When did bodies begin to smell? Mr. Fleming had within twenty-four hours. This became the topic while we waited on Bass. Kodie didn’t answer. She went mute and I felt horrible for asking now.
“In a week and it’ll be unmistakable,” she said. “Do we pile and burn them? Bacteria and viruses will have nowhere else to go once they’ve burned through all the flesh. Rotting bodies don’t cause disease in a population unless it gets into the water. We stay away from them, we should be okay.” We knew we could never build enough pits to bury the world’s bodies. The earth will just have to eat them all up and the dried bones will just have to sit there for time immemorial, or at least until the kids grew up some and decide they want to clean up the place.
But I was glad at least we were now firing off questions, brainstorming the new world. The stun was wearing off and now we needed to get with it. Bass didn’t seem to think there was a clock ticking, but I knew there was.
I gritted my teeth with impatience now, my body’s glands flaring and shoving its chemicals through my veins.
That was the old-world survivor in me competing with the part of me saying screw it, why bother? Roll with it, like the kids do. I think of my jazzier trombone pieces which makes me think of that saying heard around Mardi Gras—laissez les bontemps roulez. Let the good times roll.
There would be no more Mardi Gras. All the world’s traditions, holidays moot. The Great Zamboni had come and all that scratched ice and those little piles of shavings and blood droplets gone, glazed over into a surface so mirror-like that yesterday’s games are forgotten.
Martin had taken me to a bunch of Texas Stars hockey games. I feigned not wanting to go but I always relented. Looking back, I know that I desperately wanted Martin to take me. To cheer stupidly at the swirling red lights when a goal was scored and to pretend like we were father and son. Sometimes, in din of cheering and noise from the arena’s speakers, I’d tear up wishing it was my real dad who took me to hockey games and high-fived me, our hands smacking in the cool air.
The how and the why don’t matter. Only survival matters. The kids, when they grow up, will have the burden of trying to figure it out. Then again, when I see them move and act as they do, I’m not sure they have any designs to do any such thing like figuring it out, trying to divine goddamned meaning all the time. Honestly, when I saw that wave moving up Lake Austin coming fast on the heel of those sounds, I wasn’t surprised. It knew what it was. I couldn’t put it into words, but I knew. I’d dreamed it. I’d written it in a story already. A version of it. The way it felt. Not the wave or the whalesounds, just the doom. Seeing it, my mind screamed, there it is!
I’m calm right now. Talking to you helps me. You’re like my shrink, dear reader, my analyst nodding at my problems. As I talk this out, I feel warm and soothed like I’m floating in the womb of the world. I think I’ve said that before, the womb of the world. Of course, I am actually floating southbound on this turgid river.
Water. Womb. World. Whalesounds. Waves. Warm.
Not a whimper but a whuh!
We made our way down Sixth and zoomed up onto MoPac. No merging. It was all ours and its emptiness made my stomach sour.
“You see her, Bass?” I asked.
“Who?” Bass had spaced out a bit, snapped back. “Huh? Oh, uh, no. No suicide brides on the fifth floor.”
I’ll never forget the way he looked at me after he said that. It came out as such an obvious lie that I laughed out loud at him. When I saw his face, I stifled it. Though my heart raced with his look, keeping things light, I’d said, “Well, thanks for wasting our time.”
The windows are down, for we are ever listening, and we’re flying up MoPac and he turns and looks at me again, his face pallid and drawn, his eyes saucer-huge. It was enough to shut me up.
Such weirdness compounded here at the end of the world: My eyes whipping open this morning and then I’m chasing a train. Bass U-turning and running upstairs into an old hotel to see a ghost. Kodie and I compelled to go to Rebecca’s house. Some random dying man’s request. Now Johnny’s gone. But for Rebecca, he’d probably still be with us.
What will be the repercussions of my compulsion to train-chase, Bass’s attempted ghost-spotting, Kodie’s need to stay with Rebecca, her siren’s dance to Legend: The Best of Bob Marley and the Wailers?
We knew they were coming and we waited for them—the repercussions. That’s all we could do.
Belaboring how things looked in the days after, the bodies, the piles of stones here and there, the slow degradation of things—little things at first like the accumulation of trash and leaves in places where you’d normally not see it, at places of business, hospitals, and here, the Lowe’s—gets monotonous so I won’t bother with the apocalyptic tourism.
The corpses and the stink and the fear. It’s all there, know that. That ever-increasing deathsmell hangs as omnipresent fog. The sweetness, the tang. So thick you almost think you can see the amalgamated fumes.
So there we were at the Lowe’s up on Shoal Creek. Our talk and cries of shock and disgust at the sights echoed throughout the massive still building. Lowe’s opened at 6:00 a.m., so folks had been here at daybreak. Employees and all those early-risen construction workers and painters in their speckled chinos. The handful of bodies were mostly chokers-of-the-white, but there were a couple of suicides (nail gun, saw).
We acquired two generators, an ass-load of batteries and flashlights and lanterns, a couple of those big portable space heaters (November cold after Halloween), and then we got gasoline in about fifty red plastic two-gallon containers. It took all afternoon. But we were doing something. Being proactive, Martin would say.
Doors unlocked, we just walked into the Hummer dealer, found the drawer where they kept all the keys. No bodies and no piles.
Our shoes squeaked on the glossy cement showroom floor. We weren’t agog or excited. Acquiring some material thing in the new world held no meaning. It was big, shiny, so what. Maybe we should just go take over one of the palace homes overlooking the lake. We talked about it. Maybe we would, some place that’s all windows facing west and a wine cellar and beer fridge stocked to make Bacchus blush. Take over the W Hotel downtown, run amok, stay drunk. Maybe we would.
“There she is,” Bass said with put-on drawling pride in his voice. The Hummer Bass chose was black on black, tinted windows, a tricked-out, violent rap video’s ride. Bass hopped in. Over the harsh echo of the door slamming shut he put his wrist on the steering wheel, looked out the window and said, “Dig my ride, bitches?” I didn’t answer. Kodie shook her head slowly, smirking at Bass.
We figured out how to roll up the front garage door. Before driving off, Bass stopped, powered down his window again, and threw me the Bronco keys. I bobbled and dropped them. As I bent over, he said, “It’s yours, bud. But, I don’t get it. Why don’t you just take one of these? Get something else tomorrow? The next day. I mean, who cares?”
I shrugged.
“Maybe tomorrow.”
I drove home in Bass’s Bronco. He didn’t even hang and wait for me. Kodie, clearly not feeling well, jumped in with him.
Maybe Bass was right: Who cares?
I followed them for a bit, but turned off. Guess they didn’t notice.
Driving alone in someone else’s car, this muffler’s death rattle caroming off every building back into my ears, I felt what it may be like for me sooner than I wanted to believe: Roaming these streets alone, hiding from the children as if they’re killers, no girlfriend’s hand to clutch, no little brother to hug, no compatriot in Bass. Nobody.