The Late Bloomer Read online

  “I fell deep into the postapocalyptic and addictively complex world of The Late Bloomer and didn’t want it to end. Not only is it a wonderful, binge-able story, but the voice of the central character had me hooked from the beginning, and Kevin March became a person I cared about, thought about, even after the last page was finished.”

  —Dan Chaon,

  author of Ill Will

  “Like a sharp, winding staircase that narrows as it turns, the claustrophobic world of The Late Bloomer hems the reader in page by page.”

  —Tal M. Klein,

  author of The Punch Escrow

  “Harrowing, unsettling and exquisitely written, The Late Bloomer is part War of the Worlds, part Twilight Zone, and part Shirley Jackson. It is an unforgettable, unforgiving vision of the end of the world, of those who attempt to survive and those who wish to stop them. The images conjured here will haunt you long after putting it down. Good luck, dear reader.”

  —Louisa Luna,

  author of Two Girls Down

  “We classify some prose as genre, some as literary, and ‘never the twain shall meet.’ The Late Bloomer is both. Falkin gives us all sorts of Stephen King (story), meets the oft-mentioned William Golding’s (character), Lord of the Flies. Experimental in its style, protagonist, writing protégé Kevin Gabriel March, possible future guide of the new world, dictates the old world’s ending into a stolen voice recorder. Establishing a Stand-like setting, The Late Bloomer morphs into full-on textbook lit, like, for the ages literature. Like man versus all seven narrative conflict themes. Like drilling deep for symbolism and allegory. Yes, literary devices and shit. This novel overflows with rich language and divine sentences. The Late Bloomer is giving me everything! After the end someone must tell the tale, dear Reader. Why not our Kevin Gabriel March?”

  —Teffanie T. White,

  African American Literary Award-winning author of Dirt

  “An apocalyptic coming-of-age tale the likes of which you’ve never seen, Mark Falkin’s The Late Bloomer channels the heart of Ray Bradbury, the sensibilities of Rod Serling, and the grim despair of Cormac McCarthy, all wrapped up in Falkin’s unshakable, inimitable style. Both beautiful and horrific, this is a young adult novel that even the most case-hardened fans of speculative fiction will find riveting and deeply moving. Highly recommended.”

  —Ronald Malfi,

  author of Bone White and Little Girls

  “With dark humor and taught prose, The Late Bloomer takes the reader on an apocalyptic journey that is hurried, furrowed and in Mark Falkin’s skilled hands, all too real. Literary horror at its finest.”

  —Bethany Hegedus,

  author of Alabama Spitfire: The Story of Harper Lee

  and To Kill a Mockingbird

  “If you’re a fan of dull, weary storytelling with characters you’ve seen a million times doing the things you’ve seen them do a million times until you pass out from boredom, then this isn’t the book for you. If, on the other hand, you’re into roller coasters, laughter, fear, surprise, and characters who keep going against all odds, then The Late Bloomer will suck you down its twisted literary throat through its very last word.”

  —Jason Neulander,

  producer, director and creator of The Intergalactic Nemesis

  “With pitch-perfect prose, Falkin has penned an irresistible and audacious coming-of-age novel that plumbs the depths of adolescence and global cataclysm in equal, page-turning measure. I predict The Late Bloomer will take its place on the post-apocalyptic bestseller list, next to Station Eleven and The Stand.”

  —Will Clarke,

  author of The Neon Palm of Madame Melançon and

  Lord Vishnu’s Love Handles.

  “With The Late Bloomer, Mark Falkin has created a visceral, classic adventure story updated for our dystopian times when many of us long to push the reset button. Read your Jackson, your Golding, your King, and your Falkin, and be careful what you wish for.”

  —Michelle Newby Lancaster,

  Contributing Editor, Lone Star Literary Life

  “An apocalyptic tale unlike any other, The Late Bloomer is smartly written; with shades of Stephen King meeting Cormac McCarthy, a blistering pace and lyrical prose, it demands to be consumed. Falkin’s take on the end of the world is intriguing, beautiful and tragic—a must-read.”

