Hollow Kingdom

by Kira Jane Buxton

  My bones. Like whale ribs in times of plenty, they press against my fur, dank and brittle. I have swum for days with a broken heart, hunting for a reason to swim and draw frosty air. I am the very Last Of The Ice Bears.

  Tornassuk. Tornassuk.

  The last of my hope rides on the wind. It is a metallic smell of blood and brine, the promise of a walrus ahead a few miles that spills red onto sparkling white powder. I follow with laden paws and vanishing body.

  The walrus is fresh, tusks now stationary swords. Blood pools on the ice and then in my frozen veins as I see my once-little cub who was swallowed by the sea. It is you! You have grown, Tornassuk. You, and the others. We, Seal’s Dread, The Hunters Of The Floe, The Ice Bears, have returned as the sea’s fish have. You have made the ice your kingdom.

  The sky bursts with opalescent strokes of color that dance across icicle shadows.

  We eat.

  And The Ice Bears live on.

  Chapter 34

  S.T.

  Lynnwood, Washington, USA

  We were still gathered and grieving when our new kingdom threw its head back and roared once more. On the horizon, a pastel scarf whipped satin loops in the air, performing acrobatics. As it neared, the scarf revealed itself to be feathereds. Cedar waxwings, with their silky gradient of dusky sunset colors and rakish black masks, came to us, panicked and breathless.

  “It’s happening,” they said, hearts trilling, “The One Who Conquers is in our territory.”

  I turned to Kraai and saw a fire light in him, a smolder that lifted his flight feathers.

  “It is time,” he called. “Send word to all the crows, rally our allies. We must fight for what’s ours!”

  The crows mobilized with a cacophony of caws, and other birds followed suit. The air was filled with frantic wings, black, green, white, brown, blue, and yellow. Migisi dropped down next to me, chittering with anticipation. Woodpeckers drilled into the wooden telephone poles, sending a sort of emergency Morse code through Aura. News would travel on the wings of an Arctic tern, and circulate with the keen and cackle of Echo’s sea birds. Dogs barked and spun in circles. I hopped onto Migisi’s back in a daze and suddenly the dogs were getting smaller and the wind was ruffling my feathers and the elephants looked like Stonehenge from above, standing guard of our Dennis. Leaving him this time felt no different than any other time, my heart lodged itself somewhere in my brain and my insides felt like chile con queso. Out of everything I’d been through, leaving Dennis was still by far the hardest thing I’d ever done, but I had no choice. Because I lived for the two of us now; I lived for Dennis and I lived for me, and apparently we both had an insatiable thirst for danger. And we had to save the one place where our crows and our domestics had a shot. This was the one thing we could control. When you have the power to stand up to oppression, you must. Time with the elephants had strengthened me and I’d remembered myself. The crow in me had loyalty and passion. The MoFo in me, hope. I was about to unleash a motherfucking hurricane.

  Migisi flew high over 164th Street, high above the small park and the lake where Dennis had been a hero and the hideous creatures had drowned. Flanked by thousands of wings, we headed south, mind maps guiding us with precision by UV light and strumming vibrations that turned our hearts into tiny ukuleles, toward where the waxwings had seen The One Who Conquers infiltrate our territory. They had snuck up on us, invading while we were distracted by our grief and honoring our friend.

  We flew over the dying concrete jungle below, over carnage and decay, bursting beauty and the optimism of seedlings alike. A sign for Bothell Landing identified a park with its rusting climbing frame, weeds slowly digesting picnic tables, and the Sammamish River, gorged and swollen, snaking through hurriedly to other adventures. It didn’t take me long to locate The One Who Conquers, only to discover that once again, the feathereds had let me down with their lack of a grip on plural nouns. The One Who Conquers was a “they.” More than one predator had taken down the gorilla at King Street Station. More than one had been terrorizing and conquering Seattle. In keeping with the calling of their blood, they had formed a pack. And now, below us, the pack was holding ground against the birds that mobbed them from the sky, local crows, gulls, geese, with some brave and foolhardy charging from the ducks and cormorants calling for backup from the river.

