Dennis, with me still in his mouth, his slimy, soft jowls blanketing my body, left the town house and our partner and The One Who Spits by taking off down Phinney Avenue. The sky, perhaps also in mourning for our little friend, released its promised rain, thick sheets of cloudburst that felt like heartbreak. We were drenched by the downpour. Dennis was walking now, a slow, plodding amble, until we were a good distance from the town house. I couldn’t tell you how long the walk was or what we passed. “The One Who Keeps” had been broken with pain and frustration, drowning in disappointment. Our mission felt fruitless, too big to accomplish. After everything we’d done, we’d only saved two pointers and a thuggish common house sparrow. A wild bird. And now the puppies would die because I was inept. I was weak and disabled, unsuitable to take on such a big task. I hadn’t saved our beautiful friend. It felt like a cosmic joke. Dennis eventually sat us under a stand of western red cedars, dropping me gently onto a pile of damp moss. The cedars were silent and I wanted to scream at them. Hadn’t they led us here? Hadn’t the trees all made me believe this was the right path? And now, when it actually mattered, when I needed guidance, they were audaciously unspeaking, drinking in the rains, and taking care of only themselves. I could barely breathe, anger and frustration and pain squeezing my arteries, choking me from the inside out. The world was too difficult, too painful. Without the MoFos to keep it in check, rabies would be spreading through the natural world, foaming at the mouth and spilling into their systems through a bite, reducing animals to violence and seizures—to utter madness. The One Who Spits couldn’t be just that African wild dog. It had to be the name those idiot birds of Aura had given to the collective, to all the animals caged in the grips of the disease. I shuddered to think of how many there might be.
Dennis lay on the ground with his head on his paws. Rain soaked him to the skin despite the shade from the red cedar. Dennis had known it was over before I had. Perhaps, with his Umwelt, the incredible stories his nose tells him, he saw some of this coming. He had saved me from my own stupidity. My plucky, idiot self. His breathing was heavy, The Black Tide crashing in around him, but there was nothing I could do. And for the first time, I knew exactly what he was feeling. I missed Cinnamon, the guilt of not being able to save her like a plastic bag on my face. The end had been fast and she hadn’t suffered and become The One Who Spits, but there was little comfort in that. And then, a tidal wave crashed into me without warning: how much I missed Big Jim. I had been waggish and upbeat and I’d believed the best in everything and it had gotten me nowhere. I missed how Big Jim took care of me and knew my favorite treasures and how he’d tell me all the things that were on his beautiful mind. I missed how proud of me he was when he took me to the local bars or Wings of the World where everyone else had parrots and cockatiels but he had a motherfucking crow who’d do anything for him and that got him a lot of respect. I missed how when he’d almost reached the end of a bottle, he’d tell me how much I meant to him, how special I was, how Dennis and I were the only ones he could talk to. I missed Big Jim and I missed feeling the wind in my wings. The Black Tide swallowed me up, drenching me in sadness, its undertow dragging me down, further than I’d ever been.
Things couldn’t get any worse. But then I realized that was a particularly idiotic thing to suggest, because they suddenly did get worse, as I raised my drenched head and realized that Dennis and I were surrounded.
Chapter 21
Angus, Highland Cow
Strathpeffer, Scotland
Where the hell is my human? I huvnae seen her in weeks. At first I thought it was a wee joke. A wee prank on auld Angus, but sure as I shit grass, it’s been absolutely ages.
I’ve been standing alone in this bastard field for days. Who is going to bring me my alfalfa cubes? My welly-wearing human, that’s who. Soon as she bloody remembers. Poor old Angus out here in the countryside, waiting and waiting like some sort of ginger-haired poultice.
Awright. I suppose I’m not totally alone. I’m stuck here on these boring rolling green hills with Nubbins the donkey. The weather is absolute shite. I’m bored out of my mind. I’m so bored I’ve taken to making up wee songs and poems. Here’s a cracker:
Again, again, again with the rain,
I hate the rain.
Pitter patter, shitty shatter,
Where are my alfalfa cubes, you walloping twonk.
Nubbins cannae do poetry or songs. Nubbins is too busy rolling around in his own shite. I’m a prized Highland cow. Nubbins is a rescue donkey with a mind like melted haggis. Surely destined to be a wee glue pot.
