I spied a police car on the shoulder of MoPac near the Windsor Road exit. Keys in the ignition. I wanted speed. I wanted search lights. Maggie hopped in. “K9 unit?” She wagged her tail. We were good again.
I flicked on the loud siren, ran it for a few cycles. Echoing, echoing. Maggie ducked at the noise. I kept the lights on as I cruised at cop speed, Barney Fife sniffing, wrist-driving. Emergency. Clear the area, everyone.
On the Congress Avenue bridge. A wintry front’s wind spread and chased ripples across Lady Bird Lake.
Lamar’s yellow lines blurred. In my fog and blear on this last stretch of road home, I realized they’d been trying to tell me since June that this moment came. Johnny, standing in my room, his eyes fixed in sleepwalk, mumbling—coming…coming…close…close…close…shifting his weight back and forth on his feet. Simon, his pale face in the green bordering Memorial Park Cemetery, had said the kids feared a beast.
From writing my essay I’d learned that “lord of the flies” translates in Hebrew to Ba’alzevuv.
In Greek…Beelzebub.
My house looked like a shipwreck from the age of the Barbary pirates, cannon-shot and listing. The other houses looked as they always did. Now that the cold had come, the yards weren’t weedy. It was possible to believe the neighborhood was simply experiencing a sleepy Sunday.
When we pulled up, cats flew from the holes and disappeared. In the middle of the street about four houses up stood a coyote frozen in mid-lope with its ears perked. It watched us get out of the car. I stood behind the open door and stared at it. It stared back at me like I was a dead man walking, then completed its unhurried crossing into a yard where I lost sight of it.
Exhausted. There’s no hero in me.
From the street, I hear it. This flapping. We walk to the porch and I see paper under a stone sitting atop my trombone case in the entryway.
It’s a foot-long receipt from the Dollar Tree dated September 24. It’s folded in half. On one side is written a note18 I’ve seen before:
512-455-4688 call me to discuss all things pseudo-intellectual
—K
Kodie had left this note for me in my cubby in the storeroom on that day. I’d asked for her number several times. She’d been coy. But then on that day she gave it to me and I had called her and that night we went out to dinner. We got looped on free margaritas, the bartender dude giving me the stink eye the whole time because I think he was one of her wanna-bes but never-wases. Then we’d gone up to Ginny’s Little Longhorn, this tiny, bar painted UT burnt orange with a Baptist church steeple on top. They wouldn’t let us in so we hung out with the regulars in lawn chairs in the parking lot, the door open. We listened to a country band covering Beatles songs. She sat on my lap and we kissed and the regulars all said awwww.
I’d kept it folded in my desk drawer, thinking someday I’d show it to her when we were older and have a laugh. I turned it over.
In the same handwriting, but different ink, the text uneven and slanted, it read
Kevin, Come down
We can start over
Adam and Eve just like you said
—K
The euphoria I felt knowing she was alive was dampened by the weirdness. It doesn’t sound like her. More like Nate’s somnambulistic oratory, but with a pen.
I never told her about how I thought we could be like Adam and Eve. I’d only thought about it. I’ve only told you, dear reader.
Maybe innately is farfetched, but to describe how I knew where she was, that’s the best word I can come up with. Although she could’ve given a specific location (lacking in specificity), she doesn’t, or the kids don’t want her to. My quest. Up to me.
I figured I didn’t have much of a choice.
When she says “come down,” in my mind’s eye I’m looking south from atop Mount Bonnell on the morning of. That wave rolling. So calm in its progress. I know that’s the direction I’m to go.
I remember thumbing Jespers’s copy of Heart of Darkness in the stack under Lord of the Flies, Kurtz declaring, “My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—”
The river. Kodie waits for me where the Colorado River unburdens itself into the Matagorda Bay. On a beach there, she will be waiting.
One look at that note and I knew this innately.
That and the beach at night, their bright fires.
Maggie and I walk through the house of holes and the rain pours through and cold drops strike my scalp. From under some rocks I manage to pull out Martin’s big canvas bag he used on his outdoor buddy excursions—still smelling of funk and fish—dragged it to my bedroom, stuff it. So tired, I just want to curl up.
Curl up and die, my brain banged at me. Not my mind. This came from my reptilian midbrain. Curl up now, Kev, and you will die.
Then that brain of mine shoots me up with adrenaline. My pupils dilate with a snap. My hands shake.
I hesitated before the fridge. They’d smashed the shelves and everything had dropped and congealed at the bottom, the stench nipping my sinuses. I closed the door, and that’s when I looked through the place where the kitchen window used to be.
There, on the cement, placed, no, presented in front of the bashed portable generators was my twelve-foot periwinkle blue tandem kayak, the oars lying neatly within the rear paddler’s well. A floor display at REI.
The kayak had been stored in the standalone garage, suspended by ropes and pulleys attached to the crossbeams, a condo for wintering mice. They’d bashed everything else, yet here sat this cleaned-up kayak.
Take me.
“No no,” I said chuckling. “No way. Not happening.” I looked at Maggie.
“We’ll be taking the K9 unit.”
