The Late Bloomer

by Falkin, Mark;

  “I’m armed.” I displayed two loaded handguns I wore, one being Martin’s glock. I held up the crossbow, arched a brow.

  “So am I.” Bass cocked his head and smiled, took a pistol from his rear waistband all gangsta.

  I looked at his gun. “I’m so needed in this new world, and you’re to protect me or whatever, you’ll shoot me if I were to run. That makes sense how?”

  “When you look at it that way.”

  I feint toward the Hummer. “You’d, what? Shoot me in the leg?”

  “Ah, an incapacitating flesh wound. Good idea.”

  “Yeah. Gandhi had a limp,” Kodie added, needling. “Kevin, enough…okay? Listen.” She took in a deep breath, held it, shot a glance at Bass. Exhaling, she said, “I’ve seen the dark smiling teeth, too. The night before it went down.”

  Bass raised his hand, sheepish and nodding. “Me too. That night. Didn’t know what it was but knew it was something to do with you. Thought it a vivid nightmare.”

  I hadn’t talked about that. Those were my dreams and visions, me and Professor Fleming. But I thought of the strange and scary conversation Mr. English and I had in his office. We’d shared dreams. Why I wouldn’t I also with Kodie and Bass?

  Their faces softened. They knew I believed them.

  They had a point about not going across Texas right now, I’d even argued that last night, but now I felt like this was too much waiting, and if you’re waiting, you’re waiting for something to happen.

  Kodie and Bass fell asleep. It was dusk and I snuck out, taking Martin’s bolt cutters hanging from a peg board in the garage and went four doors down to get that dog. It was quiet for now. One of the neighbors on this street I didn’t know at all. They had plastic playscapes for toddlers in their yard and sometimes I saw a woman, a nanny or a mom, I never knew which, sitting on the porch steps watching them play. She never waved when I rode by on my bike. She’d look up but never wave. I waved at first but, over time, stopped. You tire of waving at people who don’t wave back.

  I could’ve brought the dog through the house, I guess, but this was a house we’d skipped. I’d seen the woman who didn’t ever wave lying on the floor through the window.

  The dog was a mix, not big. Brown, maybe some lab in there, likely some pit, but some other breed too, keeping it smallish. When I first walked up to the gate, the dog came hauling up to the fence and barked. I could see its agitation through the slats. After a few seconds of that it whined with anxiety like it wanted to see me. When I pulled myself up to look over at it, it wagged its tail and twirled around in circles. God knew how hungry and frightened the thing must have been. “I’m getting you out, okay? Hold on.” The dog sat at my voice, tail wiping the concrete, clearing away an arc of leaves.

  I snapped off the fence lock with the bolt cutters. The dog nosed through the opening, shoving its way out as I unhinged it. It spazzed and ran around me, leaping, licking. I put my hands on it and it sat and I took a look at the dulled tag on the collar. Maggie. “Hey, Maggie. That you barking your ass off, Maggie? Yes, I know it was you.” I talked baby-talk to her and she nuzzled my legs. I bent down and she leaned into my body and I held her. Her body shook.

  Maggie followed me home. Kodie and Bass stood in the yard. They buried the worried looks on their faces as I approached once they saw Maggie running up to them.

  We all went in and fed her people food. The dog ate in huge inhaling gulps and drank water from a mixing bowl for a minute straight, her metal tag clinking the bowl. Maggie replete and belching, Kodie and I sat at the kitchen counter bar and said nothing as the sun fell on All Saints Day. The Day of the Dead. We waited. Bass sat at the ham radio and listened like a SETI scientist listens to the cosmos, from time to time making calls out to the void. Loud, unnerving static assaulted our ears.

  The fear of inertia fell over me. Maggie stirred at our feet. The Utopia voices, the Mexico City voices, the last we’d heard, had long ago stopped coming over. We flipped on the TV, radio, phones and laptop just for grins, but of course browsers decried errors, mobile phones found no towers, landlines dead. The only life was from the radio, some nameless station with ads still looping, one for car insurance, one for fast food.

  The Earth spun. We rode it.

