Hollow Kingdom

by Kira Jane Buxton

  “War…”

  “Yes. War is coming. And I tell you now, while we still have time, that it won’t be like anything we’ve ever seen.”

  I lose myself for a few moments to thoughts of World Wars I and II, the American Revolution, the Battle of Hastings, the Gulf War, Tibet, Kosovo, Cyprus, some of the many, many times when MoFos fought over land and resources. Territory is the source of almost every battle ever fought. Every inch of what Kraai called the big beautiful blue had been fought over many times. I hadn’t thought about this—that without the number one predator on earth, there would be savage bloodshed to conquer the spoils.

  “So, will you help us rescue the domestics?” I asked.

  “And we will provide you with—” he paused, eyes taking in the desecrated high school, the pools of blood, the scars of a bomb, the recent memory of The Terrible Three— “protection. For both of you.”

  An alliance. Dennis had fallen asleep under the Norway maple, wiped out from the trekking and baying and the general keeping alive in a sharp-toothed world. Gentle snores and whistles fluttered from his jowls and that magical nose, our secret weapon in the new beautiful blue.

  “Yes,” I told Kraai. “We will show you how to shatter glass.”

  Kraai nodded. He released a shuddering rattle from deep in his throat. Then he stretched his wings to the ends of the earth and let out a hoarse caw, a curious utterance I didn’t know.

  Clarion crow calls lifted into the sky. I had no idea what or whom they were addressing with their strange song, but they were doing so with an urgency I’d never heard before. Aura strummed, crooned, and trilled with intensity. Dennis rolled his cherry eyes to register I was okay and then resumed his slumber, tired to his bones.

  “Come. It is time. We must fly.” Kraai was calm, stoicism in the feather. He stood under the stretched limbs of the Norway maple with the command of a King, the wisdom of the wind. His brethren poured sound into the sky, expelled their lungs around him, a never-ending summoning.

  “But Kraai, I can’t fly. Something’s happened to my wing, I’m as useless as a fucking penguin—”

  Kraai turned away from me, his glossy tail feathers stroking the grass. He raised his head and waited. Within seconds, a shape burst through the clouds, a dark V that rode the air.

  “Who…what’s—?” I started, but succumbed to staring up at the approaching entity. Kraai kept his focus on the V. As it dropped down in looping circles, a flash of white gave its identity away. It was a bald eagle. This didn’t seem like a wonderful development; eagles and crows are known nemeses, crow hatchlings taught to detest the birds of prey for their egg thievery and predator power. Crows mob eagles every chance they get. I waited for the murder to activate, to commence a Herculean mobbing of the taloned one. But Kraai didn’t move. Something about the way he watched so purposefully, or perhaps just because I had developed a respect for this crow king, made me trust his choice to silently watch an archenemy draw near his family.

  The crows fell silent as the eagle dropped down with a piping chatter of high-pitched notes. I have to be honest here and tell you that I’d always resented eagles and their undeserved status as our national emblem. But having never personally mobbed a bald eagle, I’d never been in this sort of proximity to one before. This bird—with her buttercup-yellow eyes and perfectly alabaster head plumage, her voluptuous shuttlecock tail, and the rich chocolate of her body—rendered me a statue. She was flawless in feather, strong and savvy. She looked at me—right fucking at me!—with that iconic regal expression, daffodil-yellow eye absorbing and adjudicating with a sharpness rivaled only by her talons. Bald eagles are majestic as fuck. If we were going to dive headfirst into a war, I couldn’t think of a more emboldening mascot.

  Kraai strode toward her. The eagle chittered. She spread her magnificent wingspan and lowered her formidable beak.

  “Hurry,” Kraai said, turning to me. “It is time.”

  Chapter 24

  S.T.

