Feral Creatures

by Kira Jane Buxton

  The Hollow Hatchling yells out. I don’t know this call, but her bald beak is leaky, her face is flower red. She bears the sadness of an ancient oak. The Hollow face can tell so much.

  She looks at S.T. in the crush of the Great Insect. She has already lost everything.

  The tiger moves toward the Great Insect. Closer. Closer. The stinger is sharp and ready for striped fur. The tiger will soon not know itself. And the Hollow Hatchling, S.T.’s Dee, will not stand a chance.

  “Come together, Blackwings, come together!” I call. We are ready to swarm around S.T.’s Hollow. He loves her and we love her too. We’ll protect her in the code of murder. In the name of nature.

  The Hollow Hatchling calls out so loud the tigers flinch. She jumps in front of the tiger. She is brave as a hummingbird. Fearless as a Sky Sentinel. The Great Insect pauses. It holds back its stinger. S.T. hangs limp in its claw. Dee leaps at the stinger, hurling herself toward the sharp poison.

  “No!” I call out. The Blackwings join me. “No, Dee! No! No! No!”

  The Great Insect swings its stinger away from Dee, flinging S.T. to the ground. It will not sting The Last’s skin. Dee throws herself to where S.T. lies, his beautiful black feathers in her paws. She performs a Hollow ritual, slumping to the ground. She lifts him in the scoops of her strong branches. She pulls our Brother Blackwing to her face. Dee wails, the cries of loss, of hollow longing. Her pain is so heavy, we all fight to fly. Her eyes close and her body suffers an inner earthquake. Her pain dances up around us in jagged bolts like northern lights. S.T. is boneless. His sad wing hangs.

  “The Insect!” I yell to the sky sentinels. We swoop around a glassy head and compound eye. The tigers swipe their claws at the Great Insect, but not too close—they know that stinger’s power. I zoom in, close to its many frog-egg eyes and it swings a claw at me. Snap! I dodge it.

  And the Great Insect opens its jaws and it calls out too. A scream. A screech of The Changed Ones.

  “Rise, Blackwings! Rise!” I tell them. We spiral above the Great Insect and we see them coming. More bird Changed Ones. They are distant, but there are many of them, flying toward us, calling for our deaths. And behind them, we see The Weavers as they spider across the ground—they are coming too.

  The tigers pace. They roar and bite at the quick distance between them and the Great Insect. They cannot get close and so they can do nothing.

  And Dee is on the ground, rounded like a rock. She scoops S.T. and she empties out what is inside of her. Her breaths are a wounded rabbit’s. A storm passes through her, rain pours from her eyes. She hums in her breast, the hum of the hive. Like S.T., she straddles worlds. They were hybrid together. They were part of each other. I mustn’t think of this.

  I hear her sing the song of bees.

  The Weavers and The Flight Ones and The Beetle Kind are coming.

  We cannot stop them, we all know it.

  But we will fight with every last feather. Together.

  We will always watch out for you, S.T. In life and what flies beyond.

  That is the code of murder.

  Chapter 33

  The Letter

  Little One,

  I know you won’t read this, but perhaps, somehow, someone will. Someone who’ll see who you are, that you need someone to love you when I’m gone. We don’t have the time I thought we did. We were cheated. I guess none of us are guaranteed life, but I still want it so much. Maybe that’s a very lovely thing, to suffer so terribly and to still want to breathe the earth’s air, to still want to sit and watch the river. After all that’s happened, I still believe the earth is worth it. I believe she has a soul, and maybe, I write this to her. I just want to hold you for longer. I want to watch you grow. I’m so hungry to know who you’ll be. I know I can’t have these things. I can’t stop my loved ones from losing their souls. And I can’t stop the tears.

  Something’s happening inside me. I can feel it moving around, cold and angry, hiding behind my eyes, growing and replicating. It’s taking over, so I write this quickly as my time runs out. My time runs out.

