We went down the hall a few steps, Kodie stooped and limping, clutching the knife. A stout breeze funneled through it, and in it Maggie found something. She barked and bolted. Our flashlights tried to find her but she was gone and outside before we knew it.
Then I heard it, sounding faraway.
Help.
A voice. Not far. Just outside.
Kevin, help me . . .
Bass’s muffled, pained voice.
Maggie’s bark said something’s treed. Maybe Bass was up in that nest thing I saw. It’s all my mind would consider, Bass hanging in some sort of cocoon.
“Bastian!” I yelled. We started to run. The rocks on the floor troubled us, our ankles straining, the flashlights shooting all over the house walls, the holes, the ceiling.
I make a struggling sound and Kodie, finding herself ahead of me a few steps, pauses to look back over her shoulder at me.
My beam finds the boy’s face looming right behind her.
His face in the bright light has a ghastly pallor and red-rimmed eyes.
I try to keep my light on him. My throat freezes but my jaw starts to move and when Kodie asks what is it, I am finally able to yell out at her, “A boy! There’s a boy! Right there!”
She turns. Her light finds him. Adds to my light. Kodie screams. He’s an arm’s length from her. She falls, drops her knife, starts to scramble backward over the stones. Her light fell off him, but mine’s still on him and his face does something.
It moves, it blurs. A wave flashes through it, under his skin, muscle and bone.
That’s when I feel small cold hands on my ankles. I’m yanked hard backwards with monstrous strength, falling on my front, bashing my face onto the stones covering the floor.
I fade, hearing Kodie. At first, though there was heady fear in it, the voice of the teacher she wanted to be said to them, “Now boys and girls, let’s all calm down. Let’s each take a turn, tell each other what we’re feeling, okay?” They responded with shuffling, gathering quiet.
Fading more now, I hear her voice devolving from articulated speech into a repetition of a hysterical monotone that echoes through this house of holes, “No! No! No!”
I crane my neck up to follow my flashlight’s beam which has fallen to the floor next to me but which still aims in the direction of her voice.
The last thing I see in the off-centered shaft of light is a group of children surrounding her with workman-like demeanor. They wear jeans and branded T-shirts and Velcroed sequined tennies, one-piece knit dresses, denim skirts and pigtails swirling.
They put their hands on her skin, run their grubby fingers through her hair.
One has her knife.
The last thing I hear is her silence.
Bright day streamed through the hole. I’d been looking at it there and again for the last several hours but my head wouldn’t yet let me wake up. Finally I roused, my head aching, my jaw sore from how I landed. I worked it, rubbed my hand over it.
They’d pulled me back into my bedroom. The rain left and the smell of smoke had grown pungent. Maggie the dog lay beside me. First thing I did was feed her. She inhaled the bread and bananas, the first things I could find.
But for the dog’s smacking: the stillness. The quiet. Just me now. A wet broken house full of rocks and distant smoke. I checked the fridge instinctively. The light out, cool but not cold. A cursory survey of the outside revealed destroyed generators, slashed tires on all the cars, even Mom’s, save for Bastian’s beater Bronco. They wanted to hear me coming. Fine. I could easily get another car, but fine. Whatever you guys want. I was pissed now.
I missed the water. I had cuts and stingers all over and wanted to wash them out, wash my face off at least, brush the suede off my teeth, slake a brutal thirst. I felt relief when I remembered the cases of bottled water we’d stored in the garage. When I checked, of course, they were smashed and spilled out. I found a couple bottles intact and chugged one down in seconds. I used the other to rinse my face off.
Back inside, I made my way through the rocks, kicking at some. They hit the walls, popped and echoed. I changed clothes and in Mom and Martin’s bedroom I found the glock and holster and put them back on. My uniform.
As I walked out of the bedroom, my heart panged. There on the dresser by the door was Lord of the Flies, Kodie’s pink gum in an imperfect ball stuck to the green cloth hardback cover. I picked it off and put it on my tongue. It took a few presses of my teeth to get it into chewing shape, but once it moistened it still tasted of hot cinnamon, of Kodie. Her hot laugh in my mouth.
