Feral Creatures

by Kira Jane Buxton

  “Dee! Gaaluupp gguuulllltthpppp! Dee! Look out, there’s something in the wat—”

  The knife-sharp fin towered above her like the tail of an airplane.

  “Deeeeeee!”

  A great predatory shadow lurked under the swell, closing in on her tiny, thrashing body.

  “Dee! Dee, look out, swim! Dee, swim—” and the ocean poured into my lungs.

  I was bone tired, dizzy from an assault of salt and being flung around like flotsam. The dark shadow was closing in on Dee. I tried so very, very hard to keep my little eyes on her, but the waves were relentless, punching me around the border of their cruel world, and I couldn’t see what was happening to my nestling, and I wheezed out a deflated “Deeee—”

  And suddenly, I was yanked from the fray, lifted into the air. Water poured from my feathers.

  I levitated through the storm’s whipping wind, gular flapping like a fish out of water.

  “Onida? Migisi, get Dennis!” I said, delirious as my brain churned like spume, upside down and inside out.

  My eyes rolled like runaway marbles, and everything went as black as the sinister fin that sliced the water around us.

  Footnotes

  1Tiffany S. from Tinder and I had a complicated relationship, and by that, I mean that I didn’t like her. Big Jim and Tiffany S. had their ups and downs but also had undeniable chemistry, which was special since most women found Big Jim as sensual as an orthotic shoe. Big Jim and Tiffany S. couldn’t seem to stay away from one another. A bit like me and Cheetos®.

  2This is another MoFo movie reference. This movie was about a young MoFo woman who made weird friends (many were missing vital organs), passed out in a poppy field, and was chased by flying monkeys, only to discover she’d hallucinated the whole thing (see: poppies) and to disappointingly learn that she hadn’t left Kansas. I gave this movie one wing up because I was pretty offended by the concept of a scarecrow.

  Chapter 9

  S.T.

  Still No Clue Where in the Bering Sea

  My nictitating membranes exploded open like the Levi’s Big Jim was wearing at Rosita’s Mexican Grill on Cinco de Mayo, when he washed down an expresso burrito with five jalapeño margaritas. Warm breath ruffled my feathers. I wrangled my pinball eyes to focus on a giant nose. It gave a primal snuffle, then pulled back so I could see more of its owner’s form. The smooth start of a cheek licked scarlet from a fight with the ocean. Sahara-dry lips that emulated calls of the winged and wild. A modest number of eyes that crackled with intelligence. Hair styled as if by leaf blower. Could she have used a little moisturizer? Absolutely. But to me, there was nothing more magical in the world I came from or the world I was now in. She was utter earthly perfection.

  My nestling.

  Dee clicked her tongue in delight. She rubbed her face against my beak in the distinctive display of affection among owls. The grateful ghost of a recent meal lingered around her. I had a lot of work to do to make her a real-life MoFo, before I lost her to the natural world. But for now, I was a puffed soufflé of gratitude—I hadn’t lost Dee to an oceanic storm.

  “Hugs, Dee; MoFos do hugs,” I scolded her. So much unlocked potential in that furless form. She ignored my request and continued rubbing her nose to my beak.

  A scream shattered the calm and some of my smaller ear bones. A horrible, eyebrow-hoisting, pinion-poofing shriek, emanating from someone with the fortitude of a yellow-bellied newt. I quickly deduced the source of the scream. It was me. I’d been swept up by the element of surprise, unprepared for the great fishy rainbow mist that erupted from the ocean’s top predator.

  Oh, yeah. The fin.

  Dee gingerly placed me on a slippery surface and surprised me by standing up. Still groggy and disoriented, I took in the scene. We were moving, and fast. Echo streamed beside me, calmer after recovering from its midmorning meltdown.

  Dee let out a howl, a wild sound I hadn’t heard her make in a long time. It had bright energy and stirred the wind. She stood with a straight back, balanced on powerful legs, her right hand curled around the shiny edge of a six-foot dorsal fin. I knew then that Dee had survived not only the wrath of the blue tide, but the beckoning of the Black one. And she was now standing on top of a speeding killer whale. I shot to my feet, too fast; the world wobbled, and I almost slid off waxy skin. Crouching, I steadied. All around us were enormous black fins that shot from the water like skyscrapers. I had very mixed feelings about all of it.