  We met in my body and I knew you were very special. Very special. You were born in our cabin, but I was alone because some of the sick had come to our village and there was fighting. You were born silent. You were born and the winds were strong and the trees rustled. The trees our elders first fought about—foreign trees that grew here so fast, so tall, away from their homeland. Some elders tried to cut the outsiders down, others tied their bodies to trunks and called out for mercy. Now we cherish and honor our strange trees because they were a gift from someone unseen. You were born and there were great white owls sitting outside the window in those trees, watching with yellow eyes. I couldn’t leave the bed and then shadow filled the cabin’s front door. A moose—the largest I have ever seen, with antlers like a chandelier—stood at the front of the cabin. He tried to get in the door, and shaking, cornered, I aimed a rifle at his head.

  “What do you want?” I yelled.

  The moose didn’t take his eyes off you.

  “Go!” I yelled. “You can’t have her!”

  The moose was not afraid and watched without moving. The great moose and the white owls watched you, Little One. The moose left very slowly, and the night filled with sounds, a night so bright the moon hurt my eyes. And the owls watched you from the window. I was so afraid, but you weren’t. You stared at them as if you’d met them before. On the night you were born, an unkindness of ravens flew over our cabin; they sang an eerie song and I knew they were calling for you. I lit a fire and held you close, and I knew then that you were extraordinary.

  When the doctor came, she said you were different. I already knew. She said we would need to do tests, but there was no longer anyone to give them. No tests. No labels. Time running out. So, you were just extraordinary.

  Everyone in the village fell sick—their eyes, their hands—I don’t have time to speak of it. We thought we had survived when the rest of the world hadn’t. Even your father lost the light in his eyes. I knew what was coming, so I broke my own heart and tricked them. I locked them in the basement. I’m going to join them before it’s too late, but not you. It will kill me, but I am already dying. I feel it. I have to believe that there’s a chance for you. Am I insane to think this? Is it my right mind’s choice? I’m terrified. I have to believe that the girl who won’t stop crying until she hears the birds is where she needs to be. I have to believe that the one I’ve always spoken to—a whisper I hear in trees, the voice of water, the thing I see in the eyes of animals—is listening. I cry rivers and I give you to the earth.

  I did it for you, Little One. I did it for you, Little One. I did it for you, Little One. I knew you were special. I need to find them. They must be close by. My time runs out.

  Something’s happening inside me. My time runs out.     Runs out.

     I’m going to lock us in.   I’m going to lock us all in.

   The screens.     I’ll just find a screen.     I’ll find a screen. I am

  rewriting what’s inside me.     Changing from the inside.

  I’ll kill them all.    I’ll kill you all.     I’m starving for screens. Starving

  for screens.     Starving for screens. I’ll kill you all. I’ll kill you all.

  I’ll kill you.

  Changing.     Something’s happening inside me.

  Find the screens.   Starving. Starving.   My time’s run out. I’ll kill you

  all.    I’m starving for screens.    Starving for screens.

  I’m starving for screens.

  I have to let you go.

  Chapter 34

  S.T.

  Chateau Ste. Michelle, Woodinville, Washington, USA

  My nictitating membranes burst open like the velvet curtains at Big Jim’s beloved old strip club Jiggles (formally the comedy club, Giggles). Dee’s face shone down on me. I was soaked with her tears.
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  “You’re okay, my nestling, everything’s okay. I’m here,” I told her, just as I did when she waddled in a makeshift moss diaper or when she’d wandered too many tree trunks ahead, wailing because she couldn’t see me. I wiggled to feel what was happening in my body. My rib cage throbbed. My gular fluttered like a hawk moth. I felt distinctly like something chewed up and shat out by a dyspeptic giraffe.

  Dee, laughing and crying in a complex cabaret of pure emotion, let my name roll from her tongue again and again. “Astee, Astee, Astee!”

  I looked around.

  Above us, my crow family swarmed and whirled and cawed. To my left, I saw a white MoFo tent, some sort of enormous gathering shelter that ran along the horizon as far as the eye could see. In front of it, The Wasp Queen in a standoff with three tiger brothers, Eko, Liem, Olan. The tigers looked like creatures who knew death was coming for them, its soft fruit scent convening in the clouds. And to my right, the distant bodies of Changed Ones—masses of their strange heads and stolen bodies, bird, spider, beetle—were coming for us.

