The Bitching Tree

by Scott Hungerford

  Without meaning to, Cobb slept all the way to the city across the water, warm within his layers of coats, hats, and gloves. Waking up only when the driver pulled over to let him off at the downtown park, he ended up paying the man more bills than he’d been expecting, leaving him very little money.

  Chainsaw bag in one hand and his heavy backpack over his shoulder, Cobb looked around as the cab pulled away. While the park was quite pretty, with a wide greensward leading to a manmade lake, his gaze soon moved up to the high towers above. Looking for crow spies, he was glad that there were none to be seen, providing that much more advantage over his enemy.

  Going back to the same little restaurant by the bus station, he bought a small sandwich and an orange juice with the last of the cash from his can. As it was too busy inside to get a table, he went outside with his food, then ate and drank while standing in the middle of the busy sidewalk.

  “Am I kidding myself?” he said out loud, an oddly human phrase. But nobody walking around him seemed to notice his words, or cared to respond. With his tools and his knife, with his chainsaw and his gun and his whackety stick, he was about to walk into the Red Crow’s den and try to save everyone. He was going to destroy the Red Crow’s magic, to deny the enemy any more hold over Torvo or Hawna or Old Thom. But was he really up to the task? Self-doubt tore at him, digging into his insides.

  “Just think like Torvo,” he told himself. He’d tracked the enemy to its lair and bargained with humans for the tools he would need. He had avoided the Red Crow’s lieutenants who had come to kill him at his apartment, and outwitted the army of crows who knew his name. He’d already done many brave things; this was just one more.

  But Cobb was scared. Frightened, now starting to visibly shake at the thought of what he was going to have to do. But he knew he had the element of surprise. No crow had ever done anything like this before. No crow would ever likely do something like this again. Just like they said on the television, it was stupid, but it just might work. He just had to get inside, find the sacred tree and cut it apart—and he would be the savior of his people. Hoisting the chainsaw bag, he headed down the hill toward the enemy’s lair, weaving through the noonday lunch crowd toward his destiny.

  Walking up to the tower, Cobb half expected to see crows flying around the top, or gargoyles perched and watching on the low walls. But there were none to be seen. He figured they were all back at his apartment, keeping watch in the event that he was stupid enough to return.

  As he walked onto the property and approached the front door, he could see the lovely garden that surrounded the building was empty of people. The maple trees were empty of any of the Red Crow’s spies. As he approached the glass door, he could imagine the spiderlike security cameras turning in their glass balls, watching his every footstep as he came up to the entrance.

  When he got close enough, he pulled on the door handle, noting his own strange, bundled-up reflection cast in the shadowy, tinted glass. To his surprise, the door wasn’t locked. Letting himself inside, Cobb found himself in a large lobby, about two stories tall. Once it had probably been a very nice place, but now it was all torn apart, with wires hanging down and whole sections of one wall torn apart. The marble floor underneath his feet was slick with dust and covered with boot tracks. At the back end of the room two banks of elevators faced each other, each with their own shaft. Just beyond, a pair of heavy wooden doors blocked the way into the heart of the complex.

  A very large man was sitting behind the desk, wearing a pair of blue coveralls and a bright yellow plastic hat the color of dandelion flowers. Confused by Cobb’s arrival, he turned to give the intruder a quizzical stare.

  Cobb was ready for this; he was wearing his disguise. He hoped that his bulky coat, his gloves, his hat and his sunglasses would provide him just enough cover for his plan to work.

  “Hey, buddy,” the man said, standing up from behind the dust-covered desk as Cobb approached. “This is private property.”

  “My name is Bart,” Cobb announced in his gruffest voice. “I’m here about the pole.”

  “About the pole?” the man said, giving Cobb the up and down. He looked at the bag Cobb was carrying with a wary eye, but seemed to be amused more than wary.

  “That’s what I said. I’m here to work on the pole.”

  “The … totem pole,” the man said carefully. He didn’t have as much facial hair as the white man Cobb had seen last night, but he clearly hadn’t shaved in a few days. “You know about that?”

