Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

“Huh-uh.”

Simon turned back to me and locked onto my face again. “I just know it’s the beginning. But the end has to come first, and it’s not quite over yet. There are a few things that have to happen… I saw an ocean. Then a beach, and then…”

“When? What did you see?” Did we see the same things when we dreamed, this kid and I?

“I don’t want to say.” He shook his head and burst out a single cry and immediately sucked it up so that his throat got caught up in itself and he choked for a second. “No. I don’t believe it.” He shook his head hard, trying to loose whatever was lodged there.

Oh—he gave me the most pitiable look. His chin muscle quaked.Almost pouting, talking more to himself than us, he said, “Not everything I dreamed has happened. Maybe it’s not true.” Satisfied with that logic, he continued to me, “But one thing I know is true because I’ve been around them, all the kids. They’re scared like you wouldn’t believe. Not just because all their moms and dads are gone but because… well…”

“What?” Bass asked, still looking into the woods.

“They think there’s a beast out… there.” He motioned his hand out and up.

“A beast,” I deadpanned.

He nodded and sniffed. “That it needs to be satisfied. Or else it will come for them. This is what the real end is. Satisfying it.” In half a day, all innocence had left this boy’s eyes. I couldn’t muster a response. The hard look in his eyes stopped me cold. I knew it to be all the truth I required.

“Satisfying?” Bass asked.

“Feeding. The kids think it needs to be fed. They think it will eat them all up if it’s not.”

My mind flashed on the great shadowed thing. I asked, “But what—?”

And then they started coming. We could hear them flooding the woods.

He hissed at us, “Go!”

We locked eyes for one shared heartbeat.

My eyes pleaded that he come with us. He shook his head with resignation.

Then me and Bass were in the Bronco and peeling out in reverse and then bounding over the cemetery dale, swerving around headstones.

I put my head out the window and craned my neck to see the tree line. Though the Bronco’s motor roared, I heard screaming in the woods.

I remember snapping back inside, shoving my back straight against the seat and closing my eyes tight and not opening them again until we stopped. My mouth grew salty with nausea and Simon’s scream wouldn’t stop echoing between my temples. Bass concentrated on driving but he’d heard it too.

We pulled up to my car. Inside sat Johnny and Kodie. Rebecca hadn’t moved.

“Meet us at my house.” I jumped out and slammed the door.

“What happened to his car?” Kodie asked.

“Hailstorm,” I said.

“Nuh-uh,” Johnny said, incredulous.

“What the man said.”

“But you don’t believe that, right?” Johnny asked. Kodie knew I lied, felt the gravity of why I did, and, like Bass, said nothing. “Kevin, it hasn’t rained in weeks. We didn’t get hail last spring.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said as I turned the ignition key. Johnny looked past me into the faraway woods. From the corner of my eye I saw that he waved his hand reluctantly at whomever he saw there, and then quickly tucked it away. I didn’t ask.

We did a lot of that in those opening hours. We saw but didn’t say anything because we didn’t want to know yet what we knew we would soon enough.

The traffic light was changing as we pulled out. “Look, still got power,” Johnny said.

I heard him but didn’t listen, for Simon’s disembodied face was still screaming in my head.

The first thing we all wanted to do was eat. We locked the doors and looked at the weapons lying about the living room like Christmas morning gifts from a very different kind of Santa. Safety and sanity returned with all of this.

Safety in numbers, in being indoors, in at least wrapping our collective heads around what has happened.

We pointed and grunted, guzzled straight from large containers, lines of liquid rolling down chins. The microwave thrummed.

Our minds reengaged. It occurred to all of us with our stuffed mouths that we were trapped in this new world we didn’t choose. A type of rebirth had occurred, one we hadn’t sought, as we are forced out from the womb by cosmic fiat.

The children had been reborn too, but they probably weren’t examining the hows and whys like us. An old-world philosopher had said an unexamined life wasn’t worth living. What a bunch of crap.

We sat at the dining room table in front of the big picture window to the backyard. An old playscape Johnny didn’t use anymore rusted in the gloam. We kept glancing up at it. The swings swayed and the rust made the chains sing and we thought of children, the ones we used to be and all of them out there now. Those untold millions who didn’t seem to have any need for our help. That they were hostile to our remaining. We stayed quiet on that topic.

But about other things, I couldn’t stay quiet. “Okay. I’ve got to air this,” I said. “Before we can plan our next steps, I think we need to come to a consensus—”

“What’s a consensus?” asked Johnny.

“When everybody agrees,” answered Kodie, leaning into Johnny.

I nodded. “Right.”

“Agree to what?”

“I’m getting to that.” I hadn’t yet told Kodie what Simon had said to me. As the others put away groceries, I’d taken the bag with the stone in it and tossed it in the trash.

“We need to agree on something important. It’s about you, Johnny.”

Kodie’s pupils dilated to their blue retinal edges. She conferred with her plate, looked back up at me, bated.

“Me?”

Bass reached into a flaming bag of corn chips and answered Johnny with a crunch.

“When Bass and I went to get his Bronco, we talked to a kid.”

“A kid came into the cemetery?” he asked.

“He stuck his head through the brush at the edge of it.” This set Johnny on the defensive. “Why do you ask that? I mean, you’re a kid, and you were in the cemetery just fine.”

Johnny responded with, “But I was with you all. It was okay.”

Bass, Kodie, and I looked at each other with the shot eyebrows that come with a break in the case. What we were all thinking: there were these rules he intuitively knew. What we were all asking ourselves: had they been downloaded into him at dawn?

I just came out and asked, “Johnny, are there important things you think you want to tell me but don’t know if you should? Maybe you think I’ll be mad?”

He nodded. His eyes welled. Johnny sighed and said, “Tell me what you were going to tell me first. What about this kid?”

“The boy’s name was Simon. He told me to keep you with me.”

Bass and Kodie deferred to the brothers here, each of them being an only child. Bass crunched.

“But why? You weren’t going to leave me, were you?”

“Of course not.”

“So why does this kid who doesn’t know us say this?”

“I was hoping maybe you’d tell me.”

“How can I?”

“I think you know things. Things you want to tell me.”

He looked at his lap, ashamed. “I don’t.”

“But you just nodded that you did, just now.”

“I don’t understand what’s happening. I’m scared, Kev.”

In my head I’m yelling at him, Why don’t you tell me the truth?

“My head hurts,” Johnny mumbled.

Why’d you let them push me out of that room?

I asked, “Do you know Simon?”

He shook his head and grimaced.

“You don’t know a redheaded kid named Simon? Not at school, not from the neighborhood?”

He shook his head the same way while on his face was a mask of solemn duty which said: deny deny deny.