With a purpose that neither Bobby nor I foresaw, they shrieked across the park, across the street, and rocketed unchecked into the face of a two-story building three doors from the movie theater in front of which we stood. They hit the structure with such brutal force that the pock-pock-pock of their bodies smashing against the stucco sounded like relentless automatic-weapons fire; combined with their shrill cries, this barrage nearly drowned out the brittle ringing of the shattered window glass.
Horrified, sickened, I turned away from the carnage and leaned against the Jeep.
Considering the speed of the flock’s kamikaze descent, the hard rattle of death could not have continued for more than seconds, but minutes seemed to pass before the terrible noise ceased. The quiet that followed was heavy with catastrophic import, like the hush in the wake of a bomb blast.
I closed my eyes — but opened them again when a replay of the flocks’ suicidal plunge was projected vividly onto the backs of my eyelids.
All of nature was on the brink. I had known that much for the past month, since I’d learned what had happened in the hidden labs of Wyvern. Now the perilous ledge on which the future stood seemed narrower than I had thought, the height of the cliff far greater than it had seemed a moment ago, and the rocks below more jagged than my worst imaginings.
With my eyes open, into my mind came a photographic memory of my mother’s face. So wise. So kind.
The image of her blurred. Everything around me blurred for a moment, the street and the movie theater.
I took a shallow breath, which entered my chest with an ache, then a deeper breath that hurt less, and I wiped my eyes with the back of one jacket sleeve.
My heritage requires me to bear witness, and I can’t shirk that responsibility. The light of the sun is denied to me, but I must not avoid the light of truth, which also burns but anneals rather than destroys.
I turned to look at the silenced flock.
Hundreds of small birds littered the sidewalk. Only a few wings shuddered feebly with rapidly fading life. Most of them had hit so hard that their fragile skulls had shattered and their necks had broken on impact.
Because they appeared to be ordinary nighthawks, I wondered what internal change had swept through these birds. Although invisible to the unassisted eye, the difference was evidently so substantive that they believed continued existence to be intolerable.
Or perhaps their kamikaze flight had not been a conscious act. Perhaps it had resulted from a deterioration of their directional instincts or mass blindness, or dementia.
No. Remembering their elaborate aerobatics, I had to assume that the change was more profound, more mysterious, and more disturbing than mere physical dysfunction.
Beside me, the engine of the Jeep turned over, caught, roared, and then idled as Bobby let up on the accelerator.
I hadn’t been aware of him getting behind the steering wheel.
“Bro,” he said.
Although not directly related to the disappearance of Orson or to the kidnapping of Jimmy Wing, the flock’s self-destruction added urgency to the already pressing need to find the dog and the boy.
For once in his life, Bobby appeared to feel the solvent of time passing through him and swirling away, carrying with it some dissolved essence, like water into a drain.
He said, “Let’s cruise,” with a solemn expression in his eyes that belied the laid-back tone of his voice and the casualness of his language.
I climbed into the Jeep and yanked the door shut.
The shotgun was propped between the seats again.
Bobby switched on the headlights and pulled away from the curb.
As we approached the mounded birds, I saw that no wing fluttered any longer, except from the ruffling touch of the gentle breeze.
Neither Bobby nor I had spoken of what we’d witnessed. No words seemed adequate.
Passing the site of the carnage, he kept his eyes on the street ahead, not glancing even once at the dead flock.
I, on the other hand, couldn’t look away — and turned to stare back after we had passed.
In my mind’s ear, the music came from a piano with only black keys, jangling and discordant.
Finally I turned to face forward. We drove into the fearsome brightness of the Jeep headlamps, but regardless of our speed, we remained always in the dark, hopelessly chasing the light.
10
Dead Town could have passed for a neighborhood in Hell, where the condemned were subjected not to fire and boiling oil but to the more significant punishment of solitude and an eternity of quiet in which to contemplate what might have been. As if we were engaged in a supernatural rescue mission to extract two wrongfully damned souls from Hades, Bobby and I searched the streets for any sign of my furry brother or Lilly’s son.