  “The Red Crow told me.”

  “Ohh …” the man said, nodding, as if he were getting it now. “Right. You’re here to work on the pole. I get it now. Right this way.” Cobb, more than a little astonished that his ruse worked, followed the man toward the double doors at the back of the room. The man took out a little plastic card from his belt, then beeped it on a rectangular white piece of plastic sticking out of the wall. Automatically, the doors began to open all by themselves, just like magic.

  “It’s right in here, in the atrium.” The man gestured for Cobb to head right on through.

  “Thank you,” Cobb said out of habit as he entered into the darkened interior of the building. Like a hollowed-out tree, the entire interior of the building, once a pleasant hotel, was open all the way up to the ceiling twenty stories above. Around the edges of the space, on every floor, were balconies and open doorways beyond count, spiraling all the way up to the penthouse level high above.

  But down at floor level, there were a number of vehicles parked on the cracked tile floor. A tow truck. Two black vans with tinted windows. Two white vans with writing on the side that Cobb could mostly understand. SEATTLE HOMELESS TRANSPORT. FREE SHOWERS. FREE FOOD. SAFE SHELTER.

  But in the very center of the darkened atrium, lit only by a few dim work lights, was the Bitching Tree. Or what was left of it. While before the sacred tree had been huge, with a canopy that could hold a dozen flocks of crows at once, now it was just a shadow of its previous self, a log stripped of its bark instead of a protective shelter for all. Set upright, it was already carved from top to bottom with strange symbols, leering faces and ugly crows with hooks instead of beaks standing on each other’s heads. At first glance, the totem pole already seemed to be complete.

  But Cobb already had his plan; he was ready for what would happen next. The second he heard the double doors behind him click shut, Cobb whipped his bear-mace out of his jacket pocket, spun around, and sprayed the man right in the eyes. As the man dropped to his knees, choking out a gargled combination of agony and alert, Cobb was shocked to see the man drop the pistol that he had been about to use to shoot him right in the back of the head.

  Following through, Cobb dropped both bags, then quickly slid his whackety stick out of his backpack. Without hesitation, he turned and hit the man in the head as hard as he could, just like cutting a piece of really crunchy firewood. To his relief, the man went to sleep, and didn’t look like he was going to wake up anytime soon.

  Cobb spun around, looking for more enemies that could stop him. But there was nobody down here, nobody with knives or sticks or guns. He kicked the pistol away from the downed man, as he didn’t need to carry a second one. Then, slowly, carefully, he moved to the totem pole, investigating it up close, making very sure not to touch it. He could feel power emanating from it; but the pole felt wrong, twisted, devoid of anything that could possibly be good.

  A noise came from above in the dark, the sound of movement, footsteps in the gloom. Cobb froze in place as people started to come through the open doorways out onto the balconies surrounding the central space. Within seconds there were ten, then twenty, then thirty of them scattered across the bottom few balconies, almost too many for Cobb to count. All of them stood silently, watching, listening. Cobb didn’t dare move, didn’t dare breathe, wondering if he’d been caught.

  “Taw?” a mascara-smeared brunette woman announced from two stories up, her unbuttoned shirt hanging open to reveal her heavy, danglin
g breasts.

  “Taw?” said a black man from across the atrium, dressed in a mismatch of old, ragged clothes. He had a terrible, bloody wound on his face, one that distorted his jaw as he spoke.

  “Taw?” someone else cried out from higher up. Cobb found him as the speaker flapped his arms a bit, the human balancing on bare feet on the slippery rail over a six-story fall, looking down upon the invader below with challenge.

  Cobb was horrified when he realized that all of them were like him. All of them were two-in-ones. All of them were crows that had been brought across by the power of the Bitching Tree.

  And all of them were clearly mad.

  “TAW!” the woman with the open shirt screamed—and the entire tower exploded into a cacophony of noise, of warning, of challenge!

