The Bitching Tree

by Scott Hungerford

  Five minutes later they pulled up in front of a building, the one with Cobb’s apartment tucked away inside. When the cabbie asked him for the fare he took the right card from his wallet and gave it to him. The cabbie pressed it against his machine, but then gave him a dark look. He said the card was busted, didn’t have a good strip. He would have to pay with something else.

  Cobb nodded, embarrassed but not really knowing why. He took some money out of the coffee can and gave the driver five twenties. When the man didn’t offer any change back, Cobb was glad that he didn’t have to argue. He just took his backpack and got out into the street.

  He felt dizzy for a moment, disoriented by the sweep of the familiar blurring with the unfamiliar, his human sensibilities trying to right themselves against what the crow knew was true. But Cobb struggled through it and managed to get to the building’s front door. It took him four tries to find the right key, but he got in.

  Just inside the lobby that smelled a little like stew and a bit like pine-scented washing detergent, he found himself holding up a different key on his ring, heading toward a series of metal boxes sunk into the wall. He let his hands finish the motion and soon discovered a wealth of paper envelopes and magazines stuffed in his particular container. He took the pile, closed the mailbox door, then mounted the stairs up to his apartment. He opened the dead bolt with his key on the very first try.

  Flipping on the hall light inside, he closed and locked the door behind him. Everything seemed to be just the way he had left it—though the pungent stench coming from the kitchen was unbearable even to his somewhat dampened human nose. Dropping the mail on the unmade bed, he quickly tied up the trash bag, put it in another one and then left the full bag in the hallway outside his front door.

  Stepping back in again, Cobb could feel a sense of relief coming on. He was home, or at least the place the human called home. He wanted to be in Alaska, but he also felt he could be happy here. This place smelled like him, and he was surrounded by the hundreds of things that made up his external identity, that constantly reminded him of who the human Cobb was and where he’d been and what he’d done.

  Following his memories, he went over to the shrine of Kory’s picture and dusted it off with a couple of gentle puffs of breath. He smiled at seeing her face—and felt an intense sadness at the same time.

  Taking off his coat, Cobb looked around the small apartment, noting that everything was completely out of place. Deciding his course, he shucked off his clothes and added them to the overflowing hamper. Going into the bathroom, he used the toilet, then took a long, hot shower, scrubbing the cobwebs out of his brain with strong-smelling medicinal soap.

  When he was finished, he dressed himself in a pair of jeans and a sweater from a drawer, clothes that now didn’t fit him very well. They seemed too loose by far, but should stay on his bony hips until he could find a belt. Cobb then began to clean house, setting everything right, sweeping, rinsing, dusting. He tossed anything in the refrigerator that smelled or looked like it had gone bad. For three hours he worked hard, even running the scary vacuum along the floor, both by the bed and beneath it, where he found lost art brushes, pencils, bits of paper with store numbers on them, and a handful of long-abandoned torn square foil wrappers that he didn’t totally understand.

  By midnight Cobb had the entire place put back in order again, did laundry in the laundry machines, and had even put away his things from the backpack. Everything was back to normal. He let his hands open the mail, but there was nothing personal, no letters, nothing handwritten from anyone he thought he should know. As far as he could figure, everything in the mail had come out of a machine. Putting the stack with the rest of the papers on the desk, he retrieved the bag of smelly trash from the hallway and tiptoed down the back steps, hoping he wouldn’t get caught stinking up the hallway. Reflexively kicking a wooden wedge between the heavy outer door and the doorframe, he made his way outside to the very garbage bin he’d nearly fallen into. With a heave he tossed the bag in, then returned to the door, let himself inside, and closed it up tight.

  Then he was back inside his apartment, door locked, kitchen window closed and blinds pulled down low. He lit a candle to make it feel more like Alaska, turned on classical music on the radio, then turned off all the electric lights in his apartment until he was just a shadow among shadows.

