On the river, a boat emerges from a clump of trees. The craft is long and thin with a motor sputtering at its rear. The boat is heaped with boxes, and it slices into the moon-soaked shoal toward Locksley Ponds’ docks.
The boat pulls behind the docks, and the driver cuts the engine. He’s a heavyset man in bib overalls. A mop of blond hair glows silver in the moonlight.
It’s the Birmingham Kid.
Sweetwater’s face sags. She steps toward the glass. “Oh dear,” she mumbles. “What’s that asshole doing now?”
Charlie Lee turns toward his pile of boxes, opens one, and plunges his arm into it.
“Stop him,” Sweetwater yells to the guards. One of them turns and jogs out the door.
Something catches Charlie Lee’s eye—something by the dock. He stands and stares at it.
“God is great!” he yells. He stoops and pulls the chord on the engine. It sputters for a moment and then comes to life. Swerving, Charlie Lee aims his boat directly at the Crab Shack restaurant.
“No!” Sweetwater presses herself against the glass window.
Charlie Lee’s boat slices through the water, aimed like a laser at the building. Just before he slams into the side of it, I see the Birmingham Kid raise his arms over his head and catch a glimpse of his howling face.
“God is great! God is . . .”
The Crab Shack explodes into an orange mushroom cloud. Next to it, the building with the French sign on it also bursts into flames. A giant arm of fire reaches up toward the heavens. A thunderclap echoes throughout Locksley Ponds.
In the white room, the lights flicker and die. Pale moonlight casts everything in a silver glow. The guards look rattled, glancing around uncomfortably.
Sweetwater peels herself from the window and turns. Her eyes are wild with fear.
“The animals,” she says. “They’re loose!”
the thought
I never much wondered where thoughts came from. They’re just there. They come from somewhere inside you. They’re part of you. They don’t have sizes or shapes or weight, really—they’re just the electricity buzzing around in your head. I never bothered to ponder exactly where they come from beforehand, or if they arrive from someplace outside of you.
This thought, people, doesn’t seem to come from the usual place. It comes from somewhere outside. I don’t mean to say I’ve been possessed or some nut-job thing like that. But it’s this concrete thing in my head. A voice.
“Hi, Winthrop,” it says.
I’m wondering where it came from, but I’m also kind of busy looking back and forth between the billowing orange fire outside the window and my friends handcuffed in the white room. So I don’t say hi back.
“She left her remote control behind,” the voice says. It’s this deep-throated, dumb-sounding voice. “It’s there on the window ledge.”
I look, and sure enough, Sweetwater has left behind that gray rectangular remote she used to change the room into the mirrored wall.
“The top center button in the remote unlocks the cage,” the voice says amiably. “Why don’t you press it?”
After that thought come others. These hangers-on are all mine, I can tell, and I know they come from my usual thought place because they’re shapeless.
They divide. TV shows, Red Grizzly songs, the Moms’ little pink pucker marks on the forearms, and the great TV are on one side. On the other, there’s Arthur, Kang, Seabrook, Esmerelda, and the Shrub People.
You make a million choices every day. Most of them are rolls with loaded dice, or you hope you’re playing the video game with the right key code so you can automatically get to the next level even if you lose all your lives.
You go in the third entrance at the front of the Primrose School every day because you always do.
You pick meat or veggies on your pizza because you were wired to do it, because it’s what’s expected of you.
You wear black turtlenecks and listen to the right music because it’s what the guys around you want.
You run away from camp because deep down you think it’s what your father wants.
I’ve never faced this before.
If I don’t press the button, I know they’ll probably fix whatever damage has been done to Locksley Ponds. I’ll watch some more awesome TV, and in a couple of hours His Eminence and the Moms will show up and take me home.
If I press it, I don’t know what will happen. What will the things in the box do? Will this kill my friends or set them free?
It’s the biggest choice I’ve ever faced.
So I roll the dice.
I press the button.
just desserts
I am something of an expert on just desserts.