  Lord of the Flies was still on the chair where Bass had left it. I stood at the huge front picture window watching the darkness, knowing I looked like a skewerable fish in a bowl to them, purposefully stood there as counterfeit sacrifice, in a dare—c’mon. An eldritch half-moon hung above gnarled live oaks. Celestial bodies shone bright without city light to blot them. In the window’s reflection, I watched Kodie pick up the book, thumb it so that air lifted her bangs, close it. She pivoted to me, and I watched her reflection approach, felt the heat of her once she arrived beside me, smelled her hot cinnamon gum.

  We looked at each other’s figures in the window. Kodie slipped her hand into mine, then got on her toes so that her mouth hovered before my ear and she whispered through the ham’s cosmos static, “We’re still here.”

  My last kiss with her was before we fell asleep that night. Our teeth clicked as we pressed harder into each other, moving our heads back and forth, scoping and hoping for more, to get beyond the limitations of skin, muscle, bone, tongue. Trying to climb inside each other.

  The first stone comes sometime after midnight.

  Having never reset it after turning on the generators at about five in the afternoon, the clock blinks 7:19 7:19 7:19. Kodie slumbers on her side, her back to me, her curves like a cello silhouetted against the window. The static’s roaring in the front of the house. Bass listening for patterns in all that negative space. Beyond that, the low hum of the generators.

  Maggie’s bark somewhere inside the house makes me sit up. Kodie does too. We grip each other’s forearms.

  Before you realize the power’s out, there’s silence. All that booming static is gone. That drumming generator hum falls off. Even the dog goes quiet, her alarmist duties disrupted. The Utopia guy, Chris, had told us that dogs and the kids don’t like each other. Maggie was here not only to let us know something wicked this way comes. Maybe she could thwart it.

  Maggie resumes her baying. Moonbeams slant in and pool on the floor. Bass’s footfalls thud down the hall. He jostles the locked knob. “Hey, guys! I think—” and that’s when we hear the first crash of glass somewhere in the front of the house.

  Maggie’s barking augments to communicating more than something’s here; it warns stay away or I’ll rip your lungs out. She’s in the room where the stone came through. Kodie says, “They’re trying to get in.”

  I open the door to Bastian. “Let’s get the guns,” he says in a clipped whisper. I nod, but what I really want to do is find Maggie as she’s the one on point. Bass jogs through the house ahead of me and starts grabbing weapons in the living room. I pick up Martin’s glock from the nightstand.

  “Stay here,” I say. The hall brightens as Bass looks for things with his flashlight. I grab a flashlight from the line of them set on the entryway table, jog it back to Kodie and toss it on the bed. “Don’t use it yet,” I tell her.

  “I’m not staying here.”

  We join Bass in the living room, his flashlight beaming around the floor on guns, boxes of bullets. “Turn it off,” I tell him. “They’re watching.” But for the moonlight, the room goes pitch dark. Maggie starts in again with volleys of barks, running from room to room now, her nails skidding and clicking on the wood floors. That’s all we hear in the dark besides our breathing—Maggie’s barks, growls and skittering, the pads of her feet trying to achieve purchase with each new directional change corresponding to their movements and smells. She’s everywhere, playing whack-a-mole, going from window to window to door to door, making sure they know she’s omnipresent and against the very idea of their encroachments.

  This goes on for a long minute. Nobody says any
thing but Maggie who starts winding down, just growling and pacing. The dining room window is the one that’s broken, a huge picture window, now with a grapefruit-sized hole in it, splinters radiating around it. High-quality double-paned tempered glass. Martin reminded us all of this often enough, especially when it iced once a year. Kodie, Bass, Maggie and I are all in the dining room looking at the hole, feeling the air. We smell smoke in that air.

  I turned around and looked for the stone that must be on the floor right behind us. “Smoke?” Kodie asks, that bowie knife in hand.

  “What’s burning?” Bass whispers.

  I find the stone. It’s fist-sized, heavy, water-riven smooth. I hold it to my side. My throat constricts and dries.

