After a great many mornings on the road, we’re headed back to our wee farm in Strathpeffer now, to see if our human came back for us. Maybe she’ll be there wearing her wellies and a smile. Maybe Margaret and Shelly will be there and some big wee Anguses to play with. Until then, we hoof on and Angus will never be lonely because I made a promise. I’m Nubbins and I’m a survival expert. I’ve been preparing my whole life.
Routine, discipline, regimen, vigilance.
Chapter 21
S.T.
Bothell, Washington, USA
Dee’s eyes were two frightened fish as she ran. They flickered, watery, darting up at a halo of crows. Kraai manifested by my side, beating his wings in active flight.
“Blackwing, are you sure? I just think it would be better for you to come with us. Please, I can’t persuade you—”
“It must be this way. I have to hide Dee away,” I told him. Migisi caught her breath as she perched us on top of a toppled billboard with a snapped neck. The billboard was covered in dirt, bracken, and siftings of snow, but you could still read its original Christmas advertisement. Santa rode with reindeer through a velvet-blue sky as he delivered a sack full of cell phones. Peeling letters peeked through—Peace on earth—and hectic red graffiti over the top of it: GUNS AND AMMO SEE ERIC IN WOODINVILLE IF YOUR SICK WELL SHOOT. And smaller green scrawl: UR GUNS WON’T HELP U NOW.
I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right: this was empirical evidence that the very first casualty of the apocalypse had been grammar.
Migisi sat watching, wings tucked tight, head camouflaging with the snow. Her breathing felt labored.
“Please, Kraai, this is the last favor I’ll ask of you,” I begged him.
He bobbed his head, though it pained him. Then his cool gaze lingered on my nestling. We could all feel the longing of his corvid companions, how they wanted to be close to her.
“Rise!” he called, and as they lifted farther from her fingers, Dee wailed. Dee had heard stories about these crows, longing to be part of the murder her whole life. She was getting abandoned again. They left like a gust of airborne leaves. Dee fell to her knees, her arms stretched high. She turned to show me her pleading, tear-streaked face. I heard my heart crack. I knew this bitter feeling, what it’s like to be the only one, an outsider that never fits in. She’d wanted to be a part of this family, but, just as with the owls, she kept getting shut out. Did she think she’d done something wrong? I looked away; I had to stay strong. The One Who Keeps was doing this so that she’d live. Because keeping her alive was a nonnegotiable goal, because the murder was headed back to warn Ghubari and the animals at Tavern on the Square, and they all saw Dee as a weapon. They were biased and blinded by their own fear. They couldn’t see her for what she was.
Nestlings are not weapons. Dee was not born on this big beautiful blue as a “resource,” existing solely for our convenience.
Migisi’s breathing still seemed raspy, even after her break on the billboard. I peered down to make sure she was alright, and she snapped at me. Something was up and she clearly didn’t want to squawk about it, so Shit Turd’s Mixed Concerns (a list) was growing by the minute. It was possible she was on her moon time. Tiffany S. from Tinder used to sometimes get this way, and once Big Jim said, “I get it! It’s shark week!” and Tiffany S. slapped him so hard his beer hat fell off. Tiffany S. then kicked the La-Z-Boy®, screaming something about respect and a period. A pretty dramatic response over a punctuation mark if you ask me.
Our heads filled with the ghastly cries of hollow creatures.
“We need somewhere to hide, Migisi, quickly,” I told her. “Away from everyone and everything. They only see Dee as either a weapon or prey. That’s not what Dee is. She is my nestling. We have to keep her to ourselves.”
I told her my great plan. Migisi read the UV patterns that pirouetted across the snow in northern lights colors. Her chocolate feathers ruffled as they felt the earth’s magnetic vibrations flow through her, strumming her heart. This is how the creatures of Aura navigate the sky; we create mind maps by using light and the planet’s percussion. This was how we would stay one step ahead of The Changed Ones, whose distant screaming was a thick, smoggy pollution. Migisi sensed the world around her and used the skill of sky dwellers—from merganser to arctic tern—to plot our great flight. We agreed on the final location. Our beautiful eagle had a lifetime of using mind maps, but as much as I tried, I was still better at navigating with landmarks like Dick’s Drive-In and Five Guys. Um, yum.