In Star Wars, for example, the evil Emperor got his in the end when a dying Darth Vader threw him down a bottomless pit. King Kong, of course, was beaned by biplanes on top of the Empire State Building before falling to his death. In this old movie called Breakdown, Kurt Russell killed the bad guy by squashing him with a tractor trailer he first dangled and aimed at him over the rail of a bridge.
Maude Sweetwater’s end is up there with the very cream. When the hatch falls open, a squirrel scrambles out. It looks just an ordinary little squirrel, the same kind I see darting through the trees back home in Philadelphia. But Sweetwater shrieks at the sight of it, a wail like one of the co-eds in Zombie Cannibals.
Then thousands of squirrels surge out of the metal crate. They swarm all over her, more squirrels than I’ve ever seen. Thousands of puffy tails and needle-like claws and ears encircle her until she disappears within the cloud. First she screams. Then she makes animal noises like a bleating pig. Then the squirrels all fall in on her and dart away. All that’s left is a clean white skeleton draped in a shredded green muumuu.
More squirrels engulf the guards, who fire randomly at them, even managing to pick off a few of the tiny creatures, which explode in red mist. Soon the guards, too, disappear, leaving nothing behind but bones, black uniforms, metal helmets, and machine guns. One guard shrieks in terror and runs for the door, but by the time his hand grasps the knob, it’s a white cluster of bones.
But that’s not the strangest part. The piranha squirrels haven’t laid a tooth on the Tamzene’s crew. The feeding frenzy keeps its distance. And when it ends, the squirrels dart around the room, sniffing the air and waggling their tails as if foraging for nuts.
I go out the door I’d seen Sweetwater take. The hall outside is dark. I feel around for a doorknob, find one, and walk into a room.
Squirrels are everywhere, making wild chirps and clicking noises.
“Careful, Mr. Brubaker,” Seabrook says.
“I don’t think they’re going to hurt us.”
He nods. “Even so,” he says. “Let’s get out of here. Slowly.”
Gingerly, each of them stands, dragging with them the chairs to which they are tied. They creep through the room, shuffling forward with the metal seats in tow, careful not to step on or bump into any squirrels. The squirrels chatter at us, some standing on their hind legs on tables and the backs of furniture.
“Try the pockets,” Seabrook says. He nods toward the wet skeleton of one of the guards. I want to hurl. I feel ribs and hip bones—all moist with squirrel spit—and I find a wallet and a small set of keys.
I unlock all the cuffs. They’ve taken Arthur’s PA system. It makes me wicked sad. So sad that I start crying.
“I’m sorry, man,” I say.
He gets this big grin and hugs me.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Seabrook says.
We head toward the door, inching between the chattering squirrels. I try not to look. When I do, all of them stare back—thousands of them, each black eye a curved mirror that reflects the room. They stand everywhere, sniffing at the bones piled around the crate, on the backs of the chairs, atop the windowsill. These are silhouettes against the fire consuming the docks outside the window. Their chattering noises swell in the room.
; I freeze. Why don’t they attack? For a second I can’t move. If make the slightest noise—even breathe the wrong way—it might mean something in squirrel-ese, and I’d be little more than an acorn at dinner time.
Outside in the dark hallway, voices gurgle from every direction, every now and then punctuated by a chorus of shouts. Bursts of machine-gun fire come from somewhere in the house. I feel my way down the hallway, bringing up the rear.
At the end of the hall, we pass through the doorway to the long corridor with the animal heads. The sconces along the wall have been doused, but orange light fans up the stairway from the windows in the lobby, and along with it the sounds of several voices screaming and the screeching of animals. The bursts of gunfire come in deafening blasts.
At the other end of the hall I see a shadowy figure. It crouches on all fours, and its tail coils and uncoils in the dim light. Its eyes glow with yellow fire.
It’s a cougar.
“Everybody freeze,” Seabrook says.
The cougar crouches on the carpet, holding us in its glowing gaze. Its tail flicks back and forth.
