The shrew’s pinprick eyes were closed with the exertion of escape. “No, no, let me, get, go, ugh—”
“Wait!” I said to Migisi, who shot me a look colder than moonlight on a penguin’s ass. The eagle’s death glare suddenly morphed into a large flat-screen TV and a cozy craftsman living room long ago, where I sat, stabbing my splayed toes against a remote to change the channels. I located National Geographic, then nestled into the La-Z-Boy®, helping myself to a little beakful of the warm Pabst Blue Ribbon Big Jim had orphaned due to having fallen asleep naked on the coffee table again. I stole a Cheeto® from its bag gingerly to avoid a rousing rustle. Dennis, all velvet folds and jowly slime, lay at the base of the La-Z-Boy®, dreaming about something vivid. His gangly legs thrashed, whacking the legs of the coffee table, and his tail mimicked a rudder. He emitted shrill moans and porcine snorts. I rolled my eyes at the slimy, half-eaten bull pizzle that lay next to him. The Nat Geo special, my late-night treat, had been about shrews. I watched the Bugle-nosed rodents skitter across the screen, learning about their territorial nature and impassioned battles. About how shrew moms venture out with their babies by having each of them clench the base of a sibling’s tail to form a shrew safety conga line. I learned about the venom they inject through grooves in their teeth, a venom strong enough to kill two hundred mice. They use echolocation to find prey, determine where enemies are, and navigate space in a black underworld. What I learned from that Nat Geo special is that size is relative, and this little guy was worth more to me alive than as Migisi’s protein bar.
Brilliant thoughts unleashed from my mind, thundering forth like the supreme athletes of the Canterbury Park corgi races. One idea careened across the finish line. I yelled out to the shrew, explaining what I needed.
“She’ll let you go if you’ll help us,” I added.
Migisi squeezed him so that his phallic nose inflated, and his eyeballs looked like steamed pork buns.
“Migisi!” I squawked at her. “Do you agree, shrew?”
He nodded. Migisi reluctantly flung him to the ground and started beating up a mound of snow-covered sword ferns. The shrew prepared to dart, and then saw all the eyes in the trees.
The shrew sighed heavily before doing as asked. The crows tilted their heads in confusion. I hoped this would work because I wasn’t sure how else to stop Migisi from snacking on Special Agent Shrew. The shrew burrowed underneath the soil there and then, emitting sounds—tiny, crystal bell–like tings—through the world of Web as he went. He moved fast enough that the birds fluttered to the nearest tree when necessary, tracking him from the sky. Twitter and skitter, twitter and skitter. I felt I had begun to lose my audience; I could feel Kraai pulling in the air, needing to tell me to leave the shrew and get to hunting the best way possible—from the clouds. But then, eureka. The little shrew struck gold.
“This one?” he asked, whiskers twitching. His eyes were no bigger than a needle’s.
Under the lip of a rock was a haphazard silver web and its creator, a black widow spider.
“Yes!” I shrieked. “Thank—”
But he had already vanished into a dark tunnel network beneath the sparkling snow, tiny obscenities echoing in his wake.
Pressa fluttered down and jutted her beak. “How did you know he could find the spider?”
“Shrews are the only rodent who can echolocate,” I whispered. “I learned it from the MoFos. I’ve seen the magic of echolocation up close; some good friends showed me.”
“S.T., why are we spider hunting? How will this help find Dee?”
“The spiders will know who took Dee; they’ve always watched over her. But spiders are hard to find unless you have a bond with them, right, Spider?”
The black widow—a defensive female with the telltale scarlet hourglass painted across her body that translates as “don’t fucking eat me” in bird hieroglyphics—sat watching with eight skeptical eyes.
“I’m a friend of Dee,” I whispered. Her body relaxed in recognition. I asked her where Dee was.
“A hunt,” she said, lifting several arms. “Find the tigers.”
It wasn’t much, but enough for me. “The tigers! Quickly, we have to find them!” I shrieked.
“I just saw them!” called out a crow with one backward-facing feather. “I know where they are!”
Kraai dropped to the ground next to me. “You are tired; we can find her for you.” As if the black feathereds hadn’t already been patrolling these treacherous streets all night, unheard of for birds who instinctually huddle from hidden frights and nights with grabby fingers.
