Brood

by Chase Novak

  Rodolfo’s dream: One day they will use the blood money to buy a place in the country. It shouldn’t be too far away. They will always need the city; business, after all, is business. Maybe a hundred miles up the river. A big house, large enough for dozens of them. Up a long driveway, with a locked gate at the mouth of it. Porches. Balconies. A big old lawn, a million trees. A pond, a lake, a pool. He can close his eyes and see the moon riding the ripples of the water.

  Though normally when they romp through the park they are kind of a formless pack, tonight, Polly is always at Rodolfo’s side. Bounding up a hill, playing on the swings—wherever he goes, she is right next to him, matching him step for step, with her moon face and long braid, her babyish nose, and her bright green eyes behind thick glasses.

  Unlike most of the crew, Polly was never in danger in her old home. Her parents were two of the few who managed to kill themselves—most of the other parents were too beastly to take their own lives; animals do not commit suicide. Yet Polly’s folks found a way. She woke up one morning and her parents were in their bedroom, orderly for once, clothes put away, chairs upright, bed made, both of them looking oddly peaceful and demure and, of course, dead. They were old, in their late fifties, professors, and in a different world, Polly would have one day become a professor too. All she did was read. She never let anyone touch her. If you found her standing next to you, it was because she wanted to talk.

  And the way she talked! Her great subject at the moment was that they were all post-human. “We are the beginnings of a new race. We’re new. There are extinct species buried in the Burgess Shale we can’t even imagine. Creatures with fifty legs and two heads,” she says now.

  “That’s barking,” Rodolfo says.

  “Not everything makes it up the evolutionary ladder,” Polly continues. “And even if it does, no one knows even half of what’s here. Science knows only about ten percent of all the species on earth. The world is full of living things, animals and plants and everything, and no one has studied them, they don’t even have names for them. And they don’t have names for us either. Just look at us! We’re faster, stronger, and I wouldn’t say we’re stupid, that’s for sure. That’s why they hate us. We have to be careful until there are more of us.”

  And she says it all in the old-fashioned English her parents taught her. Some of the pack mistrust her, with her schoolteacher way of talking. It was the voice of the enemy; they heard it like an Allied soldier in World War II would hear achtung.

  “How many of us have they gotten so far?” Polly asks. She and Rodolfo are on the swings in the Diana Ross Playground. The chains squeak. She holds her feet with the toes pointing straight out to make herself go higher and higher.

  “We’s fine. Me’s finding who be the doing of it, put him down good.” He lifts his chin, purses his lips. He can hear his boys, and the girls too, somewhere in the darkness. Dueling with sticks. Wrestling.

  “Owww!” someone cries. “Don’t throw me’s so hard.”

  That must be Little Man. Always losing, always complaining. If he were in a litter of pups, he’d be the one getting shoved off the teat…he’d be the one some little girl would be feeding through an eyedropper.

  “But how many, Rodolfo?” Polly persists. “How many are missing?”

  “Six?” He shrugs, as if it were a matter of indifference to him, but his heart surges and twists at the very thought of it.

  “They want to wipe us off the face of the earth,” Polly says. “I was reading—”

  Rodolfo laughs as if she has just confessed something slightly embarrassing.

  “About this factory in China. You know what they make?”

  “Chopsticks.”

  “Mice. All different kinds. They sell them to labs. Bald mice. Schizo mice. Mice that can only walk backward. Mice that get old in one day.”

  “Peoples is mean like monster movie,” says Rodolfo.

  “They can do it by changing just one chromosome,” Polly says. “That mouse factory has a thousand different kinds of mice, like flavors of ice cream, and they sell them to whoever wants to experiment. The only thing is, they can’t control what happens in the next generation. That one missing chromosome changes the DNA, but it’s not predictable. So even if you get two bald ones to mate, their babies might be biters or maybe glow in the dark, like those fish they sell in pet stores.”

  “Me’s love to glow in the dark!”

  “Maybe your children will. We’ve got a baby with wings.”

  “He cute.”

  “The point is, Rodolfo, what are we? I don’t know what we are. And neither do you.”

