The King of Crows

  “Theta…?” Evie said.

  Isaiah fought his wooziness. He clawed at Memphis to get his attention.

  “Me-mem… phis…” Isaiah spat out the words on a hoarse whisper: “Th-th-they’re… c-c-com-ming.”

  When the sky cracked open over Gideon, the people were too startled to scream. They had no reference for what they were seeing, and so they were simply stunned into silence. The Diviners knew better.

  “Do you see…?” Evie said.

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “We’re about to have company.”

  “He’s f-f-found us,” Isaiah said, struggling to his feet. “They’re c-coming.”

  Angry lightning shot down from the clouds and arced around the town like the talons of a feral bird intent on making Gideon its prey. The lightning made contact with a distant grain silo and a farm. They wavered for a moment, an X-ray image, and then they were simply gone. Nothing but smoke and fire and rubble. A locust smashed against the windshield of a shiny Chrysler. Its bug guts spread out jellylike against the glass. Another hit, and then another, locusts falling from the sky like raindrops. The birds pushed off from the telephone wires. The citizens ducked as the birds swooped through the town, crying. The people crowded together. Fear had picked up along with the storm. A great shadow moved across the land like fingers reaching toward Gideon. Down the road, a giant billowing wall of dust gobbled up everything in its path. And out of the dust emerged a man.

  A farmer in coveralls and a brown hat elbowed his neighbor. “What in the name of heaven? How’s he doing that?”

  “Dunno.” The other man called to his wife, who was coming out of the dry-goods store, “Myrtle! Is the circus come to town?”

  “Not that I know about,” the wife answered, holding fast to her hat. “Mercy! What on earth?”

  Behind her, the shop boy carrying her bags of flour, sugar, and salt slowed and gaped, slack-jawed, at the angry sky and the ominous, stormy dust cloud that roiled behind the King of Crows, who moved with some secret purpose toward the good citizens of Gideon. The shop boy’s mother had told him that staring was rude, but who wouldn’t stare at this man? Blue lightning sparked along his feather-caped shoulders and danced atop his tall hat. His shadow stretched out before him, reaching the town first. And as he walked down the center of Main Street, seemingly oblivious to the destruction in his wake, he tipped his hat.

  “Good afternoon. How do you do? I am the King of Crows.”

  There were a good many people gathered on Main Street now.

  “Must be one of those circus fellas. Maybe even something with the Elks or Booster Club,” a man whispered to his wife, his brain still trying to make sense of the senseless, to banish fear with any form of reason.

  “We all need a good boost now and then, don’t we?” The King of Crows raised a hand. The electricity along his fingers grew fainter, shorting out.

  “A magic trick!” a young girl in pigtails said in wonder.

  “I have more magic tricks up my sleeve. Would you like to see?”

  “Don’t listen to him. Don’t let him get inside your head,” Sam said to the people of Gideon.

  “Ah. At last. Welcome, Diviners.” The King of Crows rested his thumbs against the lapels of his shine-slick feathered coat and faced the Diviners, drawing the attention of Gideon’s townspeople.

  “You know this fella?” the farmer asked just as a woman in a simple cloche squinted at the Diviners and asked, “Who are you?”

  “Don’t you recognize these criminals in your midst? These are the Diviners. That radical sort wanted by the authorities across the nation for the bombings at Mr. Marlowe’s exhibition. For the murder of Sarah Snow.”

  The buzz of gossip filled the streets: “I heard about it on the radio.” “Lands’ sake! How’d they get to Gideon?” “This is a safe place.”

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” Theta promised.

  “How do we know that?” “You killed Sarah Snow!” “Ralph, grab the rifles and get the sheriff.”

  “We didn’t. I promise you,” Henry chimed in.

  Sam put up his hands in a peaceful gesture. “It isn’t true.”

  “Which part isn’t true? Are you them?”

  “We’re Diviners, yes, but we didn’t do those things. I promise,” Evie added. “We’re innocent.”

  “No one is ever truly innocent. As you’ll soon see,” the King of Crows tutted.