Night was coming yet I knew I had to leave. I saw movement in the trees, scurrying silhouettes against the sky’s violet crown.
I had water, food, my bag and my dog. I sat behind the wheel of an Austin Police car with a full tank of gas. A loaded policeman’s shotgun stood near the gearshift and my glock was strapped snug at my side. I opened a crisp map of Texas, plotted my general course under the dome light, and pulled out. Highway 71 south. All the way to Matagorda Bay.
Full dark by the time I reached the letter avenues intersecting Forty-Fifth. I haven’t driven alone in the dark since chasing the train. That had felt different. I still had friends waiting at home.
No streetlights, no ambient light from storefronts. Pitch dark. Not even a moon shone for the rain. I had my brights on. No oncoming traffic to blind. Deer and cats darted across. “Slow and steady, steady and slow, that’s the way we always go,” I said to Maggie over my shoulder in Goofy the Disney dog’s voice. Her tail thumped and she put her snout on my shoulder. I smelled bad egg sulfur and Nate’s blood.
The blood smell reminded me of feral kids. This was no river. When would the windshield turn into stars from thrown stones?
Forty-fifth Street crosses train tracks before the airport which takes you out southwest to Highway 71.
We rolled slowly like we’re patrolling.
Maggie growled in my ear.
There.
They suddenly appeared in the headlights along the train tracks as if arising from the earth itself. They stood in rank after tight rank like a phalanx of Trojans. I stopped the car, flipped on the search light. I dragged the beam slowly along them, examined each face in the front row. Mannequins in the cold rain. Not a pair of eyeglasses rested on a nose. They blinked in dolorous synchronicity. They didn’t utter a sound, didn’t move. Though winter approached, they wore no coats. Some wore the pajamas they woke up in the morning of, some the filthy clothes of that morning, what they would’ve worn to kindergarten and elementary school. They quaked and stood stone-faced.
Despite my ire toward them, in that moment I found myself suddenly overwhelmed with the need to connect to them. I felt such pity for th
em. I craved the ability to expand my reach so that I could surround them with my arms and hold them tight and tell them we are all going to be okay like I had Johnny and Nate.
I know they did what they did mindlessly, without conscience. When an animal does something vile yet in its nature, you find it abhorrent, but you understand. You can forgive it. Although what Maggie and the Utopia dogs did was beyond abhorrent—the thought of him running from them in his panic with that basket of eggs, their baying and snarling and running him down and when he screamed they tore into him even more. But, ultimately, I could forgive them.
But these are human children. They’ve woken up to this new world and they haven’t a clue what’s happening. I can forgive them.
I put my lips to the loudspeaker handset. I pressed the button. “I forgive you.” It came out loud and authoritative.
The rain came down harder and they shook more.
“Let me by, at least,” I demanded.
They moved shoulder to shoulder in one quick motion. It was a bit more than that, dear reader. A bit more than shoulder to shoulder like the von Trapp children.
Their faces all morphed. A wave radiated through.
My heart beat in my ears.
I got out and stood behind the open car door holding the handset. “Why?” I called out to them in a plangent voice, almost begging. “Why won’t you let me go?”
I flicked on the red-and-blue lights. Nothing. I blasted the siren. Nothing. Not a blink. Nothing but shivering bodies so tight they looked woven together.
I looked closer. I was the one blinking in the rain, in disbelief.
Maggie rumbled low from the back seat.
I got back in and put the car into drive and pulled up so that we were twenty feet from them. The headlights and emergency lights splashed all over them. Their eyelids flexed in the lights and rain. Drops sparked as they passed through the beams.
Their shivering became shaking. Then it became a fearsome quaking, set to explode.
Their flesh—at their bare places, elbows, knees, ears, and even cheeks. The skin started to…join.
The white stuff. A mesh of it flung out like webbing, conjoining them. Before my eyes, in seconds, that latticework thickened. They formed a human wall.
I put my shaking hand to my mouth. My body and mind thrummed with ancient terror.
All the noise in the world was the sound of rain hitting the pavement and car metal and Maggie’s throat rumbling. In my rearview I saw the silhouette of her hackles rise. I felt my hair and skin rise and turn to gooseflesh.
The kids’ skin morphed and connected. Ours rose and spiked.
Organisms displaying vital tropisms at a standoff.
In park, I revved the engine, let it fall off. I repeated this, the car lifting and surging, hoping to threaten them. Angry with them, I threw open the door, pulled out the glock, stood between car and door, and drew the gun down on them.
They stepped forward. I didn’t move. They came at me, moving together. The lines of them extended beyond the road. They rose together out of the foliage and trees on both sides. Before they could surround the car, I jumped in and reversed with the pedal floored.
Fifty yards up the street from them, I spun the car around, stopped, and looked in my rearview. They, too, had stopped, and I could just see that they drew apart into individual beings again.
The rearview mirror shook with the police car’s acceleration.
It stood behind the children.
Its spread wings spanned beyond the road.
I’m flying down south on Red River, trying to beat them over on to I-35. Up ahead looms UT’s indoor athletic practice facility, which had been a huge white dome made of air-inflated fabric. The dome was gone; the thing looking like a collapsed cake.
