When I searched both their faces, they looked down.
And then Kodie wheezed, her first of the day I knew of. It crackled and whined. An uncomfortable static-filled quiet followed.
“I’ve loaded all these here,” Bass said, waving his hand in game-show-display form. “I know guns. Fourteen different species of handguns here, all ready. Same with the twelve shotguns. Now, these automatics here, civilian-grade military assault rifles, your Bushmaster M-16s, these are all topped off. I can teach anyone to shoot who doesn’t know how. We should all know how at least. Over here you’ve got your . . .” and as he continued with his proud inventory all I could think of was kids. Mowing down kids, sweating and sneering like Rambo. What else would we be shooting at?
When Bass was finished, I had to say it. “Let’s not avoid the nine-hundred-pound pink gorilla riding the elephant in the room. Anyone here think there are adults alive? Show of hands.”
Kodie raised her hand. “We don’t know anything for sure.” She punctuated this with a cough.
Me: “True. But, Occam’s Razor. No military jets or tanks. There’s nothing, right? We know this.”
“Still. It’s early. We don’t know,” she said.
“Can we agree they’re dangerous? Are we willing to shoot to kill if it comes to that?”
Bass said, “If in mortal danger, we’re going to protect ourselves as needs be. If a hoard of a ten thousand kids comes running down the street at us, I say we get out the M-16s and . . .”
“What, mow them down?” Kodie asked, slackjawed at Bass. More sarcasm than disdain.
Bass said, “If they’re coming to kill us, then…yes.”
“When I fired into the air the night of, they scattered,” I said. “Probably all we’d need to do.”
“They won’t go into a cemetery for chrissakes,” said Bass. “They’re scared kids.”
“But then why are we scared of them?” I asked. A measure of pause. “Because we are. It’s the way they move, isn’t it? What we saw. That was enough. Their roaring from two miles away. That hum.”
Bass nodded his head with vigor. “Yes, definitely. They are changed. They’re together and they don’t seem to want our help.”
We all stood in that circle in my living room and nodded to ourselves. Radio static. Kodie’s sizzling lungs.
Bass turned to me and said, “Generators. I’ll go, before it gets dark.”
The first transmission came in at sunset.
We were playing coin poker on the living room floor while listening to my phone’s music player on low volume so we could hear the ham. Not totally unserious about it, I had suggested strip poker. Kodie smirked.
“Two dudes, one girl. Right,” she said. Her wheezing got worse with the dark and her fever returned, her face flush with it. While we were making our water rounds this afternoon, I had felt her forehead. It felt warm but I told her that I thought the fever was a good thing. I thought it meant she was simply old-world sick. She said she hoped so, adding that she’d had bronchitis before and this is how it felt. I thought, bronchitis—three days ago we’d shrug and take the antibiotics or whatever. Without doctors, pharmacists…the flu, influenza, to use its deadlier-sounding real name, could kill us now. Sure, we could break into pharmacies, hospitals, pilfer medicines, but we wouldn’t know what we’re doing. We could kill ourselves taking these things. Shelf life, quantity, dosage, who knows?
The adults knew. They left a gaping hole in the safety net. No, they’d taken the damn thing out from under us altogether.
Now children didn’t dare cross into cemeteries. They threw rocks, covered bodies, clung together like atoms of water. Primordial fear. They left that for us too.
The precariousness of our lives now, the omnipresent dangers of the new world, started to flow through and fill the passages and chambers of my mind, threatening to overflow into a panic flood. Darkness itself was now fearsome, and it came again soon. I’d been marking the sun’s scrape across the sky all day like prey dreading night-feeders.
When we heard the voice come over, we looked up from our cards and into each other’s eyes with shock and threw down our cards. Bass had turned down the volume so we could hear the music over the static but now leaped from the floor to crank it up.
The Late Bloomer Page 20