“Dee! Come!” I said to her in Big Jim’s no-nonsense bass. Dee gestured to the sky, toward where a constellation of sooty speckles seasoned the air. She placed her hand on her chest. It hurts, said her eyes. We both filled up with the sorrow and loneliness of the day we lost our parliament of owls. The crows left our heavy hearts, printing the sky in V’s and lowercase m’s. V for valor. m for murder.
“Danger, let’s go, Dee!” I told her. As if in response, a scream—closer than the others—shot through our skin to scrape bone. The tigers growled in harmony.
“They come. They come quickly,” said Liem, his pupils swelling until they eclipsed his eyes.
“They come for the Keeper,” said Olan. “They hunt her.” Dee leapt over to me. She held up the cupped castle of her palms. I launched myself from Migisi’s broad back, landing in the exquisite cage of Dee’s fingers. I would not let her be ground-bound alone. Migisi would direct us from the air, keeping watch for sky-shrunken predators. My MoFo and I would stay together—always together—and find a home of our very own.
Migisi lifted, and from below, I could see that her flaps were missing their fluid power. Still, she glided with the beauty of the white dunes she cast in shadow. Dee ran, powered by frustration and the flint-tipped slice of pain. She chuffed, the tigers running along beside her, though always a little ahead. I kept my beady eyes on a bouncing Bothell.
The screaming became more and more distant, and I wondered if The Changed Ones had been led a different way by Kraai and the murder. Wonderful—another skewer of guilt for the Shish Turd kebab. And then, Dee and the big cats stopped. The cats moaned, their whiskers fanning like porcupine quills. Dee, then, as if to defy me, squatted right there and peed, daubing the snow in lemon yellow.
“Christ on a Cheese Nip, Dee! Toilet time is private!” I scolded. You’d have thought she’d been raised by an incontinent corgi-poo, not five snowy owls, a bald eagle, and a staggeringly cerebral crow! The tigers were agitated, pacing, leaking groans. Dee chuffed at them. Olan let out a roar so ferocious it bullied the snow off branches. Dee roared back at him.
“No! Go!” she yelled.
The tigers paced and snarled and chirped and moaned but seemed to be pinned in place, unable to go any farther. And Dee was stern as she bared her teeth into a sharp snarl.
“Go! Run fas fas!” she told them with a growl. And then she took off.
“Dee! We need those sentient trash liners!” I squawked in protest.
“No! Danger!” she spat back at me. I watched the tigers pummel white powder in frustration. Dee shushed me and focused on her flight across the snow.
We ran along a road. Lake Washington loomed to our left, still and silky. Dee avoided the flooded parts of the road. The trees that lined the road were alive but silent, skeletal as winter-white goblins. Dee ran swiftly, doe-like. There were no sounds but the eerie sugarplum tinkle of ice drips. She stooped every now and then to squat and urinate.
“Dee, pull yourself together! You don’t pee willy-nilly like this! Where do you think you are, Chuck E. Cheese?!”
I rattled my disapproval at her squatting—I’d worked exceptionally hard on her toilet training.
It happened enough times to make me wonder whether she had a bladder infection, which was one of the many, many things I learned about after Dee’s little teeth started falling out, and I didn’t know that was a thing so I was in a total tailspin and thought she was Changing and I read every medical book Night
mute library had to offer, which had horrifically graphic pictures and eventually made me want to impale myself on a chopstick.
“Hamburger help us! Dee, what is it? A menopausal anterior prolapse? Oh god, it’s benign prostatic hyperplasia, isn’t it? It’s a prostate issue, isn’t it? I’ve always feared this. Talk to me, Dee!”
Dee stopped on a dime, startled by something. She put me down to circle a cluster of bags that looked to have been the treasures of a MoFo. Migisi’s shadow swam across the bags.
“No! Come on! We have to go!” I yelled.
The burlap bags gaped open, their wares spilling out, mantled with siftings of snow. Dee darted her head at hoarded shoes, gold coins, cigarettes, and what looked to be seeds. At the very end, things that became the most valuable to MoFos were the glittering things crows had always cherished.1
“Dee! They’re coming for us!” I begged of her. “You’re unwell and making terrible decisions; your prostate problem is more serious than we thought!”
