The five other cassowaries huddled together, staring at the black little earth bird with more than a modicum of confusion. One cassowary, who I quickly discerned as the male partner to the bird upon whose back I squatted, fixed his gaze on Budiwati. His approach was sheepish. He cautiously tip-taloned toward her. She dwarfed him.
“Budiwati…”
She swung her burning eyes to meet her partner’s, her neck coiling skyward—a roused cobra—to her full height.
“Perhaps, darling, you should reconsider this,” he said with trepidation. “We could stay here near the lake where it’s safer and—”
Budiwati let out a scream that blew her partner’s red wattle scarves into the air behind him.
“Have a lovely time, darling!” he said, shuffling back to the cluster of cassowaries who seemed unsurprised by this exchange.
That great helmet—the peak of a barren mountain—swiveled back to me.
“For whom should we hunt first?” Budiwati’s diesel voice was laced with menace.
“The crows,” I said. “I need to find my family. The crows know everything about The Changed Ones. They’ll help me find Dee.”
She paused. I imagined Mr. Budiwati’s words sinking into her skin, the realization that being the Uber driver for a total stranger was a potential death sentence.
“Inside you, are you a slow loris?” she asked. It took a minute to think about what she meant as I flipped through images in my head, scrolling to a National Geographic documentary on the slow loris—an adorable, gong-eyed Indonesian primate that covers its face when frightened.
“Yes, I’m afraid,” I told her. “But inside, I’m a dinosaur.”
“Which way?” she said, and I felt her enormous leg maneuver underneath me, her three toe-daggers fashioning grand canyons into the world of Web.
“Honestly, I don’t have a clue,” I told her, exasperated.
“This way! This way!” chorused the penguins, as they threw out blares and peeps and shuddering honks. The sounds swirled and pinged against our skin, forming a mind map inside us. “Go this way!”
“We believe in you!”
“You can do it!”
“Find the crows! Find the Keeper!”
Budiwati’s eyes lingered on me, the oasis of each pupil swelling. In the sheen of her eyes I saw the reflection of a little black bird with a broken heart.
A crocodilian rumble shuddered free from her throat. “I do hope you can hold on,” she said. I was skewered by a cold spear of fear. There was an unbridled mischief in this voice, and the terse exchange with her partner told me that creatures did not fucketh with this bird. Budiwati was leggy and lawless. And she was calling all the shots.
She liberated another primordial roar, raking the earth with her toes. I turned to the kayak shed.
“Press—”
Budiwati rocketed into motion. A few muscular strides brought us to the cruising speed of a hipster’s well-maintained Subaru. I barely got to hear the penguins’ honking vibrato song about The One Who Keeps: Very Handsome Legend. Trees and foliage whizzed by in a speeding train of greens—chartreuse, olive, emerald, bottle, shamrock, sage, crocodile, and pickle. Houses were a brick blur. My face felt like it was being lambasted by a large industrial fan. Above us, Pressa flapped furiously, riding the sediment stream of aerial plankton.
I jolted up and down on Budiwati’s back, flung about like a show-jumping stallion’s sugar lumps.
I’m coming, Dee. I’ll find you. Or I’ll die trying.
It was a suicide mission to leave one of the only safe areas left in Seattle. To put my trust in an emotionally constipated dinosaur.
I was experiencing acute déjà death—the familiar feeling that we were about to snuff it.
I knew why I was doing this, but why was Budiwati doing this?
Pressa sliced the sky to keep up with Budiwati. The trees that surged beside us were scooped out and hollow, their slow rhythms stilled. Some surely sat with bodies inside them. Incubating—what did Ghubari call them?—Masticators, imitation bark beetles waiting to unleash their horrors.
Focus, Shit Turd. Focus on hope. Find the Sky Sentinels. They’ll know what to do.
Budiwati skidded to a halt, my beak slamming into the back of her leathery neck. Her head darted in a reptilian manner. The draping black feathers of her body started to vibrate, accompanied by a throaty, blood-chilling hiss. I peered around her snaking neck. In front of us—Changed Ones.
Pressa’s wingbeats drummed out a panicked solo.
“Run! Fall back! Fall back!” yelled Pressa.
“What she said!” I squawked.