Och, I shouldnae be so rude. He’s a wee bit traumatized, our Nubbins. Yesterday he said he’d seen Farmer Stuart in his jammies chasing a sheep that was wearing a biometric collar. Jings, I told him to stop eating thistles, it’s frazzling what’s left of his wee pea brain.
I stuck my head under the fence to ask Hamish about this whole Farmer Stuart gossip. Hamish is a Hebridean sheep, a black wee jobby. Hamish says that he heard Gregor the goose telling Esme—a Scots Dumpy hen who sticks her beak in everyone’s business—that he saw Farmer Stuart staggering around the dog kennels the other day. Said he was blootered—his eyes were bright red. Who knows what the truth is? You cannae trust a black sheep.
So Nubbins, that numpty, is going bonkers and I’m bored of the green hillside and the rain and the rabbits are absolutely out of control. They bonk day and night and now there are thousands of the wee bastards. I try to send the foxes after them, but you know foxes, what like are they? Bunch of absolute arseholes. Cannae be trusted. Have you heard them at night?! Bloody banshees!
I told Nubbins to have a wee word with Margaret, a Highland heifer I’ve had my beady eye on. I plan to approach her myself when I’ve figured out what to say. Margaret is an absolute ginger goddess. Udder like a bloody bagpipe filled with custard! Och, I mustnae get too excited. So, Nubbins goes up to the electric fence, right up to Margaret in the next field, and he’s there for ages and I’m giving him the eye, like, “Come ON, Nubbins you giant pillock!” and eventually he comes back with this stupid story about how Margaret’s wee pal Shelly the Shetland pony told Margaret, the super sexy Highland cow, that all the human farmers have been crawling on top of the barn in town, smashing their noggins on the roof to get inside where all the agricultural robots are. What a load of gossip for the gullible. If humans wanted inside the barn, they could just open the door, for Christ’s sakes. Nubbins is a nutjob. He still believes in the Loch Ness monster! It’s all those sweetie wrappers he’s been eating.
My human will be here soon to trim my toes. Sure of it. Angus the ginger cow is an Overall Champion at the Royal Highland Show and he’s got glamour standards to uphold for God’s sakes! She’s probably down at the pub. Or at a horse show. Do you think she’s gone away on holiday without me? Aye. Maybe Blackpool. Och no, she’s probably stuck in the queue at Marks & Spencer. Ah, it’s absolutely mobbed this time of year.
She’d better hurry up before Nubbins chokes on a discarded can of Irn-Bru, that scabby wee fart lozenge.
“Eh? What’s that, Nubbins?”
Och, he’s mumbling again, that silly wee boot. He’s saying the electric fence is off and we’re free to go for a wee wander. What a load of tosh. Full of absolute fantasy, that Nubbins.
Chapter 22
S.T.
Up Shit Creek, Seattle, Washington, USA
The rain pummeled down, spitting and weeping in cool sheets. An ass-load of fuliginous, unblinking eyes watched us from the branches of red cedars. We were besieged, winged beings outnumbering us. I looked up at their glares, the anticipatory judgment that rained down on me from above. My heart started to race. A fluttering from a high branch caught my eye. A beautiful bird, resplendent with an opalescent sheen, glided down from a red cedar, dropping to the earth near my patch of moss. His contour and facial feathers were elevated, a sign of his breezy dominance. It was Kraai, the head cheese of the UW Bothell murder.
“You are injur
ed,” he said, spreading his magnificent pinions, waterdrops releasing like tiny crystals.
“No shit.”
“Times have been tough for you,” he said.
“What the…what is this? You’re going to fly down from your high branch and just start stating the obvious? Thanks, dick-wad. You can take your blatant observations and your annoyingly flawless feathers and functioning wings somewhere else.”
A smattering of crows cawed out. They weren’t happy with how I was speaking to their beloved brother.
The beautiful crow raised his head up to the sky, raindrops running down the length of his onyx beak. “You are rescuing the domestics. That’s why you were searching for The One Who Opens Doors.”
This guy was just all about wounds and salt. And he was really ruffling my feathers. “Not that it’s any of your damn business, but I got bad intel from the farce that is Aura and your stupid kind harassed me at the zoo so I nearly got snarfed by a tiger.”
“They are our kind, but the zoo crows are not a part of our murder. You shouldn’t just lump us all together like that. We are all individuals, even our murders have their own characteristics. I’m sure there were humans that you didn’t like.”