  Sitting cross-legged on the neatly made bed, he looked at Kory’s picture for a long time, thinking about what little he knew about her. He tried to remember everything that Torvo had taught him—and everything that Hawna had taught him, too. He considered calling her on the funny phone hanging on the wall of the kitchen, but decided it was too early, too late, and too soon.

  After a while Cobb got tired of classical music, so he turned the box off, not wanting to listen to any more advertisements. Instead he crawled into bed, curled up surrounded by his own scent and let himself sleep. Tomorrow he would start to look for the tools he would need to fight the enemy, and hope that the wait for the gun to be delivered wouldn’t be very long.

  In his dreams, as Cobb faded from the waking world to slumber, he found himself in the tunnels once again, but this time there was little light. Just noise and mocking laughter in the distance, never coming closer or moving further away.

  Turning a corner, Cobb found himself facing a man he’d never seen before. Tall, wearing a long cloak woven of white owl feathers and a crown of red iron that matched the color of his eyes. His naked body was marked with ritual patterns, scars and other strange tattoos. In one hand, he held a black spear with a sharp iron tip.

  “Cobb,” the man said to the crow, called his name right out there in the open.

  “Enemy,” Cobb replied, naming him as such, not budging an inch from where he stood. “You can’t hurt me. Not anymore.”

  “I can’t here,” the Red Crow said as he stepped up close, smiling through flat white human teeth. “But I can speak with you.”

  “I have nothing to say to you, enemy,” Cobb replied. He turned and began to walk away, feeling that he had to leave before the dream got worse.

  “Your teacher had power,” the Red Crow boasted. “He fought well. But in the end, I won. I bested him the same way that I will best you.”

  “You will never find me.”

  “You have returned to Seattle. You are in the home of the one you suborned. You plan to come for me in the days ahead, while you think I am unaware.” The Red Crow came up behind him, close enough that Cobb could smell his foul, carrion breath. “But I’m not unaware. The soul of your tree gives me power. Just like all of the others I’ve taken, all the ones I’ve conquered during my lifetimes.”

  “I’m leaving now,” Cobb said—but found the Red Crow suddenly standing in front of him, blocking his passage out of the cavern, spear held at the ready.

  “You won’t leave that easily.”

  Cobb was about to shove him, about to attack. Instead he held back his rage, held back the urge to shred the Red Crow’s wings and to rake his talons across the enemy’s eyes and throat. But then he remembered this was a dream, and dreams had power.

  “What are you thinking, little crow?”

  “I was thinking about something that Torvo taught me, before you stole his voice. I was thinking about the price of blood and what a life is worth.”

  “And what is my life worth, little crow?”

  “Nothing,” Cobb said—and raised the familiar memory of Torvo’s heavy pistol to the man’s chest and calmly pulled the trigger. The blast startled him, but not nearly as much as it startled the Red Crow, as a spray of bright red blood was blasted all over the cave wall behind him. Cobb shot again and again, blasting at the stumbling apparition until the Red Crow was gone, leaving behind only a drift of bloody owl feathers.

  Cobb woke up covered in sweat. Outside it was morning, the clouds a gray palette of paint smeared on gray canvas. Someone was talking outside his apartment door, two women speaking in low voices. His throat felt raw, as
if he had been screaming, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t made a sound. He also thought he could still smell gunpowder lingering on the air, could still taste the wet, metallic tang of the Red Crow’s blood.

  Staggering up out of bed, Cobb went to the eyehole at the door, but didn’t recognize either of the women talking. He assumed they might be his neighbors, gossipy ones at that.

  Ignoring them, he went and took a shower, as hot as he could bear, rinsing away the dream until the shakes stopped, until he could stand upright without wondering if he was going to fall. Getting out of the shower, he put on fresh clothes again.

  When he went to the kitchen to try to find something that would take away the growling hunger in his belly, something out of a jar or out of a can that hadn’t spoiled, Cobb saw something that disturbed him to the core. There were three crows standing outside the windowpane, standing in his window box, just peering in through the glass.