  It all happens so fast:

  Maggie panting at our feet, we all stop scanning the windows to focus on the one with the hole in it, and the vaguest glow way in the distance. We look at it with idiot-moth reverence.

  Maggie tears into shouting yowls, making us all jump, barking with such ferocity that her body crouches. She slides back with each bark.

  In answer, we hear the children roar as one.

  One booming burst that comes from all around us. How many of them, a thousand, more. No knowing.

  All of us grab at each other’s arms and shudder and crouch. Maggie rages at their movements in the dark. They roar again, higher in pitch, wet-sounding. You can hear the little children among them, screaming in perfect unison with the rest.

  My blood zings through my arteries looking for some escape but there isn’t one so the centripetal force of it makes me lightheaded and I feel that my throat might burst open in a gush.

  Heavy thudding footfalls on the roof. A buzz-hum coming from outside. Maggie whines and shakes her head like it itches. I’m half blind with confusion and bloodrush. My breath seizes in hitches of panic.

  A terse, louder roar precedes the hail that falls upon us.

  Glass from every window in the house comes in at once. All we could do was duck. The drumming and pounding against the roof, the walls. It’s not only the windows. The entire house is bombarded. A tornadic din grows.

  Such chaos follows that I cannot tell you the exact order of what happens next. We’re on the floor scrambling on broken glass but we don’t know where to. We shout at each other but there’s no hearing, no more than you could hear someone trying to tell you something amid a field of exploding landmines.

  The world washed out. It broke apart all around me and I remember just waiting to be taken asunder too, in a way welcoming its inevitability because I didn’t want to be a part of a world where this happened. I didn’t want to save it, lead it, be in it. That’s when I almost gave up, right there.

  One of the drawbacks to the house, Martin told us every spring, is that there isn’t a safe area to go to in case of a tornado. Best we could do was all get in the bathtub and pull a mattress over our heads. We actually drilled on this, Johnny thinking it was a riot, Mom thinking it was necessary, me thinking it was stupid because it’s something Martin wanted to do. In general, if Martin was excited about it, I wasn’t, no matter what it was. Typical shit-ass teenage step-kid. I miss him.

  All we could do was stay down. Within seconds, Bass and Kodie are on top of me and covering me. Maggie barking. Interminable drumming and pounding. Goes on for so long that Kodie cries out, “Why won’t they stop?” I try to budge them off but Bass is too strong. I was lying on my front, struggling with them. Bass keeps yelling through gritted teeth to stay down. Glass bits tear at my shoulders and kneecaps. Sandy shards abrade my cheek.

  This shower of stone and glass. Unceasing waves. The house coming apart in places, the actual wood and sheetrock and insulation spraying out in puffs. The holes become spaces and the spaces allow more to come through with their vicious aim, to connect with us, our tissue bruising now, and I wonder how long it can last.

  This is when all the fear and wonder of these days went from nebulous gas to bright star in my mind, under the siege of stones. That bright star winked and shined and its message was they are trying to kill us.

  How many are out there and how many stones can there be? Did they carry them here or have they been stockpiling clandestinely all along, lying in these supplies for days unseen?

  My God. It must be.

  I hear Bass take one to his body and he says oh. We’re covering our heads now. The barrage is so complete that we don’t dare stand to run elsewhere. There’s nowhere to run. It comes from all sides.

  Maggie barks somewhere, whines in pain, continues.

  Kodie covers my head with her body in fetal position and weeps. She’s hit in the back a couple of times and she cries out like I’ve heard mothers cry out giving birth, a shocked, bewildered cry.

  They cover me and take this. For me.

  I don’t understand it, yet I do.

  I think of Mr. English, the thinking steeple he creates with his fingers, leaning back in his chair, looking at me in a manner both quizzical and fearful.

  It’s so loud, violent, and malevolent that I just want it to end, for all of us. Enough, is what my mind flashed. Over and over it flashed enough of this, Johnny and let it end, Johnny.

  A lull. Bass off of me and standing, I could now see him, a man in full, teeth bared, seething, bloodied in the face, his clothes tattered, drips of blood falling from a fingertip. All of this as shown in moonlight. A comic book scene. My mind put him in a square on a page and above the square in a caption block it reads in that handwritten small-caps script, Bastian’s Last Stand.