“Guess that power outage opened some cages,” I say.
“What the hell is this place, Winthrop?” Seabrook yells.
We stare at one another—the cougar and the four of us—for what seems like hours. And then Esmerelda bounds up the stairs.
It must be Esmerelda, but she looks like one of the chicks from Hot Force. She’s gripping this big-ass assault gun that’s nearly as big as she is. Her frizzy blond hair has been slicked back, and her green eyes glow beneath the black stuff she’s painted her face with. The cougar snarls at her and raises a paw. I hear myself scream.
Esmerelda never flinches.
“Easy!” she yells, like she’s talking to a yapping Pekingese.
“Ms. Chicklis!” Seabrook says.
“Where’s Sweetwater?” she growls.
“Squirrels got her,” I say. “Oh yeah, guys, Esmerelda’s, like, some kind of secret agent.”
“Later,” she says, and glances down stairs. “Let’s go, guys.” She notices we’re all staring at the mammoth cat at her side. “Oh,” she says. “She won’t hurt you. I don’t know why, but she won’t. None of them will. Let’s move.”
We follow Esmerelda in single file toward the steps while the cougar watches, its eyes burning. I wait for it to pounce on us. How would its claws feel, how would it roar on the high-def? Would fangs knifing through my flesh hurt worse in a billion megapixels? I shake my head and focus on the stairs. The cougar never moves.
The lobby is chaos. Orange light from the fire at the docks streams in through the cavernous front windows. Green Police officers dart back and forth while an enormous flock of birds swoops everywhere, diving at them and slashing them with their talons and beaks. They are pigeons with slate-gray backs, scarlet eyes, and gray bellies.
In the great room, three grizzly bears hold four guards at bay. They stand on their hind legs and roar. The guards cower behind a sofa. One bear, riddled with bullet holes, lies dead next to the fireplace.
I count the splayed bodies of four guards in the opposite room. They aren’t moving. Blood from beneath their helmets soaks through the carpet. Some of the gray birds are perched on them, pecking away.
From rooms elsewhere in the house, screams and loud volleys of machine-gun fire reverberate.
Outside the windows, other weird animals attack the guards. Several of them dart away from some sort of beast I can’t identify, a gray hulking thing with floppy ears that rushes at them.
Guards run to and fro. If they see us, they don’t seem to care.
“The munitions,” one mutters as he passes. “If the animals get into the armory, God help us all.”
Seabrook leads us through the entrance hall toward the front door. A guard darts in front of us, howling as a snarling brown cat of some sort runs after him. Others bat their arms helplessly at the flocks of birds that dive-bomb them, slicing their cheeks and hands.
None of the animals pay us the slightest attention. It’s like we’re ghosts.
When we reach the door, someone shouts, “Hey! Stop them! Don’t let them get away!”
“You there! Halt!”
A machine gun goes off. I feel the hot air of the bullets whiz past my ankles. Esmerelda breaks into a run. We follow. We make it as far as the porch when everyone stops and stares at what hours before was the field where Maude Sweetwater gunned down the passenger pigeons.
A wall of woolly brown forms thunder past like traffic on a busy freeway, raising clouds of dust that shimmer in the moonlight. The rumbling noise blots out all the other sounds. They are thousands of buffalo, and their stampede is blocking our path to the river’s edge.
At first I can’t believe there are so many, and then I remember what Sweetwater told me about repopulating species. In history class, we learned that before Europeans moved to America, buffalo herds were as large as three hundred thousand animals. Some say even bigger.
“Don’t move!” someone yells over the stampede.
Over my shoulder, I see a guard. His uniform is ripped, and blood trickles from a slash on his cheek. He points a machine gun at us.
“All of you, lie on the ground and put your hands on your heads!” he yells.
Esmerelda whirls. She hoists her beast-sized gun and points it at him.
I turn and face the dark forms of the buffalo charging past. Everything has been hollowed by the TV, so I have nothing—no games, no movies, no Grizzlies—to rescue me from my thoughts.
