I glanced at the church playground swings swaying empty.
“Then I saw it.”
“What?” I asked. That low boom-bang again, like someone throwing something heavy into a dumpster.
“The white stuff. It stopped at her lips. In the minute I sat there it seemed to harden. Made ugly splitting noises like when you step on thin ice.” He shifted his weight on the helmet. “I carried her into the house and then ran to my dad on the deck on his back. Same thing. Eyes open, that white hard foamy… glittery… stuff filled his throat and mouth. He died alone.” Bass looked at me and towered over me and asked me like I knew something, nostrils flaring, caging his rage. “What is it, Kevin? You tell me what that is, what does that. To the whole fucking world!”
He calmed. We walked. “Got a crossbow and a pony keg in the trunk of my car.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Well now. It is Friday afternoon, after all.” We sniggered and watched ahead, veering away from an outlying crop of new headstones which had jumped the road onto this new acreage. We neared the treeline and the Bronco. The church’s playground was clear to us now, but empty. That one swing swaying in the breeze. The breeze made me remember the plane crash and I looked over that way and saw thin smoke.
“Man, right about now, if this day was what it was supposed to be… Well, I take that back. This is clearly what it is supposed to be. You know what I mean? Tell me to shut up, I’m high.”
“Shut up. You’re high.”
“Thank you. Now, if this was the homecoming football game day it says it is on my phone.” He pulled it out, scrolled the screen with this thumb, turned the screen to my face as proof. “See? Says Homecoming vs CP, right? We’d be getting out of class early and the teacher would be all sulky about it because us jocks get to leave and there’s nothing they can say about it, and we’d be going to the locker room for a team meeting before going off to our absurdly early dinner at Luby’s.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Let me see that thing. Thought I saw something.”
“What?”
“Give it.” I thought I’d seen the phone’s reception bars moving and those buffering turning circles. If those things are moving, maybe the net or cell towers were working. On mine, on Kodie’s, all day they’ve been dead since I got their texts.
He gave it to me. Looking at it again, I see it must have been a trick of my vision, my eyes wanting to see movement. I tapped and scrolled but nothing moved. Glowing hockey pucks at this point. Pointless plastic and gla—But then something did move, in the reflection off the phone’s glass. Bass couldn’t see it as the screen was titled away from him. I saw it though. Just as I’d seen its shadow in that first dream in June, just as I’d seen its shadow riding along that wave rolling upriver like an arrow pointing the way.
Winged thing. A long thin tail, something from the fantasy pulps lining my wall. Or Dante.
I startled and swung my face to the sky behind us to try to see it.
“What?” Bass asked, facing me, his back turned to the woods.
“Nothing.” My mind scrambled for an answer. “Thought I saw… your buffering symbol swirling.”
“The way you jumped.” He shifted his weight and cocked his helmet. “You toke up?”
Apocalyptic paranoia brought on by skunk weed. That’s all…
“I did just a little at dawn. Like, one hit. Then things went to shit.”
But then I did see movement. In the trees.
As I slowly handed him back his phone, my stricken face to the woods, Bass whipped around. “What? You see them?”
Bass didn’t see me nod.
“How many?”
My voice low and sure. “Looked like one kid—”
—Hey! Hey you guys come here!
A boy’s voice coming from the woods, an echo tailing it. We jogged toward the voice, both of us understanding the voice to be earnest. My heart swelled and thumped high in my barren throat. I forgot all about Kodie and Johnny. When we got to the Bronco, it was dinged and webbed cracks spread across the windshield and windows facing the woods.
You’d think weeks of lifting your knees high while playing a trombone would benefit one’s cardio fitness, but you’d be wrong. Out of breath, I asked Bass, “You go chasing one of those nasty fall hailstorms again?” I put my hands on my knees and scanned the woods.
“Nope,” answered Bass who wasn’t winded in the slightest. Though hanging onto the edge of the game roster by his fingernails, he had done the two-a-days, the man-killers. His head panned back and forth along the wall of green.
Not even birds scratched out their call-and-response language of warnings. That intense and intentional quiet thickened.
It’s not just the quiet attendant to an ended world. It’s a quiet of being watched, being tracked. A quiet that wicks into your marrow’s sponge.
Feeling it too, Bass pulled his keys out of his pocket and made toward the Bronco with long strides and tossed the helmet through the open back seat window. “Screw this. Let’s get out of here.”
“Hold on.”
There.
Down low in the green I saw the flash of his spectacles and I could make out a face in the ivy and wild shrubs that fortified the tree line. The boy knelt on both knees and he pushed his face through the foliage like he emerged from another dimension, a turtle forcing its head from its carapace.
“Hey,” I whispered loudly to the boy. He hid from the others. From his face, he held a secret.
The boy waved us over while looking over his shoulder. When he turned back to us, the dread in his face made me stutter-step.
We knelt down to his level.
“I’m not supposed to do this,” he whispered, his lips sticking, his throat clicking with fear. Though I saw his eyelashes flapping, I couldn’t see his left eye through the webbed lens of his wire-rims. “They’ll be here quick.”
“Not supposed to do what?” I asked him.
He padded the air downward with his palm as if to quell my volume. He looked over one shoulder, then the other. The boy and Bass met eyes, and by the transmission between them, Bass knew to watch behind the boy for others.
“Who are you? What’s going on?” I asked in a clipped whisper.
Clear-eyed and with a response that seemed readymade, he whispered, “There’s no time. They’ll be here. I’m Simon. I know what’s going to happen next. And I think it concerns you.” He pointed at me.
Simon looked to be maybe eleven, his ginger bangs sweat-plastered to his forehead, his freckles popping through his ruddy cheeks. I was so stunned at the surreality of a little boy from the green telling me this I could hardly think and certainly couldn’t talk. Simon seemed to intuit this and he nodded his head with understanding.
“Here.” Simon produced from behind him a plastic bag with something in it and tossed it to me.
I picked up the bag, felt the weight of it, holding it between knuckles by its knot. I recognized it to be a grocery bag, one of those you put your fruit or vegetables in before weighing, just like one from Central Market. I lifted it up thinking the kid had offered me some food. I lifted it up to get a look at it. My stomach freefell.
This Simon kid said, “Don’t let your brother go. Keep him with you.” And he looked dead level at me, tight-lipped and blinkless. I dove into his eyes but couldn’t wrap my mind around why it mattered that I keep Johnny with me.
“What’s this about Johnny? How do you even have this?” I lifted the bag and noticed the SKU price sticker on it. Vidalia Onion, $1.49.
Through the opaque plastic swaying before my eyes hung a stone. The stone Johnny had bagged and thrown down the corridor of pallets.