The Chaos

by Nalo Hopkinson

  The guy in the bomber jacket looked up at the bird. “It’s not like she could put a leash on it,” he said. He sounded too calm, as though he was thinking really hard about staying calm.

  “It’s not mine. My aunt just sent me to try to help it.”

  “And what does she think a teenager’s going to do? That animal is injured! Someone should fetch trained professionals.”

  I sighed. “You guys have cars. Why don’t one of you go get some help for it?”

  “Me?” said the woman. “But I don’t . . . but I can’t . . .”

  Bomber jacket guy said, still in this weirdly reasonable way, “It’s getting blood on the roof of my car.”

  There was a screech of tires. The third driver had thrown his car into reverse, then into forward again. He took the car up onto the sidewalk to get around the bird and drove away.

  Bomber jacket guy was still staring up at the bird. “I’m out looking for my kid sister. Nobody’s seen or heard from her since the volcano. So, uh, good luck with that.”

  “I hope you find your sister,” I told him. “My big brother’s missing.”

  “That sucks. I’m really sorry.” He got back into his car and pulled away, driving slowly so he could check down alleyways.

  A fat drop of big bird blood fell onto the woman’s sturdy black shoes. She looked down, yelped, pulled her foot away. “Okay,” she said to me, “I’ll go for help. Um, would you like to come along?”

  She was offering me a graceful way out of this situation. “Thanks. But I think someone should stay with it.”

  “But you . . . Okay. If you’re sure?”

  I looked up at the bird. I’d bet the top of its head was a good twelve feet off the ground, and it wasn’t even standing. “No way am I sure.”

  “Well, good, then. Fine.” She hadn’t heard a word I’d said. She was already backing away toward her car. “I’ll just . . . I’ll be right back. With help. I really will.”

  Sure she would. “Don’t let the door slap your ass on the way out!” I yelled as she left in a screech of tires. I’d always wanted to say that. The woman’s quick exit was spoiled a little by her having to stop and inch her car through the growing crowd.

  Slowly, I approached the bird. It turned one despairing eye on me. The eyeball was the size of a basketball.

  “It’s okay, boy,” I said. “Or girl. I’m not going to hurt you.” I took one more step. The bird raised its head and hissed. I leapt back, ready to turn tail and run. But hissing was all it could do. Its head sank to the ground again. It was in a bad way. It was still losing blood, and maybe it had other injuries as well. “Christ. I hope Auntie Mryss tears Spot a new one for doing this.” Though it was hard to imagine the thing I’d seen putting up with any back talk from one small, old woman. I just couldn’t get it out of my mind that Spot had been real all along. And Sasquatches. What else was real, then? Well, duh, Scotch; you name it. Sasquatches, demonic Tinker Bells, purple hippos wearing party hats; they were all real now.

  The bird shuddered out a big breath. It was a few long seconds before it breathed again. It was going to die while I stood here, doing nothing. Slowly, I went closer to its head. “Shh, boy. Or girl. Or whatever. It’s okay.” It really wasn’t, though.

  The bird’s eye rolled when it saw me. It struck out weakly with its beak at me. But even that had plenty of power, coming from a creature its size. I had to do a fancy leap backward to avoid its big head with its cruel eagle’s beak. But the tightness of my jeans around my tainted legs slowed me down. The bird’s beak connected with my leg. I screamed and fell onto the pavement. I rolled out of the bird’s reach. “Ow! I’m trying to help you, you stupid thing!” Dimly I heard the crowd making “Oo” and “Ahh” noises. Not a one of those so-and-sos would help me, though.

  The bird cried out, laid its head down. Didn’t look like it had any more fight left. But just in case, I got a few more feet out of its reach. And finally, I had to look at my leg. There was a long slash right through my jeans, on the outside of my leg from just below my knee to just above my ankle. The top of my leather boots had stopped the bird’s beak from going any lower. The gash in my leg was deep enough to lay a pencil in. I could see the white fat underlayer of my skin, exposed. And then blood began welling up out of the wound. Now that the shock had worn off a little, I could feel the pain of the injury. It hurt so bad. Like my leg had been stung by a thousand bees. A deep, burning pain. Relentless. I sat and rocked, doing this soft, constant whimper I had almost no control over. I couldn’t help it, I started to cry, with fear, with pain. “Can somebody help me?” I shouted to the crowd. A couple of people actually started toward me, but the bird lifted its head. It screamed a challenge at them and struck out. No one could get close.