  Cobb didn’t waste any more time. Dropping the piece of pipe, he unzipped the chainsaw bag and tugged the heavy yellow tool out of the fabric. Having no time to put on the goggles, nearly deafened by the screams of the flock of crazed humans, he ripped the chainsaw to life with a mighty tug on the handle. The onslaught of the engine’s sound in the echoing space turned the flock’s protestations from outrage to fear, with many of them running back into their rooms for cover. Gearing himself for the task at hand, he revved the chainsaw, took a good stance and ground the blade into the side of the pole, sawdust spraying out as he put everything he had into making a perfect first cut.

  Cobb sort of heard the first bullet go past him, but the second and third ones ricocheting off the tile by his feet scared him pretty good. Moving around the pole, keeping the engine going, he used the column for cover as he ripped deeper into the defiled tree. More bullets screamed past him now, all missing as he started to make his second cut. But when one winged off the chainsaw’s handle, nearly hitting his hand, Cobb reflexively pulled the tool away from the wood. Looking up, he saw the two men from his apartment last night standing on a balcony a few stories above. Both of the Red Crow’s lieutenants had guns in their hands, firing round after round at him, as the black man shouted at him in a language that Cobb didn’t understand.

  That’s when another lieutenant burst out of a stairwell door at the back of the atrium, carrying a heavier weapon that took both hands to hold. It was too long to be a pistol, but too short to be a rifle. But when the tip began spraying bullets at high speed, filling the air around Cobb with screaming death, he dropped the still-spinning chainsaw to the floor with a grinding, blade-destroying crunch.

  Stumbling, Cobb grabbed his backpack and ran. He considered heading for the closed doors leading back outside, but instead followed his gut and veered off, narrowly avoiding being cut down by a string of flying bullets. Banging his way through the fire-escape door, he ran up the stairs. Stopping at the first landing, he frantically unzipped the front pocket of his backpack to take out his pistol—when he realized he’d never taken the time to unpeel the bullet boxes or load it.

  “Fuck!” Cobb swore under his breath as he zipped up the pocket and ran for safety. He needed to get up as high as he could, to make it more difficult for the hunters to track him through the maze. Climbing eight floors of stairs lit only by dim emergency lights, he chose to exit through one of the staircase doors—and heard one of his pursuers bang through a doorway just a few floors below.

  Beyond the doorway, on the wide balcony ledge stretching across the inside of the building, there were at least half a dozen two-in-ones in various states of filth and dress. While the whole building was building into a riot of noise, the crows on this floor quickly made note of Cobb’s arrival and sent up the alarm. Two of the brave ones even turned to face him, ready to catch him with their bare hands as the rest fled in panic. Taking out the noisy can from his other pocket, Cobb raised it toward the advancing men, gritted his teeth and pressed down the plunger.

  The obnoxiously loud peal from the air horn sent the two enemies scrambling backward, eyes wide with terror. Breaking into a run, Cobb charged them, driving them down to the floor with his magic can, even as the other ones retreated back into their doorless rooms. Holding his finger down on the button to keep them down, Cobb sprinted past them and down the length of the carpeted walkway, slamming through the staircase door at the end.

  Surging up two stairs at a time, Cobb climbed up floor after floor until his lungs were burning. This time, when he chose a doorway to exit the stairwell, he couldn’t hear anybody chasing him—yet. Up on this level of the hotel the architecture was the same as down below, a wide balcony with a glass-and-metal railing along the edge. Like everywhere else he could see, all the doors to the rooms had been removed, and he didn’t know why.

  Two women came out of a room three doors down, saw Cobb holding the gun, screamed and fled back inside again. Hating the fact that he’d been found again so quickly, he had to assume that his pursuers would be coming up fast now, to cut him off and catch him before he could do any more damage to the tree. Needing time to load his gun, Cobb chose the first room on the right to hole up in.

  Within the enclosed space, the smell of human feces affronted him, dark and foul and wet. The room was small, with a painted door leading off the living room into a dark bedroom. Through a crack in the mostly closed blackout curtains, Cobb could see the cityscape below, the sea of buildings and rooftops showing through the tinted picture windows.