I wanted to collapse with her gone, but I couldn’t. Stony resilience bred within me.
The change of clothes felt so much better than I ever thought a change of clothes could. I collected the Lord of the Flies, a few guns and boxes of bullets, my $1,000 binoculars, and climbed into the only vehicle they’d left me.
Maggie came running out and I opened the door for her to hop in over my lap.
Following the smoke, south. No kids. In the blur of my motion I do notice that the few cairns looked disturbed. The bodies had been pulled out. I’m pushing the Bronco as fast as it will go without losing control. The muffler’s blat in all this quiet heard for miles.
Ask me if I cared anymore.
Now, however—floating along here, I hear them in the trees. They fill my head with euphoric hum. It’s a new-world serenade and its impact is physical. It makes me feel good. They know to do it when I’m feeling sad or tired or scared. Usually it’s all three at once. It calms me. Like I’m at the dentist and the assistant has slipped the nitrous oxide tube into my nostrils. My head fills with sweetness. She asks in a mellifluous, warbled voice, You feeling more relaxed now, Kevin? Good, the light panels on the ceiling looking soft and I can only nod at her.
A lullaby is what it is. It feels so good that I don’t care. Grows stronger as I float south. They’re helping me. They’re easing me down down down to the sea whence came the wave. And when they cut it off…I’m their junkie. More. I keep going in hopes of feeling it again.
I speak these hosannas when I’m feeling their song, as I do again now, which is why I click off.
Now: no song. When they cut it off, I come to my senses. Things clear, I’ve lost hours, but I’ve gone many miles. No portaging necessary for the flood.
Got to tell it faster now, as I’m getting closer.
How many more like me stood upon high watching them do this? Were there any? In over two days the ham found nobody else. Was there somebody in some field outside La Paz watching a similar scene? Some savannah on the outskirts of Nairobi? A chilly expanse near Winnipeg? If there are, the children aren’t wanting us to get together. Seems they’ve moved on from the initial shock and crazy download they all got to burning.
The rising smoke my beacon, I finally arrived near its fire. Southbound MoPac ends and takes a hard right to the northwest. I stopped on the little rise of an overpass.
Unlike the other day at Butler Park when we approached slowly and quietly, this time I’d come roaring up, Bass’s muffler heralding me. Maggie barking. When I got to the top of the overpass, I put the Bronco in park and let it chug. I get out and stand on the shuddering hood with my binoculars. To my right is the Circle C housing development. They’re in the open space south of it. Moving as an entity. Their movements a sea. They hummed. This is what they do.
Beyond their mass, the fire.
I put the binoculars to my eyes.
One looks over her shoulder, then they all do, and the movement of their turning heads fans over the thousands of them looking like wind stirring a millpond.
They’ve dug a pit. Still expanding and deepening it, kids digging around its perimeter. Without binoculars they look like ants working their pile to some end they don’t comprehend. The pit is aflame. In it I see mounds of corpses. The kids drag them. I see no
vehicles. My mind staggers: How in the hell did they get all those corpses there?
I scanned around with the binoculars. In the trees surrounding the open area hung nests. Maybe I saw ten. They have rounded, basket-like bottoms made of branches, sticks, and vine. The watchers sat there, disconnected from the rest. All ages, the watchers.
I see nests here and there along the river. I’ve seen a head pop up a few times, a semicircle of dark against the sky, darting back down as soon as I notice.
These open spaces, these burning pits. I imagine this happening all over the world right at this moment. Out where the city melds into the pastoral there are children digging pits, dragging the corpses that had been under cairns. Rolling them in, watching them burn.
Will they next burn entire cities? Or will they simply acquit themselves of the metros to let them crumble and overgrow? Seems that’s more their style.
It dawns on me for the first time that in looking at them, other than Rebecca, Simon, and Johnny, I’ve never seen or hear them speak. Not to each other, not to us. They hum and they roar.