“No one comes to mind,” I lied. “Why don’t you just leave us alone?”
“Because we look after our kind. That is part of what it means to be a crow. The code of murder.”
We both looked at Dennis, now a wet rolled rug under the trees. Dennis was my murder. A memory surging like a jolt of electricity hit me. It had been the first thing Kraai had inquired about when I met him by the university library. He had wanted to know about my control over the dog. It was Dennis he was interested in. And I swore right then on the whole of my cache collection that he would never have him. “I’m not your kind; I want nothing to do with you and your sky-squatting, bitch-beaked ways. I am not a crow, I’m a MoFo!” As my words bounced off the rusty trunks of the old cedars, the corvid lungs in the trees gasped.
“But you are a crow. It is known.” Kraai cocked his head. No. He would not take away the last good thing Big Jim ever said to me, “Shit Turd, you’re one crazy MoFo.” Those were my words, my last piece of Big Jim to keep forever.
“Stop telling me who I am and invading my space! Get the hell away from us!” I shrieked, feeling something inside me rising, boiling like stew.
“The humans are dying out because they upset the natural order of balance. You must accept this. You must return to your roots.”
“It isn’t true and I don’t have to accept a fucking cracker of what you say. You’re a bunch of idiots who think you know everything and you’re wrong! I know they are still out there! You can’t claim to know for sure—”
“We know through Aura—”
“Aura is nothing but spam, a network of totally unreliable fabrications, no better than the National Enquirer. The MoFos will survive this.”
“Blackwing, the humans were a plague on the earth. They were not able to control their numbers or their consumption of the land, and so Nature did it for them. She is not kind, she is balanced. The One Who Hollows as well must return. It is known. For every species there is a calling to evolve, an opportunity for change to ensure survival. If a species misses the calling to evolve, they are destined for extinction. This is the law of the earth. I know that deep down you believe this. We have lived side by side happily with humans as their aerial allies and now we must thrive without them. Surely you do not miss those treacherous—”
“MoFos are treacherous? What about Nature? What about the orca who catapults a seal forty feet into the air just for the hell of it, or when an assassin bug wears the corpse of its victim for camouflage? Or when a baboon eats its young! That’s savagery! MoFos are kind and resourceful and clever and unparalleled in their ingenuity. Masters of creativity! You don’t know what you’re talking about! I AM A MOFO!” A cacophony of complaint came from the branches, the brassy song of angered crows.
Kraai held on to his patience like a top-tier canopy branch. “Perhaps the truth is that the part of you that’s smart and resourceful is the crow part. We’re smarter than you give us credit for.”
“You are birdbrained and simple compared to the MoFos,” I spat.
“How many of us can recognize a human face? Even with a mask on or when they try to disguise themselves?”
“We all can, we all can!” came unanimous squawking from the trees.
He continued. “Our children’s children know to heed the warnings of an enemy. And how many humans can recognize an individual crow?” His eyes were hypnotic and shiny. I thought of how once, after I’d gone to stretch my wings around the neighborhood, I returned to catch Big Jim squawking at a college crow with a white streak on her wing, agitatedly beckoning her from our Green Mountain sugar maple. He called her Shit Turd, yelling for her to hurry up and sit on his shoulder because he was late for beer pong. She was molting, half my size, and had a sebaceous cyst the size of a jawbreaker sticking out of her breast. It had been a serious blow to the old self-esteem.
Kraai continued. “How many of us do you see crumpled roadside like the squirrels and raccoons?”
“None! None!” cried the avian audience.
“We are soaring shadows, adapting on the wing. We are everywhere on this big beautiful blue and that is the privilege of being a crow, Blackwing. We are not caged, never confined to bars and walls. We build tools and communities and use our mind maps to navigate the world, so much easier now without the electro-smog blurring our flight paths. And we are survivors. We thrived in the hollowing time of trash and plastic, and we will thrive in the New World, as Nature settles her debts. It’s time to take what is ours.” The crows cawed in agreement.
“I am not. Like. You.” The steaming bubbles inside me were rising.
“You can’t run from who you are, Blackwing. If you try, you will always suffer.”
“KISS MY CLOACA!”
“You are a crow. It is your privilege.”
“GET AWAY FROM ME!” Counterintuitively, I hopped toward him, rain streaming down my face.
“You may have been close to a MoFo, and I can understand that, but they did not heed the warnings and are suffering the consequences. Your human is gone and now you must move on. It is time.”