  Their power was immediately obvious. One wolf is a threat, a fearless assassin, but this pack was enormous, too many for me to count, and at the front of the legion of silver-tipped fur and seasoned fangs were four snow-white wolves. I knew them instantly, their rangy bodies and striking cool glow, white as snow-buried bones. The sister wolves from the Woodland Park Zoo. Big Jim and I had watched them from behind the safety of their enclosure as they wandered its periphery in a territorial trot. And here they were, freed and fused to a prodigious new pack that rallied behind them. I flashed back to the dead wolves I saw in Mill Creek’s town center, a smaller, weaker pack that couldn’t survive the new realm. Wild wolves who didn’t have the leadership and savvy of the white wolves familiar with the ways of MoFos. This pack was different. Larger, stronger, it had grown its numbers to survive. They had made lairs and eaten gorillas and become formidable. The wolves held their ground, backs of their stiff bodies arched, heads lowered in toothy snarls. Tails were tucked, hackles stood up like newly mowed grass. Birds dove at them, screeching a fight song, and I watched in horror as several were swiped from the sky and from this earth. Feathered mounds dotted the grass like molehills.

  Kraai shot past Migisi and me, shouting directions to the black mass that was ready to die by his command. The crows cawed and began their mobbing, pulling at tails and facing lines of glistening teeth. And then Ghubari was beside me, flapping in place, with Pressa by his side, the burns of her underwing exposed.

  “There is another threat!” Ghubari wheezed, out of breath.

  Pressa took over for him. “Others are taking our territory not far from here! Kraai has sent more crows and summoned for help through Aura, but he can’t be in both places at once!”

  “Show me!” I demanded, and we took off as if shot from Sigourney Weaver, Big Jim’s Marlin Model 336 lever-action rifle. We were skimming over trees and my mind was whirling and then we were above a golf course and a cluster of western white pines. Migisi, Ghubari, and Pressa touched down onto a high branch and we stared down at our next problem.

  Below us was another creature I had never encountered, and I was willing to bet that I wasn’t alone in this regard. Dotted on the ground were strange black-and-white lumps that I’d seen before, each about the size of a packet of Doritos that gave off an acidic smell. And then I knew that these lumps were fecal matter. They were droppings, and what had made them was what had sent the formidable ant army running for their lives, daring even to take to water as a chance at survival. It dawned on me that the cocooned body Dennis and I had found in the tree trunk had been prey, woven tight and decomposing in silk. These were The Weavers. I stared openmouthed at the second hybrid monster I’d seen, something that was both MoFo and not, with its strange horizontal body, dark mottled skin. It had a head where a head shouldn’t be on a MoFo body, surging directly from the center of its horizontal torso and it looked up with fuliginous holes where there should have been eyes. Homo sapien, but not. And where there should have been a mouth, there was a mandible with a sensory pedipalp, jaws that leaked silvery strings of fluid. Its sides sprouted arms, but they weren’t arms, they were legs, and everything about them, from their sharp angles to their coating of spiky hair, suggested that they were arachnid. The gift of animal instinct is this—knowing a danger before it has shown you its teeth. My animal instinct told me I was looking at an unspeakable danger to our world.

  “Look what they’ve done!” hissed Pressa, pointing her beak at the trees below.

  The Weavers, chronic and cancerous in their destruction, had burrowed into the trees, leaving great holes, scratched sap-streaming scars across their beautiful trunks. The d
ecaying bodies of birds, raccoons, and squirrels were suspended in the trees, silk wrapped and strangled. Cocooned corpses. I thought of Rohan’s desperate conversation at the hospital. Cancer is a newly evolved parasitic species. Humans are becoming that cancer. The question begged, was the earth healthy enough to fight off this parasite? I held back nausea as we watched them, these five lion-sized monsters with no names, shift mechanically around the base of tree trunks, and then I lost the air from my lungs as I watched one of them rise up, lifting its horrible bristled limbs to the pine’s bark and hoisting its enormous body. They could climb.

  “We’ve been watching them move,” said Pressa, her normally cool voice stricken with dismay. “They are heading in the direction of the campus. They’re coming for us.”

  The domestic safe zone. Beaks and talons and the hollow bones of birds were no match for this type of predator. My first instincts were (in this order) to scream, run around in circles, shit myself, and perform a stiff-legged faint like those myotonic goats, but this wasn’t a time to panic. It was a time for me to use my melon, every trick in my crow-MoFo mind.

  “Migisi! Rise!” I yelled, and she did, Ghubari and Pressa joining us in the air, lifting from the pines. I addressed Aura, calling out to nature’s network for help. I asked for specific information—a location. Now, I was the one who was hunting.

