I think the kid was there to report on events. That one of the last of us was about to go. I think he was a messenger, an errand boy.
The dead kid wasn’t one of the kids who were standing in the neighbor’s yard. This boy had darker, shorter hair and he was younger. He’s maybe eight, nine. I didn’t know what to make of Bastian’s claim that the kid’s face wasn’t still. His words. In flux he also said of the kid’s face later, looking at me as we sat at the table eating cereal, looking at me in that…way.
Thing was, Kodie admitted the same thing later to me. That’s what made her scream. Not just that he was there. His face.
Whoever the kid was, he was dead and he was lying on our porch through breakfast and no kids showed up to cover him with stones. Must’ve driven them nuts.
I wondered how long it would take them to arrive and push us out—like they did to the Utopia bunch in San Antonio—now that we’d killed one of them. Maybe because we did, they’d not be so kind as to just push us out. Maybe that’s the incentive they needed, I thought. The fear grinding to a fever pitch among them. They’d come and overwhelm and destroy us. That seemed a stretch, and I knew nothing. Except that I felt their impatience.
Last night we went to bed saying we were going to Utopia today. Given recent events, we’d decided to collect ourselves and gauge the kids’ reaction. It was only a three-hour drive. We just needed to beat the dark.
Midmorning. The ham’s static filled the house. Bass would look over his shoulder and smile at me. It was like a smile maybe I’d have given to you, Mr. English, if this hadn’t all happened and you were there in the audience at some reading of mine in the far future. My discoverer and patron. A reverent and hopeful smile.
Kodie sat on the swing outside, idling side to side. Grackles wound themselves up above her. She didn’t cough. She said she needed some other clothes. She’d been wearing the same thing for days now.
The thin hiss of static inside and that dog nearby barking. And barking.
I was angry at them for their fear of us, if that’s what it was, for their coldness, their unspoken excommunication of us. Their staring, their stealth. I was angry at how different they were. A different species than us. A new branch on the taxonomy tree.
The power that caused it frightened me, yet also emboldened me, because for every action there must be a reaction. One force cannot exist without another acting upon it. We, the survivors, we’re part of whatever it is that acts against this change. I can’t and won’t assign the words good and evil to them because those are old-world words. The forces simply are, one against, or maybe more accurately, one acting with, reacting to, defining another. Yin and yang.
Afternoon. Heavy rain. Rolling blackouts had started and the water pressure had lessened. We’d decided to keep trying Chris on the radio, pack properly and leave for Utopia in the morning. Before venturing out in the Hummer to get Kodie some clothes, we decided to go check the bathtubs in the nearby houses in case we found ourselves off-grid sooner than we thought.
The boy’s body was gone from the porch. The dog had been barking and now I knew why. I imagined a small group of them, the ones assigned to watch us, a blur of silent little scavengers.
The rain pounded. We stayed together under two umbrellas. Me in the middle, Kodie and Bastian flanking me. Holding the umbrellas over me.
Before we got to the first house two doors down (Kodie and I skipped my neighbors’ because I knew Anne and David, a young childless couple who had moved here from Washington DC, and I didn’t have the chutzpah to see them just starting out), Bass asked me as we walked, “You know what that ghost said to me, Kevin?”
“Which one?” I keep seeing glimpses of kids but Kodie and Bass don’t see them. Or they don’t say anything. The kids show themselves to me. I’ll look somewhere, deep into a backyard through a chain-link or open fence, and they’ll step into my view as if to say peekaboo, we see you.
“Hah. Funny. You know, the lady of the Driskill.”
“What’d she say? I thought you didn’t see her.” Humoring him.
“I did. And she saw me. I ran up the stairs to the top floor, came to the landing, stepped through the door at the end of the hall, and looked down it.”
We stopped walking and stood in the middle of the street. Rain boomed on the umbrellas. “Let me guess,” I said. “She came out because you were staring down the hall.” I turned my head during Bass’s dramatic pause and stared at the corner of a house far up ahead. A beat, two. Around came the little forehead, the little face, stern and doll-like, making sure to meet my eyes even from that distance, then ducked away.