With a powerful handheld spotlight that Bobby plugged into the cigarette lighter, I probed between houses lined up like tombstones. Through cracked or partially broken-out windows, where the reflection of the light glowed like a spirit face. Along bristling brown hedgerows. Among dead shrubs from which leaped bony shadows.
Though the light was directed away from me, the backwash was great enough to be troublesome. My eyes quickly grew tired; they felt strained, grainy. I would have put on my sunglasses, which on some occasions I wear even at night, but a pair of Ray-Bans sure as hell wouldn’t facilitate the search.
Cruising slowly, surveying the night, Bobby said, “What’s wrong with your face?”
“Sasha says nothing.”
“She needs an emergency transfusion of good taste. What’re you picking?”
“I’m not picking.”
“Didn’t your mom ever teach you not to pick at yourself?”
“I’m poking.”
While with my right hand I held the pistol-grip spotlight, with my left I’d been unconsciously fingering the sore spot on my face, which I had first discovered a little earlier in the night.
“You see a bruise here?” I asked, indicating the penny-size tenderness on my left cheek.
“Not in this light.”
“Sore.”
“Well, you’ve been knocking around.”
“This is the way it’ll start.”
“What?”
“Cancer.”
“Probably a pimple.”
“First a soreness, then a lesion, and then, because my skin has no defense against it…rapid metastasis.”
“You’re a one-man party,” Bobby said.
“Just being realistic.”
Turning right into a new street, Bobby said, “What good did being realistic ever do anyone?”
More shabby bungalows. More dead hedgerows.
“Got a headache, too,” I said.
“You’re giving me a full-on skull-splitter.”
“One day maybe I’ll get a headache that never goes away, from neurological damage caused by XP.”
“Dude, you’ve got more psychosomatic symptoms than Scrooge McDuck has money.”
“Thanks for the analysis, Doctor Bob. You know, you’ve never cut me any slack in seventeen years.”
“You never need any.”
“Sometimes,” I said.
He drove in silence for half a block and then said, “You never bring me flowers anymore.”
“What?”
“You never tell me I’m pretty.”
I laughed in spite of myself. “Asshole.”
“See? You’re way cruel.”
Bobby stopped the Jeep in the middle of the street.
I looked around alertly. “Something?”
“If I was wrapped in neoprene, man, I wouldn’t have to stop,” he said, neoprene meaning the wet suit that a surfer wears when the water temp is too nipple for him to hit the waves in only a pair of swimming trunks.
During a long session in cold water, while sitting in the line waiting for a set of glassy, pumping monoliths, surfers from time to time relieve themselves right in their wet suits. The word for it is urinophoria, that l
ovely warm sensation that lasts until the constant but gradual flush of seawater rinses it away.
If surfing isn’t the most romantic, glamorous sport ever, then I don’t know what is. Certainly not golf.
Bobby got out of the Jeep and stepped to the curb, with his back to me. “I hope this bladder pressure doesn’t mean I’ve got cancer.”
“You already made your point,” I said.
“This bizarre urge to relieve myself. Man, it’s…it’s mondo malignant.”
“Just hurry up.”
“I probably held it too insanely long, and now I’ve got uric-acid poisoning.”
I had switched off the spotlight. I put it down and picked up the shotgun.
Bobby said, “My kidneys will probably implode, my hair’ll fall out, my nose’ll drop off. I’m doomed.”
“You are if you don’t shut up.”
“Even if I don’t die, what wahine is going to want to date a bald, noseless guy with imploded kidneys?”