“No,” I told him. “I have to be there; I’m the only one she listens to.” I warmed myself with the costly fleece of a lie on the coldest and bleakest morning in memory.
Migisi spread her chocolate wings, a hundred crows looking on in utter horror as I stumbled onto her back.
“Rise!” called Kraai, and hundreds of wings lifted with the grace of Pabst Blue Ribbon bubbles. The red brick building and the gray hulls of elephants shrank to pebbles. A tower of giraffes ambled near them, from this height now wandering pencils. Ivy-smothered buildings had drunk the drink-me potion and a greatly changed Bothell looked like a train set swaddled in snow. And we set out to find my heart.
Kraai and Pressa aligned themselves with Migisi’s smooth flaps.
“Dee!” I called out. “Dee! Dee!”
“NO!” snapped Kraai. It was the first time I’d ever heard him lose patience. The crows, busy birds of constant chatter and a whole Reddit thread of opinions, flapped silently, the air stitched tight between them.
“There has been so much change since you left,” Kraai told me in a velvet voice. “Aura has been sabotaged. It is spotty at best, the connectors unable to reach one another through the hollow trees. It is dangerous to be out here in the great numbers of a murder. But to be alone…” We both let the sentence trail like the landscape in miniature below.
I searched desperately for the weathered ruff of a sealskin parka and hair like a back-combed Peruvian guinea pig. I looked for dexterous limbs and a strong, agile body.
I just wanted her back.
From the sky it was easier to see the barren spots The Changed Ones had claimed, gloom gray and poxed by rust’s slow war. I caught glimpses of scurrying creatures—rat and rabbit and raccoon—as we soared across a white kingdom.
My Dee. My best thing. Where are you, Dee?
“Kraai,” I reassured myself, “Dee can handle herself, even among tigers. She’s a MoFo; she has the traits of them. I want you to get to know her, Kraai. I want you to see how much potential she has—” I stopped. It was too hard to go on.
“I don’t doubt she is a marvelous creature. But you should know that this is no longer our world. The Changed Ones have taken over. They are destroying our homes, feasting on our bodies. They are caging us, and our cage is shrinking. We fly when they allow it, when the skies are clear. Which is only when they are dormant.”
“They are dormant now?”
“Of course. There are lone ones, some that seem to be struggling to change and survive. But most of them—thank flight—are dormant.”
“They are becoming more active, aren’t they? Getting…stronger?” The temperature dropped.
He tucked dark thoughts behind a cheery tone. “Let’s focus on your nestling. Keep your eyes wide-open. We’re almost there.”
We flew in silence, hundreds of eyes in the sky. The birds scanned a fondant landscape for movement. Packs of dogs gilded the ground with pawprints. A white blanket shrouded the rusting relics of extinct MoFos.
And then, as if the sky had heard my desperate pleas, thanks to the luminous glow of snow, I was able to clearly see streaks of orange and black as they thundered between trees, across an ivory quilt.
“There!” I cawed.
Migisi lowered, streamlining her body into a bullet. The crows plummeted with us, calling out the location. Orange and black zigzagged between the bulbous crowns of trees. Fro
m above, the scene was spotty as they ducked in between foliage, vehicles sleeping in snow, across treeless patches. But I knew. They were hunting. Chasing something down.
Dee.
“Get to them, Migisi!”
My shivering legs squeezed tight as we swooped down, licking in between tree trunks, narrowly missing scratches from skeletal boughs. Speeding snow blinded me. Rocks blurred below like rivers. The crows called for the tigers to abandon their hunt. A rabbit vanished into the wrinkled pockets of a cotton landscape. Migisi lowered to hover above three orange-and-black cats.
“You owe me a rabbit,” Eko growled at me.
“Dee’s been taken!” I told him. “Taken by one of…them.”
His roar was a living thing. His brothers growled at him, biting at the air. He was putting them in danger, calling unwanted attention to a trio who stood out like a crow in a coffee shop.
“Silence!” said Olan, licking his lips. “We will find her. Come!” The tigers broke into a run. The eyes in the sky followed.
“You cannot trust them, these cats,” Pressa said, appearing next to me.