  Someone threw a rock at the bird. It missed by a mile. “Stop it!” I yelled. “You’re going to hit me, too! What is it with people and throwing stones?”

  “Miss!” yelled someone from the crowd. A woman, maybe in her thirties, looked Latina, short hair, broad shoulders, wearing a light blue shirt with the red crest of the Toronto Transit Commission on the pocket. “You need to get away from it so we can get close to you!” A few more people shouted in agreement, urged me to get out of there.

  “I can’t use my leg!” I sobbed.

  The woman yelled again, “Can you make it over here?”

  Oh, God. Oh, God. I hurt so much, I just wanted to curl up into a ball and whimper until someone made the pain go away. “I’ll try!”

  “Quickly!”

  I managed to push myself into a standing position on my good leg. Every movement shot pain through the sliced-up one. I was shaking. And my nose was all snotty. They would have to cut my jeans off me to treat my leg, and then they would see the taint crusting my body like old, chewed-up gum.

  I screwed my eyes up tight and took a deep breath. I started screaming in anticipation of the searing pain I would feel when I put my weight on my slashed leg. I stared down at the leg. My jeans had a spreading purple stain where the blue of the denim mixed with my red blood. And something else was leaking from the wound; an oily, black liquid. Startled, I put my bad foot down without thinking about it.

  I stopped midscream. It hadn’t hurt. In fact, the gash wasn’t even there anymore. To be sure, I pulled open the rip in my jeans.

  “Miss? Are you okay?”

  I shouted, “Yeah! Just give me a minute!”

  My jeans were still soaked with blood, but my flesh was whole again. Even the awful black blemish had sealed right up, as though there’d never been a long gouge through my calf. My leg was a teeny bit tender, that was all.

  “Miss, get out of the way! We have a man here with a hunting rifle!”

  “No!” I scrambled to my feet. “No, it’s okay! I’m okay! See?” I took a few strong steps to show them. The woman looked confused. Beside her, a man lowered his rifle. Before today, I’d never seen a real rifle before, not even at a distance. My mom always harped on about how it was better that she and Dad were raising us here instead of in the U.S., where “everybody and their dog” had a gun.

  Weakly, the bird tried to strike me again. It missed. Its head flopped to the ground. It’d lost a ton of blood, and who knew what internal injuries it had? The woman shouted, “We still need to shoot it, Miss! It’s a danger to everyone!” The man raised his rifle again.

  “No, no; don’t! It’s dying, can’t you see that?” How could I keep him from shooting it? Maybe if I were on it, he wouldn’t shoot because he’d be afraid to hit me. I ran right up to the bird and started climbing. The skin on my back was crawling at the thought that it was now exposed to the guy with the gun. I yelled, “Don’t shoot! Just give me a freaking minute, okay?” The bird’s feathers were more like young tree branches; they made good handholds. They also smelled like rancid fish oil. And it had fleas. Fighting not to gag, not to freak at the sensation of fleas running over my hands, I climbed onto the bird’s back, up near its neck. That added the smell o
f raw blood to the rest of the nastiness. I avoided the tarry patches where Spot had mired the bird’s feathers. I straddled it, near its neck. It didn’t react at all. “That’s right, baby,” I crooned to the bird, “don’t kill me.” Not that it could, in its present state. I didn’t even know if it was still alive.

  From my perch, I looked out over the crowd. Some of them had gotten bored already and were wandering away. I thought I saw a Sasquatch among them. It was wearing jeans and a loose hoodie with the hood pulled up over its head. A few people were still there, including the woman who’d tried to help me and the man with the gun. The two of them were talking to each other. Then the woman nodded, and she and the man made their way cautiously over to the side of the bird.

  The man looked angry. “What’re you playing at?” he said. “You told this lady you were injured.”

  “I didn’t tell her anything! She could see it for herself!”

  The woman said, “You could have faked that.”

