The tithes of Mousetail Divisional Academy do not know and cannot see the dark thunderheads growing to the south. It is a tempest far more devastating than they dare imagine, which threatens to end them before the scalpel can.
On the night before the Stork Brigade’s planned attack, the tithes take to their beds after gentle prayer and the brushing of teeth, never suspecting that judgment will soon rain upon them with ballistic intensity, unless an unexpected front moves in to quiet the storm.
28 • Starkey
He is abducted in the middle of the night. It’s different from the time the clappers came for him. This time his attackers are of the stealth kind, rather than from the school of brute force. They sneak up to him instead of bludgeoning their way through the rank and file. Without a commotion to alert him, Starkey has no warning before the tranq bullet pierces his thigh. Not a tranq dart, which is kinder and gentler, but a full-payload chemical bullet that explodes like a bug on a windshield but only after penetrating deep into the epidermis. Tranq bullets hurt like hell, even if they don’t do any real damage.
The pain jolts Starkey awake just long enough to register that he’s been tranq’d, then he’s swallowed by unconsciousness once more.
• • •
He’s awakened sometime later by a slap to the face. A hard one. Then another, because the first slap didn’t quite do the job. The third slap is purely gratuitous on the part of the assailant, whoever he is.
“Awake yet, stork boy?” says a man with tousled hair and a severe expression. “Or do you need another one?”
“Go to hell,” Starkey grunts out. That summons forth another slap, this one backhanded and brutal. It would sting quite a lot if he weren’t still numb from the tranqs. He feels blood on his face, though. The guy has a ring that cut Starkey’s cheek.
“Whoever you are, you’re a dead man,” Starkey tells him, trying not to slur his words. “My storks will find you, kill you, and string you up as a warning for all the other idiots out there.”
“Will they, now?” The man is amused. Sure of himself. This does not bode well for Starkey, and so Starkey takes a moment to measure the situation.
He’s outside in the woods. It’s chilly. Starkey can see only in scant grays and deep royal blues. It must be dawn. He’s bound but not gagged, which means they want him to be able to talk. Negotiate perhaps. His attacker, however, is angry. Very angry.
“Let me go, and we’ll pretend this never happened,” Starkey suggests. He knows it won’t work, but how the man responds will define Starkey’s parameters.
The man’s response is a swift kick to Starkey’s ribs, and he feels at least two of them crack. Starkey falls to the side, moaning in pain that can’t be quelled by the tranqs still in his system. He now knows his parameters. They’re roughly the dimensions of a coffin.
“Don’t break him,” hisses a voice in the shadows. Barely a voice at all—more like the breathy rasp of ghost. Starkey sees a figure shift. The silhouette of a shoulder, but the rest is obscured by a tree. “The less he’s broken, the more he’s worth.”
The man backs off, but he doesn’t seem any less angry. Although he’s not all that big, not all that muscular, his simmering rage makes up for it. Starkey tries not to let the pain in his side drive him toward panic. There’s never been a trap he hasn’t been able to get out of. He escaped from the Juvey-rounders who came to unwind him, and killed one of them in the process. He escaped from the Graveyard, even though he had to shatter his own hand to do it. The lesson? He can escape from any situation . . . but he must be willing to do the unthinkable.
“Let me kill him!” says the brutal one, clearly the enforcer of this team. “Let me kill him and be done with it.”
“Stick to the plan,” rasps the voice in the shadows. “He’s worth more to us alive.”
Starkey tries to calculate how far he might be from safety. The growing light confirms that it’s daybreak. They took him sometime during the night. He could be hours away from his storks, or just outside the gate of the abandoned power plant they’ve been calling home. The plant is on the banks of the Mississippi. He tries to listen for the river, but realizes that the river moves so slowly, you couldn’t hear it if it were right behind you. You can smell it, though. He takes a deep whiff. The air does not have the unpleasant smell of organic decay married to chemical runoff that typifies the Mississippi. His panic begins bubbling to the surface again.