A Changed One swiveled to face us with a horrific crack of bone. It was fused to the side of a dusty food truck, glued by sticky finger pads and a transparent webbing between its joints. Moody gray skin, body slippery and muscled in the manner of a reptile. Branded with burn marks and the silver ghosts of scars. Rusted barbed wire coiled tightly around her muzzle. Chains embedded into her calloused skin trailed behind her—jewelry of the damned. A jigsaw piece of her skull was missing to expose a swath of glistening gray brain. Clumps of moss had affixed to the exposed gray matter, literal moss on the mind—it was revolting, I hope you’re not eating. A screwdriver stuck angrily out from the compacted snake of brain tissue, and I suspected then that at some point, a long time ago, this Changed One had been tortured and terrorized by MoFos. Treated like an animal.
Her sleek body shimmied from the food truck with a gecko’s precision. Dart and stop. Dart and stop. She paused in a large oily puddle in the road. Bloodshot eyes absorbed a hissing cassowary. The other Changed One was as white as bone, on all fours with backward joints and the fleshy tail of a sun-starved thing. Its white hair hung like limp straw, pointed ears erect. Its face wasn’t visible because it was stuck in a large metal coffee can. Fading words blazoned the exposed base of the can—RECYCLE. Stealthy and silent, these Changed Ones were working together, as each other’s eyes and ears. The one with a can stuck to its face angled its pointed ears back and forth, listening to paint the picture in front of it. I didn’t know how it had survived and I didn’t fucking care. I had a black belt in running away from things and I wasn’t afraid to use it. I felt Budiwati’s muscles ripple underneath me, the comforting squeeze of a pending retreat.
Nope.
Budiwati let out a battle cry and ran straight at the Changed One with the Phillips-head lodged in its noggin.
“No, no, no, no, no!” I yelled as my little black body jockeyed up and down. Trees bounced. Pressa screamed. I swear I heard an earthworm laughing, that sadistic fuck crumb. The Changed One shimmied across the puddle as if also liquid. As large bird and large beast were about to collide, Budiwati’s power-pylon legs catapulted us into the air. For a moment, we were flying. She thrust her mighty legs forward, jacking them into the chest of the lizard creature. The force of the kick sent the lizard flying, slamming into the side of the food truck with a metallic clang.
Budiwati shrieked and the coffee can snapped toward her. Three muscular strides and Budiwati was can-to-face with Can Face. She kicked the can upward, a neck snapped, alabaster body flipping into the air. It landed in the puddle. Budiwati pummeled it with those enormous feet, stomping and huffing in low growls.
The reptile creature recovered from her colossal kick, lifting onto two legs, memory of muscle. It ran like a frantic basilisk lizard toward us.
“Chain lizard incoming!” I screamed in the soprano of a Bee Gee.
Budiwati’s bone helmet lifted. And as the Changed One with its scars and chains and tightly bound muzzle was almost upon us, lizard legs readying to pounce, Budiwati swung her weapon-like second toe diagonally down its chest. A bloom of bright red entrails splat onto the road in front of us. Budiwati turned her attention to the pale, can-faced Changed One. She bobbed her head and brought those legs down onto its pallid body, again and again and again, not totally unlike a more violent version of Tom Hanks’s Riverdance.
�
��I think you’ve extinguished it,” I told her, noting that when Aura was back up, I’d need to locate an emotional support animal. Surely the right peacock was out there…
I turned to find we had more company. We’d attracted the attention of a huge festering clot of sick MoFos.
“Fuck trinkets,” I said, eloquently.
A gang of them, rotten imitations of earthly things. There were too many for even three dinosaurs. In unison, vermillion eyes rolled into focus, widening at the colossal bird and its plucky passenger. Budiwati let out a hiss that was missing steam. She knew we were outnumbered.
“Oh no…” dropped from Pressa above us.
A heavy feeling sank all my organs.
And then, a frenetic whirring sounded out in the boisterous hum of Tiffany S.’s mini vibrator. A fun-sized bird darted past Pressa while letting out staccato drt! notes. It stopped on a dime in midair, wings in a blurred flurry of motion, its throat magenta and opalescent, shimmering like a sequined scarf. An Anna’s hummingbird. We stared at her in a slow-motion stupor, and I swear I heard Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.”
