Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

“Yeah. That paper he tried to publish,” I pointed to the floor, the desk. “A no go.”

Kodie added, “He was still working on proof. And then, before he was able to… everybody died.”

“I had written this weird story this summer. I just wrote an extra credit essay on this.” I held up Golding’s novel.

A beat of stillness and thought.

“I don’t get it, but it’s more than coincidence. I’m fucking spooked,” Bass said as he begins to quickly unhook Jespers’s desktop computer to take with us. I’m retrieving Jespers’s paper from his desk, collecting and unwadding the pages from the floor.

Kodie says in dazed wonderment, “These men meant to lead us here so we’d know. They presaged this. Fleming wasn’t ready to tell anyone yet because it sounds crazy. They want us to carry on with it somehow.”

Just as I’d said, “Yeah, but what I can’t figure out is why Fleming tore off and threw away this PS part, because it’s got all the—” there was a loud boom at the metal door. Another. We went to it and as we unlocked it we heard shattering glass at the front. Kodie checked the metal side door while Bass and I ran to the front, me carrying Jespers’s paper, Bass Jespers’s computer.

Glass once in the doors was strewn all over the foyer. A couple of stones lay among the shards. Bass and I ran out the doors. “Johnny?!” I screamed at the empty street.

Kodie came around from the side of the building. “Nobody there.”

“We gotta find these little shits,” said Bass.

RadioShack up on Burnet would have a ham radio. None of us knew how to operate one but Bastian is one of those people who asks how hard can it be? when confronted with a novel task requiring an unlearned skill.

Kodie and Bass looked to me to do the breaking and entering. I wrapped my outer shirt around my right hand and punched in the door’s glass. An alarm sounded and my pulse quickened. Bass noticed my hesitance. “Nobody’s coming,” he said. I kicked in the whole panel of glass and was able to crawl inside and open the door for them.

The RadioShack’s hours, as stenciled on the glass next to the front door, were 10am-7pm. Nobody had opened the store yet when this all happened and, unlike McBride’s Guns, nobody had come to stock up as things fell apart.

“Can we kill that alarm?” Kodie shouted, fingers pressed to one ear.

“I got it,” Bass yelled over his shoulder.

“I’m going to get solar panels,” Kodie said directly into my ear, and then we heard a slam and a bang and the alarm stopped. Talking normally, she said, “For when the grid goes down.”

Bass came striding out from the back room comically wiping his hands together in a job-well-done manner. “There,” he said, cruising past us.

Bass was already deep inside scoping the shelves, whittling down the location and the choices until we all gathered in front of the ones he stood looking at. Bass picked the most expensive radio off the shelf. Kodie and I simultaneously asked him if he knew anything about them.

“How hard can it be?” he asked. “Solar panels. Good thinking. Also going to need to get power generators and gas. Lowe’s. But first, kids.”

“But the Wal-Mart’s got them low low prices,” I said with a bubba drawl which in old-world mixed company might have offended.

They snickered and my mind flashed on the dark smiling teeth. My stomach roiled.

On our way out, I spied this [13] Sound of heavy thumping. KGM is tapping the device with which he makes this recording. here Olympus digital voice recorder with intelligent functions, snatched it from the shelf like a kid shoplifting condoms. I also grabbed a pair of $1,000 binoculars.

We bobbed and wove around the few vehicles.

We drove fast with the windows down. We didn’t talk, just looked with amazement out at our stilled city.

“There’s just… nothing,” Kodie finally said, more to herself than us. I figured that a day later we’d see some signs of infrastructure collapse, some evidence of things falling apart. But, still nothing. No smoke, no burned-out cars, no mounds of corpses in the streets. Not even flashing signal lights. They turned from green to yellow to red like the world went on, ghost cars cruising through. There weren’t even all that many mounds of stones. A few in parking lots here and there near all-night places, that’s it.

I told Bass to go over to I-35. This stretch of one of the longest interstates in the country was the busiest so I thought (no, hoped) we’d see wreckage, jackknifed eighteen-wheelers, a city bus on its side, cars gutted, blackened and smoldering, hazard lights flashing. I still can’t articulate why I was so panicked about not seeing any signs of panic. With panic comes haste and with haste comes waste and I saw none. Standing in the DT parking lot, we’d heard distant booms. Could’ve been faraway explosions, like what happened in West, Texas a few years ago. But other than that… the inexorable winding down of it is what scared me, the way everyone seemed to have simply succumbed to it. That whimpering way the world ended.

It had happened so quickly. Obvious now. It came over you and killed you quickly. The chokers and suicides out in the open were quickly covered with stones. Mr. Fleming, Rebecca’s dad; these folks held out longer than most. It seems everyone died within minutes to an hour of dawn.

Did the rest of the as-of-yet-unaffected world know what was happening on the other side of the planet and just think, Oh, shit ? What did they do as dawn rolled its way to them? Did they all hear those sounds? Did it go down that way? I. Don’t. Know.

You reading this, you probably do.

Just knowing that in house after house after house, apartment, condo, and dorm, places of business open early, there’s a succumbed corpse once belonging to a terrified human being not knowing what was happening. Just… oh. In each and every there was a Mr. Fleming with a suit on; a woman in her favorite chair with a knife in her gut; parents, like Bastian’s, like Kodie’s, lying at the front curb and on the backyard deck, on top of each other.

Mom had wandered off. Bass’s parents had tried to. Mr. Fleming’s open window. An overwhelming need to get out? Trying to go somewhere. All the cars we’ve seen on the roadsides are empty. Save for the sexton at Memorial Park, not a single car has had a corpse in it. All keys in the ignition, most doors open, door chimes binging away.

Everything had settled now. The sky wasn’t yesterday’s cobalt and the blustery winds were gone. The sky was low, morning-gray and flickering electric as we headed back out of downtown and up I-35. My eye snagged on a huge blow-up jack-o’-lantern affixed to the top of a strip mall.

On I-35 we saw eighteen-wheelers stopped at the side of the road every fifty yards or so. We stopped at the first three we came to and checked the cabs. Empty. We stood on the shoulder of a flyover looking down at east Austin. No stone piles anywhere on 35 and none could be seen down on the streets below except for the couple I saw in a Fiesta grocery store parking lot.

“What the hell, Kev? Where did the truckers go? All the drivers?”

“Truckers’ve got CBs. Maybe they communicated and went somewhere? No idea.” Specious reasoning. Bass didn’t follow up. Most of our initial questions were rhetorical, WTF? questions.

Went somewhere . That took root in my head. I closed my eyes and my eyelids fluttered. I heard Bass ask if I was okay and though I nodded, what I saw behind my eyes were the dark smiling teeth. Smiling as if pleased that I’d figured something out.

Went somewhere…

I opened my eyes and swayed a bit. “Another vision?” Bass asked with true concern and reverence in his voice. He took hold of my elbow to steady me.