  He looked at them for a while, trying to see if he knew them. But he suspected they weren’t Old Thom’s crows. They were too big, with longer beaks and more rear-set legs. These were foreigners, which meant they didn’t belong to Old Thom, but to the Red Crow.

  He was about to bang on the window to shoo them off, when one of them opened his beak and shouted, loud enough for the world to hear.

  “COBB!” it cried out. “COBB! COBB! COBB!” The other two took up the cry as well. When he finally banged on the window frame they all flew off in different directions, still crying his name. Looking out and up, he couldn’t see any other scouts on the watch. Going out to the living room of the studio, he opened those blinds as well, tangling the long white strings in his haste. To his dismay, there were more crows on the roof across the way, a half dozen in total, watching his apartment.

  Cobb hung his head. “He knows I’m here,” he said. It was real. The dream was real and now he was in danger. So he untangled the long white cords and closed all the shades up tight, so the scouts could no longer see inside his sanctum.

  His quest for food in his apartment was unsuccessful, as everything was too old or tasted too weird to provide him any sustenance. There were no canned goods or soup that he recognized, and he needed food that he knew. Putting on his shoes and coat, grabbing his keys and a handful of bills out of the can, he let himself out of the apartment and locked the door behind him. Moving down the hall, he took the stairs as quickly as he dared—then banged his way out the front door. Sprinting now, his footing easy on the firm pavement, he ran the two blocks to the human Cobb’s favorite grocery store as fast as he could, watching the empty skies for the Red Crow’s scouts.

  The grocery store shocked him upon entering, blew through his mental reserves. Tens of thousands of pieces of information confronted him from every angle, from every poster, every product, from every aisle and shelf. Wandering through in a daze, he took in the labels, sorting the familiar from the unfamiliar. When he found the canned soup aisle, this one he knew the taste of by the color of the label; this one he didn’t because of the extra words indicating it was healthy rather than edible. Moving from row to row, he eventually found the familiar things and loaded his arms up with a dozen cans of beef stew. Dropping one or two cans on the way, in too much of a hurry to pick them up, he dumped them all by the cashier and thrust money into her hands before she could even begin to ring them up.

  “Honey,” she told him. “Slow down. This is the express aisle, but you’re going way too fast.”

  “I have to get home,” he told her. “Before they come.”

  “Before who comes?”

  “His flock,” Cobb said, earning himself one of those looks. Much to his relief she didn’t question him anymore and just ran the cans through the beeper. She put them into a paper bag, then gave him his change—including two new shiny quarters.

  “Thank you,” he said, meaning it as he turned to sprint.

  “You’re welcome,” she told him. “Do you want your receipt?”

  He took the bit of paper from her, not knowing why he needed it, and put it in his mouth. Then he was out the store’s door, ready to head for home. He turned the corner, took a step and—

  Stopped.

  Every overhead wire on the street was now covered with crows. Hundreds and hundreds of them lined the buildings and light poles. Some were even down at ground level pecking around the tires of parked cars. All of them were too big to be part of Old Thom’s flock. This was the Red Crow’s army. Or worse yet, part of it.

  Cobb panicked. He had no gun. No chainsaw. Nothing that would make enough noise to frighten them away. While other people in the street were looking on the intruders with curiosity, the entire flock was just looking at him, watching him, seeing what he was going to do.

  He had no choice. He ran, ran for his life down the street even as the entire noisy horde abruptly took flight, cawing, tawing, screaming his name over and over again in their strange tongue. As they circled and mobbed, some of the quicker ones took swipes at him, feathers grazing his face, claws nearly tearing the precious paper bag of cans out of his hand. Dodging this way and that, covering his eyes with his sleeve, he managed to make it all the way to the building’s front door. There he managed to use the metal key quickly enough to slip inside—and close it tight before any of them could get in.