And this on what should be the day of his greatest harvest camp attack.
“What do you want?” he asks.
Finally the second assailant steps out of the shadows. There’s a third one too. Shorter than the other two, lingering back. He holds something in his hand. Could be a weapon of some sort. While the enforcer’s face is fully exposed, these other two wear black ski masks hiding their faces in wool-knit obscurity.
“Beg for your life,” says the third assailant, with the same breathy hiss as the other masked kidnapper.
“I don’t beg,” announces Starkey, and his posturing is met with silence. As his arms are tied behind his back, he has to squirm up to a sitting position. “But I’m sure we can work this out.”
“We know who you are,” says the enforcer. “There’s a reward on your head—dead or alive. I prefer dead.”
Now he thinks he knows their play. They intend to turn him in for the reward—but they could have just kept him unconscious until they handed him over. They want him to make a better offer, and with the clapper movement behind him, he has the resources to do it.
“Name your price,” Starkey says. “I pay better than the Juvenile Authority.”
The enforcer seethes. “You think this is about money? We’re not interested in yours, or the Juvies’ money either.”
Starkey wasn’t expecting that.
The enforcer looks to the second assailant as if for permission. Number two, who is clearly in charge, nods. Starkey suspects that it’s a woman, but the shadows are still too thick to be sure.
“The Burmese Dah Zey pays in more than just cash,” the enforcer tells him. “It pays in respect. And career advancement.”
Starkey’s fear, which had just been gnawing at him, now clamps down, driving its teeth deep. His blood literally begins to feel cold within his body, like his veins are being caressed with ice. “You can’t be serious.”
But their solemn silence proves that they are. There’s the black market, and then there’s the Dah Zey.
Starkey tries to swallow, but finds his throat too dry. “Okay . . . okay . . . we can work this out. You don’t need to do this; we can work this out.” Maybe he does beg after all.
“Too late for that,” snaps the enforcer.
“No,” rasps the whisperer. “Let him talk.”
Starkey knows this will be the greatest escape act of his life, if he can pull it off. “I can supply you,” he says.
“We don’t need supplies,” says the enforcer.
“That’s not what I mean. If you free me, I can supply you with Unwinds to sell to the Dah Zey. They’re AWOL storks marked for unwinding, so no one will miss them. Imagine that—a constant supply . . . and not just any kids—I’ll give you the cream of the crop. The strongest, the healthiest, the smartest. I’ll keep you flush for a long, long time, and get you that respect you were talking about.”
They just stare at him for a moment. Then the enforcer says, “You would do that? Sacrifice the other storks to save yourself?”
Starkey nods without hesitation. “What you don’t understand is that they need me. They need me more than they need each other.”
Again, weighty silence as they consider it. Starkey wishes he could see their eyes better. He wishes he could see the expressions of the other two behind their ski masks.
“How many will you give us?” the whisperer asks, her voice still a toneless rasp.
“How many do you need?” Starkey forces a smile. “Ten percent? Like a tithing? That’s right, they’ll be like tithes!”
<
br /> Starkey knows he’s getting somewhere. As for the logistics, those can be worked out later. The consequences of this escape can be dealt with. The aftermath is always manageable. All that matters in the moment is the escape itself.
“How could you do that to them?” says the third one, and his whisper breaks, a bit of roundness coming into his timbre. In the back of Starkey’s mind, that voice is familiar, but it’s so far back in his mind, he doesn’t register it yet.
“I can do it because it’s the right thing to do!” Starkey insists. “The idea of a war is more important than any of its warriors. And I am the idea!” Then he looks away. “I don’t expect you to understand that.”
And suddenly the whispering woman isn’t whispering anymore. “We understand a lot more than you think.” Starkey realizes who she is the moment before she removes her ski mask.
“Bam?”
She turns to the third attacker. “Are we good, Jeevan?”
Jeevan removes his mask as well, then fiddles with the small object in his hand. “Yeah, we’re good.”