Budiwati hissed at the encroaching gang of Changed Ones. The Changed Ones kept rapt focus on the miniature bird hovering above them. Hummingbirds have great healing powers; those burring wings will heal a wounded heart, beat for beat. Was it the gossamer fairy wings? Those hypnotic figure eights? The dazzling metallic rainbow of color? Was there something deep inside The Changed Ones that recognized the wonder of nature’s exquisite imagination? Could this glittery miracle have done the impossible, warm candy colors searing through festering skin to restart the human heart?
Pressa lowered to my side, eyes filled with terror.
“There are too many, S.T.,” she whispered.
The hummingbird materialized in front of Pressa’s beak.
“The bees! The bees sent me! Don’t worry! I’m here!” chirped the Anna’s hummingbird. This wasn’t terribly reassuring—a bit like we’d shown up to a sword fight with a carrot. Or a miniature vibrator. She threw out more chip notes. The Changed Ones became enraged, leaping and swiping at the air around her. And it dawned on me. Those drt, drt, drt, sounds were exactly like the typing taps of an iPhone.
The sick MoFos burst into palsied lunges, triggered by the taps of an iPhone, limbs raking at the sky to snatch the hummingbird. The aerodynamic jewel dove and wove around them, a shimmering will-o’-the-wisp, out of reach.1
“Fuck. You. My. Flowers!” The Anna’s hummingbird shot down to a gooseberry flower for a quick sugar hit. She darted into the air again, almost too fast for an eye to follow. Then the Lilliputian bird dove—faster than a fighter plane—right at a Changed One. She poked it squarely in the eye before rocketing up to the height of an evergreen. She whizzed back past the disoriented cluster of Changed Ones, who lurched like old machines to locate the airborne iPhone. Budiwati used the distraction to escape. We owed our lives to an itsy-bitsy bird with so many secrets in its prismatic plumage.
And we ran and ran, buoyed by a bird the size of Big Jim’s house key.
Budiwati broke into a freedom run. Pressa weaved above. For a moment, fear released its talon-hold on my neck. Budiwati’s feet pounded a rhythm. I started to hear excited whispering among living trees. I tuned in, and even while traveling at Subaru speed, I heard the crisp crunch of many-legged beings inspired by our boldness, stirring in soil. I heard the halcyon rhythms of the natural world crescendo into an oratorio of liberty, as if the sounds themselves were on a great adventure.
I didn’t know Budiwati’s past, but she was writing a new story with each footfall. Fear would not map her course. She was feral, free, and possibly a few flamingoes short of a flamboyance. The sun shone on her tropical-lagoon-to-fire-engine colors. She unshackled a paralyzing roar. Sure, tonally, it sounded like the backfiring bowels of Hades, but it was also one of the most magnificent things I’d ever heard. With that oratorial firework of freedom, I knew I had been wrong to try and hide Dee. Because what kind of a life is a life lived in fear? What kind of hollow living meant you couldn’t stretch your wings and scream the song inside of you? Dee knew a caged life, clipped wings, slinking in the shadows. She knew what it felt like to be ashamed of who you are, to be herded into a skin that doesn’t suit. Dee deserved to sing her own songbird’s aria, to push up from the dirt, to reach for the sun. I had to show her that I hadn’t been listening and that now, I had tuned in and I could hear everything.
Budiwati’s call was the eruption of an ancient volcano, a celebration that rained down in fiery liquid. I remembered the orcas, the shrew skittering through soil. I thought of what the big male orca had said—“We use sound to tell us things, more than what we meet with our eyes. It is our great gift”—and if this Indonesian dinosaur had the courage to break away from her chains, then so did this little corvidosaurus. The sea wolves used sound to seal the intimacy of their pods. Tribal tones. And I remembered a gift that I’d always had. One of the most heeded calls in the animal kingdom. MoFos inspired crows—their avian shadows—to evolve alongside them, challenging us to compete with the boisterous bedlam of MoFo life. To lift our voices to the blare of the bulldozer, police siren song, the seismic tease of a subwoofer. I opened my beak and freed a sound recognizable to every being on earth. Five sharp caws.
The corvid alarm.
A pause. And then, buoyed by flipping the bird in the face of danger, I let out five more. I was a crow and this was my song.