Any pity I may have had for them in the beginning was gone. I should’ve held no faith in reserve for them after seeing them in that room in Rebecca’s house. They’ve killed my friends, taken or killed my love, Kodie. They’ve taken my brother away from me, demolished my house when all I’d tried to do was help them. I told them as much at the plane crash. Their shadowy ranks just stood there. And now they were probably burning Mom and Martin and Mr. E in that pit down there.
When you stand at a busy anthill, the ants barely notice you. You have to kick the hill to get them to move.
I pull Lord of the Flies from my waistband, took out the glock and held them both high over my head in each hand. I fired into the air, screaming my throat raw, “Burn this too! Burn books with the dead. Go ahead! Be my fucking guest!” I threw it at them, smacking Kodie’s gum as the book flew out from the overpass.
Through the binoculars, focusing in on one little boy at the back of the mass, leaning against a shovel taller than he is. He’s got it gripped in two fists in front of him, his forehead to it, eyes closed as if he’s resting.
My stare bored into the back of his head. I whispered, “Turn. Look at me.”
When he stood up straight as if something had stung him, his movement rippled out over the swarm. He turned slowly around and the ripples flared out. He faced me. The scene shook a little through the binoculars due to the distance. This kid with his cropped hair, gamer’s body, and doughy face wearing an Under Armour tee ordering all to Just Call Me Awesome, he called me over with his arm. All around him did it. Beckoning me to come down. He lifted the shovel and held it up.
They wanted me to help them dig. Taunting me.
He smiled wide. They all did. All their smiling teeth.
I said, “No. I won’t help you.”
Then I heard a new noise from them.
Thousands, laughing.
We’d lost contact with Utopia after Halloween night. If anybody there was still alive, maybe we could pull together others. If not, well, hell, I didn’t know.
Using a map in Bass’s glove box, I zigzag my way up to Route 290 west. The roads to Utopia are pretty much open. An hour from Austin the rain starts. It’s comforting. The world goes on. Shooting through a rainy Hill Country of postcards now, the road cutting through them on Highway 16 heading south toward Medina from Kerrville. Maggie looks out the window, tired as I am.
Fredericksburg looked an Old West movie set. I expected a tumbleweed to roll in front of me. A few disturbed cairns. No askance vehicles. I did see a few more cairns on the way. Parking lots in Dripping Springs, Johnson City, Kerrville’s outskirts, cutting down the Medina Highway. Each of them disturbed, its former resident dragged off to some fiery pit. I saw a few lines of smoke here and there, dousing in the rain, a big one all the way over in San Antonio.
Only a few times did errant cars force me off road. Once, my back tires spun in the mud off the shoulder. After I got unstuck, I closed my eyes in relief, finding myself whispering prayers, hoping they had influence and could shield me from a thousand incidents like this waiting for me.
As I approached the I-10 overpass, a long line of them stood up from what must have been crouched positions. Standing in their ranks, the children watched me pass under. I winced, expecting they’d throw rocks at the car. Maggie bellowed. In the rearview, another long line of them shot up to watch me go.
A murder of crows on a wire.
Angling deeper into the higher, remote Texas Hill Country. A deer leapt across the road, followed by a heard of them, hundreds. I got excited. Animals don’t have to contend with our fences and deathly highways anymore. No kids, no piles for miles. The silences deepening and welling, but they are soothing silences, for they belong here. It’s the silences of the cities that unmoor your soul.
The Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch was up ahead. Maggie sniffed at the air. The Bronco rollicked through the twists and turns through the steep hills and walls of cedar and oaks. I had to double back a couple of times, relying on Bass’s notes from talking with Chris.
I pull in and immediately dozens of dogs come rushing up, their tails wagging like mad and jumping up. So glad to see me. Maggie jumped down and made friends. There was none of the usual initial break-in phase with the dogs where they fight a little, gnash teeth, establish pecking orders. I found myself laughing out loud at their glee to see us.
As excited as they were, they didn’t seem as desperate as Maggie was when I let her out. She was ravenous, the ribs showing just above her abdomen. A few steady meals staved off her developing into an ectomorph, which is what I’d expected to find here. Not the case. They looked free and glad—you know a smiling dog when you see one—and they looked fed. Either they’d gotten into the food supply here, had been foraging or hunting, or somebody had been feeding them.
