The air inside the main house wasn’t as stale as expected, and certainly didn’t contain the deathreek of the houses on my street. Fat flies buzzed.
No sign of the San Antonio late bloomers now but for a pillaged kitchen strewn with wrappers and empty containers and butter knives smeared with condiments and various open jars of peanut butter, a pyramid of empty Pabst Blue Ribbon tall boys against the wall stuck together with Crazy Glue as evidenced by the open tube stuck to the table, a condom unfurled on the bathroom floor like snake molting.
Flicking dead switches, tapping the various buttons which used to grant access, perform a service; the fridge water dispenser, the iPad lying on the kitchen counter next to the open mayonnaise jar with flies buzzing the rim. Maggie ghosted behind me, sniffing at yet another condom on the kitchen floor. I toed her nose away from it. The other couple of dogs who came in with us scavenged the pantry. I heard them in there knocking things over and munching. I came to a wood-paneled office with a desk and lamp and desk calendar blotter decorated with yellow sticky notes, and a dead computer screen. A cheery room with art done in clumpy paint on the walls and a wooden figure folk art thing with a cigar in its mouth leaning against a wall.
Here was the ham radio Chris had used. I picked up the microphone from the floor and placed it back on the table, pressed the power button. No juice. On top of the ham was a relic: a Polaroid camera. I pointed it down at Maggie, pressed the button, and heard that glorious old-world noise, smelled that chemical smell of quick film development. It came out the slot at me like a tongue, a critical missive inserting itself from the world of a few seconds ago.
That mechanical sound of the camera is how long each of the several whalesounds lasted. That’s how quick the world changed.
A button pressed and here it came, no stopping it.
To hasten its development, I shook the Polaroid picture, and danced to that Outkast tune in my head. Maggie looked at me like I was out of my barking mind. I looked down at the picture. There she was, a perplexed and innocent dog face looking upward.
Where did they go, the bloomers who were here?
Where did everyone else go? Toward where the pits would be? Must be. Kids couldn’t have moved them all there that fast. If they walked, how come I didn’t see anybody as I drove home from Mount Bonnell?
Hold on, that isn’t true, is it? I saw the garbage man, who had just abandoned his truck. He was walking south down my street. The man on my street in his robe. He stood out there, dumbfounded. I bet he was a walker too.[16]
But solving that little mystery is pointless. It’s a footnote to this, a shoulder shrug.
“Get it through your head,” I’d said, standing in Kinky’s office. “They are all dead.” Even the late bloomers now, these few days on. Kodie had been right. The late bloomers just got to see and suffer more.
There’s no telltale kid-destruction here. I could’ve gone looking for them, these late bloomer wonderers, out there in the brush, risked hurting myself out there alone. But why? I need to stay alive and that’s it. Why doesn’t matter right now. Fleming/Jespers, or whatever the cause, could be tackled later. Much later.
On the desk calendar, fitting perfectly on the October 31 square, Polaroid pictures sit in a short neat stack. Portraits. Names written on the bottom in their respective scripts. There’s the black Sharpie next to the stack. Twelve pictures of six people, four young women, two young men, all ridiculously attractive. The portraits look like headshots of the cast of some Disney neon-drenched dubstep music video / porny spring break movie.
The first six photos in the stack are the portraits. Each of them has posed with the folk art wooden cigar chomping man standing here like he’s a spring break buddy, Mr. Party, the older weirdo guy hanging around spring breakers and nobody knows who he is but the intoxication is so total that nobody asks or cares. Old-world cupidity and sex is in their eyes despite having fled out to this dog rescue ranch at the end of their world.
The next six are group shots, five people in each. They are petting the dogs out in the pens, sitting on chairs outside on the landing which gives a view to the thousand foot high hills. One guy carves a pumpkin in each of these, not looking up at the camera. No beer cans, not many smiles. One girl, Kimberly (cross-referencing the inscribed portraits), seems to really have it for one of the guys, a Lance—he of the backwards-set ball cap and throw-pillow pecs under Hollister tee—by her torchy glances at him in each. Lance, ever aware of the lens, smolders for it, for all the ladies out there, seeming to forget there’s nobody left but them. Old habits die hard for smoldering dudes. I understood. Sure I did. Probably had his shirt off later, prancing around after a couple of brews.
And my nasty little brain uttered to nobody but me: Will the world miss these people?
This must have been Halloween day, the day the ham operator, Chris, made contact. The last one, a thirteenth photo I found off by itself on the desk, is a selfie, taken here in this room, his face washed out from the flash. Deep black doom in the eyes. A selfie because he’s the last one.
He has written at the bottom—I’m certain it’s Chris’s script, from his other, happier headshot—the two short words I used as the clever title to my extra credit essay for Mr. E’s English class.
Both end with an O.
You guessed it.
Mr. E’s words, in his voice from his note at the top of the essay’s title page, echo here: You really saw this didn’t you?
Mrs. Fleming’s shout from across the street echoes right after it: You knew, didn’t you?
I put my hands flat on the desk at either side of the array, elbows locked, head thrust down, and I looked into each face, found the good in each, quickly came to know them as their mothers’ children and that they all had the same secret, sane, and simple desires of the heart as I do.
Were the dogs heard on the ham just baying at the Halloween moon?
“Who knows?” I said to Maggie, who twisted an ear at me. “No shattered windows. Nothing like what those little shits did to us.”
Through the window I see a vulture swoop down over the empty pen. No shadow followed it. Its flight embodied patience, a scanning glide, knowing there always would be plenty of death upon which to feast. I pick up and look at the developed Polaroid I’d just taken. My brow creases and my stomach clenches. I angle the photo to the window to see it better.
In the extreme top left corner of the photo, I see a foot. The toe of a small-sized tennis shoe.
My heart thuds against the roof of my mouth.
Prickles of gooseflesh shoot across my entire skin as fast as kid movements, a wave of it moving over me instantaneously.
Before I could turn around—“I knew you’d come.”
The child’s voice issued from the gloom. Maggie and I spun around. She growled deep and long and stayed put.
The kid emerged from the shadow behind the office door. He stepped out, holding his hands behind his back. I never sensed him. Maggie hadn’t either. The somehow is what bothers me now. That boy had to have been standing there stone-still the entire time we perused the room. That Maggie didn’t notice his presence still confounds me, confirming that he and they are of a thoroughly different kind.
16
While none of us remember these early days, we now know this is what happened to many people that morning.