Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

Maggie’s bark somewhere inside the house makes me sit up. Kodie does too. We grip each other’s forearms.

Before you realize the power’s out, there’s silence. All that booming static is gone. That drumming generator hum falls off. Even the dog goes quiet, her alarmist duties disrupted. The Utopia guy, Chris, had told us that dogs and the kids don’t like each other. Maggie was here not only to let us know something wicked this way comes. Maybe she could thwart it.

Maggie resumes her baying. Moonbeams slant in and pool on the floor. Bass’s footfalls thud down the hall. He jostles the locked knob. “Hey, guys! I think—” and that’s when we hear the first crash of glass somewhere in the front of the house.

Maggie’s barking augments to communicating more than something’s here ; it warns stay away or I’ll rip your lungs out . She’s in the room where the stone came through. Kodie says, “They’re trying to get in.”

I open the door to Bastian. “Let’s get the guns,” he says in a clipped whisper. I nod, but what I really want to do is find Maggie as she’s the one on point. Bass jogs through the house ahead of me and starts grabbing weapons in the living room. I pick up Martin’s glock from the nightstand.

“Stay here,” I say. The hall brightens as Bass looks for things with his flashlight. I grab a flashlight from the line of them set on the entryway table, jog it back to Kodie and toss it on the bed. “Don’t use it yet,” I tell her.

“I’m not staying here.”

We join Bass in the living room, his flashlight beaming around the floor on guns, boxes of bullets. “Turn it off,” I tell him. “They’re watching.” But for the moonlight, the room goes pitch dark. Maggie starts in again with volleys of barks, running from room to room now, her nails skidding and clicking on the wood floors. That’s all we hear in the dark besides our breathing—Maggie’s barks, growls and skittering, the pads of her feet trying to achieve purchase with each new directional change corresponding to their movements and smells. She’s everywhere, playing whack-a-mole, going from window to window to door to door, making sure they know she’s omnipresent and against the very idea of their encroachments.

This goes on for a long minute. Nobody says anything but Maggie who starts winding down, just growling and pacing. The dining room window is the one that’s broken, a huge picture window, now with a grapefruit-sized hole in it, splinters radiating around it. High-quality double-paned tempered glass. Martin reminded us all of this often enough, especially when it iced once a year. Kodie, Bass, Maggie and I are all in the dining room looking at the hole, feeling the air. We smell smoke in that air.

I turned around and looked for the stone that must be on the floor right behind us. “Smoke?” Kodie asks, that bowie knife in hand.

“What’s burning?” Bass whispers.

I find the stone. It’s fist-sized, heavy, water-riven smooth. I hold it to my side. My throat constricts and dries.

It all happens so fast:

Maggie panting at our feet, we all stop scanning the windows to focus on the one with the hole in it, and the vaguest glow way in the distance. We look at it with idiot-moth reverence.

Maggie tears into shouting yowls, making us all jump, barking with such ferocity that her body crouches. She slides back with each bark.

In answer, we hear the children roar as one.

One booming burst that comes from all around us. How many of them, a thousand, more. No knowing.

All of us grab at each other’s arms and shudder and crouch. Maggie rages at their movements in the dark. They roar again, higher in pitch, wet-sounding. You can hear the little children among them, screaming in perfect unison with the rest.

My blood zings through my arteries looking for some escape but there isn’t one so the centripetal force of it makes me lightheaded and I feel that my throat might burst open in a gush.

Heavy thudding footfalls on the roof. A buzz-hum coming from outside. Maggie whines and shakes her head like it itches. I’m half blind with confusion and bloodrush. My breath seizes in hitches of panic.

A terse, louder roar precedes the hail that falls upon us.

Glass from every window in the house comes in at once. All we could do was duck. The drumming and pounding against the roof, the walls. It’s not only the windows. The entire house is bombarded. A tornadic din grows.

Such chaos follows that I cannot tell you the exact order of what happens next. We’re on the floor scrambling on broken glass but we don’t know where to. We shout at each other but there’s no hearing, no more than you could hear someone trying to tell you something amid a field of exploding landmines.

The world washed out. It broke apart all around me and I remember just waiting to be taken asunder too, in a way welcoming its inevitability because I didn’t want to be a part of a world where this happened. I didn’t want to save it, lead it, be in it. That’s when I almost gave up, right there.

One of the drawbacks to the house, Martin told us every spring, is that there isn’t a safe area to go to in case of a tornado. Best we could do was all get in the bathtub and pull a mattress over our heads. We actually drilled on this, Johnny thinking it was a riot, Mom thinking it was necessary, me thinking it was stupid because it’s something Martin wanted to do. In general, if Martin was excited about it, I wasn’t, no matter what it was. Typical shit-ass teenage step-kid. I miss him.

All we could do was stay down. Within seconds, Bass and Kodie are on top of me and covering me. Maggie barking. Interminable drumming and pounding. Goes on for so long that Kodie cries out, “Why won’t they stop?” I try to budge them off but Bass is too strong. I was lying on my front, struggling with them. Bass keeps yelling through gritted teeth to stay down. Glass bits tear at my shoulders and kneecaps. Sandy shards abrade my cheek.

This shower of stone and glass. Unceasing waves. The house coming apart in places, the actual wood and sheetrock and insulation spraying out in puffs. The holes become spaces and the spaces allow more to come through with their vicious aim, to connect with us, our tissue bruising now, and I wonder how long it can last.

This is when all the fear and wonder of these days went from nebulous gas to bright star in my mind, under the siege of stones. That bright star winked and shined and its message was they are trying to kill us .

How many are out there and how many stones can there be? Did they carry them here or have they been stockpiling clandestinely all along, lying in these supplies for days unseen?

My God. It must be.

I hear Bass take one to his body and he says oh . We’re covering our heads now. The barrage is so complete that we don’t dare stand to run elsewhere. There’s nowhere to run. It comes from all sides.

Maggie barks somewhere, whines in pain, continues.

Kodie covers my head with her body in fetal position and weeps. She’s hit in the back a couple of times and she cries out like I’ve heard mothers cry out giving birth, a shocked, bewildered cry.

They cover me and take this. For me .

I don’t understand it, yet I do.

I think of Mr. English, the thinking steeple he creates with his fingers, leaning back in his chair, looking at me in a manner both quizzical and fearful.

It’s so loud, violent, and malevolent that I just want it to end, for all of us. Enough , is what my mind flashed. Over and over it flashed enough of this, Johnny and let it end, Johnny .

A lull. Bass off of me and standing, I could now see him, a man in full, teeth bared, seething, bloodied in the face, his clothes tattered, drips of blood falling from a fingertip. All of this as shown in moonlight. A comic book scene. My mind put him in a square on a page and above the square in a caption block it reads in that handwritten small-caps script, Bastian’s Last Stand.