I snatched the gun from the floor and took a step away from him. “It’s all right, Bass, okay?”
He blinked at me like someone awakening from a dream. Looked at Kodie, down at his nakedness. He immediately covered himself. He brought his knees together and hunkered. “Man… what the hell? What was I…?”
“You beat it, Bass,” I said. “You beat back what millions upon millions couldn’t.” Like I thought I had beat it back at McBride’s Guns. I think late bloomers have the ability to beat it all back. Adults didn’t and got overwhelmed with it. All conjecture, of course.
“You did it. You saved me, Kevin.” When he said that, I specifically remember a wave of electricity coursing through me, numbing my hair, tweaking my pinky toe.
I stammered, “I just reacted. I thought you were going to take us out. Are you…?”
“Okay?” he asked, a look of amazement on his face. “Yeah. I feel great. I mean, oh my God I feel like something’s literally been lifted off of me, a weighty fog. I can’t believe I was about to…” He shuddered.
I flicked the gun halfheartedly at him. “Can you maybe get away from the rest of the weapons there and put your clothes back on?”
“Sure.” His voice trailed away as he stared at the kid on the porch. “But I don’t know where they are just now.”
“Let’s go look,” I said. “You don’t mind if I keep this thing on you for a few minutes until I’m sure you’re cool?”
“Whatever makes you feel better. But I swear,” and he chuckled here, “I’m not ever going to get in that… place again. I can’t explain it. It’s gone, and it won’t come back. Thanks to you.”
I believed Bastian. Mouths might, but faces don’t lie. He had defeated the feeling, whether it was with my help or not I’m not sure. The way he treated me thereafter, you’d’ve thought I’d taken the bullet myself and then risen three days later wearing a muslin robe and sandals.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I gambled and won, that’s all. Fifty-fifty shot. You can’t tell someone that, shrug your shoulders and say yeah, well, I got lucky and so did you. Someone’s very life is worth more than that, the result of a coin toss. You want to believe that, anyway.
His face and demeanor changed. He became the positive one. Convincing us things would get better.
Something strange happening. He had this, what was it? A reverence for me. I’d catch him looking at me all starry-eyed. He was agreeable to anything I said and very solicitous. If I was bending down to lift something, he’d say, let me. Sometimes he’d look at me with his lips parted and all walleyed staring, like a dog looks at you when you’ve got too much of a meat sandwich on your hands.
Maybe I did save him. It was lucky.
Grandma Lucille. Well, you know what she’d say about that. Instead of saying ‘There are no coincidences, Kevin,’ she’d just as likely say, ‘There’s no such thing as luck.’ Same thing.
Whatever it was, there was a dead kid on our porch. The kid wouldn’t be dead if I’d managed to get Bastian outside or if he’d just shot himself.
I think the kid was there to report on events. That one of the last of us was about to go. I think he was a messenger, an errand boy.
The dead kid wasn’t one of the kids who were standing in the neighbor’s yard. This boy had darker, shorter hair and he was younger. He’s maybe eight, nine. I didn’t know what to make of Bastian’s claim that the kid’s face wasn’t still. His words. In flux he also said of the kid’s face later, looking at me as we sat at the table eating cereal, looking at me in that… way.
Thing was, Kodie admitted the same thing later to me. That’s what made her scream. Not just that he was there. His face.
Whoever the kid was, he was dead and he was lying on our porch through breakfast and no kids showed up to cover him with stones. Must’ve driven them nuts.
I wondered how long it would take them to arrive and push us out—like they did to the Utopia bunch in San Antonio—now that we’d killed one of them. Maybe because we did, they’d not be so kind as to just push us out. Maybe that’s the incentive they needed, I thought. The fear grinding to a fever pitch among them. They’d come and overwhelm and destroy us. That seemed a stretch, and I knew nothing. Except that I felt their impatience.
Last night we went to bed saying we were going to Utopia today. Given recent events, we’d decided to collect ourselves and gauge the kids’ reaction. It was only a three-hour drive. We just needed to beat the dark.
Midmorning. The ham’s static filled the house. Bass would look over his shoulder and smile at me. It was like a smile maybe I’d have given to you, Mr. English, if this hadn’t all happened and you were there in the audience at some reading of mine in the far future. My discoverer and patron. A reverent and hopeful smile.
Kodie sat on the swing outside, idling side to side. Grackles wound themselves up above her. She didn’t cough. She said she needed some other clothes. She’d been wearing the same thing for days now.
The thin hiss of static inside and that dog nearby barking. And barking.
I was angry at them for their fear of us, if that’s what it was, for their coldness, their unspoken excommunication of us. Their staring, their stealth. I was angry at how different they were. A different species than us. A new branch on the taxonomy tree.
The power that caused it frightened me, yet also emboldened me, because for every action there must be a reaction. One force cannot exist without another acting upon it. We, the survivors, we’re part of whatever it is that acts against this change. I can’t and won’t assign the words good and evil to them because those are old-world words. The forces simply are, one against, or maybe more accurately, one acting with, reacting to, defining another. Yin and yang.
Afternoon. Heavy rain. Rolling blackouts had started and the water pressure had lessened. We’d decided to keep trying Chris on the radio, pack properly and leave for Utopia in the morning. Before venturing out in the Hummer to get Kodie some clothes, we decided to go check the bathtubs in the nearby houses in case we found ourselves off-grid sooner than we thought.
The boy’s body was gone from the porch. The dog had been barking and now I knew why. I imagined a small group of them, the ones assigned to watch us, a blur of silent little scavengers.
The rain pounded. We stayed together under two umbrellas. Me in the middle, Kodie and Bastian flanking me. Holding the umbrellas over me.
Before we got to the first house two doors down (Kodie and I skipped my neighbors’ because I knew Anne and David, a young childless couple who had moved here from Washington DC, and I didn’t have the chutzpah to see them just starting out), Bass asked me as we walked, “You know what that ghost said to me, Kevin?”
“Which one?” I keep seeing glimpses of kids but Kodie and Bass don’t see them. Or they don’t say anything. The kids show themselves to me. I’ll look somewhere, deep into a backyard through a chain-link or open fence, and they’ll step into my view as if to say peekaboo, we see you.
“Hah. Funny. You know, the lady of the Driskill.”
“What’d she say? I thought you didn’t see her.” Humoring him.
“I did. And she saw me. I ran up the stairs to the top floor, came to the landing, stepped through the door at the end of the hall, and looked down it.”
We stopped walking and stood in the middle of the street. Rain boomed on the umbrellas. “Let me guess,” I said. “She came out because you were staring down the hall.” I turned my head during Bass’s dramatic pause and stared at the corner of a house far up ahead. A beat, two. Around came the little forehead, the little face, stern and doll-like, making sure to meet my eyes even from that distance, then ducked away.