  Rodolfo launches himself from the swing seat. He hovers for a long moment midair and then lands with a soft crunch on the pebbles.

  Polly is standing there, right beside him. She takes his hand.

  So she touches, Rodolfo thinks.

  “There’s not enough of us. We can’t protect ourselves. There’s no hope for us.”

  “We’s fine. We’s getting rich.”

  He gets back on the swing, and so does she.

  She bends and extends her long slender legs; they are in perfect rhythm. He has an impulse to touch her legs, but he grips the chains harder.

  “Selling our blood so a bunch of old perverts can feel young? How long is that going to last? And how do you even know whose blood to put out there? Use the wrong batch and someone goes crazy and then the police and everyone else comes looking for us like we blew up the Empire State Building.”

  “So many worries, Polly. You’s needing to relax.” He laughs, reaches over, and tugs at her long braid—it’s like a rope that rings a church bell.

  “You want my blood, you can have it,” she says. “I know I am mostly not wild. I think maybe I am twenty percent animal. So my blood is safe. Some of us—wow! Too wild.”

  “Me’s wild too,” Rodolfo says.

  “Not really. I mean, yes, sure, you are. But not like some of the others.” She grabs his wrist, and his swing reacts, twisting and turning. She holds tight and pushes up the sleeve of his white shirt. She runs her hand up and down his arm. “You’re smooth. And you’re smart. And you’re gentle.”

  “Me’s not gentle,” he says, pulling his arm away.

  “You should take me someplace,” Polly says.

  “Where? Everything’s here.”

  “I just would like to be alone with you.”

  Rodolfo feels the heat of embarrassment rush into his face, and he turns away, not wanting her to see. Polly is a pretty girl, in her own way. And smart. And, really, he does not mind how she talks, like a princess on TV.

  “Me’s down with that,” he says. “Back home?”

  “I love the apartment, Rodolfo. But it’s too crazy there.”

  “Me’s got a room, solitary.”

  “I know. But it would be weird. Going in with you? Everyone on the other side of the door. Philip, Little Man, Suzie, Captain Blood.” She moves her fingers as she counts them, her long, slender fingers. She still does her hand exercises so she will be able to easily reach an octave if she ever gets the chance to sit at a piano again. “Boy-Boy, Bump, Lola. They all worship you.”

  It makes him smile. Warmth oozes through him, like honey through a crack in the jar. He closes his eyes and pumps his legs, propelling the swing higher. It wouldn’t take much more elevation for him to go up and over. Or maybe he will jump—the energy generated by the swing plus his own energy, he might stay airborne for five seconds. He feels a cooling breeze on his face. The night air fills his shirt.

  He glances up at the tops of the trees; the flashing lights of a patrol car illuminate the leaves, and they tremble blue and white. Moments later, the cop car appears, and to show how seriously put out he is, the officer driving steers it over the curb, over the paved walkway, and onto the grass, stopping as close to the playground as he possibly can.

  Normally, the crew can almost instantly disappear when they see the police—if a cop ever sees them, the boys an
d girls move so quickly that the officers on patrol don’t even register their presence, or they rub their eyes and look at each other quizzically, as if they had perhaps just glimpsed a coyote. But tonight is different.

  Tonight the children do not run, nor do they steal into the shadows.

  Rodolfo looks at Polly. She has dug the tips of her shoes into the gravel to stop her swing. She holds on to the chains and looks back at Rodolfo, waiting for him to indicate what they should do next.

  From the tops of the boulders, from the bushes and the Great Lawn, from the four points of the compass, the brood appears, in twos, threes, and fours, until there are twenty of them encircling the playground. Tonight they are unafraid. Tonight they have reached the end of hiding, and they have reached the end of wishing that people would leave them alone. Tonight they are no longer wishing they were just normal children living in apartments with normal parents. Tonight they are tired of being hated and they are tired of being hunted. Tonight they are curious what will happen if they simply hold their ground.