  “Look!” cried Pressa, her feathers ruffling.

  A butterfly whose wings were the most brilliant iridescent blue fluttered toward me. A species native to tropical rainforests, she was at once delicate and a joyful icon of survival, a symbol of the impossible. How could she have survived this climate? This world? She was so very far from home. She bolstered me. Her glowing cerulean wings held my attention as she showed me a mind map by using her wand-like antennae to paint a picture in ultraviolet light. She watched me leave and I felt that I was protected by her gaze. I knew then that I was being watched, cheered even, from worlds I couldn’t see.

  My love for Dennis fortified me as I followed the directions from the blue morpho butterfly. Ghubari and Pressa flew at top speed behind me, and I felt them on my tail feathers. We didn’t have to go far. The ones I was hunting for were patrolling the large backyard of a mansion, their shoulder blades rising and falling as they skulked through the long grass. One of them was lying on a MoFo’s deck, resting but always, always vigilant. His limpid eyes scanned for movement in the grass and the long-abandoned chicken coop. Another was busy marking his territory by squirting urine all over the place. Cats, I’m telling you. From above, their stripes looked like eels swimming in a blazing fire.

  I was almost hyperventilating. My head darted from side to side as I instructed Migisi to swoop around the surrounding area, being careful to steer clear of the Brothers Burning Bright. A neighboring house, another McMansion with a front lawn covered in trash, seemed like it might have what I was looking for. Migisi touched down onto the grass and I got to work, sifting through the piles, tossing up tissues, wine bottles, yogurt cartons, condom packages, and old editions of the Times—New York and Seattle. Ghubari and Pressa perched on debris in the shadow of the enormous house. Pressa seemed unsure, sitting on the top of an empty Amazon box. Ghubari hopped toward me, as I spat various items from my beak and made disgruntled noises. Pressa hopped down from the Amazon box, eyed the clutter, then picked up something with her beak and plopped it in front of me.

  “How about this turtle egg?” she asked.

  “That’s a golf ball,” I said.

  “Hmm. This dried up weasel turd?” she asked, gesturing with her foot.

  “That’s a cigar.”

  “How about this shiny chestnut?”

  “That’s a Ken doll hairpiece.”

  “Oh. Colorful worm?”

  “A shoelace.”

  “These corn kernels?”

  “False teeth.”

  “Well then, what about this? This looks like a very useful thing!” She was just so chipper and trying so very hard to be helpful. I didn’t have the heart to tell her how off the mark she was, offering up a locket with its tiny amateur oil painting that was supposed to be Nicolas Cage but looked more like a Yukon Gold potato. I kept up my search, beginning to fear we’d never find what I needed. But when a young MoFo’s foreclosed Barbie Malibu Dreamhouse came into view, my hope surged. I hopped over to a pile of scraps leftover from MoFo children—Legos, Star Wars figurines, coloring books—and finally selected an item I felt would work, even if it was a little disturbing. Then I got to work on searching for the second part I needed.

  “Tell us what else you’re looking for so we can help!” said Pressa.

  I felt dubious. The enthusiasm was there, she just didn’t know what MoFo things were. How could she?

  “We need…a snake. A long, dead, brown snake,” I said.

  Pressa hopped determinedly behind an uprooted toilet and emerged victorious, dragging along a tatty old rope as long as our yard in her beak. It was perfect.

  “Dead snake,” she scoffed. “What do you take me for, a turkey?”

  Ghubari let out Rohan’s melodic laugh.

  I thanked her and got to work plunging my beak into the side of the plush toy I’d found, ripping a hole in its side and spitting out fluff onto the lawn. Ghubari helped me to push the rope through the hole, and I punctured another hole in the other side of the toy’s head, slipping the rope all the way through it. I gave Ghubari an inquiring look. He appeared satisfied with my toolmaking. Pressa seemed disturbed by my lobotomizing an Angry Bird. I did see the irony that the only plush toy happened to be a feathered. Next was convincing the largest and most powerful of us to help us carry out our plan.

  “Migisi?”

  The beautiful bald eagle was sitting on a small wooden chest she had broken open and was carefully studying the images of herself she recognized on seven denominations of U.S. currency. Seemingly flattered, she ruffled her feathers, then took lunging strides toward me—which continued to be, quite frankly, intimidating as fuck.