  Staring Blankly at a Bald Eagle, Seattle, Washington, USA

  I refused to leave Dennis, setting aside the utterly absurd prospect of mounting a bird of prey. But Kraai had a way with normalizing insanity—for example, by calmly convincing you to abandon your best friend and cavort with a deadly raptor. He assigned an intimidating mass of crows to station themselves silently among the limbs of the Norway maple, their sole job to keep one eye out for danger and the other eye on my bloodhound. Tippi Hedren would have peed herself. It was utter madness, but I did it. I clambered my way onto the back of a fucking bald eagle, or rather hobbled up there, as awkward as an elevator fart. With a tight chitter, she spread her powerful wings and lifted us into the air. The Norway maple below us rustled and shimmied as hundreds of crows shot from its branches. The crows’ strange summoning song rose with us, softening and fading.

  The bald eagle’s mighty flaps rose us higher, shrinking the grass, the Norway maple, and Ballard High School. I dug my feet into her back, feeling the muscle under her carpet of smooth down, the composed power of our flight. Her feathers felt silky and strong, their wispy plumes lifting to dance where the wind kissed them. This was her destiny, to ride the wind. She was airborne. Pride fizzed inside me. To be feathered, I thought—as the eagle owned the sky, gravity tipping its cap—is to eschew captivity, to taste the pulpy fruit of freedom. Oh, how I had missed it. Gliding smoothed out the ride; she flapped half as much as the crows, slicing through the air as if it were whipped frosting. Her fleece-white head jerked mechanically in front of me as she used those keen yellow eyes to navigate, monitoring the Lego pieces of Seattle below. I didn’t say anything to her because I felt awkward as hell. I mean, what would you say? “Have you done this before? Am I your first crow?” No, if Big Jim had taught me anything about talking to females, it was that sometimes you can save yourself by shutting your Cheeto® hole. The fluff-puff sparrow sped along beside us among the Blackwings with rapid wing flaps, a bullet of a songbird. My body buzzed with exhilaration, with being the badass crow on the back of a bald eagle. With just being.

  Trees were broccoli. Roofs were playing cards. Roads were ribbons and hills were mole mounds. A muddled cluster of army trucks and tanks looked like the olive-green G.I. Joe toys of young MoFos. The world seemed more manageable again, as I’d known it to be when I could fly. Flanking us were hundreds of crows, now silent but for the whooshing of onyx wings. Then, curiously, I realized that it wasn’t just crows around us. Clenching my feet tighter, I stole a glance behind me, almost losing my grip in shock. My eyes were met with an avian horde that was on our tail: an immense flock of crows, but also the white-and-black bands of Canada geese. There were song sparrows and house finches, frantically flapping mallards, and great blue herons, the sky’s RVs. The bright yellow blips were American goldfinches, shouldered by dark-eyed juncos, pine siskins, bushtits, robins, wrens, and nuthatches. Flickers and jays and swallows and towhees. Parakeets and starlings, flycatchers and vireos. A cast of red-tailed hawks hovered above, dangerously near their prey, but everyone focused on flight alone as if we were one airborne entity. That’s when the nerves got me, snatching my legs with pulsing shakes. Here we were, all flying side by side, elbowing out the clouds, all led by me and the bald eagle I was riding. I was the ringmaster. No one made a sound, not a single cheep or chirrup. My insides quivered like microwaved pudding.

  “Shit Turd!”

  I startled at hearing my full name, ducking before darting my head in search mode.

  “You’re alive!” came the voice. I took in the gunmetal-gray body, the determined flapping that brought it alongside the eagle. I shook my head in disbelief upon seeing those pale custard-yellow eyes, still playful and lit with wisdom, and a tail as flaming red as a cayenne pepper. It was Ghubari.

  “Is it—is it really you?” I asked the volitant parrot, scared to face another disappointment, another taunting ghost from my old life. A heart can only take so many dangling carrots.

  “’Tis I!” he
squawked. “Didn’t think you made it out alive! You appear to have hijacked an eagle too; bit of a change from Big Jim’s shoulder but very intrepid. Good for you!” Big Jim! What a burst of joy to hear his name spoken, stoking the glowing embers of his memory. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen Ghubari and his MoFo, Rohan. It must have been at Wings of the World, the exotic bird store in Bothell, because that was always where we saw one another, but the times all blended together. Big Jim and Rohan always exchanged tiny talk, finding an infrequent oasis of common ground amidst a sea of differed opinions. I would jabber with Ghubari, one of the only birds I would associate with because of his sharp intellect and deep insight into the world of the MoFos. The African gray could speak English, so many more words than I could. He could do impressions and count and be funny and entertain a crowd with his clever tricks. He was a brilliant being, a straddler of worlds.