  The two police officers are both out of the Central Park Precinct—their headquarters are just two minutes from here, the building bucolic and barn brown with raised white letters proudly displaying the precinct’s name. One of the officers is Olivia Martinez, and this is her first month on the job. Her black hair is cropped short as a choirboy’s, and she is slight—so slight that she struggles with the gear she must carry: the club, the cuffs, the flashlight, the radio, the revolver, all ponderously hanging from her belt. Her partner is John Kluggel, a tall, fleshy officer in his sixteenth year on the force. This assignment is a demotion for him; he was pushed down the pay ladder from sergeant to patrolman after ordering his ex-wife’s husband’s car towed not once, not twice, but three times. Kluggel has watery blue eyes that say Don’t bother me and a large red birthmark on his cheek the size of a slap.

  Kluggel unsnaps his holster, and though Martinez thinks this is absolutely not the way to proceed with what appears to be, after all, just a bunch of teenagers hanging around a playground, she does the same, aware that by not doing so, she would be tacitly criticizing Kluggel.

  “Watch and learn,” Kluggel mutters to her as he approaches Rodolfo and Polly. (He says, “Watch and learn,” no matter what he does in her presence, from filling out an arrest report to ordering hazelnut coffee.)

  Martinez, glancing upward, left, right, then left again, is not sure if John has failed to see the dozen or so others who now basically encircle them or if he has seen them but chosen to ignore them and go for the two on the swings.

  There are two ways to approach someone: You can walk fast or slow. John used to favor the slow approach, liking the cowboy swagger of it and the implication that he had all the time in the world and was not in the slightest bit tense or concerned. The slow approach gave whoever you were going to stop and frisk time to get real worried. But fairly recently, he switched to the rapid approach, coming up to people with startling speed, moving as if powered by an engine at full throttle. He covers the distance between the cruiser and the bed of white stones around the swings in four or five vigorous strides.

  “Get up,” he says to the two on the swings, resting his hand on the butt of his revolver. He waits a moment and then repeats his order, this time his voice at a thick boil. He is a loyal subscriber to the shock-and-awe theory of police work.

  But the two teenagers appear serene. The boy seems to be smiling, and the girl adjusts her long braid so that it hangs down the very middle of her back.

  “We’s not bothering,” Rodolfo says. He almost sings it.

  “You heard me,” Kluggel says.

  “You truthin’ on that, Mr. Bang-Bang,” Rodolfo says.

  The girl grins, and Officer Martinez recognizes the quality of the smile, sees the expression of a girl who is just the slightest bit frightened but who has had the misfortune to lose her heart to a troublemaker. Some girls like to ride the emotional rodeo until they are bucked off and go flying, until they get gored, until they get good and used up. Poor saps…

  John, like every cop in the Central Park Precinct, knows that there is a bunch of weird kids roaming the park at weird hours, leaving weird things in their wake—bones of small animals, discreet little piles of human scat—and being weirdly elusive too, so elusive that spotting one of them (and these two on the swings surely fall into the category of Weird Kids in the Park, as do the other knuckleheads slowly encircling them above) is tantamount to a hiker spotting Bigfoot. And every cop in the precinct also knows that the mayor has a special interest in these little fuckers, an interest that is as weird as the bones and scat that the cops and everyday citizens find in the park from Columbus Circle all the way up to Harlem. Weird because each time the mayor, that rich little snob strutting around Gracie Mansion, applies a little heat on the matter of the park kids, he also makes a point of adding that if any cops see someone young running with the pack, they’d better not harm a hair on his (or her) head. Now, why would Mayor Morris say that? Speculation is that the mayor’s own missing kid is now one of them, but of course, whenever anything big happens (and Dylan Morris’s disappearance is huge), there are always conspiracy nuts who manage to “see” a pattern of secrecy and cover-up. John’s explanation for the mayor’s directive is a lot simpler, having to do with the mayor’s wanting to avoid the public-relations disaster that would inevitably come if they were to harm some ten-year-old. But these two on the swings? Old enough to know better, and old enough to kick the shit out of, if need be.

  “We’re not doing anything wrong, Officer,” Polly says. She doesn’t say it pleadingly, just states it as a matter of fact.