  “I want to ask you for a favor,” I told her. She listened to me carefully and then let out a sharp shriek. Pressa looked panicked and confused.

  “S.T.! You cannot ask her to do that!” cried Pressa.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Because she might die! Because you might die!”

  “Trust me, this will work! I’m using MoFo knowledge here!”

  “You trust me! S.T., things that are Hollow or MoFo or whatever are dangerous to the feathereds. I won’t let us die for this!” Pressa spread her wings to fully showcase the burns underneath. I felt so sorry that she had been injured. That somehow MoFos had caused it. That we had such different experiences.

  Ghubari intervened. “Well, there’s certainly no use in us just standing around debating like a married couple trying to pick a restaurant. What say we settle it like our, as you call them, MoFos used to?”

  “Fist fight!” I screeched.

  “—By respecting the depth of each other’s feelings but ultimately deferring to the only one whose decision really matters—”

  “Mine!” Pressa and I chorused. Ghubari gave us a patronizing look. He’s good at those.

  “Fine,” I said. “Migisi gets the final say! Do we all agree on that?”

  Pressa and Ghubari nodded. The three of us turned to our eagle friend. Migisi had returned to the carpet of American dollar bills to study her ravishing likeness again, bored with all the arguing and the endless gibberish that flew from beaks. She had never been a bird for a lot of noise and language, but rather, she was an adventure eagle.

  “Migisi?” asked Pressa, her voice choked with worry. “What is your final decision?” Migisi threw back her bright white head and let out a scream that needed no translation…

  “WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE WAITING FOR?!”

  And that settled the matter.

  “Pressa, I know you’re worried. That’s a thing we no longer have time for; our friends are in danger and it’s do-or-die. Or do
-and-die, but at least one involves no regrets.” I chuckled. This didn’t seem to alleviate her worry. I remembered that in the animal kingdom, trust is not given away. It is earned. I looked deep into Pressa’s shining eyes, echoing words she’d said to me the first time she dabbed my wonky wing in special herbs. “Trust me?”

  She nodded.

  I hopped onto Migisi and she held the rope ends in her formidable talons. Ghubari positioned the Angry Bird plush toy so that it would hang low to the ground as we lifted the rope ends it was attached to. Migisi rose into the air and dragged the Angry Bird below her. The bait.

  There wasn’t any time for practice. We each gave each other a look. Ghubari—resigned commitment. Pressa—panic and fear. Me—here we fucking go. We took off, and I felt the change in Migisi’s flight as she dragged the long rope, an Angry Bird bumping along the ground and another one riding a bald eagle, out to rescue his murder.

  We flew over the fence of the mansion to where the big cats lurked. I felt fear that fizzed and bubbled inside me, tempered by a determination so strong I was dizzy with anticipation. The Angry Bird scraped against the top of the tall wooden fence, then dropped onto the grass and bounced through the weeds. It happened fast: the tigers acted on genetic instinct, something I was counting on. All three shot from their positions and lunged toward the bouncing bird.

  “GO, MIGISI!” I cawed. And Migisi shot through the air, trailing the rope in her talons. Ghubari and Pressa shrieked and hollered as they flew with us. I kept my eye on the tigers as they scaled the wooden fence, their agile feline bodies trained on a stuffed bird with slug eyebrows. We tore across backyards, using any obstacle we could—a paddling pool, climbing frame, barbecue pits, and fire tables—to our advantage. Migisi lifted up higher to pull the bird above these objects, while the tigers had to navigate around or over them. But they were fast. Frighteningly fast. So fast that I felt quick rising nausea for fear that they’d gain on the bird and we’d lose our shot. Migisi yanked the bait over the last of the neighborhood fences and—terrifying an innocent herd of cattle who were congregated curbside and took off like their asses were on fire—trailed the rope down the length of a road. And this is where the tigers picked up speed and really showed their stripes. There were no obstacles to jump over, just a few vehicles to dodge. The smallest brother gained traction, and powerful back legs lunged him into an enormous leap, his body lengthening like a striking snake. He drove his claws into the body of the Angry Bird, and Migisi and I were yanked downward. She let go of the rope, and the tiger rolled with the impact of the attack, falling back to the ground with the Angry Bird. The three tigers circled the toy, shaking the earth with their growls, fighting over who got the kill.