  Shit Turd’s Mixed Concerns (a list):

  Killer whales are the known wolves of the sea.

  They have the word “killer” at the blatant forefront of their name, in lieu of the less threatening “Mrs.” or “Dame.” MoFos had not named them Good Samaritan whales or “cockapoos of the sea” but killer whales. Killing whales that do killing. Killy whales.

  We were still in Echo, that sloppy-ass septic tank.

  What happened at the end of Fight Club? I know as a rule, I’m not supposed to talk about it, but I never had a chance to finish it before the world went banoony. This wasn’t currently relevant, but it did worry me from time to time.

  I had to get shit under control, had to make sure that these massive apex marine monsters had good intentions. Utterly at their mercy, I decided that charm was the name of the game. I slid up past Dee and the towering dorsal fin with the grace of a newborn giraffe on a Slip ’N Slide lubricated with Crisco, then rapped my feet on the gigantic black melon of the speeding cetacean.

  “Um! Excuse me!”

  Kooooooooooosh. The blowhole behind me blasted a geyser plume to the sky. It had a distinctive aroma, reminiscent of when Big Jim used to leave lumps of Filet-O-Fish® in the garbage disposal. Then a sound slammed into me. A series of hollow clicks like a hailstorm of bullets peppered my body, arrowing right through my internal organs. I screeched, checking my body for holes, then looked over at where the sound had come from. Another killer whale, this one smaller than the one we rode, had her head out of the water in what the Discovery Channel called a “spyhop,” her massive inky head and its clean white eye patch trained on me. She let out a series of light squeals that sounded a lot like laughter.

  “Hey!” I stamped my foot impatiently on the killer whale’s head again, forgetting my original plan to be charming.

  And then came the most unusual voice I’ve ever heard. It was deeply sonorous and didn’t seem to come from one source but was rather like the boisterous stage act of an overzealous ventriloquist on amphetamines. “He is awake! Welcome to Echo,” said the voice, bouncing from all directions, vibrational pings coming from everywhere and nowhere to paint tight bumps over my skin.

  “Fucking Echo,” I muttered to myself, forgetting that these guys are sound specialists. The orca let out high-pitched laughter.

  “We understand when you enter a new world, you have to leave behind some of your own. I imagine it’s very hard.” I didn’t want to think about what I’d left behind. Ashen memories. A life.

  I was guarded, careful with my questions. “Did you save us?”

  “Yes.” The word swirled around me, then slipped under my feathers and felt like the warmth rising from oven-fresh biscuits.

  “Who are you?”

  “We are the Black Fins. We are pod and family.”

  “You’re not going to eat us then?”

  He laughed, a deep, echoey boom that caused me to slip and smack onto my good wing. I righted myself and flapped my feathers, feeling those rich, warm sound bullets dance and morph into curlicues and tingling twists. To our left, another whale, with its own distinctive dorsal patch like a white fingerprint behind its fin flag, had its head out of the water. Watching me.

  The huge male whale continued: “You are full of worry. Full of pain where you’ve been hiding what’s happening to the world from the ones you love. But you, Bird of Aura, have the heart of a blue baleen.”

  “What in the name of Triscuits are they firing at me?”

  The watching whale let out a serie
s of small clicks. They ran up my matchstick legs. I jumped up and down, flapping to swat them away. The big male went on: “We use sound to tell us things, more than what we meet with our eyes. It is our great gift; she means no harm.” The killer whale to the right of me lifted her head out of the water and clucked at me gently. I gave her a look mostly reserved for proselytizing deer ticks or MoFos who talked at the movies, puffing myself up to show her I shouldn’t be pinged anymore. Just because you have some sort of weird X-ray superpower doesn’t mean you should use it willy-nilly. Who knows what the long-term side effects of that shit are? It felt invasive as fuck, reminding me of when Big Jim got in an argument with Sea-Tac airport TSA over the body scanner and yelled, “Quit taking pictures of my schlong!”

