The rising smoke my beacon, I finally arrived near its fire. Southbound MoPac ends and takes a hard right to the northwest. I stopped on the little rise of an overpass.
Unlike the other day at Butler Park when we approached slowly and quietly, this time I’d come roaring up, Bass’s muffler heralding me. Maggie barking. When I got to the top of the overpass, I put the Bronco in park and let it chug. I get out and stand on the shuddering hood with my binoculars. To my right is the Circle C housing development. They’re in the open space south of it. Moving as an entity. Their movements a sea. They hummed. This is what they do.
Beyond their mass, the fire.
I put the binoculars to my eyes.
One looks over her shoulder, then they all do, and the movement of their turning heads fans over the thousands of them looking like wind stirring a millpond.
They’ve dug a pit. Still expanding and deepening it, kids digging around its perimeter. Without binoculars they look like ants working their pile to some end they don’t comprehend. The pit is aflame. In it I see mounds of corpses. The kids drag them. I see no vehicles. My mind staggers: How in the hell did they get all those corpses there?
I scanned around with the binoculars. In the trees surrounding the open area hung nests. Maybe I saw ten. They have rounded, basket-like bottoms made of branches, sticks, and vine. The watchers sat there, disconnected from the rest. All ages, the watchers.
I see nests here and there along the river. I’ve seen a head pop up a few times, a semicircle of dark against the sky, darting back down as soon as I notice.
These open spaces, these burning pits. I imagine this happening all over the world right at this moment. Out where the city melds into the pastoral there are children digging pits, dragging the corpses that had been under cairns. Rolling them in, watching them burn.
Will they next burn entire cities? Or will they simply acquit themselves of the metros to let them crumble and overgrow? Seems that’s more their style.
It dawns on me for the first time that in looking at them, other than Rebecca, Simon, and Johnny, I’ve never seen or hear them speak. Not to each other, not to us. They hum and they roar.
Any pity I may have had for them in the beginning was gone. I should’ve held no faith in reserve for them after seeing them in that room in Rebecca’s house. They’ve killed my friends, taken or killed my love, Kodie. They’ve taken my brother away from me, demolished my house when all I’d tried to do was help them. I told them as much at the plane crash. Their shadowy ranks just stood there. And now they were probably burning Mom and Martin and Mr. E in that pit down there.
When you stand at a busy anthill, the ants barely notice you. You have to kick the hill to get them to move.
I pull Lord of the Flies from my waistband, took out the glock and held them both high over my head in each hand. I fired into the air, screaming my throat raw, “Burn this too! Burn books with the dead. Go ahead! Be my fucking guest!” I threw it at them, smacking Kodie’s gum as the book flew out from the overpass.
Through the binoculars, focusing in on one little boy at the back of the mass, leaning against a shovel taller than he is. He’s got it gripped in two fists in front of him, his forehead to it, eyes closed as if he’s resting.
My stare bored into the back of his head. I whispered, “Turn. Look at me.”
When he stood up straight as if something had stung him, his movement rippled out over the swarm. He turned slowly around and the ripples flared out. He faced me. The scene shook a little through the binoculars due to the distance. This kid with his cropped hair, gamer’s body, and doughy face wearing an Under Armour tee ordering all to Just Call Me Awesome, he called me over with his arm. All around him did it. Beckoning me to come down. He lifted the shovel and held it up.
They wanted me to help them dig. Taunting me.
He smiled wide. They all did. All their smiling teeth.
I said, “No. I won’t help you.”
Then I heard a new noise from them.
Thousands, laughing.
We’d lost contact with Utopia after Halloween night. If anybody there was still alive, maybe we could pull together others. If not, well, hell, I didn’t know.
Using a map in Bass’s glove box, I zigzag my way up to Route 290 west. The roads to Utopia are pretty much open. An hour from Austin the rain starts. It’s comforting. The world goes on. Shooting through a rainy Hill Country of postcards now, the road cutting through them on Highway 16 heading south toward Medina from Kerrville. Maggie looks out the window, tired as I am.
Fredericksburg looked an Old West movie set. I expected a tumbleweed to roll in front of me. A few disturbed cairns. No askance vehicles. I did see a few more cairns on the way. Parking lots in Dripping Springs, Johnson City, Kerrville’s outskirts, cutting down the Medina Highway. Each of them disturbed, its former resident dragged off to some fiery pit. I saw a few lines of smoke here and there, dousing in the rain, a big one all the way over in San Antonio.
Only a few times did errant cars force me off road. Once, my back tires spun in the mud off the shoulder. After I got unstuck, I closed my eyes in relief, finding myself whispering prayers, hoping they had influence and could shield me from a thousand incidents like this waiting for me.
As I approached the I-10 overpass, a long line of them stood up from what must have been crouched positions. Standing in their ranks, the children watched me pass under. I winced, expecting they’d throw rocks at the car. Maggie bellowed. In the rearview, another long line of them shot up to watch me go.
A murder of crows on a wire.
Angling deeper into the higher, remote Texas Hill Country. A deer leapt across the road, followed by a heard of them, hundreds. I got excited. Animals don’t have to contend with our fences and deathly highways anymore. No kids, no piles for miles. The silences deepening and welling, but they are soothing silences, for they belong here. It’s the silences of the cities that unmoor your soul.
The Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch was up ahead. Maggie sniffed at the air. The Bronco rollicked through the twists and turns through the steep hills and walls of cedar and oaks. I had to double back a couple of times, relying on Bass’s notes from talking with Chris.
I pull in and immediately dozens of dogs come rushing up, their tails wagging like mad and jumping up. So glad to see me. Maggie jumped down and made friends. There was none of the usual initial break-in phase with the dogs where they fight a little, gnash teeth, establish pecking orders. I found myself laughing out loud at their glee to see us.
As excited as they were, they didn’t seem as desperate as Maggie was when I let her out. She was ravenous, the ribs showing just above her abdomen. A few steady meals staved off her developing into an ectomorph, which is what I’d expected to find here. Not the case. They looked free and glad—you know a smiling dog when you see one—and they looked fed. Either they’d gotten into the food supply here, had been foraging or hunting, or somebody had been feeding them.
The rain had let up but the air was timorous. A bunch of dogs who hadn’t managed to escape barked and wagged like mad in the big open-air pens. These were hungry and whining. The pens had wooden donor plaques hanging from them—Don and Linda’s Homestead, etc. I let them out and the group of them gathered around me like I was the pied piper.
Around back behind the main house, which was constructed of beige stone, the wooden parts painted red, I found a Bobcat diesel four-by-four ATV. There was a well-used pickup and a recent model SUV. The SUV had bumper stickers on it indicating its San Antonio origin—one a euro-circled SA, another proclaiming a parent’s child and money went to some private school. The truck had done the ranch work and the SUV had brought the refugees from San Antonio, whom we’d talked to on the ham. Place felt abandoned. No souls stirred here.