“I don’t trust them, Pressa, but they say they can find her!” I said, huffing clouds of cold air.
The snow blurred the lines between areas green and thriving, and the urban patches ravaged by The Changed Ones. We could no longer clearly see the delineations, the boundaries of safe and not. We reached a clearing ringed by Douglas firs. They held out their arms in a welcoming manner, and we filled them with our bodies, clutching to their lichen-licked branches. The tigers started sniffing, rubbing against bark.
“Where is she?” I asked the firs, feeling their faint heartbeats. They didn’t answer. Only a few clung to life, sacrificing bright pulses and nourishment they couldn’t afford to give in a determined quest to revive their loved ones. Trees would never lose hope, and they would not stop gifting their own vitality in magnetic messages and deep, earthy altruism. I tried not to imagine their suffering, and instead imagined what else was out there and where Dee might be in a world I had no mind map for.
A cluster of glowing eyes with pupils like pinpricks stared at us from a hollow in the fir.
“Who are you?” called Kraai, flapping from his branch.
“Raccoons, I think,” I whispered to him.
Faces poked out of the dark abyss. It became clear that they were not raccoons.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, stunned.
“Trying to live?” said one of them, peering from their huddle in the hollow. There were a cluster of yellow eyeballs and a crowding of long, striped tails. The creature’s voice was pleasant, a musically tropical tongue in a strange land.
“Ring-tailed lemurs,” I said to Kraai. “Zoo survivors.”
The lemur extruded a skinny finger from the hole in the tree, pointing below. “Tell them to fuck off, please.” He gestured toward the cats being cats at the base of the Douglas firs.
“Please, I need you to tell me if you’ve seen a Mo…a human.”
The lemur looked at me as if I’d slapped one of his wives. “They’re everywhere, those beastly creatures, tearing up the trees and preying on everything that moves—”
“No,” I said. “A real human. Like they used to be.”
“He’s been at the fiddle-neck, Tahiry,” said a sharp voice from the Madagascan huddle. “Hear that, Felana? It’s asking if we’ve seen any healthy humans around!”
“Crazier than a bag of bark beetles,” said another lady lemur.
“What is it, Hanitra? I can’t see!”
“Some sort of grubby parrot. Lost all its fancy colors. Might have been on fire at some point. That reminds me, Felana, I have a lump I’d like you to look at—”
I didn’t take it personally. I refuse to be insulted by a species that practices “stink fights” by rubbing scent glands from their wrists over their preposterous tails, then flicking them at one another like nut-bag perfumers. Tahiry lived with so many partners because lemurs are polygynous (one male mates with several females in a breeding season). MoFos were also sometimes polygynous, but most tended to have just one wife, which they called monotony.
The tigers were sniffing for scent marks. Liem rolled in powdery snow. I looked around this forest clearing gently nuzzled in white and saw other eyes in the trees. Things were hiding from us. Other things were surviving here, and I felt the stabbing ache of wanting that for Dee so very badly.
“Kraai, what if we split up? We’ll find her faster,” I suggested.
“No,” he said. “We never split up. We are more powerful when we work together because we look out for one another by being one. That is the code of murder. You are…” And then Kraai spoke MoFo, which I’d never heard him do. “Family.”
“Kraai, please, we have to keep moving; I have to find her. Every second that slips by… How much area is there to cover?”
“S.T.” He paused, took his time. “I want you to understand that if she is taken by a Changed One, we may not even see her from the sky.” The air suddenly seemed poisonous, burning my lungs.
“This way,” came a low growl from Liem. The tigers padded like forest phantoms, leading us to a stand of western hemlocks.
We feathereds landed, silently, sensing a presence in our pinions, touching onto wintry limbs. And there, splayed across the bough of a great blue-green beauty of an ancient evergreen, was my nestling. My heart.
She wasn’t moving.
Footnotes
1Three toes forward, one toe back.
Chapter 19
S.T.
Bothell, Washington, USA
Dee’s body was prone, slung across a thick, mossy bough halfway up a Sitka spruce. Her legs and mud-speckled mukluks dangled. Her arms hung, lifeless, from the branch, precious hands mottled, stiffened by snow. The clumped fur of her sealskin parka’s hood was pulled partially over her head so I couldn’t see her face.