  “Where are you taking us?” I asked.

  “Where you want to go,” said the great black sea wolf.

  The smaller killer whale was still staring at me as she cruised. I can’t help being handsome, but this was starting to smell like a restraining order.

  “I suppose she determined that through the sound X-ray thing,” I said with a great deal of salt in my throat.

  “You told us when you were passed out. You want to help your family. Family is the essence of the pod.”

  “Oh.” I felt another gush of heat, though this time internal. What else had I said when I was unconscious? Did they know my real reasons for wanting to get to Seattle? Did they know I planned to hide my nestling away from the horrors of the new world? They valued family, so perhaps they would understand. Or perhaps—and this was the more likely case—they were agents of Onida. Blubber butt had plans to sacrifice my Dee for their own selfish gains, or as I long suspected, because Onida wanted to seal the extinction of humanity.

  The great sea wolf continued: “You must rest, Blackwing. You have been on a long journey. A journey that has just begun.”

  “How in the name of Aura could you know what’s coming for me?”

  “We feel things. You must rest; the pain in your right wing is worse.” I spread my wings, noticing a pulsing throb. What was this meddlesome malarkey? Never in my whole life had I felt so transparent, like a pulpy page of wet newspaper.

  I spoke to him whilst using my wings to cover up my bits. “Since you’re the boss of the pod, I’d like to discuss how to connect with Aura from here and—”

  “We have already sent out sound for you. The seabirds, connectors of Echo and Aura, will know.”

  The whole ocean rippled with sound bullets, buoyant and bubbly. They softened to a gentle patter, like drumming fingers, then fused together like droplets of liquid mercury in the colors of Easter. I turned to find Dee laughing, a sun-summoning smile drawn on her face, sound bullets warming her skin. Resentment swirled through my see-through body. Despite a lifetime of trying, I’d never made her laugh like that.

  “And I’m not the leader of our pod,” the killer whale said, a smile tickling his sounds. “Our leader is here.” Here, the orca let out a long string of clicks that floated ahead of us like incandescent electric ball bounces—hypnotic and nightclub blue—disappearing into the dorsal fin ahead of us. The towering fin that led the pod was graffitied with notches and scratches, the slapdash signature of boat propellers. To my right, the smaller killer whale, who was clearly carrying a torch for yours truly, aligned with the male we rode. She chirped in a broken smoke detector’s lonely calls. Dee let out a perfectly mimicked squeal. The pod chuffed and exhaled rainbows in delight. I reeled, stung by the green stinger of the jealousy hornet, stunned from the visualizations, as if on Tiffany S.’s secret stash of marshmallow-flavored edibles. It was a swift and sonorous magic. Laughter pealed, bubbling up from the deep in a colorful kaleidoscope of sound. Dee hummed to them in her song of the bees and the whales silenced themselves, listening in rapture. The salt world she had dreamed of finally welcomed her. She was better than a paperback heroine with a pearl in her mouth. Dee was the pearl.

  I suddenly understood that I was expected to hop onto this finned fan of mine. I did it—gingerly so as not to slip in between the bodies of two whales and end up a crowst beef sandwich. Once I was on her back, the whale chirruped with happiness, and I suddenly felt buoyed myself, filled with brassy beading sounds of joy. It was seductive, but I tried not to be bowled over; great danger hides in delight. The female killer whale accelerated, shooting the two of us through a sea that hissed and babbled, carefree foam frothing in confetti sprinkles. We zoomed past other dorsal fins, even the tiny fin of a baby whale. A chorus of complex chatter in a swirling vortex of color and sound made me realize something utterly dreadful. The whales were dumbing themselves down to talk to me.

  She slowed as we approached a notched dorsal fin that wasn’t as tall as hers, its gloss dulled by adventure. A dorsal fin that stood firm in the face of time, etched with a constellation of tooth marks. I wondered how the massive shark had fared. Shivering seized my body. I didn’t need sound pictures or songs or audible hallucinations to know I was in the presence of an ancient greatness.