  “Why are you piggybacking on a bald eagle?” he asked, as one might.

  “I think I wanted to be a MoFo so much that I wished away my wing.”

  “I see. You’re grounded?”

  “Yes.”

  “Permanent?” he asked.

  “Who knows?” And that’s all we said about that. Creatures of the animal kingdom don’t dwell on disability, they accept and carry on. “Tell me, Ghubari. Where’s Rohan?” I asked, frightened of an answer.

  Ghubari, his flight like glitter dropping from an envelope, lowered his custard eyes to a mass of sick MoFos scurrying below like ants around spilled Kool-Aid. He clicked his tongue and whistled. I listened in rapture to this Old World bird who held cities in his mind, whole history books deep in his belly. “Hold on to your heart as I tell you this, S.T. Neera got sick. Rohan told her to stay at home because her symptoms seemed odd. She rained with sweat and her hands were swollen, fingerprints distorted, twice the size they normally were. But our matriarch insisted she was fine. Of course, the time-old lesson; she should have hung back, abandoned her fighting impulse. But Neera had fought her whole life and knew nothing else. It got worse while she was teaching that day and red-and-blue flashing lights took her to the hospital. Rohan and I raced there to be at her side. It was chaos. Armed guards seized the sick and were quarantining them in plastic bubbles and holding cells. There were needles and Tasers. People screamed about conspiracies and the reckoning. Some had grayish skin, one was cannibalizing his own foot right there in the hospital lobby, I tell you. Priests in penguin colors were called in, but most ran away screaming. There was a young child, a brown-eyed girl whose skin was sloughing off; her tears couldn’t stop it. I saw a man whose head had swollen, features bulbous and shiny, his jaw twice the size of a normal man.

  “Then two armed men in yellow suits and masks snatched Neera. She started to scream, a sort of primal keening. It didn’t sound like our Neera. Neera had always sounded like the May rains, spring’s lullaby. Rohan ran to her. A guard brought his club down on Rohan’s temple.” Here Ghubari paused to pluck Rohan’s voice from the sky. He mimicked him perfectly, yelling, “Leave her alone! I beg you!” He transported me back in time to the horrors of a hospital lobby, watching Rohan plead with a soldier. Begging, desperate, as raw as a fresh wound.

  “I pecked and scratched at the guard’s face, pinning him into a corner, holding him as best I could with my claws. The other tried to tranquilize Neera. She ripped his arm clean out of its socket. I no longer knew her. Neera, custodian of Rohan’s heart, our brilliant professor of gender studies, our gentile, soft-spoken sage. Then—and I tell you, Shit Turd, I’ve seen some things in my day—but Rohan and I could do nothing, as if we were stripped of our minds, feathers, and fingers as we watched Neera…change.”

  “Change?” I asked, thinking of Big Jim, his rogue eyeball and endlessly swiping digits.

  “Neera started secreting something from her skin, different from the sweat. Something…sticky. And S.T., right then and there she climbed up the hospital’s insides, scaling drywall. She just hung there silent, stuck in the middle of the lobby wall, watching us. For a few moments, she didn’t move, but I knew that would change. I could feel something coming, something so dark it couldn’t be named. I screeched and panicked because I could feel that she had gone, S.T., but Rohan’s love was so big. He couldn’t leave her. His heart was fused to the wall with her. I shot up and perched on an air vent and watched the descent in horror.”

  “The descent?”

  “There was a…degradation. They all…changed. Or they were devoured by The Changed Ones. I saw a newly hatched human, fresh from the egg, and I tell you it had ridges on its skin and thin, jutting limbs and it was scuttling around the hospital like a bleeding spider. Not yet a day in the world, and—it was hunting. Rohan was taken as he tried to rip Neera from the wall. The human with the monstrous jaw brought his teeth down onto Rohan’s neck. There was nothing I could do. Nothing but to fly away before what Neera had turned into made it up the wall to where I was perched. I took Rohan’s kanthi mala from around his neck when The Changed Ones were distracted. I flew back to our home to bury the necklace to pay respects to their memory.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” was the only thing I could think to say. Ghubari must have carried the same weight I did, hard on the wings.

