“Mr. Fleming! Do you know what’s going on?” My voice ricocheted and didn’t sound like mine with that hysterical break in it. I took a step toward him.
He closed the door more, leaving only inches through which to yell. “You stay back! I’ve got my gun here.” He tipped the barrel he gripped with his fist into view. “Loaded.”
“I’m not…” I remember I didn’t know what to say. I felt accused and didn’t understand. I backed up a step and put my hands up in a defensive posture.
“You’re not what, son? Responsible? Jesus Holy Christ.” I’ll never forget that because it confused me then as it confuses me now. Though now, I must admit, I do see maybe what he meant.
“Honestly, I just got home to pick up Johnny. I don’t know what’s happening.”
His eyes scanned down to his wife. He stopped blinking and stared as renewed shock poured over him. His face was ashen and slicked with sweat. I waited for him to cry out. He looked back up at me. “I took today off. Woke up later than usual. Becky’d gone off to work. Then the exploding texts… then the TV… then I got my gun. Then I looked out the window.” He nodded down like at a struck animal on the highway. “Saw her.”
“I haven’t seen TV yet. The radio’s not been specific.”
Mr. Fleming looked above my head at the smoke from the plane, rubbed his nose with his hand. He still wouldn’t open the door. “Yeah. I’d say that’s the gist of it. Nonspecific. Lacking in specificity.” He chuckled.
Amidst the chaos of downed-plane-nearby and dead-woman-on-the-walkway, that Mr. Fleming said this calmed me a smidge because that’s something he would say.
Martin didn’t much like Mr. Fleming—so I did, by default. I’m sure Mr. Fleming never knew nor cared. Martin didn’t think twice about announcing this dislike to us. Often he stood at the window, curtain parted with one hand, coffee in the other, watching his neighbor doing something as benign as mowing the grass, saying what’s that asshole up to now? Martin didn’t like him for the same stupid reasons people forever haven’t liked each other. He assumed the other guy thought he was special and resented him for it. What made Martin think Mr. Fleming think he was so special, what made him think he was so goddammed smart, was that Professor Fleming taught at UT. Sociology, long-tenured, PhD. He tended his raised vegetable gardens with a big floppy hat Martin thought was just precious. A real homophobe, straight out of central casting. I mean, Mr. Fleming had been married for decades, had kids on both coasts. Sometimes the news interviewed Mr. Fleming as an expert on all things anomie—social media, texting while driving, little girls dressed like hookers, the starvation death cult they discovered out near Marfa last year calling themselves Breatharians.
So, when Mr. Fleming said “lacking in specificity,” for a moment, we were talking like neighbors again. He the professor, me the befuddled kid.
“What?! What is this?” I demanded.
“TV’s not happening anymore. It’s happening that fast.”
“What is?”
“I’d tell you if I knew. But don’t touch her. Leave her alone, okay? I think the best thing you can do right now is go home and shut yourself in.”
“How long has she been like that? Did you call nine one one? What were they saying on TV?” I was whining now, desperate to know anything.
He looked down at his wife and frowned, a commonplace frown you’d issue if your raked pile of leaves had been scattered by wind. I didn’t understand it then. Now I do: he frowned at his wife’s corpse because the sadness had become so absolute that his spirit was unable to do anything else. “Just all camera phone stuff. I didn’t see any on-camera live footage. That’s how fast.”
“Footage of what?”
He paused. The constant faraway car and home alarms. “Listen, Kevin, I’m sorry but I need to close the door.” He coughed. The look on the sliver of his face said pain and panic. He swallowed hard and looked back down at Mrs. Fleming. His chin quivered. His hand shook as with elderly palsy as he raised it to clutch his throat.
“Please. If whatever this is happens as fast as you say—” and I’m nearly crying now. I wanted to blurt out my guesses in staccato to him. Oh, I wanted, still want, to name this, put it in an airtight bottle, label it, put it on a shelf of logic.
“It is happening fast.” The sound of a skidding car, a dull crunch-thud streets away. “Something black and awful. Nothing we’ve ever been prepared for or would have ever been able to prepare for. We couldn’t have known this was a possibility.” He coughed into his fist. “Something’s happened, something’s taken ahold now. It’s just… death. I think it’s extinction time, Kevin. I really do. But hell if I know what’s causing it.” He looked guiltily away. Something clouded his mind. “It’s over. It’s just… over.”
This coming from a professor of sociology, it sounds official, confirmed. And in my heart I know he’s right. But what about me? Am I going to die today?
I try but fail to not glance down at Mrs. Fleming’s stuffed maw, her purpling skin. Swallowing hard, I say, “So it’s happening that fast. I may not ever see anything about it because TV’s out.” I looked at him, beseeching. “I need to know. What did you see?”
He opened the door an inch more. “Only an hour or so. Total chaos on screen, at the newsrooms. Because they’re not just reporting it. They’re affected, too.” I remember the wind dying down and hearing the roar and crackle of the plane wreck. “The first images were of whales on beaches. Lined up like rows of batteries, bleeding from the ears. Beaches in Mexico, Nicaragua, England, South Africa, India, Australia, Japan. Massachusetts. Down here at Matagorda Bay. CNN’s running raw footage. Hardly any commentary. One woman, not even in makeup, a runner, an intern, was trying to report but she didn’t stay on camera long. Shaking shots of people running nowhere. Staggering and grabbing their throats. And then scenes and scenes of people jumping from buildings and bridges. You don’t even know what cities. There’s no scrolling chyrons. They’re not jumping from flames like on Nine Eleven. They’re just jumping. People blowing their heads off with guns.”
He looks down at his shotgun, back at me. “Anchorpersons only said ‘we’re bringing you this raw footage’ and ‘we’re waiting for a message from the president.’ Things like that. A static shot of the White House press room waiting for him. Minutes later the signal just dropped out. And then—”
“Professor Fleming, what’ll we do—?”
“Go back to your house.”
“Where’s the military? The safe places? The contingency plans?” Panicked breathing.
“The military is made up of people. It’s flesh. All that might means nothing in the face of this.”
“This?”
“Go back to your house.”
“But after that. What am I supposed to do?”
He closed his eyes and said calmly, “Go back to your house.”
“You’re a professor of… you know people. What is this? I have to know. A virus? A military thing gone wrong?”
“The world choking… and worldwide mass suicide at dawn, Kevin? I cannot conceive of a virus, bacterium, a gas…” He cackled with fright and wild hilarity. “It can’t even be star monsters, or creatures wandering in from those other dimensions! Those maybe we could fight.”
I didn’t want to say it but I did. “End times? Biblical, Mayans, whatever?” A pause. “This white stuff?” As I waited for his answer, I viewed in my mind’s eye the wave rolling up the river, heard the massive dawnsounds before that, the smiling faces under wind-whipped hair. The dark smiling teeth of my summerdreams.
He put a fist to his mouth and stifled another cough, his cheeks billowing out. “Heh. Pick a book. Pick a chart. Pick a pundit, a preacher, a Petri dish.”