  —Kristen Zimmer,

  Amazon #1 bestselling author of The Gravity Between Us

  “With The Late Bloomer, Mark Falkin has written a Blair Witch Project-kind of novel, a dystopian nightmare that sends his characters racing to escape a killer that always seems to be waiting just ahead of them. It’s a gripping rush of literary adrenaline.”

  —Michael Noll,

  Program Director, Writers’ League of Texas

  and author of The Writer’s Field Guide to the Craft of Fiction

  “Imagine nature itself seething with Holden Caulfield’s rage at adult phoniness. Now imagine what happens when a decimated humanity inherits the planet. With The Late Bloomer, Mark Falkin combines an authentic portrait of twenty-first-century adolescence with a terrifying, and unsettlingly plausible, vision of the end of humanity as we know it.”

  —Christian TeBordo,

  author of Toughlahoma and director of the MFA Program and Assistant Professor of English at Roosevelt University

  “The Late Bloomer is a standout novel—a contemporary end-of-days novel that grabs you by the throat and won’t let go. Narrated in the unforgettable voice of Kevin March, the unlikely and resistant teenaged ‘late bloomer’ whose prophetic dreams have marked him for leadership of those who survive a world apocalypse reminiscent of the great floods, The Late Bloomer is an important cautionary tale that will haunt you long after you’ve finished the last page. With themes of good versus evil, the horrors of mob mentality, and the necessity of human empathy, The Late Bloomer gives strong nods to The Hunger Games, The Terminator, and The Lord of the Flies, wherein the beast resides within us all. The story’s unexpected climax is a chilling perspective of a political era where it may seem that only our youth can be entrusted with society’s moral compass.”

  —Martha Louise Hunter,

  author of Painting Juliana and host of KOOP’s Writing on the Air

  “Imagine a dystopian vision in which Stephen King’s The Mist meets Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach trilogy, and Margaret Atwood’s The MaddAddam Trilogy. This is the world Mark Falkin conjures up in The Late Bloomer. Like the best postapocalyptic novels, The Late Bloomer is a tale of horror derived from the stuff of everyday life. A dark menace haunts these pages, lurks in the shadows, and the beauty of this novel is that it makes you seriously wonder: could this happen to us? A smart, sophisticated YA novel, The Late Bloomer will grab you by the scruff and pull you along for a wild ride.”

  —Kyle Semmel,

  2016 NEA Literary Translation Fellow

  and Executive Director of Writers & Books

  “In The Late Bloomer, Mark Falkin’s postapocalyptic young adult novel, the world as we know it has imploded. A small band of teenagers are the only ones left to figure out what has happened and try to piece some semblance of their world back together. Beautifully written and action-packed, The Late Bloomer is narrated by a teenager who is at once jaded and hopeful, a voice you’re not likely to forget any time soon.”

  —Suzanne Greenberg,

  Professor of English at California State University and winner

  of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for Speed-Walk and Other Stories

  THIS IS A GENUINE CALIFORNIA COLDBLOOD BOOK

  A California Coldblood Book | Rare Bird Books

  453 South Spring Street, Suit
e 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  rarebirdbooks.com

  californiacoldblood.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Mark Falkin

  ISBN 978-1-947856-54-7

  FIRST TRADE PAPERBACK ORIGINAL EDITION

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address:

  Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department,

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302, Los Angeles, CA 90013.

  Set in Minion

  Cover art and typesetting by Leonard Philbrick.

  Author photo © 2018 Mike Mulry/XCELARTS

  Printed in the United States

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Falkin, Mark, author.

  Title: The Late Bloomer / Mark Falkin.

  Description: Los Angeles, CA: California Coldblood Books,

  an imprint of Rare Bird Books: 2018.