  The street teemed with people. The citizens streamed out of their pretty houses and shops to gawp at the strangers in their midst. A man with a napkin stuffed into the neck of his shirt arrived. He didn’t remove it. He was accustomed to handling any small squabble in the town easily, and he hoped to go back to his early supper. “Afternoon. I’m the mayor here,” he said without offering his hand.

  “What a fine town you have here, sir,” the King of Crows said.

  “Towns don’t come much finer than Gideon,” the mayor agreed. “You can have your Kansas City or New York. Why, this is the good life right here. In Gideon. And now we’ll be known as the town that caught America’s Most Wanted.”

  “Indeed, a fine town,” the King of Crows said, ignoring the mayor. “We’ll take it.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “I said we’ll take it.”

  “Gideon isn’t for sale, mister.”

  “Ah, yes. Like the Louisiana Purchase, or Manhattan. I see. Should I have come with a purse full of beads and a wagon of diseased blankets?”

  “Mister, I think you should leave. We’ll take care of things from here.”

  “Will you? I rather doubt it.” He breathed in deeply, and if he exhaled, it was hard to tell. “Can’t you smell the history in the air? No doubt their grandfathers rushed across these prairies in their wagons, knocking down the natives, smashing in their brains in their zeal to stake their claim. That pioneer spirit. My, what a land! What a people! I’ve learned so much from you.”

  He turned to Memphis and Ling, to Isaiah just behind. “They’ll never let you in, you know. Not without constant vigilance and revolution. And even then, they’ll do it begrudgingly. This land bleeds with its wounds still. Wouldn’t you like to see justice served? Maybe even revenge for the generations destroyed?”

  Memphis could feel the “yes” crawling up to sit angry and hurting on his tongue. Beside him, Theta whispered, “I would.”

  Several of the men from Gideon had loaded their rifles. They took aim at the King of Crows.

  “Look how small and scared they live. Reaching for their guns at the slightest provocation.” The King of Crows tsked and shook his head. “They don’t want to hear what you have to say. This is what they want: blood.”

  The sheriff cocked his gun. “Mister, we don’t want any trouble here.”

  “And yet.” The King of Crows inhaled deeply. Exhaled. “So be it. Behold! Feast upon the story of yourselves.”

  With that, the King of Crows opened his coat, and the citizens of Gideon were mesmerized by what it held inside: A history that shifted to suit whatever the viewer wanted to see. One that let them be the heroes of their stories, with a right to whatever they held, whatever they had taken, whatever they wanted next. One that granted them permission for their greed. “Who wants to etch their names into this story?”

  A gleam dawned in the sheriff’s eye. “I do.”

  “Me! I want it.”

  “So be it. But first, let us call forth your dead. Come. Come out.”

  One by one, the dead of Gideon appeared, faint wisps between houses, a handful of phantoms standing beside the headstones that marked their lives with a few etched words. A boy with brown hair and freckles walked from the cemetery and into the street.

  “Harry? Is that my Harry?” a tearful woman cried. “Harry, it’s Mama.” She started toward the boy. Evie and Theta tried to hold her back.

  “You mustn’t go,” Evie said.

  “But that’s my boy!” the woman said with great longing.

  “No. Not the way yo
u remember,” Evie said.

  “Your dead are here,” the King of Crows said. “Look. There they are. All nicely arrayed. They watch you. They know what secrets beat inside your hearts. It pulls them from their graves. They, too, see a new frontier.”

  The ghost boy, Harry, snapped at his mother like a rabid dog. She cried out and fell back. The ghosts of Gideon showed their sharp teeth. Fear shot through the townspeople. They’d heard old-timers talk of having to massacre the Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Comanches who stood in the way of settling this land. But they, themselves, had never faced such a threat.

  “What’s going on here, mister?” the mayor asked. With a shaking hand, he pulled the napkin free from his collar at last, as if that might make a difference. “What is this?”

  “An accounting,” the King of Crows said. “Do they frighten you, your dead?”

  “Sheriff, get them out of here!” someone shouted.

  “I will take these dead from your town,” the King of Crows promised. “Think of me as a vigilante spirit from a nation that loves its law and order conducted by outlaws. But first, ask yourselves, good citizens: Would this be happening if there was not rot within Gideon? Would your dead rise from their graves and come for a reckoning if all were well?”