  But above me, The Sun. She hummed the hive song.

  We would be together. And it would be okay. The truth is that we are all just little owlets imprinting on one another. When you love someone with your soul, they never really leave you; they are hemmed into your heart. It was this way with Dennis. Big Jim. Nargatha. Tiffany S.

  I was glad I was shit at counting. MoFos counted their lives in days and months and years. They got it wrong. Lives aren’t measured this way. It’s not about how many sunrises we have but how much we fill them with fervor and flight.

  Dee shot to her feet. She cradled me carefully in her arms. Then started a vigorous sniffing. She tilted her head, then let out an excited yelp. The Changed Ones grew larger as they neared. Dee looked up to the sky above the white MoFo tent.

  Cresting over the top of the fluttering tent was a swarm. Millions of insects formed a pointillism, rendering the whole sky a fuzzy TV screen. Dee hummed louder, calling out to them.

  “Astee!” she said. “Sky, Astee!” And the great mass, a veritable cloud formation of bees, descended on her, forming a second skin. Their deafening buzz filled my head; bees landed on my feathers, my beak. I saw their beautiful boiling across Dee’s skin. She’d called them to her for comfort. And after the fuzzy tunnel of bees came birds. Not crows this time, but gulls. Glaucous-winged and western gulls swirling the sky in white and silver, splashes of marigold beaks and sugar-pink legs. They called out in questioning keens.

  Dee called back to them in gull from the back of her throat, skin buzzing with bees, heart buzzing with excitement.

  But The Weavers kept coming. And The Masticators skittered toward us with twitchy mechanical limbs. They were starting to conquer the stretch of open land between us. Coming for us, always coming for us.

  The gulls looped in the sky above Dee and she held up her arms and called out to them, her smile blooming. Over an evacuation tent like a white surrender flag came semipalmated plovers, dunlins, and western sandpipers—shorebirds with twig legs and tweezer beaks. They wove their bodies through the tapestry of sky and gull and bee. Black oystercatchers followed them with Vegas-orange bills, and now the sky was speckled with seabirds. Cassin’s auklets smudged in charcoal and Leach’s storm petrels cut above us with forked tails and ghost colors. Common murres came next, and then the cormorants came—double-crested, Brandt’s, pelagic—birds with serpent necks and gorgeous glossy feathers that sang for salt. Then came the arctic terns—the big beautiful blue’s migrational marathoners who travel the equivalent of three or more round trips to the moon in their long lives—swirling in white bodies sporting dapper black caps.

  Dee screeched in delight. These were birds of Echo, the birds that bridge sky and sea. Birds of Echo had come, and I thought about the orcas and Onida. Everything is connected, I thought. Life is a breathtaking concatenation.

  At the end, they lifted Dee’s heart, and that was enough for me.

  The first of The Weavers was now placing spiked legs down on the same grass field we stood on. The Masticators came in a palsied shimmy. They ran fast. Incoming artillery.

  I felt a rumble and squinted at a dandelion. Even if we would not, this beautiful weed that flourished in buttery yellow optimism would live on, spinning sunshine into sugar. Imagine getting to live in a world so beautiful that even a weed is a golden treasure. I took comfort in this thought as I saw the dandelion pulse from the shock of something that shook the earth.

  And The Weavers filled in all around, taking up space that wasn’t theirs, their specialty. The tigers panicked. They formed a striped circle. The Great Insect readied to give its command. And The Changed Ones caught up to us and crouched, poised for violence. Ready to do what their dictator demanded.

  Then came music I’d missed as much as the crinkle of a Cheeto® bag.

  “Scrreeeeedeeeee, screeeeeeeedeeeeee!”

  The call of a snowy owl.

  Dee jumped up and down. She sent bright sounds up to the owls who had raised her. We saw Ookpik and Bristle first, side by side in stealth flight. Little Wik burst onto the scene with a screech. The Hook came after like a flat-faced king. Dee held her breath, waiting for her pepper-winged guardian. We heard her first, screaming out for her owlet. And there was Kuupa, her one citrine eye igniting when it found Dee. Dee lifted her arms and Kuupa whooshed by them, a brush with flight feathers.