I swung a hard left and there they were, spanned across Dean Keeton Street.
Back down Red River I flew, past the stadium, through MLK, assuming they’d have an established checkpoint there too. Past Brackenridge Hospital, through the Red River music district. I didn’t want to cut over yet, didn’t want to lose time against them.
There couldn’t be enough of them to cut me off at every turn. At some point they’d get spread too thin. I get down to First Street going freeway speeds, catching air in this police cruiser more than once, Maggie hitting her head on the ceiling.
When they were all together like that, I knew I couldn’t physically get through. I couldn’t do it anyway, plow into them like that idiot at South by Southwest a few years ago, at Charlottesville. If I did, I’d take the first three rows of kids out, but they’d be all glued together like that and by sheer mass and size they’d stymie and surround me.
Then what? I didn’t know.
I thought of Nate as the dogs surrounded to him. His cries echoing the cliffs.
The frontage road to I-35 becomes visible. I punch it. I’m getting through. I’m laughing with Maggie. We come over the rise doing eighty and I imagine thousands of children running to this spot realizing that they aren’t going to make it and their collective panic rising into some frenzied quantum entity capable of doing things I can’t conceive.
We take the rise. We catch air. My headlights skim the clouds. Rain drops little meteors. I’m flying.
The tires hit the pavement and there it is. A pile of everything they could get their little hands on, all smashed and swirled together forming a macabre mountain, a mockery of the old world. Reminded me of the pile of furniture in the bottlenecked street in Les Misérables, but this one was lined with corrugated metal and an actual stop sign they’d transplanted into the middle of it all. It was thick, it was tall, and it covered the access road and well beyond into the dark. Off-roading over the wet ground, down the slope, would be chancy at best.
The stop sign bore their handprints like paleo cave walls.
They’d done this everywhere, I knew. In every street out of the city there would be old-world heaps. Busy beavers while I was gone. Sure, I could try to blow them up with scavenged explosives (blowing my hands off and bleeding to death in the process) or plow through them with a vehicle from Camp Mabry. And let’s say I could even start making headway through. They’d be waiting for me on the other side.
They’d act on fear. They’d just as soon jab me with pointed sticks like Jack’s gang in Lord of the Flies than lift me on their shoulders, their hero.
They’d already destroyed anything I could’ve used to go around or get through. I’d find tires slashed, engine blocks smashed. I was still holding on to hope of some sort of control, a solution based in the old-world way of thinking, which is the only way I knew to think.
They were going to show me another way. It had to be their way.
They’d let me back in but now they wouldn’t let me leave.
I heard them coming, a rumbling herd in the dark closing in. They sang-hummed. That flanged polyphonic nightmare-dream sick-sweet sound rode the air into my mind. They flew through the night, leaping and climbing over anything that got in their way. Night of the locusts.
The suite at the W Hotel was heaven. The sheets, dry and crisp and smelling of industrial soap. There was the stink, to be sure, but once I climbed up to the tenth floor, the smell dissipated. I looked out over the black city. Not a single light, fire, nothing but abject darkness. The only light in this entire city was my flashlight flitting about the room.
I’m sure they all looked up at my window, the light swirling around inside.
My alarm didn’t go off and it’s SAT day. My alarm didn’t go off and I’m in a New York hotel and the parade is over. Nobody came to wake me.
I was late. Kodie needed me and she was so very far away.
To get a better view, I had run up to the top of the hotel, wandered breathless toward the first open room door I saw. Outside the door stood a housekeeping cart, spray bottles hooked along the
side.
The woman from housekeeping lay on the bathroom floor. I couldn’t look long. Nature had carted away most of her flesh. It stunk, but not so bad as in the first days. Fat angry flies jumped from her to me. I ran out and slammed the door. The next open door was to a big suite, windows open to half the city.
They had done it. On every road out of town. Piles of stuff dammed up onramps, freeways, regular streets that led out of the city. From up here I saw the rough pattern of their blockades formed a huge circle. If I managed to get through or around, it’d be the wall of flesh again.
Lady Bird Lake, Lake Austin, thinning down into the Colorado River. The morning sun burnished it silver atop the blue and green.
The path of no resistance is the river.
An umbilicus to the womb of the world.
I lashed the boat slapdash to the top of the police car, went inside, picked up my trombone case inside which, checking it a last time before departing, I found this recorder. I don’t remember putting this in there (kids could’ve), but it was there and here we are, dear reader. It’s you and me now.
I put in at the Austin Rowing Center. The water from all the rains without river regulation had filled up the lake behind Tom Miller Dam. I could see water coming over the top of it. Water must have been spilling over Mansfield Dam up at Lake Travis to be filling up Lake Austin.
My eyes bulged at the sight of the water coming down. Not your docile blue-green urban waterway anymore. Foam eddied and swirled in angry chocolate water. Debris, limbs, and small trees floated by. Nature took things back. Soon these dams would break from the pressure. Clearly, the Longhorn downriver already had. The valley below Mount Bonnell must be a hundred feet higher now, all those palaces along the river under water. I just hoped the dams don’t break when I’m on the water, or within a mile from shore for that matter.
The Late Bloomer Page 30