We kept walking. “She appeared, dressed in a long beigey-gray thing. Turn of the century. Materialized at the end of the hall to where she looked almost solid. She was looking down, her hands motioning like she was about to key the door she stood in front of, and she said something to herself. I couldn’t hear it, and as if I had said that, that I couldn’t hear her, she turned her head to me. What she said was, ‘He said he loved me.’ It sounded like a real woman’s voice. She sounded distressed, spurned, about to cry. ‘He said he loved me. He said I was the only one for him. And now look. Look what’s happened.’ She turned to face me. She started to walk toward me. She shoved one sleeve midway up one arm, then the other. I thought maybe she was coming over to punch me out. Her dress swayed at her feet. Her head forward, jaw set, brow furrowed. The hall lights above her winking and strobing with her progress. She turned the insides of her arms to me. They had been deeply slashed from the meat of her palms up to her elbow.”
“Were you not just terrified?” Kodie asked, taking him seriously, as we got to the first house and stood on the small porch. “How did you just stand there when you saw her coming?” I looked at her like she was mad yet loving her earnestness.
“Well, yeah. Scared the hell out of me. And this is the thing. I couldn’t move. Overwhelmed. Like this morning until Kevin here saved me.” He gripped my shoulder and squeezed. I grew anxious to get inside. Though I couldn’t see them, I felt the kids gathering like Hitchcockean birds. “She got up close to me, about an arm’s length, her face alabaster, her wounds deep maroon, but dry. She looked at me, searching my eyes, and said, ‘If the world hurts so much, Bastian, why don’t you just leave it?’ I nodded my head at her stupidly, blinked at her. Then she repeated, ‘He said he loved me. He said I was the only one for him. And now look. Look what’s happened.’ She said this the way my mom or a stern teacher would talk to me after I’ve misbehaved. Like it was my fault. She was cross with me, her eyebrows all downturned. She slipped an arm behind her. She brought it back around and displayed a straight razor. It gleamed and flashed in the light as she turned it. ‘Why don’t you just leave it? You can, you know.’ I just ran.”
We stood on the porch of this house out of the rain. I really did not believe him.
“Why did you even go in there in the first place?”
“We all know that story of the ghost. I always wanted to go check it out. When we drove by, I felt, I don’t know, compelled, to stop and go up.”
“So you could go up there so she could suggest that you kill yourself. Fantastic. That’s great,” Kodie said.
“You looked freaked, but you said you didn’t see her. Why are you telling us this now?”
Bastian shrugged and smiled at me all beatific-like. “Dunno, man. It just seemed like the right time.” And here that smile turned so big and bright that it frightened me. It wasn’t the Suicide Smile. No. It was the I-Love-Kevin Smile, the Kevin’s-My-Hero Smile. I’ve seen Bass’s muy stoned smile but this was something else entirely. “I’m wondering now,” said Bass, pontificating, his eyes looking at the sky, “if maybe all the suicides were urged to by a ghost, a voice. When I was naked in your living room with that gun to my throat, it was her voice I heard. Her saying, ‘you can, you know.’”
“I don’t…�
� His morning protestations replayed between my ears then—I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. I shook my head at him and opened the door. We stepped into water. I ran and slid through the house, the floor sopping. I peered around the bathroom door hoping that maybe we’d just screwed up and left the water running.
The tub was busted. The porcelain edge of the tub exposed to the room had been demolished. Big white chunks of tub lay on the floor in an inch of roaming water.
Kodie and Bass came in behind and said iterations of what the hell. “Let’s check the others,” I said. Kodie and Bass gave each other this big-eyed knowing look I couldn’t decipher then and I was so freaked by the water issue that I didn’t ask what their deal was.
We ran to the next house in the rain. I led. A dog up the street barked. Kodie and Bass lagged behind, whispering.