  “What’s he doing?” Sam whispered to the others.

  “What do we need to do?” a man in suspenders asked.

  “You can’t trust his promises,” Ling warned. “They’re riddles. They’ll tie you up.”

  “Hush up! You’re wanted by the law,” the sheriff said.

  “I require payment for my services. Who among your neighbors will it be? Will it be the widow Merriwether, so young and fair? And rich now, too. Her husband is among your dead. Did he really die of a bad heart?”

  “He was awfully young,” another woman in a pale blue dress said, holding tightly to her little girl, who clung to her mother’s skirts, too frightened for tears.

  “Why, Sue Ellen,” the young widow Merriwether said. “I mourned my George! I could scarcely stop crying. You remember—all of you remember!”

  “He wasn’t in the ground three months before you took up with Ernie Porter!” a large man in a sweat-stained white shirt called out.

  “You’re only sore she didn’t take up with you, Virgil!” an old woman with a lined face shot back. “Stop this nonsense at once. This is not who we are in Gideon.”

  “If you’re looking to take somebody, why not make it Esther there!” the big man said, pointing to the old woman who’d called him out. “The old busybody. Thinks herself better’n the rest of us.”

  “Stop it!” Evie shouted. “Can’t you see he wants you to turn against one another?”

  The dead moved closer. Black drool dripped from cracked lips as they sniffed the air, hungry. The people stepped back, terrified. New accusations flew:

  “The druggist makes moonshine in his basement! I’ve heard about the still!”

  “Now, see here, Parker…” a man, presumably the druggist, said.

  “What about the janitor, Quinn? You know how the Irish are.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?” a grizzled man with a brogue answered.

  “I knew there’d be trouble when we let the Polish in to work the mills. What with their foreign ways, and Catholics to boot!”

  “Here! Take the parson’s wife! She’s so high and mighty!”

  They pushed the parson’s wife forward as she wailed, “I’ve been to your homes! I’ve sat with you in your weakest hours.”

  “And judged us for it.”

  Isaiah had been stepping closer to the King of Crows, trying to get close enough to grab his mother in her crow form from the King’s shoulder. With a grunt, he reached for his mother and missed, coming up with only a feather yanked from the King’s voluminous coat. The King of Crows whirled around. His eyes were a soulless deep, and Isaiah found he could not look away. “Did you steal from me, boy?”

  “Get away from my brother!” Memphis spat through tight teeth, fists at the ready. He wrapped his arms protectively around Isaiah.

  The King of Crows looked from brother to brother, some terrible thought twisting his lips into a cruel half smile. “You’ll beg for a bargain one day, Healer. I will deal with you both in time,” the King said. “But now, to the business at hand. Why should I be satisfied with a paltry offering when I could have everything?

  There was a high, piercing shriek, followed by the skin-crawling insect drone the Diviners knew all too well. The wind blew harder, sending hats pinwheeling down Main Street. Bright blue lightning showed in the billowing dust wall, blocking any escape from Gideon. The cloud mass groaned as if it needed to unleash something from within its gut.

  The King of Crows raised his arms, and with it, his voice. “Can you hear our humble wagons rumbling across this great nation? I will call them forth—a Manifest Destiny of the Dead.”

  The dust and clouds peeled back, forming a hole, as if the world itself were splitting open into a giant mouth ready to devour everything in its path. All they could see was a stretch of darkness, and inside a glimmering: an army of dead, thousands of them, coiled and ready.

  A woman burrowed into her husband’s side. “What in the name of heaven…?”

  “Hey. Hey, you promised to keep us safe,” the mayor said.

  “I promised no such thing. I promised to take your dead from you. And I will. They will join my army. But first, they must feed. How about a little cheer to get us started, hmm?”

  The King of Crows pounded his walking stick against the street. “Jamestown. Salem. Sand Creek. Omaha. Monticello. Andrew Jackson. Lorem Ipsum. Rah. Rah. Rah.”

