I’m being wound up. Stayed up with Kodie all night long and yet I feel no fatigue.
The death that has come comes slowly for us late bloomers. Just like in my story. There’s still enough kid in us, ersatz Peter Pans, and the death is stymied, but would it be denied?
Kodie and I had been going down the street, house by house, breaking and entering, filling the bathtubs. Her breathing had cleared and she had energy for the task. Many of the doors we came to were unlocked, but a few times we busted in through a window.
Entering each was harrowing. The interiors mausoleum-still, the dim window-lit spaces. Kodie, ever hopeful, insisted on calling out hello? each time. Her call echoed through the halls and empty rooms.
It got to where we did two at a time, she in one, me in the other, filling. I filled the tubs in the houses that had corpses. I didn’t linger around them much, tried to pretend they weren’t there, whistling while I worked to keep the creep from settling on the back of my neck. Of course, the more you ignore, the more the feeling back-builds within and soon I was sensing movement in other rooms. Thought I’d heard a shuffling, a creek of wood, a groan. I’d turn off the water and stop whistling to listen.
Oh, the silence of the world sucks to behold, dear reader.
Each of the ten or so we saw died of the white save one. The ones that died of the white were all on the floor, usually near an unlatched door or open window. A kitchenette chair knocked over. Everyday things scattered on the floor—stacked mail, breakfast cereal, toothbrush and paste—from the last throes.
I took the houses with corpses. You knew from the porch. The one suicide was a block over from my house, a house smaller than ours and painted fire-engine red. On the entry wall hung a still spot-lit painting of a melodramatic Old West winter scene—two cowboys and a Native American guide bent against the wind on horseback, oceanic tundra all around. I got up close to it and saw that the paint had become alligatored on the canvas. I couldn’t make out the signature at the corner. On the entry table were pictures of two men in various loving poses, wearing suits, tuxes, matching turtleneck sweaters. In one they held a small dog you knew was yappy as hell. The men were in their sixties, I’d guess. The house was in no disarray and the décor was contempo and clean if not breathtaking. That is, other than the cowboy painting from the mid-1800s. Seeing it spot-lit like in a gallery; that did take my breath. My mind vaulted to all the world’s art, the museums which had become themselves still-lifes, white emergency lights pulsing in their corridors.
The guy I found was in the kitchen. Several drawers were open and a few implements strewn on the floor from his riffling. The man wore a robe but it was open and splayed under him. He lay nude and spread-eagled in his remodeled midcentury-modern kitchen, a cone of light from the stove focusing on the gash across his throat from ear to ear. The wound had blackened and puffed to something like a rotten eggplant, one made so deep that the blood had simply fallen out onto the floor. The entire kitchen was a kidney-shaped tarry sea stilled by air, gravity, and time. A huge and expensive Japanese kitchen knife was stuck in the middle of the blood, an artifact in amber. The smell and the sight made me catch puke in my mouth and my eyes water. I thought I was getting used to it, a blasé veteran. Not quite.
I suppose I’ll always be shocked by death, the look of it on faces. Then all was still so… fresh, everything, even the outside air, smelling like a slaughterhouse town gone ripe.
I’d taken the painting off the wall and carried it with me under my arm from house to house, leaning it against porch steps next to uncarved pumpkins. Kodie didn’t even question it.
It became rote work. We made entry, I’d clear the house to make sure it was safe, and then she’d flip on the lights and start filling. I’d check back, next two. As the tubs filled, my eyes would glaze over at the rushing water and I’d think about how it all used to be and how was it going to be. As the waterlines crawled skyward, I saw great dark stinking pits and they were filling with bodies.
Those visions felt like my summerdreams, which I sort of lied to Mr. E about. I lied in that I didn’t tell him I was having them every night, the exact same one, only our clothing and the clouds changing, and every one had the MoPac train coming down the track we were on at the end, trapping us on the trestle. The kids would see us if we ran or jumped. We froze. Dream ended. My heart pounding as my eyes whipped open.
We made our way around the entire block, feeling good about our modest progress. We’d excitedly talked about the need for chlorine tabs to throw in the tubs. We’d need to hit the library and do book research on how to do this—how to do everything. In one house a bedside Bible caught my eye. I let the water fill the tub and flipped to the passage Jespers wrote on his whiteboard, Matthew 16:23—Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me. For you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.
It needs you to need it.
Seek you. Seek you.
The static and whine roared through the house. That sound and Bass’s flat-toned imploring drew us into the room. We heard the buzz of static from the street. The front door was open and when we walked in we saw Bass standing in front of the rack of electronics he’d constructed. Top and center sat the ham radio. Bass bobbed his head.
He’d been busy. Before that, he’d set up the solar panels in an array on top of the detached garage to catch westering sun. I marveled.
Bass had connected it all to Martin’s big speakers. He glanced back at us, lifting his eyebrows in acknowledgement. “Whole block’s tubs are filled,” I shouted, backhanding his shoulder. “Hey, kill that for a sec.” He turned it down but the static was still there.
“So, this thing’s going and I’m learning how to use it. Pretty simple, really. Just turn the dial slowly and look for open channels, listen for voices, keep calling out our existence. There’s got to be another group like us out there banging away doing the same thing.” Bass twisted the knob to a clear frequency, lifted the mike, and spoke. “Turn it to the US standard frequency here and… CQ CQ. This is Bastian in Austin Texas USA calling CQ and waiting for a call…”
“Seek you. You say seek you?” I asked.
“No. The letters. C and Q. Just the thing you say. Means we’re calling any amateur radio station out there. There’s all this protocol and codes in this guide that came with it,” Bass held up the thick soft-backed book, “but it’s meaningless now. You guys can do it, too, whenever. Just come over and grab the mike and push this here. I say we leave it open and ping away as often as we can.”
The static compounded the emptiness, hissed how desperate our hope.
“Hey, it’s Halloween,” I said. Lifted chins and attempted smiles. This might be the first Halloween that truly scared us.
“I’m going as a ham radio operator,” said Bass.
“I think Kevin and I already did our trick-or-treating,” said Kodie.
I blurted in higher-octave Peanuts-speak, “I got a pack of gum!”
“I got a rock,” Bass said like a deflated Charlie Brown. We laughed. Well, I only chuckled because when he said that, I thought of stone piles.
That image overwhelmed and so I blurted to dispel the feeling. “Do we hit the road and expose ourselves to God knows what, or stick here?” Silence. “Right now, I think we take safety where we can find it, and stick together. Agreed?”
“This radio’s our hearth and fire. We stay here, I say, for now, for tonight at least,” said Kodie.