That’s right, you guessed it, dear reader, same thing at the next one, though this time we saw the water on the porch having seeped under the front door. We checked the next several and each tub bore the same violent marks, each house a small flood.
The pattern was obvious. Panicked now, we jogged home and our thirst grew. A click formed in my throat.
I was the first one back to the house, dashing inside, hand on the kitchen faucet handle. Kodie and Bass came up behind me as I turned the knob. Air sighed through.
We still had a few cases of bottled water, but now the dynamics had shifted. They had made a direct, emphatic statement.
We don’t want you to have water.
We don’t want you here anymore.
I’m pissed now. Illogical. I’m loading up, scrambling around the house, packing more heat than made sense, striding out to the Hummer. “C’mon, Bass. Let’s go be that beast they’re so afraid of.”
Kodie and Bass stood the porch. “Kevin, no. We agreed.”
I stopped midway down the walk and turned to her holding an umbrella and a graphite crossbow. “Agreed to what? They’re saying they want us dead. It’s a formal unambiguous declaration.”
“But this isn’t what you do, Kevin,” said Bastian.
“The hell you talking about?”
“There’s something going on with you, Kev. I feel it, and I know Kodie does too.” Those two looked at each other with conspiracy in their mien, exhaling and nodding like well, we may as well tell him. “And you do too.”
“What?” I shifted my weight. “This isn’t funny.” My throat dry, voice cracking. But I knew what.
“I know you thought that we...” Bass checked back with Kodie. Her face said go on, but he stalled so she continued.
“We didn’t get together that night when you fell asleep. We found ourselves talking about you. How best to keep you going and positive.”
“You saved me, Kevin. You say you got lucky.” He shook his head. There was that word luck again.
I looked at Kodie and she just nodded, sniffing her red nose. Though evening was hours away, the November air grew cold with the rain. The air soaked, the colors of the afternoon shades of gray. She shivered in her T-shirt. “I know it freaks you out, but, Kevin, whatever all this is that’s happened…all I can say is, I,” she glanced at Bass, “we know that there’s something special in store for you.”
I eyed them incredulously, one then the other. “What exactly do you mean?”
“If I knew exactly, I’d tell you. It’s like…dreams, but it’s a feeling. It’s…You’re the leader now. Not by default, but by choice. You’ve been chosen.” Her body quivering, her face grave. “You think we come upon Jespers’s discovery otherwise? But that’s just part of it, it’s more than that. It’s—”
“Chosen.” I tried to get them to fall apart laughing by staring off into the middle distance with a rigid jaw, chest thrust out, crossbow fist on my hip like a superhero atop a mountain. Their faces stayed rigid. “We’ve got things to do. The water’s out, the grid’s probably—”
“Not kidding,” said Bass. “Do we look like we’re kidding?” I looked long and hard at each of them. They didn’t look like they were kidding.
Kodie shivered, from cold or illness or fear.
“Well, we need to pack up for Utopia if we’re going to go.”
She shook her head at me. “We can’t leave here,” she deadpanned. “They’ll kill us out there. Now that we’ve killed one of them.”
“Goddamned gremlins,” Bass said under his breath. “At some point we are going to have to get more water.”
“They’re kids,” I said.
“They’re more than that and you know it. They’re a swarm,” said Kodie.
“Kevin,” Bass said. “You’re not getting it. Me and Kodie…we have to protect you now. We are both alive because of you. It’s our duty.”
“What?! Duty?” The weird feelings and dreams of doom and some important inscrutable role I was to have in it all I’d had since summer were coming true. Still, I wanted to delay, pretend it was, is, all a dream. So, backed into this corner, I got surly. “Assuming I saved you, Bass, which I do not, how did I save you, Kodie?”
Her retort came quick like she was ready to give it, a debating politician jumping on a question about a topic she’s been dying to discuss. “I think I’ve had the white stuff, Kevin.”
I stood immobilized. My jaw fell open.
“Now I don’t. I’ve spent two nights with you at my side caring for me. It went away.”