  “Show me some ID,” Kluggel says.

  “I don’t have anything on me,” Polly says.

  Kluggel smiles like someone who enjoys the smell of rotted meat.

  “What are you doing out here?” he asks.

  “Just hanging out,” Polly says.

  “Just hanging out?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about you?” he says to Rodolfo.

  “Lick me’s ass,” Rodolfo says, pronouncing the word ass as if it had an infinite number of s’s at its end.

  Kluggel looks over his shoulder, checking to make sure Martinez is doing her job. She is. She’s just a few steps behind him. She looks scared, though. That does not help.

  “Stand up,” he says to Rodolfo.

  “Me’s swinging here, Officer.”

  “Stand the fuck up or I’ll…” But he doesn’t have to make his threat explicit. Rodolfo rises from the sling seat. Holding on to the swing’s chains, he lifts himself off the ground, somersaults backward, and, after landing, throws his hands straight up in the air, a move he learned watching the 2004 Olympics on his parents’ TV when he was a little kid.

  Polly starts to get up too, but Kluggel yanks out his billy club as if it were a sword and points it at her. “I’m asking you to stay where you are, miss,” he says with an awful approximation of good manners. She sinks down again and Kluggel’s spirits lift. He will never get tired of people doing what he tells them to do.

  “Pat her down, Officer Martinez,” he says.

  “You’s not to do,” Rodolfo says; his long finger goes back and forth like a windshield wiper.

  “You be careful here, son,” Kluggel says. “You don’t want to go opening your mouth when you’re in deep shit.”

  “Oh, me’s so scared,” Rodolfo says.

  “Please stand up for me,” Martinez says to Polly in what is meant to be an apologetic tone.

  With inexplicable speed, Rodolfo intercepts Martinez and tackles her, ramming his shoulder right above her knees. She is sprawled on the ground, blinking up at the thick night sky.

  It gives Kluggel every reason in the book to unholster his weapon. But no sooner has he withdrawn it than Rodolfo wraps his legs around Kluggel’s legs, and with a quick violent twist, as remorseless as the crack of a whip, he brings Kluggel to the ground.

  A
moment later, Rodolfo sinks his teeth into the fleshy pad of Kluggel’s right hand. Kluggel had been pretty badly bounced around by his own father, had a tooth knocked out in a fight at Far Rockaway the morning of his senior prom, had been bitten by his mother’s Chihuahua, had once had a cinder block dropped on his foot, was in a five-car pileup on the Hutchinson River Parkway five Thanksgivings ago, and had shot off the lobe of his own right ear while cleaning his revolver. But nothing he ever experienced prepared him for the pain of Rodolfo’s teeth sinking into his hand. If the pain were a color, it would be the brightest red, and if it were a temperature, it would be 213 degrees.

  It’s not just the bite. It’s the tearing, the grinding. The gun slides out of Kluggel’s hand. A voice within him sounds a warning, though he can barely understand the words—it’s like someone trying to speak over the howls of a hurricane. But it tells him that under no circumstances can he allow this boy to take control of the firearm.

  “Sorry,” Polly says to Martinez, pinning her down. She doesn’t appear to be using much force, but Martinez is unable to move. It’s as if she were in a coffin; consciousness races and lurches, but the body is finished.

  Rodolfo springs up and kicks the gun away, and it spins under some bushes. He spits what he has bitten off, a little jagged chunk of flesh, a salty spray of blood.

  “You’s sick in body and soul, Officer Bang-Bang,” Rodolfo says. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He hopes he has not just contracted some crazy disease from the officer on the ground.

  John may have had departmental difficulties—his career on the force has been far from exemplary—but he retains a kind of dedication, even a vague sort of idealism. And he has always been a real competitor. He is dizzy with pain, but he is also determined to bring these kids in—and now he has something real to charge them with, something that will 100 percent stick. Cradling his wounded hand, he struggles to his knees. He glances back at Martinez. Useless. And then at his car. Too far away. He hopes against hope that another patrol car will come gliding by. Or anyone, really. Anyone.