  Identifiers: ISBN 978-1947856547

  Summary: The world experiences an unthinkable cataclysm and Kevin March, high school band trombonist and wannabe writer, embarks on a journey that promises to change everything.

  Subjects: LCSH Horror. | Texas—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Apocalyptic fiction. | BISAC YOUNG ADULT FICTION /

  Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic

  Classification: LCC PZ7.F18852 La 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  From across the valley the thud of an axe

  arrives later than its strike

  and the call of goodbye slowly separates itself

  little by little from the vocal chords of everything.

  —Galway Kinnell, The Silence of the World

  Table of Contents

  Start

  Acknowledgments

  About The Author

  Please, God, don’t let her die.1

  So, prologue.2

  Mr. E, you’d like that I’m trying to do this. Instead of videoing everything and narrating over it. I couldn’t have done that anyway. There was no time to be a reflective documentarian. Now that I’ve got some time, maybe I can process all this and tell you what happened.

  In fact, doing it this way is how I process it.

  I know you’d prefer this to, well… you were such a supporter of my writing, a mentor. And so telling this with the intention of writing it down instead of filming it…I know you hated the world of screens we’d come to live in. I tend to agree with you now, though at first I thought you were being a crabby old teacher who didn’t get it and stubbornly didn’t want to. Referred to yourself as a Luddite. I had to look it up.

  But it’s me who gets it now. I was getting it then, the way you saw things, which wasn’t negative at all. I got that you were trying to show me that through storytelling I could show readers that the world is a beautiful place, that life is a beautiful thing, even when we’re scared and we don’t understand what life is and who we are and why we live and what happens after we die. “Don’t let anybody tell you they know, because they don’t,” you’d said. When I repeated this at the dinner table to my stepdad, Martin, he said, “Sounds like your typical liberal school teacher who can’t hack it in the real world so he teaches, warping minds with his embitterment.” Pretty poetic for an asshole like Martin, I have to say. I remember offering him a brittle smile when he said that, nodding my head, and muttering to myself, “Embitterment, hmmm.”

  And what you said about stories. I really get that now, too. You’d said they weren’t just about filling time, entertainment. Not that that’s wrong, a story can be both meaningful and entertaining, you’d said, should be both for it to resonate. You told me that stories connect us, make us understand ourselves and each other a little better. That stories make the world a better place because they are empathy engines.

  I like that. Empathy engine. Vroom vroom.

  It’s a noble cause, storytelling, you’d said. Noble work.

  So, here I go with being noble.

  This is for you Mr. English, probably for you more than anyone, except that it’s really for you, dear reader.3

  Okay, so, even more prologue. Of the housekeeping ilk.

  I’m using a little handheld digital micro voice recorder4 to talk this book into being. I took it when we broke into RadioShack. The box5 it came in said Capture Your Stories with that circled R trademark thing next to it. So, that’s what I’m doing: capturing my story. I’ll shape it later, if I make it.

  I hate that I even have to say that. If I make it. God. I want to unplug that part of my self. Got to keep my spirits up. I know that part of me is the least Kevin. I don’t know. He’s the one just trying to survive. To tell it the way things are. The reason…why things are what they are. Heh.

  I’d sit and write it properly, this book, a narrative non-fiction they’ll call it, because even though it’s got a novelish, fictiony feel to it, it’s all true. Or maybe it’s a memoir. A memwah. That’s what it is.

  Whatever. Point is, I can’t just sit and write it all down because if I don’t keep moving…well, I don’t know what they’d do. But she’s waiting for me, so I can’t stop. And doing this keeps me company. This and Maggie here. Isn’t that right, girl?

  I mean, I always wanted to be a writer. Here’s my chance. Maybe my only and last, but.

  In case I don’t get too far along doing this, I have to say that although I’ve got my reasons for going down there, I can’t say I feel like I’m truly going to save them. But maybe I can help them. It’s all a big fat maybe, as it has been from day one. They seem to think differently. Kodie says they do, at least. But I don’t know. We’re just too different now. There’s something, what? pernicious about them. Sure, because of what they did, but mostly it’s in the way they move, the way they flock...