But something had grabbed Dee’s attention. She approached a mound of MoFo garbage in the manner of a crow. Small hops forward. Swift jump back. Cautious head bobs. Sidling closer. Dee used her fingers in lieu of a beak, snatching an old wristwatch and flinging it to the ground in case it was a biter.
“DEE! For shit sakes, come on! We have to get to somewhere safe!” I chided her. I had a big problem on my pinions—I couldn’t physically force her to do anything, not even with my impeccably toned thighs. My nerves were fried, and I was losing patience. She prodded at pulp that had been a book in a past life.
“Dee! Please, we are in serious danger!” I told her. “Danger, Dee!”
Dee snatched a spoon—she’d seen those before—using it to sift aside snow. She unburied a shoe as I had a conniption fit, stomping and high kicking. She rummaged quickly, arm darting like the willowy neck of a swan. Sequestered in a filthy ballet slipper was a tiny square bottle. I recognized it instantly. Dee lifted it to her eyes to study the golden liquid.
“DEE! NOW! I’m sick of you not listening to me!” I screeched in desperation. As if in response, a Changed One’s scream sounded out.
She twisted the top, put her nose to the bottle’s delicate little neck, and retched, succumbing to an attack of the sneezes. Dee snarled at the miniature bottle of Chanel N°5 but tucked it into the pocket of her parka. She picked me up and resumed sprinting. A rattle of relief flew from my lungs.
“Good girl, Dee!” I yelled. “Finally, a little fucking culture!”
I was pleased. This made up for her horrible habits of pissing all over the place and dumpster diving. I actually knew a lot about Chanel N°5, Tiffany S.’s sworn favorite and the choice of many—a bottle was sold every thirty seconds around the world in the time of MoFos. It contains some weird shit to give it its signature scent, the so-called “scent of a woman”—including moss scraped from the bark of northern hemisphere trees. Originally, in 1921, Coco Chanel needed to add some musky base notes, and so she procured the obvious—sexual pheromones from the anal glands of the Abyssinian civet cat. In 1998, this was replaced with an imitation of the sex pheromones in cat piss, but still—it’s a hell of a smell to the non-MoFo nose, reminding me of the time I mistook Nargatha’s platter of potpourri for trail mix. Not to be outdone, Dior’s Poison contains a synthetic version of whale barf, while other prominent perfumes feature the aroma of beaver balls, deer dicks, and the fossilized feces of hyraxes.2 MoFos stealing from the pigpen of nature. How do I know all this? Big Jim and I researched it all in a fruitless attempt to get Tiffany S. to switch to something cheaper after she’d discovered that I’d been pillaging her Chanel N°5 and caching it in Nargatha’s compost bin.
“How come you always smell so fancy and French?” Nargatha asked Tiffany S. one time while kneading her arm like defrosting dough.
“It’s Chanel N°5,” Tiffany S. whispered to her, and from then on, the women in Big Jim’s life both smelled like a libidinous leopard. Bad taste, it turns out, is highly infectious. I figured Dee kept the vial because of the moss scent, but I hoped that somewhere inside, Dee felt a call to be French and fancy.
She squeezed me gently to silence me. And then she froze.
Why weren’t we hearing the distant screams of The Changed Ones? I looked up to an empty sky; Migisi had flown ahead of us to do recon.
Dee crouched. Her nose sucked up sharp air. A frenetic quilt of mice skittered across the snow. They were fleeing. Dee looked behind us, tracking, a lovely popping of cartilage the only indication of her swift movement. She launched us over a partially frozen puddle. She ducked behind a huge, anarchic mound of sticks piled next to the water. Hidden in between the sticks was a cluster of watery brown eyes. A family of beavers huddled together, nut-brown paws tucked into one another. Too frightened to breathe. Dee frowned. I worried because that was the face she pulled when I told her not to dig gigantic potholes all over Toksook because it was starting to look like a large lump of Emmental cheese. And that face usually led to a Salish Sea storm.