The engine noise, the headlights, and the spotlight might have brought us unwanted attention if anyone or anything hostile was in the neighborhood. The troop had hidden at the sound of the Jeep when Bobby had first driven into Wyvern, but perhaps they had done some reconnaissance since then; in which case they were aware that we were only two and that even with guns we were not necessarily a match for a horde of peevish primates. Worse, maybe they realized that one of us was Christopher Snow, son of Wisteria Snow, who perhaps was known to them as Wisteria von Frankenstein.
Bobby zipped up and returned safely to the Jeep. “That’s the first time anyone’s been prepared to lay down covering fire for me while I peed.”
“De nada.”
“You feeling better, bro?”
He knew me well enough to understand that my apparent attack of hypochondria was actually unexpressed anxiety for Orson.
I said, “Sorry for acting like a wanker.”
Releasing the hand brake, shifting the Jeep into drive, he said, “To wank is human, to forgive is the essence of Bobbyness.”
As we rolled slowly forward, I put down the shotgun and picked up the spotlight again. “We’re not going to find them like this.”
“Better idea?”
Before I could respond, something screamed. The cry was eerie but not entirely alien; worse, it was a disturbing hybrid of the familiar and the unknown. It seemed to be the wail of an animal, yet it had a too-human quality, a forlorn note full of loss and yearning.
Bobby braked again. “Where?”
I had already switched on the spotlight and aimed it across the street, toward where I thought the scream had originated.
The shadows of balusters and roof posts stretched to follow the beam of light, creating the illusion of movement across the front porch of a bungalow. The shadows of bare tree limbs crawled up a clapboard wall.
“Geek alert,” Bobby said, and pointed.
I swung the spotlight where he indicated, just in time to catch something racing through tall grass and disappearing behind a long, four-foot-high boxwood hedge that separated the front lawns of four bungalows from the street.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Maybe — what I told you about.”
“Big Head?”
“Big Head.”
During long hot months without water, the hedge had died, and the quenching rains of the recent winter had not been able to revive it. Although not a lick of green could be seen, a dense snarl of brittle branching remained, with wads of brown leaves lodged here and there like bits of half-masticated meat.
Bobby kept the Jeep in the middle of the street but drove slowly forward, parallel to the hedge.
Even stripped of new growth, the dead boxwood was so mature that its spiny skeleton effectively screened the creature crouched beyond it. I didn’t think I was going to be able to pick out the beast at all, but then I spotted it because, although it was a shade of brown similar to the woody veil in front of it, the softer lines of its body contrasted with the jagged patterns of the bare hedge. Through the interstices in the many layers of boxwood bones, I fixed the beam on our quarry, revealing no details but getting a glimpse of eyeshine as green as that of certain cats.
This thing was too big to be any cat other than a mountain lion.
It was no mountain lion.
Found, the creature bleated again and raced along the shielding deadwood with such speed that I couldn’t keep the light trained on it. A break in the hedgerow allowed a walkway to connect a bungalow with the street, but Big Head — or Big Foot, or the wolfman, or the Loch Ness monster in drag, or whatever the hell this was — crossed the gap fast, an instant ahead of the light. I didn’t get a look at anything but its shaggy ass, and not even a clear view of that, though a clear view of its ass might not have been either informative or gratifying.
All I had were vague impressions. The impression that it ran half erect like a monkey, shoulders sloped forward and head low, the knuckles of its hands almost dragging the ground. That it was a lot bigger than a rhesus. That it might have been even taller than Bobby had guessed, and that if it rose to its full height, it would be able to peer at us over the top of the four-foot hedge and stick its tongue out at us.
I swept the spotlight back and forth but couldn’t locate the critter along the next section of boxwood.
“Running for it,” Bobby said, braking to a full stop, rising half out of his seat, pointing.
When I shifted my focus beyond the hedgerow, I saw a shapeless figure loping across the yard, away from the street, toward the corner of the bungalow.
Even when I held the spotlight high, I couldn’t get an angle on the fast-moving beast, whose disappearing act was abetted by the intervening branches of a laurel and by tall grass.
