Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

“C’mon, Kevin. We can’t risk a rash move tonight.”

“We said that last night.”

“Well, things changed today. Bass, and the dead kid. The tubs. They’re pushing us. Let’s go on our own terms, calmly, with a plan.”

Then it hit me. They got to them. The kids, the new world. Something’s happened. A switch has been flipped. These two are not who they once were. Bodysnatched. When did this happen? How did I miss it? Have they been pretending all this time? Have they been with the kids all along?

Have I been blind? Paranoid as hell?

“Yes,” says Kodie.

I jumped. It was as if Kodie had read my mind and answered my internal questions.

“Keeping you safe, ‘let’s not be rash’… I know it’s hard to process. Me too. I couldn’t believe it at first either. I mean, the morning of, the Osterman kids standing in my yard staring at me, and the first thing I thought of was you, to try to contact you so you’d meet me at the store. Only after I texted you did I wonder about my parents.”

“Same here. I tried contacting you first thing, Kevin. Heard the sounds at dawn and watched TV for a few minutes, the whole time there’s this overwhelming need to contact you. Couldn’t call so I texted to meet at the station. Just after that, literally the second I pressed send, my parents…”

Bass, sounding exasperated with his perception of my being dense. “The Fleming/Jespers connection. You’re the late bloomer across the street. We’re your closest friends, also bloomers. It fits. Forget chosen , if you want, forget special . It just fits. The right person at the right time. Happened in the old world all the time.”

The dog down the street started up again. We all looked up in that direction.

“So, if I drive off you’ll…?”

Bass said, nodding with his eyes closed, “I’ll stop you.”

“I’m armed.” I displayed two loaded handguns I wore, one being Martin’s glock. I held up the crossbow, arched a brow.

“So am I.” Bass cocked his head and smiled, took a pistol from his rear waistband all gangsta.

I looked at his gun. “I’m so needed in this new world, and you’re to protect me or whatever, you’ll shoot me if I were to run. That makes sense how?”

“When you look at it that way.”

I feint toward the Hummer. “You’d, what? Shoot me in the leg?”

“Ah, an incapacitating flesh wound. Good idea.”

“Yeah. Gandhi had a limp,” Kodie added, needling. “Kevin, enough… okay? Listen.” She took in a deep breath, held it, shot a glance at Bass. Exhaling, she said, “I’ve seen the dark smiling teeth, too. The night before it went down.”

Bass raised his hand, sheepish and nodding. “Me too. That night. Didn’t know what it was but knew it was something to do with you. Thought it a vivid nightmare.”

I hadn’t talked about that. Those were my dreams and visions, me and Professor Fleming. But I thought of the strange and scary conversation Mr. English and I had in his office. We’d shared dreams. Why I wouldn’t I also with Kodie and Bass?

Their faces softened. They knew I believed them.

They had a point about not going across Texas right now, I’d even argued that last night, but now I felt like this was too much waiting, and if you’re waiting, you’re waiting for something to happen.

Kodie and Bass fell asleep. It was dusk and I snuck out, taking Martin’s bolt cutters hanging from a peg board in the garage and went four doors down to get that dog. It was quiet for now. One of the neighbors on this street I didn’t know at all. They had plastic playscapes for toddlers in their yard and sometimes I saw a woman, a nanny or a mom, I never knew which, sitting on the porch steps watching them play. She never waved when I rode by on my bike. She’d look up but never wave. I waved at first but, over time, stopped. You tire of waving at people who don’t wave back.

I could’ve brought the dog through the house, I guess, but this was a house we’d skipped. I’d seen the woman who didn’t ever wave lying on the floor through the window.

The dog was a mix, not big. Brown, maybe some lab in there, likely some pit, but some other breed too, keeping it smallish. When I first walked up to the gate, the dog came hauling up to the fence and barked. I could see its agitation through the slats. After a few seconds of that it whined with anxiety like it wanted to see me. When I pulled myself up to look over at it, it wagged its tail and twirled around in circles. God knew how hungry and frightened the thing must have been. “I’m getting you out, okay? Hold on.” The dog sat at my voice, tail wiping the concrete, clearing away an arc of leaves.

I snapped off the fence lock with the bolt cutters. The dog nosed through the opening, shoving its way out as I unhinged it. It spazzed and ran around me, leaping, licking. I put my hands on it and it sat and I took a look at the dulled tag on the collar. Maggie. “Hey, Maggie. That you barking your ass off, Maggie? Yes, I know it was you.” I talked baby-talk to her and she nuzzled my legs. I bent down and she leaned into my body and I held her. Her body shook.

Maggie followed me home. Kodie and Bass stood in the yard. They buried the worried looks on their faces as I approached once they saw Maggie running up to them.

We all went in and fed her people food. The dog ate in huge inhaling gulps and drank water from a mixing bowl for a minute straight, her metal tag clinking the bowl. Maggie replete and belching, Kodie and I sat at the kitchen counter bar and said nothing as the sun fell on All Saints Day. The Day of the Dead. We waited. Bass sat at the ham radio and listened like a SETI scientist listens to the cosmos, from time to time making calls out to the void. Loud, unnerving static assaulted our ears.

The fear of inertia fell over me. Maggie stirred at our feet. The Utopia voices, the Mexico City voices, the last we’d heard, had long ago stopped coming over. We flipped on the TV, radio, phones and laptop just for grins, but of course browsers decried errors, mobile phones found no towers, landlines dead. The only life was from the radio, some nameless station with ads still looping, one for car insurance, one for fast food.

The Earth spun. We rode it.

Lord of the Flies was still on the chair where Bass had left it. I stood at the huge front picture window watching the darkness, knowing I looked like a skewerable fish in a bowl to them, purposefully stood there as counterfeit sacrifice, in a dare— c’mon . An eldritch half-moon hung above gnarled live oaks. Celestial bodies shone bright without city light to blot them. In the window’s reflection, I watched Kodie pick up the book, thumb it so that air lifted her bangs, close it. She pivoted to me, and I watched her reflection approach, felt the heat of her once she arrived beside me, smelled her hot cinnamon gum.

We looked at each other’s figures in the window. Kodie slipped her hand into mine, then got on her toes so that her mouth hovered before my ear and she whispered through the ham’s cosmos static, “We’re still here.”

My last kiss with her was before we fell asleep that night. Our teeth clicked as we pressed harder into each other, moving our heads back and forth, scoping and hoping for more, to get beyond the limitations of skin, muscle, bone, tongue. Trying to climb inside each other.

The first stone comes sometime after midnight.

Having never reset it after turning on the generators at about five in the afternoon, the clock blinks 7:19 7:19 7:19. Kodie slumbers on her side, her back to me, her curves like a cello silhouetted against the window. The static’s roaring in the front of the house. Bass listening for patterns in all that negative space. Beyond that, the low hum of the generators.