  The man said, “Yeah. I know you kids today. Do anything to get attention.”

  I couldn’t see how this could end well. So I didn’t reply. Instead, I thought hard. I needed a vet; one that knew how to treat the granddaddy of all archaeopteryxes. Archaeopteryxi?

  Wait. I did know someone who could take care of huge birds that both were and weren’t birds. How to get her here, though? What had she said to her house? The soundshapes and rhythms of the old lady’s words danced in my mind, like toes tapping out a story to music. I had it. I murmured, “Dacha maya, idti syuda.” I was pretty sure it went something like that.

  Now the man looked really mad. “What the hell? Are you making fun of me?”

  I wasn’t. I was just using my superpower. “Dacha maya, idti syuda.”

  The woman shook her head. “She’s saying words. Honey, what language is that? Do you know where you are?” To the man, she said, “I think she might be delusional.”

  “Dacha maya, idti syuda.” Come on, come on.

  “Well, I say we drag her down off that thing, kill it, and march her right over to the loony bin.”

  “Dacha maya, idti syuda.” Maybe I was saying it wrong? I wasn’t. I knew I wasn’t, like I knew where each part of my body was in space when I did a somersault.

  “I don’t know,” said the woman. “We don’t want to agitate her. Or that thing she’s riding.”

  “Lady, she looks like she’s already been plenty agitated. Shaken and stirred, I’d say.” He looked up at me. “Miss, you come down here right now, you hear me?”

  The woman said, “You think she’s going to come down while you’re brandishing a gun at her? She’s schizophrenic, not stupid.”

  Oh, so now I was schizo? “Dacha maya, idti syuda.”

  “Do you even have a permit for that weapon?”

  “Dacha maya, idti syuda.” Crap. It wasn’t working. I felt like such an idiot. “Dacha maya, idti syuda!” Maybe the old woman had been lying about being able to find me anywhere.

  The man said, “Oh, so when it’s convenient for you, you’re all like, ‘Please, mister, please shoot wild, scary animals for me.’ But now—”

  A shadow fell on us. A big one. There was shouting from the crowd, and a lot of pushing and shoving to get out of the way. The man looked up and gaped. He fired a shot. The bullet buried itself in one of the wooden beams at the corner of the flying house. The old witch’s house had arrived. “Finally,” I muttered. “Took you long enough.”

  With one long, chicken-skinned claw, the house flicked the rifle out of the man’s hands. It ran to where the rifle landed and stomped on it a few times. It had learned quickly about rifles.

  “Good house,” said the Toronto Transit Commission woman approvingly. “He was going to hurt someone with that thing.”

  The giant bird chose that moment to show signs of life. It raised its head and began to struggle to its feet.

  The now rifle-less man said, “You’re all crazy. This is crazy. I’m outta here.” He took off at a run. Me, I slid down off the bird’s back to where the woman was standing.

  “Lady,” I said, “we gotta run.” I grabbed her hand and tugged her out of the way just as the bird took a swipe at where she’d been a split second before. I took her behind the legs of the witch’s house.

  “Is this safe?” she asked, looking up at the underside of the house.

  “So long as it doesn’t sit down.”

  “I was more afraid of it shitting down.”

  “Oh, crap.”

  “Precisely. How about behind that car over there?” She pointed to a yellow Prius that was on the sidewalk, kissing a telephone pole. So we went over there to watch what would happen next. “This is so exciting!” she said. “Much better than Sunday afternoon classes at my dojo.”

  The bird, which had been wobbly on its feet anyway, plopped back down in a puddle of its own congealing blood. The house put itself right in front of the bird. The bird cocked its head sideways at the house. The house’s eye shutters opened and closed.

  The house’s front door flew open so hard that it cracked against the outside wall. “Dyevuchka,” came a voice from inside, “where are you? What are you doing, ordering my house around as though it’s yours? Come and take your punishment, brazen child. You know you can’t hide.”

  True. I couldn’t. I might be in a witch’s soup pot tonight, and all for what? A big, half-dead dinosaur bird that’d just as soon kill me as look at me. “I’m coming!” I stepped out from behind the car and began making my way back over there. If this didn’t work, I was toast. “Just take a look outside first, will you?”