Bobby dropped back into his seat, swung toward the hedgerow, threw the Jeep into four-wheel drive, and tramped on the accelerator.
“Geek chase,” he said.
Because Bobby lives for the moment and because he expects ultimately to be mulched by something more immediate than melanoma, he maintains the deepest tan this side of a skin-cancer ward. By contrast, his teeth and his eyes glow as white as the plutonium-soaked bones of Chernobyl wildlife, which usually make him look dashing and exotic and full of Gypsy spirit, but which now made him look more than a little like a grinning madman.
“Way stupid,” I protested.
“Geek, geek, geek chase,” he insisted, leaning into the steering wheel.
The Jeep jumped the curb, flashed under the low-hanging branches of two flanking laurels, and crashed through the boxwood hard enough to rattle the bottles of beer in the slush-filled cooler, spitting broken hedge branches behind it. As we crossed the lawn, a raw, sweet, green odor rose from the crushed grass under the tires, which was lush from the winter rains.
The creature had disappeared around the side of the bungalow even as we were blasting through the hedge.
Bobby went after it.
“This has nothing to do with Orson or Jimmy,” I shouted over the engine roar.
“How do you know?”
He was right. I didn’t know. Maybe there was a connection. Anyway, we didn’t have any better leads to follow.
As he swung the Jeep between two bungalows, he said, “Carpe noctem, remember?”
I had recently told him my new motto. Already, I regretted having revealed it. I had the feeling that it was going to be quoted to me, at inopportune moments, until it had less appeal than a mutton milkshake.
About fifteen feet separated the bungalows, and there were no shrubs in this narrow sward. The headlights would have revealed the critter if it was here; but it was gone.
This vanishment didn’t give Bobby second thoughts. Instead, he pressed harder on the accelerator.
We rocketed into the backyard in time to see our own private Sasquatch as it sprang across a picket fence and disappeared into the next property, once more revealing no more of itself than a fleeting glimpse of its hirsute buttocks.
Bobby wasn’t any more intimidated by the line of spindly wooden pickets than he had been by the hedgerow. Speeding toward it, he laughed and said, “Skeggin’,” meaning having big-time fun, which most likely comes from skeg, the name for the rudderlike fin on the underside of a surfboard, which allows you to steer and do cool maneuvers.
Although Bobby is laid back and tranquility-loving, ranking as high in the annals of slackerhood as Saddam Hussein ranks in the Insane Dictator Hall of Fame, he’s another dude altogether, a huge macking tsunami, once he’s committed himself to a line of action. He will sit on a beach for hours, studying wave conditions, looking for sets that will push him to and maybe past his personal threshold, oblivious even to the passing contents of bun-floss bikinis, so focused and patient that he makes one of those Easter Island stone heads seem positively jittery, but when he sees what he needs and paddles his board out to the lineup, he doesn’t wallow there like a buoy; he becomes a true raging slashmaster, ripping the waves, domesticating even the hugest thunder crushers, going for it so totally that if any shark mistook him for chum, he’d flip it upside down and ride it like a longboard.
“Skeggin’, my ass,” I said as we hit the fence.
Weathered white pickets exploded over the hood of the Jeep, rattled across the windshield, clattered against the roll bar, and I was sure that one of them would ricochet at precisely the right angle to skewer one of my eyes and make brain shish kebab, but that didn’t happen. Then we were crossing the rear lawn of the house that faced out on the next street in the grid.
The yard we had left behind was smooth, but this one was full of troughs and mounds and chuckholes, over which we rollicked with such exuberance that I had to clamp one hand on my cap to keep it from flying off.
In spite of the serious risk of biting all the way through my tongue if we suddenly bottomed out too hard, I said, in a stutter worthy of Porky Pig, “You see it?”
“On it!” he assured me, though the headlights were arcing up and down so radically with the wildly bucking Jeep that I didn’t believe he could see anything smaller than the house around which he was steering us.
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