Migisi and I were on the same page of this horror story—get to Dee, now. Our eagle lifted her warrior wings. Dee’s head snapped toward us, baring the back off warning grimace of a big cat. It worked, halting Migisi’s flight, her talons strangling the branch.
I looked down at the real big cats, who were crouched side by side, watching Dee as if waiting for something inevitable.
Tension filled the urban forest around us. I felt my black brethren all around me but kept my eyes on Dee.
A porcine snuffling filled our heads. Below, emerging between the lifeless bodies of once great spruces, a being came into view. It lumbered on four legs, its back arched into a horrible bulging protuberance. The being drooled and snorted as it prowled in between the hollow trees, a halo of barbed wire embedded angrily into its gruesome hump. Small udder-like breasts swung underneath collarbones as sharp as an ulu. Twisted twig fingers held a dirty cord. The old cell phone charger dragged in the snow behind it. This was a loner like those Kraai had described, a label-less misfit. Not MoFo. Not animal. Its clothing had long rotted off, revealing dappled gray skin. Its scarlet eyes rolled in an endless quest. From the side of its horrible head grew a tumor, long and misshapen. It had the look of an experiment from a lab run by drunken squirrels, or an amateur portrait by a juvenile proboscis monkey using the medium of mayonnaise. This one seemed forever doomed to be an in-between. It was stippled with scars, defying a decade of decay, and perhaps, still searching for a screen.
I had to get Dee out of there. I looked down at the tigers, expecting them to attack in their signature explosive, 260-pound, sixty-mile-per-hour ambush, but they were lying in wait, watching Dee with a familiarity that made my pinions stand on end.
Dee’s parka hood had slipped back, exposing her fixated stare. And I knew by the lively fire in her eyes that she wasn’t here because she was lost or because she was taken. She’d snuck away and come here because she’d been freed from her Toksook cage. Because she had to see what had become of the rest of her species.
Because she had the curiosity of a crow.
Oh god. Dee knows what she is, and she sees herself in this hideous thing. She’s going to want to get close, to have contact with one of her own. A close encounter with an orangutan, however magnificent, hadn’t been enough. And here, right in front of her, finally—dear god, finally—was one of her very own species. How on earth could she resist?
A young hominid, a vestige of the greatest species to walk the earth, looking at a fun house mirror. A hybrid creature. She was searching for answers. And Dee was being watched by me, another strange hybrid, neither full corvid nor MoFo, but an in-between. Painful implications hit me like a Slim Jim® to the eyeball—the horrid thing and I were both composites, imitations of real things. The broken hybrid had come for Dee in lieu of my bloodhound best friend, in lieu of the screens that broke it. Trying to take everything I loved away from me. Its very existence was too much for Dee to deny—a ghastly siren calling her to the rocks. I was filled with an unspeakable rage. I decided then and there that I was going to kill it.
A scream flew from my beak. “Get away from my nestling, you rancid shart bag!” I readied to launch from Migisi’s back and take this abomination on myself, even though I weigh the same as a packet of spaghetti.
The creature’s head snapped toward me. And then something happened, so fast I could barely make sense of it.
A muffled crunch signified Dee’s swift drop from the fir tree.
“Stay!” Dee snarled at me.
The Changed One’s lab mouse–red eyes widened, exposing an intricate dream catcher of bloodshot veins. It lifted onto two legs, displaying an ancient scar, smiling in the letter C. The creature screamed—a shrill expulsion from the abyss of a rotten body.
The crows did not call out their trademark alarms. The ghosts of trees stayed silent—they had no choice. The Changed One’s jaw slackened with an audible crack. A sizable rock had struck it. The force of stone knocked the creature to the ground. Dee flung the rock aside and leapt flea fast to the malformed creature. She snatched the tumorous growth in one hand, flattened her palm against the opposite temple of an egg-shaped head, and with one ferocious thrust of her arm, one sound like a branch snap, the hideous screaming stopped. The creature slumped to the snow. Its body with its warped breasts and smiling scar faced the tree crowns. Its head was backward, submerged in snow. Dee spun, locating my eyes among hundreds of black bodies. Her expectant gaze locked directly onto me.
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