As the betrayal takes hold in his mind, Starkey finds his fear replaced by fury. He struggles against his bonds. He can escape from the ropes, but it will take time. He doesn’t have time! He wants to tear free now, so he can tear them all apart.
“He should die now!” announces the enforcer, who now paces in the background. “If I still had my garden shears, I’d stab them through his heart right now!”
But apparently no one present has either the guts or the inclination to end his life. It’s their weakness that will save him.
“There’s been enough killing,” Bam says. “Go wait for us in the car. We’ll be there in a minute.”
“Who the hell is that clown?” Starkey asks.
“That ‘clown’ is the head gardener at Horse Creek Harvest Camp,” Jeevan tells him. “You blew up his wife last week. You’re lucky he didn’t blow your brains out just now.”
Starkey turns to Bam, realizing that this is still a negotiation, just a very different one. “Bam, let’s talk about this. You’ve made your point, so let’s talk.”
“I’ll talk,” she says. “And you’ll listen.” She’s calm. Too calm for Starkey’s taste. He much preferred when her anger was out of control. That anger is malleable. It can be shaped any way Starkey wants. But this cool calm is like Teflon. He knows anything he says will slide right off it.
“You’re going to disappear, Mason,” she tells him. “I don’t care where you go, but you’re going to perform a total vanishing act. You will not kill the tithes at Mousetail. You will never attack another harvest camp. You’ll never fight for another ‘cause,’ and most of all, you’ll stay far away from the Stork Brigade, from now until the end of time. Or at least until the end of your miserable life.”
Starkey glares at her. “And why would I do that?”
“This is why.” And she turns to Jeevan, who fiddles with the device in his hands that Starkey had mistaken for a weapon. It’s not a weapon at all; it’s a small recording device. Jeevan hits a button, and it projects a hologram—a miniaturized version of the spot they still stand in, in high definition, just as clear as the real thing. Starkey watches himself say:
“If you free me, I can supply you with Unwinds to sell to the Dah Zey. They’re AWOL storks marked for unwinding, so no one will miss them.”
Starkey finds he can’t contain his anger. He thrashes, making his broken ribs resonate in pain. He practically dislocates his shoulders trying to pull out of the bonds. “You bitch! You made me say that. You made me make the deal!”
And yet Bam holds her Teflon calm. “No one made you do anything, Mason. We just gave you the rope; you’re the one who hung yourself with it.”
Jeevan laughs at that. “Good one,” he says. “Hung himself.”
“If you ever surface again anywhere,” Bam says, “we’ll play that recording for the storks. Not just our storks, but publicly for every stork out there. You’ll go from being their savior to being seen as the self-serving egomaniac that you are.”
“Self-serving? I did all of this for them! All of it.” Starkey would kill them right now if he could. The traitors! He would execute them without the slightest hesitation. Can’t they see what they’re doing? They’re killing a dream larger than all of them. How can storks ever hope to change their plight in the world without their leader?
He wants to scream with a wordless fury, but knows he must try as best he can to match Bam’s detachment. He forces down his anger and says, “It’s the small minds in this world that destroy everything. Don’t be a small mind, Bam. You’re smarter than that. You’re better than that.”
Bam smiles, and Starkey thinks that maybe she’s finally beginning to see the wisdom of his words. Until she says, “You’re so smooth, Mason. You can slide your way into getting what you want, and then convince everyone around you that it’s what they want too. That was your best magic trick. You made everyone believe you were doing this for them—when it was all for the fame and fortune of Mason Michael Starkey.”
“That’s not true!”
“See how good the illusion is?” Bam says. “Even you believe it.”
Starkey will not entertain this accusation. He cannot doubt himself, because doubt is his enemy. So he’ll let Bam go on with her mindless lecture. Let her think what she wants to think. She’s just jealous that she can never be him, or have him, or be in the same league as him. He is Mason Michael Starkey, the avenger of storks. No matter how hard Bam tries to take that away, the world will reward him for all the good he’s done. He didn’t do it for the fame, but he certainly deserves it.