The rain had let up but the air was timorous. A bunch of dogs who hadn’t managed to escape barked and wagged like mad in the big open-air pens. These were hungry and whining. The pens had wooden donor plaques hanging from them—Don and Linda’s Homestead, etc. I let them out and the group of them gathered around me like I was the pied piper.
Around back behind the main house, which was constructed of beige stone, the wooden parts painted red, I found a Bobcat diesel four-by-four ATV. There was a well-used pickup and a recent model SUV. The SUV had bumper stickers on it indicating its San Antonio origin—one a euro-circled SA, another proclaiming a parent’s child and money went to some private school. The truck had done the ranch work and the SUV had brought the refugees from San Antonio, whom we’d talked to on the ham. Place felt abandoned. No souls stirred here.
The air inside the main house wasn’t as stale as expected, and certainly didn’t contain the deathreek of the houses on my street. Fat flies buzzed.
No sign of the San Antonio late bloomers now but for a pillaged kitchen strewn with wrappers and empty containers and butter knives smeared with condiments and various open jars of peanut butter, a pyramid of empty Pabst Blue Ribbon tall boys against the wall stuck together with Crazy Glue as evidenced by the open tube stuck to the table, a condom unfurled on the bathroom floor like snake molting.
Flicking dead switches, tapping the various buttons which used to grant access, perform a service; the fridge water dispenser, the iPad lying on the kitchen counter next to the open mayonnaise jar with flies buzzing the rim. Maggie ghosted behind me, sniffing at yet another condom on the kitchen floor. I toed her nose away from it. The other couple of dogs who came in with us scavenged the pantry. I heard them in there knocking things over and munching. I came to a wood-paneled office with a desk and lamp and desk calendar blotter decorated with yellow sticky notes, and a dead computer screen. A cheery room with art done in clumpy paint on the walls and a wooden figure folk art thing with a cigar in its mouth leaning against a wall.
Here was the ham radio Chris had used. I picked up the microphone from the floor and placed it back on the table, pressed the power button. No juice. On top of the ham was a relic: a Polaroid camera. I pointed it down at Maggie, pressed the button, and heard that glorious old-world noise, smelled that chemical smell of quick film development. It came out the slot at me like a tongue, a critical missive inserting itself from the world of a few seconds ago.
That mechanical sound of the camera is how long each of the several whalesounds lasted. That’s how quick the world changed.
A button pressed and here it came, no stopping it.
To hasten its development, I shook the Polaroid picture, and danced to that Outkast tune in my head. Maggie looked at me like I was out of my barking mind. I looked down at the picture. There she was, a perplexed and innocent dog face looking upward.
Where did they go, the bloomers who were here?
Where did everyone else go? Toward where the pits would be? Must be. Kids couldn’t have moved them all there that fast. If they walked, how come I didn’t see anybody as I drove home from Mount Bonnell?
Hold on, that isn’t true, is it? I saw the garbage man, who had just abandoned his truck. He was walking south down my street. The man on my street in his robe. He stood out there, dumbfounded. I bet he was a walker too.16
But solving that little mystery is pointless. It’s a footnote to this, a shoulder shrug.
“Get it through your head,” I’d said, standing in Kinky’s office. “They are all dead.” Even the late bloomers now, these few days on. Kodie had been right. The late bloomers just got to see and suffer more.
There’s no telltale kid-destruction here. I could’ve gone looking for them, these late bloomer wonderers, out there in the brush, risked hurting myself out there alone. But why? I need to stay alive and that’s it. Why doesn’t matter right now. Fleming/Jespers, or whatever the cause, could be tackled later. Much later.
On the desk calendar, fitting perfectly on the October 31 square, Polaroid pictures sit in a short neat stack. Portraits. Names written on the bottom in their respective scripts. There’s the black Sharpie next to the stack. Twelve pictures of six people, four young women, two young men, all ridiculously attractive. The portraits look like headshots of the cast of some Disney neon-drenched dubstep music video / porny spring break movie.
The Late Bloomer Page 25