Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

“But then why are we scared of them?” I asked. A measure of pause. “Because we are. It’s the way they move, isn’t it? What we saw. That was enough. Their roaring from two miles away. That hum.”

Bass nodded his head with vigor. “Yes, definitely. They are changed. They’re together and they don’t seem to want our help.”

We all stood in that circle in my living room and nodded to ourselves. Radio static. Kodie’s sizzling lungs.

Bass turned to me and said, “Generators. I’ll go, before it gets dark.”

The first transmission came in at sunset.

We were playing coin poker on the living room floor while listening to my phone’s music player on low volume so we could hear the ham. Not totally unserious about it, I had suggested strip poker. Kodie smirked.

“Two dudes, one girl. Right,” she said. Her wheezing got worse with the dark and her fever returned, her face flush with it. While we were making our water rounds this afternoon, I had felt her forehead. It felt warm but I told her that I thought the fever was a good thing. I thought it meant she was simply old-world sick. She said she hoped so, adding that she’d had bronchitis before and this is how it felt. I thought, bronchitis—three days ago we’d shrug and take the antibiotics or whatever. Without doctors, pharmacists… the flu, influenza, to use its deadlier-sounding real name, could kill us now. Sure, we could break into pharmacies, hospitals, pilfer medicines, but we wouldn’t know what we’re doing. We could kill ourselves taking these things. Shelf life, quantity, dosage, who knows?

The adults knew. They left a gaping hole in the safety net. No, they’d taken the damn thing out from under us altogether.

Now children didn’t dare cross into cemeteries. They threw rocks, covered bodies, clung together like atoms of water. Primordial fear. They left that for us too.

The precariousness of our lives now, the omnipresent dangers of the new world, started to flow through and fill the passages and chambers of my mind, threatening to overflow into a panic flood. Darkness itself was now fearsome, and it came again soon. I’d been marking the sun’s scrape across the sky all day like prey dreading night-feeders.

When we heard the voice come over, we looked up from our cards and into each other’s eyes with shock and threw down our cards. Bass had turned down the volume so we could hear the music over the static but now leaped from the floor to crank it up.

The voice sounded strong and articulate. A voice like ours, late-teens maybe, deep, male.

“CQ CQ calling anybody. CQ CQ come back roger wilco shitfuck. Hello hello. CQ CQ this is Chris Washburn calling from near Medina, Texas. Awaiting any response. Hello! Goddammit, hello!” Dogs barking in the background. Lots of dogs.

Bass grabbed the mike like Bono going into a chorus at Wembley. “Yeah, hey, hello hello! Bastian Calhoun in Austin, Texas! Hello!”

“Holy Christ!” The guy, Chris, yelled off mike: “Hey, I got someone!” Back on mike: “Yeah hey, Bastian in Austin. Wow. For godsakes stay on this frequency. In case we lose it, we’re at the Utopia Ranch outside of Medina which is south of Kerrville, west of San Antonio about an hour. Holy shit man, I can’t believe it. Over—”

“Chris, yeah, us too. There’s three of us here, a couple miles north of the UT campus. How many of you are there? Over.”

“Five, now. There were six yesterday.” Pause. We didn’t ask. “We’re four girls, one guy, now. We’re all high school seniors. Over.”

“Same here, but two guys, one girl. You’re all from Medina?”

“No. Hell no. We came together from San Antonio. We had to get out. The kids. Over.”

“What happened? Why’d you have to leave? Over.”

“We just got here today, this afternoon. The kids in San Antonio… I don’t know how to say it. Well, let me ask. Any adults there at all? Anything coming together? Because in San Antonio there’s nada. Nobody alive. We drove around and around looking for others for a solid day. No one. We’d keep trying, I guess, if it wasn’t for the kids. Masses of them. They kept getting in the road, just standing there. It got to the point where they were blocking us at every turn. They didn’t do anything, though, just got in the way. It became a maze and we finally made it out of the city with nothing. Kinky had this ham radio in here, so. And now we’ve found you guys. Over.”

“Kinky? Over.”

“Yeah. We’re at Kinky Friedman’s Utopia Dog Rescue Ranch. One of the girls here used to help out here summers and since they don’t like dogs and it’s really remote out here, we came here. Random really, but. Over.”

We all looked at each other mouthing, Kinky Friedman?

“Wait, wait. They don’t like dogs? The kids? And who in the hell is Kinky Friedman? Over.”

“Kinky. Uh, ran for governor a few years ago. Musician, writer. I don’t know much about him. He’s, like, the only musical act to ever have its Austin City Limits taping fail to air. For naughtiness or something. In the seventies. Anyway, Kinky’s not here. But, yeah, dogs’ hackles go up when there’s kids around. Bark like it’s the Devil himself. They do not hang around. God, we feel sorry for the kids, but they’re scary. It’s like they know they’re different now and can’t help it. What is this that’s happened? You guys have a frigging clue? Any media, Internet, phone working there? Ours all went out by I’d say nine that morning. Sorry, I have diarrhea of the mouth. Just so excited to be making contact. Over.”

“Same here. No adults. No reception of any kind. Just looped radio ads and this ham radio. Over.”

“Ha-ha yeah same in San An. The old world still shaking its moneymaker. Maybe the dead listen, head over to the great mall in the sky. Over.”

Bass looked at us. We offered nothing but agape mouths among the scatter of cards. He stopped with the niceties and catch-up and issued an existential question meant to be practical. “So, what do we do now, Chris?”

Chris took it as practical. “We’ve been talking. Makes sense to us that we should get together with anyone we find. Out here would a good place to gather. Austin’s probably not going much better than San Antonio kid-wise. Over.”

“They’re not doing much here other than amassing down by the river and roaring a lot. They are freaky, though, yeah, give you that. I think they’re just all freaked out right now and if we just let things settle, maybe in time we can all work together. Over.” Bass shrugged at us, like, right ?

“You all clearly have not seen what we have. You wouldn’t be saying that. Over.”

“I take your word for it. We’ve seen… enough. They haven’t done the roadblock thing to us. They’ve stayed away. They did surround us once when we went to go look at a plane crash, but that’s it. Other than their Hitler-youth rallies that look like an ocean of waving wheat. Oh, and they threw stuff at my truck. Over.”

“Yes! God, they move all weird. That alone. I mean, get the hell away from me, you know? Makes my skin crawl to see them do that. Not natural. Over.”

“Yeah. Hey, keep this open. Don’t leave. We need to talk, map you guys, etcetera. Okay. Hold on. Over.”

“Gotcha. Sitting here, drinking a Lone Star, watching the dogs play, sun going down behind the hills there. Man… All good, Bastian, considering. The girls are cute. Lucked out. Over.”

Bass took his finger off the transponder. I said, “In case we get cut off, tell them where we are, the address. And ask them if they’re late bloomers.”

They looked at me weird, but didn’t question. Bass nodded and told Chris in Utopia where we were located. But he didn’t ask.