Dee’s heartbeat pulsed through her fingers and into my black body. She peered over the stick mound, taking in sights I couldn’t see, and once I started silently poking at her palm, she gingerly lifted me to witness. Some things are so horrible, your mind sews itself shut. The Changed Ones moved quickly. They raked their fingers through the snow, exposing a jumbled junkyard of things the snow had buried. One of them used scarlet eyes to scan the snowscape. Only it didn’t have to rely on two eyes. It had grown multiple heads, all of them competing for space with grayish skin stretched tight over bone, mouths gaping as if about to speak. Most of these heads were clustered on its bowed legs. It had too many veiny arms sprouting haphazardly from the sides of its torso. Another MoFo jittered as it tracked, its back so arched that pearly nubs of spine had split through its skin. Another was larger, its muscular body covered in large, burl-like growths. The smallest one, with tooth-white skin, had only half a body, severed off at the belly button. It used scraggy, jutting, backward-jointed arms like the wing bones of juvenile birds to haul itself across the snow. These things were unspeakable. I would have no way to reconcile these entities with the MoFos I’d known and loved if it weren’t for the giant John Stamos tattoo. These creatures were hunting, releasing grunts that morphed into rancid clouds in the air. I prayed that they hadn’t learned animal instinct, didn’t have Dee’s heightened senses, that they were still MoFo enough in their tracking. I still couldn’t see our beloved eagle. I didn’t know where Migisi was. And then the creatures caught wind of something.
A solitary mouse, Snickers brown and lagging behind his companions, burst into view, racing for his whiskered life. The Changed Ones focused on the tiny, terrified being as it wrestled an endless white tundra. Dee didn’t breathe. The Changed One tilted its many heads to watch the rodent. The mouse scurried on. We watched, praying the beavers could stay as still as the sticks of their home, that our bodies wouldn’t betray us with their noises. We crouched in agony near The Changed Ones. Then, the one with many heads lunged. A whiplike tongue—long as a rat snake—shot from one of its gaping mouths and lassoed the mouse. It sucked back into a gaping mouth hole. The little brown mouse vanished. Scarlet foam hung from the creature’s sickly pink jaws. And then it did something unthinkable.
“Caw! Caw! Caw!” Strings of red flew as it called out in the perfect pitch of a crow. It was telling them to keep searching. She is out there.
The creature then—a study in the unexpected—growled. The growl of a mighty cat from Malaysia, a perfect mimicry of Eko, Liem, and Olan. Then it let out a gull’s salty laughter—a language that borders and connects Aura and Echo.
These abominations were mutants, thieves stealing from the natural world—amphibian, reptile, insect, mammal. I didn’t care about Onida or prophecies or the delusions of marine mammals; Dee needed to be somewhere safe. Somewhere with impenetrable doors and iron locks. With me.
I felt Dee stir. Her free arm stretched out, her fi
ngers slipping into snow. She clutched something tightly. I looked up at her to tell her to stop—no, no, no, don’t be stupid, Dee—by bulging my eyeballs like a rubber chicken caught between a rock and The Rock. She gave me a slow blink—an affectionate gesture in cat. And then, in a lightning move, she lobbed it. The thing—rock or ball, I’ll never know—sailed through the air in a high arch at the mercy of Dee’s throwing arm, an arm that would have done the Seacrows quarterback Russell Wilson proud. Sickly heads shot to attention, and The Changed Ones scrabbled after the clunk of the projectile slamming onto the ground.
Dee’s eyes squinted to focus between the sticks to connect with the beady brown eyes of terrified aquatic engineers. She gave a bow—a sign of respect in crow—and launched us from the beaver hideout. Dee bolted across slush, and once her mukluks touched firmer ground, she began a turbocharged sprint. I kept my beak trained on the vast sugaring of snow ahead. In Dee’s tight grip, I couldn’t turn back, couldn’t see if The Changed Ones had seen us and what they would look like once they’d seen Dee—the very MoFo they’d been hunting.
Where are you, Migisi? I searched the sky for chocolate wings.
Dee didn’t stop her long-distance sprint as the road curved, and then, in a most shitty turn of events, the sky began to scream again. They were flying fast, faux-hawk screams swelling between our ears, and Dee picked up the pace, feet barely licking the snow. She flew across a parking lot and past an armored Winnebago with an “I ❤️ Uranus” sticker on it and a disemboweled lawn mower and through great glassless doors and up a sleeping escalator and then we were under a roof with busted skylights, and after interrupting a cluster of squirrels who were fornicating loudly on top of a sign that said “Self Help,” we stopped.
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