He’d gone too far. He could smack talk about me and his idiotic theories, but he couldn’t make a single squawk about Big Jim. I wouldn’t let him.
“You’re right. It is time,” I seethed through my beak. Time for me to knock him off his high branch. I snapped. Lunging into the air, a strangled caw released with some of the heat inside me. My feet came down onto Kraai’s chest, pinning him to the earth. The cedars broke out into ferocious alarm calls, crows screaming into the rain. Kraai cried out, flapping with great strength to push me off him, but my assault had just begun and I struck at him with my beak. He blocked it with his, lifting into the air. I jumped up, body checking him, sending him mud-bound, hurtling into tumbles. Then I pounced on him and we were a mass of wings and beaks and feet, strained screaming and darting, jabbing movements. Kraai gave one fierce whip of his wings, shoving me off him with a thrusting kick. He lifted again, striving to get away, but I wouldn’t allow it. I snatched at him, clawed at him, strange sounds flying from me. My feet found his, locking them tightly in my grip. He lifted me into the air with him. We spun, airborne, bound and battling, a hurricane of black feather and burning heart. We lifted higher, our screeching tearing up the sky, wings shredding the air. Dennis’s thunderous barks rose to us as he bayed up to where I squabbled with a crow stronger, fitter, and faster than me. Better than me. Some dark urge from deep inside me had taken control, driving my beak forward toward the crow’s eye, aiming to plunge it right into his brain. Kraai blocked me with his beak. He might have been better than me, but I had passion on my side, a fury that gave me the strength to wallop him with a sharp kick. And then I tumbled from the sky. I plunged down the length of the cedars, a fall I knew would kill
me. My nictitating membrane shut out the world, cocooning it into milky blue and I held a memory that would be my last: Dennis and Big Jim and me, dancing around our Green Mountain sugar maple, laughing as dandelion fluff snowed around us. I fell down, down, down.
I must have been a branch’s stretch away from the soil when the sharpness dug into my skin. My fall slowed and for a moment, I was weightless. I opened my eyes, finding myself slumped in a mud puddle, my legs sticking up in the air. Above me, four college crows hovered. I felt the breeze from their wings, the rain sliding off their shiny bodies. Satisfied they had broken my fall, the crows shot to the sky. I caught a glimpse of Kraai, cresting the canopy of the cedars, a magnificent inkblot on a paper of gray sky. He vanished. A swarm of oscillating black specks, like a great gust of ground pepper, followed. As they departed, Dennis held his nose to the sky and whimpered.
I righted myself. I was soaked. Drenched from the rain and the puddle, but mostly in hot humiliation. I had lost the fight and had to be rescued. The rain stopped abruptly, just in time for a wave of shame to crash into me. Never had I felt so small or stupid, so utterly defective. And the worst part of it? I had started it. I had launched myself at him, feral, desperately wild, and savage. An animal.
Dennis was still sniffing the sky. The residue of rain dripped off branches and hardy leaves. A carpet of moss and mud stretched out around me, lime green and glowing with satiety. Gray, shaggy parasol mushrooms sat with proud postures, slick and shiny. A few leopard slugs inched their way across the earth, leaving a silvery train, evidence of a great journey and adventurous living in their wake. Pastel-pink earthworms writhed joyously, having waited for the rains to commence travel. They breathed through their moistened skin. We were still in the city, but somewhere under a grove of cedars where the forest was teeming and ready to reign. There was a break in the clouds, audacious sunrays glowing through the gaps in lime-green leaves. Electric-green ferns and spongy moss hugged copper-brown bark and soil. A hermit thrush, freckles decorating his breast, raised and lowered his tail. He let out a powerful flutelike trilling. It was a chirruping aria about strength and resilience, something he had learned from his father and practiced immeasurably, a song that had been passed down his long line of avian ancestors until it was utter perfection in pitch and resonance. It was hauntingly beautiful, tight notes piping up to the sun, shattering the ultraviolet light into a prism of dancing rainbows. I realized, wet and defeated in a puddle of mud, that I was surrounded by devastatingly beautiful things. None of it called attention to itself, no preening and crowing here. Everything just was what it was, intricately complex and simply stunning. This was what was happening to the world; this bewitching woodsy scene that sighed creaks, croaks, and willowy whistles was a preview of oncoming attractions.
Hollow Kingdom Page 17