The dust from the stampeding herd billows over me and sticks to the sweat on my cheeks.
Then the guard lets out a cry. A cougar—possibly the same cougar that was crouching by the stairs—is wrapped around his supine body. He hammers on the big cat’s shoulder blade with his fists. The cougar roars, baring its teeth.
And then there’s an explosion.
At first it’s a deep-throated boom, so loud my head can’t contain the noise. Then everything goes silent. The noise sweeps through me and lifts me off the ground, suspending me in midair for a moment before casting me down hard. It also lifts the guard and the cougar, hurtling them into the air in a tangle of fur, black leather, arms, legs, and claws. When they land, guard and cougar bounce, and the gun clatters to the ground.
Everything goes white. Then the whiteness becomes orange, and I see orange light pouring from the holes that used to be the mansion’s windows.
Heat scorches me.
I hear a loud ringing. Gradually I make out the tinkling noise of broken glass and the crackling of fire. Inside the mansion nothing moves except fire licking at the walls.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” a guard yells.
“This whole place could go up!” someone else yells back.
I sit up, ears still going off like cell phones. As I stand, shards of broken glass slip from me. The explosion didn’t take out the buffalo stampede. If anything, the animals seem more frantic.
“Head for the river!” Seabrook yells.
“How?” I ask.
He’s lying next to me, Arthur thrown on top of him. Next to him, Esmerelda and Kang looked dazed. Esmerelda’s gun is nowhere in sight.
Seabrook looks at the herd, then back at the mansion, where jagged spikes of flame bloom through the windows.
He looks me in the face. I can’t hear him just then, but I can read his lips.
We have no choice.
Stepping off the porch, he makes his way to the edge of the herd. Then he walks right into the middle of it.
The stream of buffalo swerves to miss him.
He takes another step. Then another. Then he stops and turns back toward the mansion.
Seabrook stands at the center of an ocean of brown beasts. I can’t help thinking of that movie His Eminence always watches at Easter, the one with the guy from the National Rifle Association wearing a fake beard, parting an ocean so the Israelites can flee. It’s the same here: the buffalo flow aroun
d the Reverend Doctor like he’s sending them a personal signal. When one of the buffalo comes too close, he cringes, but the animal veers off just in time. Seabrook beckons for the rest of us to follow.
Each of us wades into the stampede. It feels like walking onto the freeway; all around are truck-sized animals charging past. The heat from their bodies feels nearly as hot as the explosion. They swerve to miss us, some coming within inches.
I know I must be recovering from my TV addiction because I wonder if the buffalo will cave in on the Green Police officers, like the water in His Eminence’s favorite movie—that is, if any of them are crazy enough to chase us.
They’re not.
Eventually we reach the other side. The cool air blowing off the river sooths my scorched skin, and I swallow deep mouthfuls into my lungs.
The docks are on fire, and several guards are attempting to hose them down. We run right past them. They either don’t see us or are too confused to care.
* * *
Seabrook scrambles into the woods. But when we don’t follow, he turns to look at us.
“Where are we going to go?” I ask.
“We’ll hike downriver, I suppose. There has to be a town or something somewhere. But standing here isn’t a—”
“Follow me,” Esmerelda says, plunging off in an another direction.“Seriously. You guys are, like, never going to believe this.”
A few hundred yards upriver from the burning mansion, hidden behind the low-hanging branches of some giant elm trees, the Tamzene bumps against the current.
Seabrook smiles. He frowns. He starts to cry, sputters, and wades into the river. Finally, laughing, he tries to hug the hull of the boat.
“How?” he manages. “When they caught us in Missouri, they put us in a truck, blindfolded us, and drove for hours.”
“Beats the hell out of me,” Esmerelda mutters.
By now Kang has already climbed aboard. He goes to the cabin, and the boat hums to life. Soon we’re all aboard and moving out into the river.
I’m forgetting something important about Esmerelda. I rummage through memories.
“AICO,” I say.
We Are All Crew Page 25