“I’ll never be a great leader,” Bam tells him. “But knowing that already makes me a better leader than you. I just wish I could have figured that out sooner.”
Starkey is exhausted struggling against his bonds. They’re looser now. He will escape. Not this moment, but soon. Ten minutes, twenty. The question is, will he go after Bam and Jeevan, or will he cave to their blackmail and go into hiding forever?
“You’ve heard our demands, and you know what will happen if you don’t follow them,” Bam says. “On the other hand, if you get with the program, we’ll keep that recording to ourselves. I know how important it is for you to be seen as the hero. You get to keep that. It’s more than you deserve. We’ll tell the storks you were captured while scouting out Mousetail, and that will make you an instant martyr. What could be better?”
Mason has no strength to argue anymore. He feels sick to his stomach, and he knows it’s not just from the tranqs. “Someone’s going to make you pay for this.”
“Maybe, but it won’t be you.” Then she turns to Jeevan, who pulls out a tranq gun—one of the nice ones the clappers provided. Probably the same one they tranq’d him with the first time.
“We can’t take a chance you’ll break free too soon,” Bam tells him. “And once you do free yourself, if you’re tempted to look for us at the power plant, don’t bother. We’ll all be gone from there long before you wake up.”
Jeevan comes close to Starkey, aims, but he doesn’t shoot just yet. Instead he suddenly spits in Starkey’s face. “That’s for all the people who died because of me,” says Jeevan. “The people who died because of the things you made me do!”
Starkey smiles at him, and repeats what Bam said just a few moments ago. “I didn’t make you do anything, Jeevan. I just gave you the rope.”
Jeevan’s response is a tranq blast right into the space between his broken ribs.
29 • Hayden
The waiting is unbearable, but Hayden cannot let it show, or it would arouse suspicion. He wanted to go with Bam and Jeevan—not that he doesn’t trust them, but he knows that Starkey is a difficult force to overcome. He was crafty enough to get this far, mesmerizing hundreds of kids long past the point when they should have done their own reality checks. Who’s to say if he might not Houdini his way out of the trap they’ve set for him?
Hayden still
finds it amazing that Starkey managed to carve himself a cult, with few tools beyond communal anger and a fistful of personal magnetism. But on the other hand, there are plenty of historical precedents.
It’s morning in the abandoned plant that’s not so abandoned anymore now that it’s home to almost seven hundred storks. Breakfast is in full swing. The kids eat in three shifts in the plant’s basement, using folding chairs and tables that were here for them when they arrived—as were comfortable bed rolls—all courtesy of the “applause department.” Very organized, this society of randomized violence. They’ve vowed to keep the storks safe, although Hayden suspects they’re only safe until the applause department decides it’s time to sacrifice them, just as they sacrifice all the other angry kids they recruit to serve the cause of mayhem. The storks won’t blow themselves up, of course, but in the end, following Starkey off a cliff isn’t all that different.
Everyone knows their next mission. Starkey made an announcement, and rallied the troops. He hasn’t told them yet that their ultimate objective is the extermination of the Mousetail tithes. They may never know. The only reason Hayden knows is because Bam shared it with him. Hayden suspects Starkey has selected an elite team to do the dirty deed once the harvest camp has been taken down. Or maybe he plans on herding the tithes into a single building and doing it himself with a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. They certainly have bunker busters that can do it in one fell swoop.
But that’s tomorrow. It doesn’t explain why Starkey isn’t here today. Hayden knows why. After all, it was his plan. The storks, however, can’t know the truth.
“He went with a special team to do some reconnaissance,” Hayden tells the masses when people begin to question Starkey’s absence. Most of the kids accept it, and are relieved because maybe it pushes their imminent attack on Mousetail back a day or two. Of course, there are some kids who are suspicious. Garson DeGrutte is full of questions.
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