  Even though there was no furniture remaining, Cobb decided the place had once been very expensive, as the plush carpets sank a bit under his shoes. But the two-in-one who had lived here had destroyed everything. Piles of shit lay on the carpets in erratic spatters. The bathroom off the kitchen was demolished, the cupboards torn off, mirror glass smashed by a hundred hateful blows.

  But the dark bedroom wasn’t empty. He could see someone laying on the carpet over by the closet door, but they weren’t moving. Hoping they were asleep, he carefully closed the door without latching it, then found a place by the windows where the carpet was mostly clean.

  Cobb knelt down with his backpack and fumbled out the first box of ammunition. Ripping open the plastic cover, he opened the box and filled up his first magazine with bullets all facing the right direction. He then slammed it home into the butt of his pistol, appreciating how he got it right on the first try. Then he loaded the other three clips, one after the other, getting every last bullet inserted properly, and got those into his backpack where they belonged.

  That’s when the bedroom door slowly started to open. Cobb reflexively raised his gun toward the person with both hands.

  She was no more than twenty years old, a mess of short-cut blonde hair and blue eyes. The stained floral-patterned dress she wore hung off her gaunt frame in rags. Only the glittering butterfly necklace she wore at her throat seemed intact, seemed to represent who she used to be.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” Cobb told her as he climbed to his feet and grabbed his backpack with one hand, even as he kept the gun steady on her with the other.

  “Taw?” she said weakly, holding on the doorjamb for support. She was nearly too weak to stand.

  “What’s your name?” Cobb asked, but got no response. “Did the Red Crow do this to you? Put you into a human body? Layered the two of you together?”

  She nodded meekly, yes.

  “Did you want it?”

  “No,” she replied, licking her dried, cracked lips. “Old Thom … is my king. They hurt me. They … used me.”

  Realizing that she was one of his own, one of the ones he’d sworn to protect, he just didn’t know what to say. He also didn’t know what would happen to her if he finished cutting the totem pole down below. Would the crow’s spirit just fly out of the body she possessed, or would she be stuck inside forever if there was no magic left to call them out? He was about to ask her what had happened, how they had hurt her—when he heard the two women down the hall scream again.

  His own two-in-one took a deep breath to scream in turn—and Cobb just barely got to her in time, covering her mouth with his hand, muffling the worst
of it. Scared of him, she snapped at him, bit at him, as he shoved her back into the bedroom, where she tripped and fell hard onto the floor. He managed to get the bedroom door mostly closed in time, just as he heard someone come into the living room outside, heavy footsteps on the carpet. But Cobb was ready. Raising the gun, not offering any warning, he fired a whole clip of shots at head and chest height, blasting holes right through the bedroom door.

  Through the gap between the wall and the door, Cobb saw as the two-in-one hit the ground, unmoving. He saw that it was the white warrior with the mustache from last night, his forehead now a blown-apart, gory mess.

  As the woman behind him scrambled into the corner, horrified by what had occurred, Cobb let himself out of the bedroom as fast as he could, crow-hopped over the corpse, then stumbled back out onto the balcony. At the glass railing, he felt like he was going to be sick, and he gulped air to try to clear his head. When he became steady again, he took a long look down into the atrium. From this angle he couldn’t see anyone except for the sleeping guard in the dandelion hat—but his dropped chainsaw was gone, confiscated by the enemy.

  Shaking his head at the bad turn of fortune, Cobb thought through his options, knowing that he couldn’t skulk around the building forever. He’d been lucky so far, but the lieutenants hunting him knew what they were doing. They had guns and radios and little white plastic key cards. They could drive vans and use chainsaws and had everything they needed to survive. If they could come to his apartment in the dead of night and shoot their way in, they could hunt him down in the shadowy darkness of the Red Crow’s tower with no problem at all.

  Then Cobb saw what he needed over by the elevator. It was a red pull-down latch in a little glass box that he knew meant HELP. Going over to it, he looked around to make sure that he wasn’t about to get shot. He was about to flick it down, to call the police, the fire department, anyone—when he saw the tangle of cut wires exposed in the drywall beneath it.

  “Fuck,” he said, more dejected than mad. Had they thought of everything?