  If I repeat myself or if this sounds clunky sometimes, just know that this is raw raw raw. I’m going to really write this someday. I need to ‘capture my story’ now because I don’t know about tomorrow. Tomorrow is so far-seeming. After all that’s happened, it would be foolish to say you’re going to know what happens next.

  But I think this book will be important because I think I may be the only one left. It certainly feels that way. Unless she really is there waiting for me like she says she is.

  Oh, duh—got off track there. Let me get this out of the way. Okay, I’m Kevin Gabriel March and I live in Austin, Texas. I’m not sure what day it is, the day I start this recording, November something, but all this started the morning of October 29, 2018. I’m a, I was, a high school junior and I’m seventeen years old. Birthday’s December 24. Always hated that timing. We get the gift-shaft, we who are born so close to Christmas. You just don’t get celebrated. You get overlooked.

  Dreams and visions swirl. They’re heavy and seem important. Not just my brain firing, my mind reacting to conscious life. So many feelings, sights and sounds, but this one’s been a repeater—a beach; a big sound of something rubbing up against an object in the water, a wooden pier, maybe; nightfall and fires in a row, dancing silhouettes; in midmorning light, a blurry presence perched on the sea’s horizon.

  They can do the jobs of armies. Odd thing is, they don’t seem to act at the behest of a leader. They move as quicksilver, like one organism, a massive flock of birds abruptly lifting into the air, undulating, twisting, graying the sky; or like a school of fish winding and turning all shiny in shafts of light knifing down through the water. A content and contiguous group, a single entity moving and working and living en masse, seeming to move toward a moment. Moving inexorably toward it.

  As am I.

  Right now, I don’t watch them. Now I move. It’s just dawn, best time to move.

  Yesterday morning, from atop of the W Hotel, I saw them through my $
1,000 binoculars. Per usual, they were out in the open, a beige wintering Texas field beyond the floodplain south of the city. I wonder now if they are the ones following me. No, I don’t think they do it that way. They don’t need to follow me. I think they relay the message ever-forward: here he comes.

  It was predawn, just when the rim of sky in Austin went that violet crown attributed by O. Henry, (Does this matter, Mr. English, the color at dawn? Sometimes I just want to describe the beauty and the horror because that’s what life is. Guess that’s why you said I’d make a better poet than a novelist. I remember asking, “Can I tell them what happens next but with lyrical writing?” You smiled so big and your eyes shined.) I saw their bellies, all of them together in total synchronization, of course, swelling and deflating rapidly though they’re asleep. Maybe they’re having bad dreams in that deep REM sleep?

  But what would they dream about?

  Anyway. Enough of this. Let’s start from the beginning.

  Okay. Deep breath. Here goes...

  To be truthful, when I first heard the sounds, I was lighting a bowl of pot.

  Most of the western hemisphere lay gripped by predawn sleep, and there I was, sitting cross-legged on a boulder at Mount Bonnell, overlooking Lake Austin. Yeah, that’s me there in your mind’s eye, the silhouette of a young man holding a blue finger of flame in the dark.

  The bowl blooming orange, that’s when it happened. Holding the smoke in my lungs, I hear this…sound.

  Sure, I’d be thinking it, too, if I were you: the guy’s a burnout, he’s hearing stuff. Yeah.

  But if you’re reading this, the very fact that you’re reading this, you know exactly what I’m talking about and so you know a couple of hits of low-impact smoke had no role to play in what I was hearing at dawn of that morning, the morning of the day of. So let’s move on.

  But just so you know, no, I am not a pothead, a burnout. Not being defensive, but I’m not. In fact, I was still new to the whole smoking-pot thing. Sure, when you’re waking and baking alone at an urban overlook, you’ve moved out of novice territory, but still.