  The cacophony, the symphony of rising hate from outside the glass was deafening as the army took roost in the trees and on the buildings. They surrounded his home, locking him in, crying out challenge against the hated intruder in their newly claimed territory.

  Cobb banged up the stairs two at a time and let himself into his apartment. The back alley was awash with flying birds as well, dozens of them circling, diving, and screaming challenge with every breath. He closed all the shades, then sat on the floor, shaking, trembling. He remembered how Old Thom had called the hunt down on the man who had killed on the green, called out all the flocks and taught them the face of the man they should attack on sight.

  Now Cobb knew how the killer felt.

  Now Cobb knew—

  Where Kory had died.

  On campus. At the University. On the green grass, warm blood in her hair.

  Cobb remembered how Kory had been late getting to his apartment. How Kory’s parents had called on the phone, that one right over there on the kitchen wall, to tell him that the love of his life was gone.

  After the woman had died at the hands of the murderer, Cobb remembered learning from Old Thom about the shape of the killer’s face, the color of his eyes, the way he walked, all in the language of the crows. Then they spread the word to all the other flocks, to harass and hunt the man whenever they saw him. To drive him out of the city forever, or better yet, to a sightless, tongue-less death of starvation somewhere the light would never reach.

  Cobb remembered Kory now, as a man, as a crow, the memories starting to assemble together. He remembered her yellow sweater, how she had her hair tied up in a tight ponytail that bobbed as she ran from the pursuing predator.

  Right beneath the branches of the Bitching Tree. Right beneath their eyes.

  His eyes.

  Cobb took a deep breath, banishing the images. He looked toward the picture, remembered that she was going to come to his apartment after class. She’d been late, then later, then—

  Her parents had called. The phone rang and it was all over.

  “That’s how we’re tied together,” the crow said with reverence. “That’s how Cobb came to us. How he came to the Bitching Tree, how he gave himself. It’s all because of her. Because she was there first.” Then it struck him. “It’s all because we didn’t save her in time—and now, he’s going to save us.”

  It was more shame to swallow, but he didn’t have the time to deal with it now. He had to choose rage over grief, action over mourning. He had to put an end to this, to put an end to the Red Crow’s power. He had to set things right and do right by Cobb the human—and Cobb the crow as well.

  He ate bites of cold soup from the can
while he sorted through Cobb’s closet and bureau drawers, looking for the clothing he would need. He found a bright red hat and a blue one with stripes. There were two pairs of gloves, one heavy, one thin, two different colors. For sunglasses, he found only a single pair, but it would have to do. In his closet he found a lightweight windbreaker that he could wear under a puffy winter jacket. The heavy jacket was better suited for snow than rainy Seattle, but he only needed to wear it for a few blocks to get out from under the gaze of the Red Crow’s spies. So he could get away, then go and find Old Thom down at the University.

  He knew how easily crows could follow faces through crowds. He’d done it himself, finding special pleasure in harassing a nice man for snacks during the months after he’d left the nest.

  Cobb got himself ready, armoring up in his layers of clothes to prepare for the long walk ahead. If he could have flown, he knew that he could have drifted from his apartment to the Bitching Tree in maybe ten or fifteen minutes, over all the treetops and rooftops. But by foot it would take at least an hour, maybe two to trudge through the maze of streets and avenues, pathways and bridges. He would bring money for a cab if he could catch one, but he knew that his money would only last for so long. He still needed to buy his weapons; he had to make every dollar count.

  When he was ready, Cobb let himself out of the apartment and walked as calmly as he could down to the building’s front door. Gearing up, he put on the first ski hat, then the second one over it to make his head look bigger. He did the same with both pairs of gloves, first black, then white, so his hands wouldn’t look the same size. Taking a deep breath, now as ready as he would ever be for the onslaught to come, he put on the light jacket, zipped up the heavier one over it, then put on the wide sunglasses to complete his disguise. He opened the door and let himself outside, the door latching shut behind him as he stood on the stoop, waiting to see if they would recognize him.