  I hopped onto the body of the magnificent whale. For the first time since I could remember, I was speechless.

  “And so here you are, brave as a beginning,” came a barnacled voice without an anchor. “With every tide it becomes rarer to find someone who knows. Many of my children only know stories and legends. But you and I, we know. We lived side by side with them. We remember the humans.”

  My beak rattled, agitated with adrenaline. I had waited winter after white winter to taste this moment. To talk to someone who knew the magnificence of MoFos. “You, you remember them! You know how important they are!”

  “I have lived one hundred salmon spawns; many stories swim in me. I can tell you stories of great human friendships, songs of fins and feet. Of kindness that came from dovelike fingers. I can tell you about how the humans rounded up my family from great machines with whirring wings, blasting our waters below. I can tell you of lost children and a mother’s screams. I can tell you of brave, bearded warrior men who put their tiny bodies between ours and a harpoon’s eye. Or perhaps you ask for stories of the brutality of boats and how it is to sing to your loved one, their desperate notes fluttering up over the waves, unable to nuzzle another again or break through the cruel mask of glass. They are stories as varied as waves. None of them matter now. Now, they are gone.”

  She released shuddering rumbles that swirled into a scene before me. Ahead, rendered by the magnificent memory of a cetacean, were the floating bodies of dead MoFos. Their eyes were stolen, skin suffering a slow escape like the shedding of wet tissue. Hair rippled in wormy tendrils. There were so many.

  Fear strummed my veins. “Then tell me why you are helping the very last one ride across an ocean that wants to swallow her?”

  Kooooooooooooooosh. She exhaled and said nothing.

  And suddenly in my mind’s movie I saw her leading us to Onida. I’d watched documentaries about killer whales and the fractious relationship they’d had with humans. Tiny tanks and the kidnapping of pod members, ambushes in coves. I thought of a favorite photograph—the one of Big Jim with sunburnt knees when we caught the big Chinook salmon, also known as king salmon—and how I later learned that our southern resident orcas were starving because they only ate Chinook salmon, which were being unnecessarily overfished by MoFos. Suddenly, I saw this pod acting out of revenge, driving us to Onida so that my nestling could be held responsible for her species. Leading us to Dee’s doom.

  What animal has had a more contentious relationship with MoFos than the killer whale?

  I let honesty speak. “Please, if you know them, then you know what she is and what her chances are. Please. She is good inside. My soul cannot fly without her.”

  “And that is why we came. Because your love for her is the loudest sound in the ocean.”

  I lay down on her back, exhaustion taking over. What choice did I have but to trust?

  “Rest, and I will tell you a story.” She started, releasing pulsing pops, wi
llowy whines. A pattering of low-frequency clicks poured around us like electric monsoon rain. The story came to life with sound, playing out in front of me like a 3D movie. An optical adventure that even the sea-foam stilled to soak up.

  The Black Fins felt the world tighten. They were the first to know, to fear an enemy with a hunger that stretched beyond the horizon and eyes like a glass cage. The Beast had an appetite for salmon, diving from the sky and into the waters to devour more salmon than The Blue could replenish.

  The One Who Hollows as well must return.

  The monster vomited its foul bile into the water, choking the lives of those who live through gills. And more salmon were taken, and more, and the Black Fins, one by one, rose to the water’s surface with hollow, breathless bellies and skins squirming with bone worms. Soon, the salmon weren’t enough, and the Beast began to eat mankind, chewing up their eyes and bodies, leaving their skins to find their own shapes. The Black Fins fought the Beast, but it grew stronger, ravishing pods of Black Fins and mankind alike.

  But the Beast, in its greed, forgot one human. The last. A raven with onyx wings and great red markings flew down from the sky and brought the last human to the remaining Black Fins. The Black Fins ferried the last human to land, to honor the code of sister species—the code of together. They delivered the last human to the glass-eyed Beast so that mankind could pay back an earthly debt. So that mankind could, in its last blowhole breath, be reminded of itself.

  Kooooooooooooooooosh.

  “That’s the end?” I asked, wide-eyed. “You realize I’m a crow, right? Not a deuteragonist raven with rosacea?”