  He repeated it, beating the stick faster and faster in time with his words: “Jamestown.Salem.SandCreek.Omaha.Monticello.AndrewJackson.LoremIpsum.Rah.Rah.Rah.”

  As a girl, Evie had once spun a shadow lamp faster and faster until the paper-cut images blurred against the light and became one undulating line of shadow. She thought of that now, watching the great wall of dead pouring out of the tear in the clouds. It was as if the dead had slipped off the lamp of the world and were moving with an awful quickness. Driven by an insatiable hunger, they hit the small town of Gideon like unleashed floodwater. They’d been emptied of any moral sense or shared humanity. There was only a burning need to consume and destroy. The ghosts moved with the force and power of a great machine, one consciousness ruling all.

  Their noses twitched, or, where there were no noses, their mouths hung slightly open. They were breathing in life, sniffing for prey.

  The King of Crows stood in the center of the street with lightning crackling all around him, a conductor directing a discordant symphony.

  A man, half-devoured, twitched on the ground, his eyes beginning to lose focus. In horror, Evie watched as a charcoal veining crawled across his body, until he was a dried-out husk. She screamed, and what was left of the man caved in on itself and became a pile of dust. Already, a gray pall climbed up the sides of the houses with their pretty front porches. No one would sit there on a summer’s evening again. The ground cracked open. Broken. Dead. The flowers wilted on their stems. The dead sucked the life force from a mother who still clutched her little boy. But three more of the ghouls descended and ripped the crying child from his dying mother’s arms. Teeth sank into flesh, the sound like a seam ripped viciously apart. The victims screamed when the teeth bit in, when they still thought they had a chance, but once they realized the battle was useless, the shock of that violence—the utter hopelessness—turned their screams to a whimpering gurgle of resignation, and then a terrible empty silence.

  “We have to get together!” Evie shouted from the library steps. “We have to fight back!”

  “We can’t!” Ling said. “That’s what he wants—if we fight back, we’ll give them our power!”

  “We can’t just let them destroy the town!” Sam said.

  “Let’s try to form some sort of barrier, then. A shield!” Ling shouted.

>   “That one! He has defied me long enough.” The King of Crows pointed a yellowed fingernail at Bill. Two ghouls rushed for him. Bill snaked a hand around the throat of one of them and it fell to dust. Jericho ripped a fence post from a yard and swung it with all the force of his serum-enhanced body. It came down on the soft head of a ghost of a girl, no more than twelve, and her bashed skull skittered across the road and came to rest at the base of a white picket fence. Jericho stared in bewildered horror. He had wanted to be a philosopher. A scholar. The dead girl’s body twitched. The ghostly hands reached up to find an empty neck, and then her atoms blasted apart.

  More were coming. Again, he swung. Like a brute. And again. Was this all the world really understood? A creature opened its mouth. Rage. Hunger. A reflex even after death. Jericho hit the dead man until there was nothing left to hit.

  “There’s too many of them! We’ll exhaust ourselves,” Evie said. She’d never felt so helpless. “What do we do?”

  Theta wished she had salt in her pockets like Miss Addie, and then she wanted to laugh at the idea that salt could protect them from this.

  “We have to try something!” Memphis shouted. “Get together!”

  The Diviners linked hands and faced the Army of the Dead.

  “What now?” Henry asked. “Ling?”

  “I don’t know! Why are you asking me?”

  “Because you’re the smart one!”

  “Think… think of, um, think of, of, of a wave—push them back!” Ling yelled.

  Their molecules fused together. Ling could feel their fear combining, too, making it difficult to concentrate. It was like a gas hose come loose, spraying fuel everywhere. They sent a wave of energy buckling fast down the street, bending the buildings inward as if they were made of water instead of brick. The first fifty ghouls flew backward and then apart. The filling station burst into flames.

  “We can’t stop them without destroying the town,” Ling said.

  “Go again,” Sam said, squeezing Henry’s and Evie’s hands. He pushed his energy down the line before everyone was ready.

  “Ahhh!” Ling fell forward, breaking the chain. Radiation burns striped down her left arm. Their power felt unstable. Wrong. A row of houses to their right wobbled.