  He asked me about Big Jim. I nodded and swallowed because that’s all I could manage. “But Dennis is alive!” I told him.

  “Dennis! Well, well, well. The Golden Nose. That is cheery news. A bit of sparkle from the Old World.”

  My heart thumped like the hind legs of a rabbit. Ghubari was a therapy bird, permitted to go everywhere as a celebrated member of MoFo society. He was a treasure trove of knowledge, an idol of my past, and now my much-altered present. And he was here for me to ask the questions I could of no one else.

  “Ghubari, what happened to them?” I pointed my beak at the humpbacked broken MoFos that dotted the land between tree crowns and the hats of buildings streaming beneath us. Ghostly shadows of the wondrous creators they had once been.

  Ghubari’s tone remained as steady and stoic as the Cascade mountains. “It was a virus.”

  “Like an infection? A disease. Like the dreaded bird flu?” I asked, hesitating to bring up such a skin-sore for our kind.

  “No. Not like AIDS or Zika or Ebola. This was man’s creation. This came from the Internet, through the screens, S.T. This came from the connectivity.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t have all the answers. And in any case, they are not mine to give. But I know it started with the addiction. Technology was an intangible seductress, a siren calling for ships to meet her jagged rocks. It was a virus that spread through the systems, through the network, chips, watches, phones, tablets. Through eyes, skin, and synapses. Rohan had seen it coming. He burned everything connected long before the first warnings were sent out—the wireless emergency alerts. We lived for a time in the dark. Choppers doused the city in their lights and blasted taped instructions. Trucks passed outside with loudspeakers and panic and, later, when the planes fell from the sky and the cars collided, a few men with farmland and big hearts yelled their warnings from horseback. Women with swollen bellies headed for safety underground, burrowing like rabbits. But the World Wide Web had the humans tangled in its threads. Seattle became a mecca of explosions and screaming and a hunger that could never be satisfied. Then the change, that virus, caused them to have physical morphing. Now, it seems that it has made them voracious; they are constantly hunting for—”

  “The Internet. Electricity. Power. Screens,” I answered, staring down at MoFos teeming over a billboard, clambering to cover every inch of it with their twisted bodies. Through gaps in their flailing limbs, I could make out its message. It said, “Will The Last Person Leaving SEATTLE Turn Out The Lights.”

  It made more sense to me now. After what happened with Tiffany S., The Black Tide began to drown Big Jim. He hid at home with his bloodhound and his crow as the world fell apart. He had no more fight left inside t
o fight what was outside. I’d been in denial about all of it, about the condition of Big Jim’s heart, about the terrible things happening in the world around us.

  “There is something more to it, S.T., though I can’t yet say what it is. Something greater is at play here. In time, it will reveal itself.” I shuddered.

  “We have lost the very best part of our world,” I told Ghubari.

  Ghubari laughed, a laugh to split open a star. “Change is inevitable, dear crow. We must adapt. You cannot stop the tide, S.T. You must be more like the log that bobs along its surface.”

  “My life is not—”

  “Everything is a tide, in and out, in and out. Even your humans. We have every advantage to us in this New World, harnessing the power and knowledge of the old one. A fresh start is sometimes just the ticket. We must recognize that our greatest gifts sometimes come in the ugliest of shells.” He sounded like Rohan with his butterscotch cadence, his buoyant wisdom.

  “But it will never be the same! It will never be as good; we are losing the MoFo touch. We will lose the most magical essence of them…creativity! To create is the greatest gift of a MoFo!”

  Below, the brambles writhed like a great black dragon, a breathing creature of thorn and spine. We flew over a seaplane that had plummeted from the sky and collided with an apartment building, severing its neck. Even in utter devastation, wounded brick, and shattered glass, the ingenious development and dreams of the MoFos were scintillatingly beautiful.

  Ghubari laughed again, the frothy laughter of a bird who has lived many lifetimes, a bird who weathered worldly change like a seasonal malt.