“Caw! Caw! Caw! Caw! Caw!” My calls filled the spaces between the trees. I cawed for the family of crows who made me proud to have fought for life from the chalky chamber of an egg. I imagined what the orcas would see—neon bursts of prismatic color shooting from The One Who Keeps, up and everywhere like a bioluminescent sea of electric-blue stars. Budiwati fucking loved it. Having savored the flavor of her own freedom, she was guzzling up mine. She threw back her casque—that great bone helmet—dangly wattle swinging. We roared the roar of dinosaurs, calling back to primordial things we once were. Bird-boned beings that had navigated a treacherous environment, supervolcanoes, an ice age, and a colossal ball of fire on the horizon that broiled everything to crispy critters. We were things that knew how to survive, then and now.
A feeling—one I hadn’t felt in so very, very long—sparked and spit and sang like a mini meteor inside me. Freedom. Purpose. Passion.
This is the feeling of flight. This is what it is to fly.
And so, three fucking dinosaurs screamed across the never-ending stretch of an extinct road. And it didn’t take long before we were heard. Sound traveled on the wind, across the crowns of faraway trees to reach us.
“Caw! Caw! Caw Caw!”
“A crow! A crow!” yelled Pressa. She called back.
Budiwati roared in delight. Pressa and I upped our game, spilling out the alarm. Louder. Faster.
The crow called back again. And then another. Stentorian sounds pinging through the air like rainbow rockets. Then came a how how how—a jungle jingle—another animal, inspired to blow its bagpipe lungs. More and more crows joined in the cacophony, Aura reconnecting, spreading an emergency call to action.
We were kindled by the sonorous calls of the crows, and other birds joined in too. Ants cheered in chemical chorus. Lemurs and golden lion tamarins—old funny-faced friends—swung into view in the trees beside us, spaghetti limbs and Silly Putty bodies that weren’t going to let fear suffocate them either. They added whistling clicks to the symphony—the eeeeooooooooow, eeeeeooooooooow holler of the lemurs, bewitching the air. Because when you’re courageous, it is an invitation to others. The sky surrenders before those brave enough to leave the branch.
“It’s The One Who Keeps!” I heard them call.
“The One Who Walks With Tigers!”
“Hero! The hero is here!”
“The One Who Rode The Mythical Stallion Of The Canine World!”
“Look! It’s The Legless Half-Breed Made Of Tumbleweeds!”
I
wasn’t thrilled that certain nicknames had stuck.
And then the sky was a pointillism of crows—“They’re here! They’ve found us!” cried Pressa. Crows settled gently all around us like siftings of gunpowder. A sea of beady black eyes shone down at us from a patchwork quilt of leaves. I spotted Kraai. He stared at me, opened and then closed his beak. Kraai was speechless. He hadn’t predicted that I’d arrive on a dinosaur. Old Shit Turd is full of fucking surprises.
“Kraai! I need your help! They took Dee!”
“I’m so sorry, S.T.,” he said, his voice thick in his throat.
“Do The Changed Ones have a den?”
“Yes,” said Kraai, thinly masking his stupefaction at the almost-seven-foot bird eyeing him like something that had been peeled from the shoe of a landfill laborer. “This way—where the sun wakes.”
“We have to hurry.”
“S.T., you must prepare yourself—” and then he stopped. Maybe he could see through my black breast, right to the big little heart inside, tattered and frayed, desperate pleas for Dee in its hollow beats. “Quick as we can! This way; follow our sky path!” yelled Kraai as he shot into the air with the grace of light.
The path we followed was twisty to avoid floods. Fire-singed buildings with delicate bones. The territories of terrible things. We saw deer, galloping wild horses, dog packs in homemade dens, Frito-toothed beavers, the glowworm eyes of feral cats. My heart fought with my rib cage, as if trying to burst through my chest and find Dee itself. I didn’t know where we’d find her, whether we’d get there in time…
But the crows—birds with guts and gumption—and the wattled gladiator who charged through a glaucous ghost of a city kept my heart beating.
I’m coming, Dee. Hang on. I’m coming, Dee. Hang on.
And I don’t know how long we ran, but every second felt like a life sentence without the being who was born to love bees, the little miracle who had been ushered into my life by owls and had made the whole world sprout sense.
Feral Creatures Page 24