  “I will not. Come along, now. Izbouchka, let her in.”

  Izbouchka did nothing of the sort. She had a good look at the injured bird. Where an ordinary bird would have cocked its head to look at something that had made it curious, Izbouchka had to cock her whole body to stare at the giant bird. I heard stuff tumbling inside, things breaking as the witch’s house tilted at an angle, with her inside. “Izbouchka!” she yelled, then a string of words that didn’t sound polite at all.

  “I’m sorry!” I shouted. “Just come out, please? Just for a second?”

  “Oh, I’m going to peel your skin off to make myself a new pair of boots. I’m going to string your teeth together for a necklace. I’m going to roast you like a suckling pig and feed your bones to Izbouchka.”

  Izbouchka righted herself.

  The old lady stuck her head out of a window that hadn’t been there a second before. She was wearing curlers in her hair. I dared not laugh. Instead, I pointed at the bird. “Um, this—whatever it is—got into a fight with my aunt’s pet rolling calf.

  She looked. “Oh, my,” she said.

  “I know, right? It looks like it’s lost a lot of blood, and I can’t take care of it. My parents’d freak. Besides, I think it’s more likely to eat me than be grateful. Anyway, I, um, I just thought that you’d know how to handle a big flying creature that’s pointy at most of its ends, and I wanted to ask your advice, you know? I’m really sorry to inconvenience you.”

  She gave me a stern look. “We’ll see.”

  What’d that mean? But I couldn’t ask her. She’d pulled her head back inside Izbouchka, and the window had disappeared. A second later, a door appeared. Izbouchka crouched down, and a set of stairs from the porch to the ground appeared. The door opened, and the old lady marched out. She’d tied a scarf around her curlers. She came down the stairs and went over to the bird. It just crouched there, tar soaked into and dripping from its feathers, panting for breath and trying to blink more tar out of its reddened eyes. It looked like it’d been caught in the biggest oil spill ever. Plus there was all that blood.

  The witch shook her head. “He’s done for,” she said. “His injuries are too serious. And there’s no way to get all that stuff off without taking his feathers and skin along with it.” She made a tutting noise. “Pity the feathers are ruined. They would have made me a wonderful cloak.”

  �
��Gross. You mean he’s going to die?”

  “Yes.”

  Izbouchka stood. The strangest noise came from inside her; kind of a whump!

  The old lady’s eyes went wide. “Dacha, no! Stop that this instant!”

  But she didn’t. The house tilted her body until her roof was pointing at the bird. Inside the house, I heard the crash and bang of things being tossed around and breaking. “Izbouchka!”

  A chimney slid out of Izbouchka’s roof. “Run!” said the old lady. She hustled me over to the side of the road. She could move pretty quickly for an old lady.

  Izbouchka coughed, an almost ladylike sound. “I’m sorry,” the old lady said to me.

  “For what?” I turned to look at what was happening.

  Flame came spurting out of Izbouchka’s chimney; a roaring torch of it a good six feet long. People who were still watching shouted in surprise.

  Izbouchka aimed her flame at the bird. The bird was covered in tar; it caught fire right away. I yelped. The crowd backed farther away. “Stop her!” I yelled. “She’s going to kill it!”

  The witch shook her head. “I can’t stop her.”

  The tarred bird was screaming now, trying to stand. It threw its head back and extended its wings. Flame licked all the way along them, outlining them in orange light. It was glorious to see, and it made me feel sick to my stomach. “She’s hurting it,” I moaned. Tears were running down my face.

  The burning bird collapsed in on itself. For a second, it glowed from within and I could see its bones. Then the flames disappeared and the lump left in the road was just a big piece of coal. “What did you do?” I screeched at Izbouchka. I started to rush toward the house, but the witch held me back.

  The charred corpse of the giant bird flared into flame again, so bright. No, not flame. A bird-shaped body was rising out of the ashes. Its plumage was red and orange, shiny new and glowing in the dark. It stretched its wings out and cawed so loudly that it hurt my ears. People in the crowd covered their ears, too. Over by the pretzled Prius, the bus driver watched, her face alight with wonder.