“Well, this is just horseshit,” I said. “You were sick sick. What? You felt the white stuff?”
Kodie paused, then nodded. “You were gone, chasing the train. I was in bed and it…bubbled up my windpipe. Burpy. A slow creep, but it came. I was dreaming of drowning in green mossy dead water. Something swam, lurked in that water and was there with me.” A roll of thunder with the rain now. “I felt it coming up. You drove up in the driveway. It receded.”
“Psychosomatic. You are both full of it.”
They both shook their heads with their eyes closed, solemn faces. Bass said, “Why would we make this up? What’s to gain? We don’t have time for games. You need to know, man. I mean, you think I’m particularly jazzed about it? In the parlance of our times: it is what it is.” He lifted his arms and dropped them to his sides, exasperated. “I don’t love it.”
Good. A little levity at least. “You mean the parlance of those times a few days ago,” I said.
Kodie continued. “I ran outside to the swings to collect myself. You saw the blood in the grass.”
I stammer-asked, “Was it…from the…stomach or…lungs?”
“Lungs. Definitely.”
“A trombone player in the high school band who just got busted with a baggie of weed in my locker. A leader of many.”
Lifted eyebrows, nodding and shrugging.
“Leaders emerge from all sorts of backgrounds. They evolve into the role. One way or the other, they do rise. Gandhi was thrown off a train and got pissed.” I don’t remember which one said that. Something Kodie would say, though. I was so flummoxed with them standing there confirming my belief that I was meant for something that my memory isn’t so good on who said what.
“You’re crazy, both of you.” Even though I knew they weren’t. “Why’d you wait until now to tell me?”
Bass said, “We didn’t think you’d believe us and—”
“I don’t.”
“—and now that they’ve backed us into this arid corner, now that we have to start taking chances, we had to tell you.”
Kodie sighed. “I’m not saying you have all the answers. At some point, you’re going to be important. To them and to us, too. In how we continue on. Right now you need to stay safe.”
“We’re going to run out of water fast. We can’t just stay here,” I said. “We have to risk to survive.”
Bass said, “We have enough for now. In this rain, it’ll be dark by seven. Too late
, again. I’ll get the power going with the generators, keep pinging Utopia.”
“We’re okay. Tomorrow.” Kodie was cool. They’d formed a united front. Staying on message.
“C’mon, Kevin. We can’t risk a rash move tonight.”
“We said that last night.”
“Well, things changed today. Bass, and the dead kid. The tubs. They’re pushing us. Let’s go on our own terms, calmly, with a plan.”
Then it hit me. They got to them. The kids, the new world. Something’s happened. A switch has been flipped. These two are not who they once were. Bodysnatched. When did this happen? How did I miss it? Have they been pretending all this time? Have they been with the kids all along?
Have I been blind? Paranoid as hell?
“Yes,” says Kodie.
I jumped. It was as if Kodie had read my mind and answered my internal questions.
“Keeping you safe, ‘let’s not be rash’…I know it’s hard to process. Me too. I couldn’t believe it at first either. I mean, the morning of, the Osterman kids standing in my yard staring at me, and the first thing I thought of was you, to try to contact you so you’d meet me at the store. Only after I texted you did I wonder about my parents.”
“Same here. I tried contacting you first thing, Kevin. Heard the sounds at dawn and watched TV for a few minutes, the whole time there’s this overwhelming need to contact you. Couldn’t call so I texted to meet at the station. Just after that, literally the second I pressed send, my parents . . .”
Bass, sounding exasperated with his perception of my being dense. “The Fleming/Jespers connection. You’re the late bloomer across the street. We’re your closest friends, also bloomers. It fits. Forget chosen, if you want, forget special. It just fits. The right person at the right time. Happened in the old world all the time.”
The dog down the street started up again. We all looked up in that direction.
“So, if I drive off you’ll…?”
Bass said, nodding with his eyes closed, “I’ll stop you.”
The Late Bloomer Page 23