  The calls of barred owls dropped from the air like round, ripe figs. And then owls were everywhere—flammulated, great gray, long- and short-eared, burrowing, and northern pygmy owls. A great parliament with wings that sliced the air like sashimi knives.

  You could feel the forgiveness for little Dee.

  Kraai and the murder panicked; owls and crows are sworn enemies. But Migisi—incubator of eggs and interspecies diplomat—maintained a steady glide between all the birds, calling out that it was safe. “Mixed up, altogether” was the rough tune of her piccolo notes.

  And then a roar convoked the last of our adrenaline. A roar that ran up every spine in a multimile radius. Tigers spun toward the tents. White material rippled as something made its way through them. Another gruff roar. Emerging from the mouth of the tents were great winter-white masses with snowshoe paws. They lumbered forth with undulating shoulders and fur thick as snowdrifts.

  Polar bears.

  Walking together—twenty or thirty or thirty-five of them. I couldn’t believe my beady little hybrid eyes. And then another lance of panic as I remembered the bony polar bear who clamped its jaws on Dee when she was just a hatchling. I was filled with the memory smell of moss and berry and starvation. What had these bears come for?

  Dee roared back at the bears with a spring shower of a smile. The bees lifted from her, making intricately morphing patterns above her.

  Led by Kuupa and her great peppery wings, the owls screeched and swooped in between the polar bears, and I realized then that the polar bears were on our side. They’d come to help us.

  The Wasp Queen swiveled her strange head, watching great white bears. The Changed Ones waited for her command. Bears, birds, bees. But even with the bears, The Changed Ones outnumbered us.

  The Queen’s antennae lifted. And The Changed Ones charged. Polar bears lifted onto their hind legs, swiping with massive paws. Weavers sank their fangs into white fur. Talons swooped down from the sky and went for the eyes of Masticators. Three tigers spun and lunged. Olan let out a glass-breaking bellow as a Masticator bit off his tail. He retaliated by decapitating the monster. The Changed Ones surged forth in a frenzied swarm. The bears roared, tearing off jittery limbs and gnarled wings, but The Changed Ones kept coming. They poured in from the Chateau grounds. And we could do nothing to stop them.

  I looked down at the tenacious dandelion flower. It pulsed. And pulsed again, each time with more vigor. And The Wasp Queen lifted its antennae to the air, ready to conduct chaos.

  A hollow sound pounded the earth. The white flags of the wine ten
t came under attack. Material fluttered and billowed, sharp tearing sounds everywhere as it was shredded, crushed into mud.

  Oh no, I thought.

  The hollow sounds of hooves.

  An ambush. Another monster, a hooved hybrid on one side. Bird, beetle, spider, and wasp things on the other. The end had come.

  Thousands of birds and bees eddied above us—the bees louder than I’d ever heard—but it wasn’t enough. Polar bears, splattered in red, bellowed and lunged at The Changed Ones. One lifted up onto its hind legs like an Arctic King, bringing down his weight onto a Weaver. I looked up at the birds, especially my crow family and the great owls who’d loved Dee from the start. At least there would be winged witnesses to the end. I lifted my beak to them, to their calligraphy in the clouds.

  The poles that held the enormous white tent structure couldn’t hold. They hit the ground with a metallic clatter.

  They were here. There was a wall stretching as wide as the great horizon. A wall of dense, wiry fur, and—I was right—hooves, mighty cloven hooves. Boned horns curling from their skulls. Shaggy-bodied beasts. These were not Changed Ones. These were prehistoric beings who once stormed through an ice age alongside woolly mammoths and short-faced bears. Like birds, these were the ones who had survived. Here were the soldiers of The Tundra.

  Side to side, colossal hoof to hoof, were millions and billions and gazillions of tons of musk oxen. And at the helm of this horizon-wide cloven force was an enormous brute of an ox with a heart the size of Alaska.

  Oomingmak.

  The whole of Alaska had come for Dee. The Last MoFo On Earth had nestled her way into the hearts of creatures and here were those hearts, beating wildly in a Hollow Kingdom.

  Oomingmak saw Dee. Dee saw Oomingmak.