Bass yammered next to me. I slapped him on the chest with the back of my hand—shut up for a sec, I’m thinking. I stared at the yellow sign which read 13ft-7in posted on the bridge across which only trains crossed. This was where the MoPac—the Missouri Pacific Railroad—took a turn through downtown Austin before making its way south. It ran right past the park, and from memory I knew it did so under the cover of trees and vines. When the train passed through it was a haunting sound because you couldn’t see it. You just hear it motoring through the trees, the high whine of stressed metal, the thunder of rolling weight. Like a monster in the trees.
A beast, maybe.
“I got it,” I said, my knuckles still brushing Bass’s T-shirt. “Look.” I pointed up.
“Ah,” Kodie said. “Nice. We can scramble up there and look down on them.”
“Won’t they see us?” Bass asked.
I shook my head. “Too many trash trees and ivy. We’ll be able to see them but they won’t see us. I got this, too.” I held up my $1,000 tactical binoculars. “If there’s a problem, we can scoot down and get to the Bronco.”
Making sure to avoid the beds of spiky poison ivy, within minutes we made it to the top of the incline where the cement braced the receding bridgeworks. Just as we got to the top, the children roared. At what impulse, we hadn’t a clue. We made our way along the track, walled-off by thick foliage.
Down below us about twenty feet, bivouacked into a spot below, a leaning tree was a miniature tent city established by some homeless. Across from this was the back of the Dougherty Arts Center which was covered in colorful graffiti. The one which caught my eye, however, was simply the word scary, rendered in black and lacking artfulness there in the middle of it all above a back door.
At the wall’s corners I noticed two identical tags: a pox on yo lips.
A place we’d never have gone a day ago, this little world behind the wide one; the dead person in one of the derelict tents, the graffiti-caked back wall, the vines which draped a curtain between us and the park.
We saw a small break in the foliage thirty yards ahead. I walked a couple steps ahead. Kodie and Bass drifted behind me. I gave them the hand signal to get low as we walked. From tie to tie we strode like creeping ducks toward the clearing. Even through the scrim of vine leaves we could see the park’s open stretches as we walked. At the front of the park stood Doug Sahm Hill, named after the sort-of-famous Austinite who had a couple of national rock ‘n roll hits in the early sixties. You know, that tired Austin Hippie Hollow Armadillo World Headquarters cosmic cowboy crap we young millennials yawned at. A cement path encircling the hill from bottom to top led to a plaque bearing his name.
We arrived at the break in the foliage. I got low, raised my head above the trestle railing, and peered through the wedge in the green.
What I saw removed my ability to breathe for a moment.
Bass and Kodie came up behind me and I guess our three heads lined up must have looked like some scene out of The Little Rascals, wide-eyed kids peeping over a whitewashed fence.
The entire front half of the park was blanketed with kids. I mean, you couldn’t see grass for a quarter-mile square. They weren’t fidgeting or running around squealing, not even the toddlers. The seven-year-olds, the ten and twelve-year-olds, boys and girls, held the sated, silent infants. Not one cried.
Dear reader, the way they collectively… were.
Words fail.
Their physical attitudes were in no way old world. They stood and watched, every face locked on whatever it was. I couldn’t quite see yet. Something on Doug Sahm Hill. While not rigid soldier-like attention, together they exhibited the quintessence of new world.
Something in them had clicked. Just as something had in the post-pubescent population of the planet—making them explode white from the inside, making them leap from high places into traffic… Something had clicked and they were changed. Though I couldn’t see it in their eyes, and wouldn’t yet for some time, I saw it in the way they moved, or didn’t.
And something else. If all the adults had essentially exploded and died within hours of that dawn, then the opposite had occurred to the world’s children. Something, a big bang, had imploded within them. The outward manifestation of this was their melding. They attained this… this synchronicity. What I mean is they physically moved together. And the way they did made you believe they thought together, too. Like a flock of birds moving in the air, or the way a school of fish suddenly turns and darts as one, responding to some collectively felt stimulus. With no outward communication, they move as one.
This crowd of children rippled. They moved in nauseating undulations.My mind flashed to that most rogue of waves rolling up Lake Austin.
Imagine “the wave” as we know it, like we see at ball games. It was instinctual, autonomic as if of one contiguous organism. One kid moved an elbow and the energy of that moved out in a fan, rippling the crowd like calm water struck by a stone. The energy of one movement dissipated but the next and multitudinous others were ongoing, surging, dying.
The infinite movement of an ocean.
A sight such as this was impossible. It made me cold.
Now I was sure that what had happened was more than an extinction event. It was a leap in evolution. A sea change you could say, to use Mr. Shakespeare’s phrase. The species was different now. Plain as that. What that meant and where things would go, well, I still can’t say, but as I float along talking into this thing to you, I feel they are watching me. Sensing me. Just as we three watched them from the tracks, they watch me from the banks of this river. I cannot see them, hear them. But when I’m floating and talking to you and Mags, I feel them. They send out their waves. I feel them in my head. A delightful throb and whisper and I’m rocked and benumbed in the womb of the world.
Their ocean rocked as they watched the top of Doug Sahm Hill.
We were all bent over with our hands on our knees like we’re about to do the hand jive, standing on a railroad track upon which no train would ever again roll. The day after, they were gathered and waiting for the beginning.
I shivered. My teeth clacked. I had to clinch them to make it stop.
Kodie touched me on my back with her spread palm, still warm with fever. “You okay?” she whispered.
I shook my head slowly. “Just… I don’t know how to even… look at them.”
In my periphery on either side of me, Bass and Kodie nodded sluggishly. Kodie uttered under her breath, “My God. What’s happened to them?”
“Happy Halloween,” whispered Bass. We stared, too scared to move. “What’s happening?” he asked, more to himself than us.
We were a good seventy-five yards away from the crowd’s edge. I wondered if they had already registered our presence. How could they not hear, feel, the Bronco’s blatting muffler, my clacking teeth?
“No sudden moves. No sneezing, nothing,” I said. “Let’s go up a bit to see what’s on that hill.” We did the walk again, tie to tie, for about twenty ties, then resumed our hands-on-knees pose.
What we saw summoned no words from our lips. What came from my throat was an airy low hiss of disbelief.
Maybe a full minute later I whispered, “Jesus Christ,” to myself.
“No pun intended,” Kodie said.
On Doug Sahm Hill were three kids tied to posts. With my $1,000 binoculars I could see they were each bound at the wrists. The posts looked to be four-by-fours, set into what I didn’t know. On top of the hill, not seen from this vantage, was a huge concrete map of Texas, its major cities and its rivers, Austin’s location depicted with a star. Surrounding this map and all along the top of the summit of the hill in a ring were cement benches. Behind was the vista of downtown and the river.