And Johnny with them.
I ran through the house to the front door. They’d disappeared like sugar dissipates into hot water.
Crestfallen then, sighing in the doorway, I didn’t know how I was to find him.
From the back of the house, Kodie said, “They were coming for me, Kevin.” I jogged back to the bedroom. “Jesus, the loathing in their eyes.”
“She’s asleep?” I ask, motioning to Rebecca.
Kodie shrugged. “She was standing there seizing. Hands to her sides in fists. Her eyes rolled back in her head. I thought she might swallow her tongue.”
“What did the other kids do?”
“Held their heads. If I’d pushed through them and bent down to help her, I think they would’ve pounced. That’s when I called for you.”
Rebecca’s abdomen swelled and deflated slow and smooth. I felt her neck for her pulse, lifted an eyelid. Like I’d know what to look for.
If things weren’t the way they were, we’d’ve called her parents, we’d’ve taken her to the hospital.
There’d be nothing but horror at the hospital. I refused to go to public buildings, to engage in apocalypse tourism. To see people in hardening scrums soon to fall into a putrid slush.
We knew our parents were dead. Tracking them down to regard their corpses? To what end, closure? Seeing Grandma Lucille in a puffy casket was horror enough. I couldn’t take a more macabre version of closure. We needed to survive, not mourn remains we’d never find anyway. This is what I argued to Kodie.
But she wasn’t having it. “I can’t not try.” Rebecca’s head lolled in her lap in the back seat. Kodie gave me a piercing look in the rearview. “I’ll retrace their steps to work, I’ll… I dunno. I’ll go without you.”
“It’s dangerous to separate.”
“I don’t care.”
I sighed and didn’t speak until completing a turn. “Okay. You’re right. Let’s get some supplies first?” She looked at me again in the mirror and assented with a single nod.
Despite all, the basic drives still moved us. We were getting hungry, and not far off was the prospect of night. The hunger wasn’t that common noon-hour hunger, but deep bodily hunger borne of lack. The energy we’d expended in all this shock had us tapped.
I fiddled with the radio. No jingles, no music, certainly no news. A lament of static was all.
I drove us to the HEB grocery store on streets engrained in my psyche but which now seemed foreign. Beyond the flick of a flag, a traffic light changing, a plastic bag rolling like a tumbleweed, only out of the corners of my eyes did I see movement. Dashing like cast-upon fish.
I flashed to me and my friends as sixth graders throwing water balloons at cars, ducking and hiding, running like hell and laughing until breathless, especially as the victim gave chase. We hid on our bellies under cars and barely breathed.
These grown-ups, gone forever now, who half-heartedly searched for us, couldn’t remember why they once did these things. They yelled and shook their fists in tirades against youth itself.
I swerved with unease around more piles of rocks on Lamar Boulevard and in parking lots. The piles like anthills pulsing up from the ground owing to the swelling pressures of spring rains. We all saw them but said nothing. The fear was there, but also: What was there to say about something you cannot yet understand? We listened to the urgency of static and were afraid of what we saw and what we couldn’t yet see. That was all.
That was how it felt the day of—stunned by silence, numbed by static, confounded by piles of stones, bewitched by twitches in the periphery.
Oh, man I did not want to go in. No shambling remainders weaved in parking lots. Inside, however… This HEB opened early, so I figured we were due for some bodies.
Afraid as I was right then, I knew I’d have to buck up if I was going to make it and that I had to make it because I had work to do beyond survival. There was something more for me. Something important. I had begun to feel as if I’d been uniquely spared. It just felt that way. The way you feel love—you can’t explain its exact origins, you just feel it.
I’d been feeling it, this weirdness, since the summerdreams of June. You know when you have an intense dream and you wake up and the residue of the dream sticks to you for a while? It’s still there in the shower, at breakfast, on the ride to school? And if it’s really strong, maybe even it lasts until lunch? You can’t shake it. It’s like déjà vu. A brain cloud. Something. But then it lifts. It always lifts.
But this never lifted.
I had the dreams. The residue didn’t lift. It clung and grew. I thought I was going crazy. I really did. Not a tweakable disorder but like psychotic, I was going over the hills and far away. Hell, maybe I have. Maybe I’m in a sanitarium right now like Holden Caulfield and in time I’ll come out of it. T’was all a bad dream.
It didn’t lift. I wrote the story The Late Bloomers to try to get it to lift. With the dawnsounds, it grew like mold, enshrouded me.
The chrysalis dream. The dream of the dream of sleep. The mouth containing the dark smiling teeth curling up at the corners segues between dream scenes. The non-voice issuing from it sounding like glass.
It grew more intense on the drive down the lane to Rebecca’s house, and now in the parking lot of the HEB.
It’s even more profound now as I talk to you as I float. Those dark smiling teeth, the sound of hardening glass.
We parked in front. In the old world, if you did this, you’d be assaulted by honks and within seconds a security guard on a golf cart with a swirling yellow light would arrive.
Little liberties like this were no consolation. All this freedom, what amounted to a new set of rules we didn’t yet understand, they just made me feel sick for what was gone. Parking here to go in the store and take things unquestioned just reminded me that I loved my mom and that she was dead, and that the whole world was this big dead altered thing.
I turned off the ignition and braced for that quiet to settle like a cloak of volcanic ash. The sky remained cobalt. I hated it too, its mocking emptiness, the void it prefigured.
Kodie still held Rebecca in the back seat, stroking her hair now, providing her that succor I couldn’t to her father. I had just gaped at him. God, what a galling sonofabitch I am for standing there with my idiot mouth open, hanging fire. How callow.
I wondered then: Would I do the same for Kodie if it struck her? It’s wishful thinking, but maybe she’s like me. Maybe we’re goddamned Adam and Eve starting this thing all over again, starting it right.
Now, that’s a thought.
Kodie stayed with rosy-cheeked Rebecca in the car, nodding for me to go ahead.
“You sure?”
“As long as she’s here, I’m okay, I think. If things get weird, I’ll honk.”
“You won’t leave her and come in with me?”
She lifted her bat from the floor of the car and smiled. “One-woman wrecking crew.”
The automatic doors which were never closed for the all-day traffic were closed now. The door sensed me and slid open. Cool air and the smell of vegetation hit me, as did the Muzak. And I thought Jesus, as soon as I can I’m going to play some real music. Nothing but ad jingles all morning, and now Muzak.
Nothing on the floor, nothing in disarray. The lights were on, the iced rows remained so. Not a puddle or drip. This HEB isn’t like conventional Midwest grocery stores. This is the upmarket HEB, Central Market. Mom liked to shop here. Martin did not. Too expensive and full of trendy people who made him itch—forty-year-olds in skinny jeans and Ray Bans pushing $2,000 baby strollers branded in umlauted Helvetica. It’s a labyrinth, forcing you through the whole store’s maze so that you’ll buy more.