I turned my head as we passed by the bookstore Bookpeople and saw on the marquee that Sarah Bird was to be reading from her new one tonight, an Updikean comedy set at a Westlake dinner party on Halloween. In monotone I said, “Birds. Yeah,” but I thought, oceanic quicksilver.
“A swarm. A hive,” Kodie said, again looking down at her hands which now formed themselves into a rounded, hive-like shape.
Bass nodded his chin her direction. “Hives. Man, that’s it. They’ve all gotten together into these mindless hives.”
I said, “I wouldn’t say mindless. Of one mind.”
Bass equivocated. “But hives have queens. I’m not seeing any leaders.”
I almost asked them right there if they’d seen the dark smiling teeth too.
“I felt kinda safe in the cemetery. Even though I was close to them. I didn’t want to move. They stay in a group, but I’ve seen a few stragglers. Rogues. Not many. Boys, mostly. They don’t venture far. I’ve seen them go off down the street and then come right back running. Eight, nine, ten-year-olds,” said Bass.
“You say rogues, but I bet there’s more to it than that. I bet those are the ones who act as hive police,” I said.
“Bet those are the ones who busted up my car,” Bass said.
And I thought, and dragged off Simon and tied him up to a post atop Doug Sahm Hill.
Nothing more to say for a few beats. In the old world, we couldn’t take it, the building up of quiet like an explosive gas, and somebody would have to rush in to say something to fill the void. The old world abhorred a vacuum. Not anymore.
Bass said at the intersection at Twenty-Fourth, “God, there’s just nothing.” He lightly thumped the steering wheel with the meat of his palm.
I kept thinking I should be despondently sad, and a part of me was, but for some reason the tears just hadn’t come, at least not like the deluge I let go when Grandma Lucille died, like a damn breaking. You’d think I would’ve by then when I thought of Mom, Dad so far away, Martin, Johnny. My classmates, friends, bandmates, Mr. English. I saw their faces, flashes of them at least (amazing how quickly you start to forget even the most important faces in your life when they’re not there to be seen anymore), but that profound mourning had yet to arise in me. Watching the train slide by did it to me, though, and Mr. Fleming’s note. That’s something, I guess.
Maybe I’m being strong for something bigger. I get that feeling now. After all, why am I paddling coastward, answering a summons I cannot begin to describe?
My aloneness is total. It’s me and you, dear reader. And those who watch. I feel their eyes on me. It’s my journey to make. What? a pilgrimage, a vision quest, a… hell, I don’t know. Maybe I’ve tumbled full on into crazy. Me and Mags here. Ol’ Mags the Killer. Aintcha, girl, huh? A goddam killa.
None of us asked why those kids were tied up on that hill, or what we thought happened to them. I waited for someone else to ask. Obviously, everyone else waited too. Didn’t happen. Verboten topic among the late bloomers.
The silence peppered with muffler blats was short-lived. Bass muttered to fill the void, answered unasked questions. “They don’t mill about. Total stillness, total discipline.” I liked Bass for his talkativeness, his old-world want to fill the void.
“They didn’t come anywhere near those train tracks. I don’t think they trust technology, you know? The old ways of doing things? You’d think they’d be going bonkers, playing with everything, burning stuff, just going wild. Or at least wandering around lost and crying, looking for Mommy and Daddy, any adult. Pounding on the doors of the Palmer, something. But it’s the opposite. They’re so… contained.”
Bass stepped on the gas and took a turn to the east. I assumed he was going to get on I-35 again. “Goddammit,” he said to no prompt. Just pissed.
“Waiting us out,” said Kodie.
I said, “If we insist, you know, assert ourselves as the elders and try to take charge, we’d be quickly dispatched out of pure fear. Like white blood cells taking out a pathogen.”
“Fighting off infection,” Kodie said. “We’re the germs. Old-world cooties.”
“I don’t know, man. Fear? Those little bastards seem just plain mean to me,” Bass said, stopping at the front of the Driskill Hotel on Sixth, throwing it into park but leaving the engine on. “Be right back.” In our talking we hadn’t noticed that Bass had backtracked to downtown.
“Wait, what? Where are you going, Bass?” Kodie asked out the window at him, worry in her voice.
He smirked. “I gotta go up and see about a ghost.”
“Oh, stop it,” I said. “We’ve got other things to do.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” he said. “Be back in a sec.”
Bass stopped on the steps fronting the hotel, an 1880s structure. I dunno architecture but it’s terra-cotta-colored and textured, one of the nicest hotels in Austin and certainly the most famous. You could say it was stately.
Martin took us to the Driskill Grille once, for a steak dinner. He actually said that. Let’s all go out for a fancy steak dinner tonight. He’d closed some deal and was feeling all magnanimous. A pretty great night, actually, near Christmas last, everything festooned and lit. Martin and Mom’s faces flush with wine, the rims of the wineglasses sparkling, the civility of the table talk, the family’s future seeming bright. Not that I had bad times—just first-world uptown teenage whiny sucky times, right?—but this was one of the good times. He insisted we all get steak and we did. He even let us have wine, and Mom said nothing about it. I’ll hold on to that memory of Martin: his face flush and candlelit at his whoop-de-doo steak dinner at the Driskill Grille.
Austin lore, Driskill lore, says a ghost lives on the top floor. I knew that’s what Bass was doing. Stoned in the dark spaces of Memorial Park, he’d get all mystic and delved into gothic what-ifs. He was superstitious too, or liked to pretend he was. We’d be standing too close to a grave and I’d be coughing up a lung due to some harsh smoke and he’d say, “Let’s walk on. We need to let this guy sleep.”
“Right now?” I whined.
“What, Kevin? What’s the hurry?” Bass said, annoyed. “Seriously, take a breath.”
I blinked hard at his logic, laying the smartassery on thick.
He exhaled loud. “Just… gimme this. A coupla minutes.”
“She’s just up there waiting on you. Today’s the day.”
“I’ve got a feeling. Given what’s happened, I’d like to think there’s lots of ghosts walking around. Whole damn planet’s haunted now.”
I hated to tell him that it already was haunted. Always was.
“We’ll run into some on the way home. C’mon. Power grid’s going to go anytime. We gotta—”
“We don’t gotta do anything. Not anymore. We’re the survivors,” he pontificated, “and we don’t got to do a damned thing.” He stood astride the steps looking like a VIP telling off a hounding reporter. “Hell, I may sleep here tonight. Armed to the teeth, of course, and drunk on the Driskill’s top-shelf hooch. Come up with me.”
“No, man. I’m not into it. I want to get a plan going, get organized, then we can screw around.”
“Jeez. I mean, Kevin, the world’s already… It can’t get worse.”
“The hell it can’t.”
“We’re still here. Let’s live, dammit. You and your Warsteiner last night and now you’re all taskmastering?”
I shook my head, a look of bewilderment, I’m sure, on my face.
He waved me off and went in. The smoked-glass doors to the Driskill swung open. I figured he’d come running right back out, his face white after seeing the concierge rotting on the lobby’s marble floor before the doors even settled back into place. But he didn’t.