  Fury fills his features. He looks out at the dark and says, “You’re gonna make it, Kev.” Outside, they roar in a burst. This time the roar is polyphonic, terrible, wholly belonging to the new world. I’d even say it’s inhuman if I didn’t know it was new-human.

  Taking it as a battle cry, Bass jumps over us and dashes through the collapsed doorframe, yelling rebellious. Kodie and I turn away bracing against the next deluge and Bass voicing what it means to be pummeled. But all we hear are his footfalls on the wooden deck and then his yell falling into the distance like he’s pitched himself into a ravine.

  Kodie and I lay on the floor. They were gone. You could feel that. Bass was gone, too. You could feel that.

  Kodie and I pulled ourselves up. I kissed her and asked if she was okay. She sniffed and bobbed her head that she was but said she wasn’t sure about her back. “I’ll have some sexy yellow-and-purple bruises.” Then she said, “He’s gone, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s you and me now.”

  I grabbed her hand. “Flashlights.”

  We picked our way through stones in the dark, each one casting its own moonshadow on the floor. The windows gaped with treacherous blades of glass. We went out the hole in the dining room where the back door had been, stepping over the rent screen Bass had leapt through.

  Middle-night still, the quiet immense. We aimed our beams around the yard, the trees, back at the house. The house looked shot-through. We searched the front and back yards. My beam fell on a large nest in the trees. A perch for them, I thought, a slapdash treehouse.

  No Bass, no body, and no cairn either. We had to get out of the dark.

  I heard Maggie whining somewhere outside. I called out to her which stopped her whining but she didn’t come and I didn’t want to wait.

  The cold told us the house was no longer a house, but it took the predawn to show us. My home was bones now. The floor looked like the end zone of a landslide. Stones blanketed the wood. Drifts of them rose in the corners. You couldn’t take a step for kicking one. We didn’t touch them. The brown ones, the pumiced, the river rocks, the limestone, all the size throwable by small hands. The floor an anthology of earth tones now, Martin’s proud pine gouged and hiding.

  The sky started to color. Kodie and I hunkered on my bed with our flashlights and waited for
daylight before doing anything else. I had my high-powered beam pointed up so that the light radiated out on the remains of the ceiling. Kodie lay in my lap. I petted her forehead. What had been done to the walls and windows had not been done as much to the roof. Light rain came and with it wet breezes.

  We shivered and listened to it come down so much louder now without windows and walls which looked like the cannon-shot hull of a wooden frigate. But we weren’t sinking, not yet, and that was good. We’d survived a battle and had suffered a dire casualty in Bastian, but they’d failed. We were still here, hangers-on of the old world.

  My mind raced with the rainsounds. At first light, what would we do? The shock of the night wore off and the future had to be considered again. There was a future to consider. There were moments last night when that didn’t seem possible. That there still was a future buoyed me, as did Maggie trotting in all wet, panting like mad and shaking off all over my room. She jumped up onto the bed, peaceable thunder rolled in the firmament, and the three of us sat there and let sleep find us.

  Her growl woke us.

  My flashlight had fallen over. A white spot on the bed. Kodie lifted her head from my lap and I sat up from the headboard. Violet filled the skyward house holes. I had fallen asleep with my palm on Maggie, and now she bristled. “What?” I whispered to Maggie. The dog reflexively turned her head to look at me and then right back to the door to the hall. Morning brewed along the horizon, but the house was still dim, the wet air making it feel more like a cave we’d bivouacked in.

  I grabbed the flashlight and aimed the beam at the door. The light caught the swirling mist in the air. Maggie stood up in the bed and perked her ears.

  “Come on, let’s go look,” I said.

  Kodie’s voice creaked. “There’s too many, Kevin. You know that.” I spoke to her silhouette against the purple veined with tree branches. I couldn’t see her eyes. Her head moved up and down. “Okay,” she said, her throat halting and mucosal. “Okay.”

  I stood from the bed and took her hand. “C’mon, Maggie.” Maggie padded in front of us.