Feral Creatures

by Kira Jane Buxton

Stay away from the edge, Dee. Climb down the copper beech to me.

  And then Dee was on the very edge of the nest, standing many, many MoFo feet above us all. The towering Insect Creature kept rapt focus on Dee.

  “Astee!” she called to the little crow in the maple who could do nothing. Dee had to leave the nest and she had to do it her way. It was too late to stop her now that she was about to throw herself off this aberrational structure. My fledgling who could not fly.

  “Dee! No!” I yelled up. And then in crow so she knew I meant it.

  No, Dee. Please.

  “Dannis!” she yelled back at me. “Dannis!”

  I know, Dee. She wanted to be a hero. She wanted to do the right thing, but strong as she was, her bones would not survive a fall from this height. Every creature here—living and in between—knew this and felt the weight of what would happen. If she was gone, The Changed Ones would stop hunting her. Dee understood this. She knew that everything else would have a better chance without her. She was thinking of her heroic Uncle Dennis luring The Changed Ones into a lake to drown.

  “Dee!” I yelled. “Please!”

  But I couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t treat her with this kind of exceptionalism—not at the cost of so many others. I thought of the words from Onida the walrus…

  She is no more important than a stone. No more vital than bacteria. Or a virus.

  If she leaves here, she will die, I told him.

  Yes, he’d said.

  I could not ask these gorillas and orangutans, survivors and refugees with their babies and their fragile futures, to lay down their lives for a one. Even the last. I could not ask the crows for more lives than they had already given. This is not the law of nature. The web of reciprocity is a balanced dance of give and take. And as much as I wanted it to, all of life did not revolve around this sun.

  “Astee!” she yelled back, her words ragged, throat closing up.

  And I couldn’t do anything. Not from this distance. I couldn’t stop her from being herself anymore, at any cost. I had to let her go.

  I suddenly saw her mother clearly. A MoFo who stood at the edge of her world’s end. A MoFo with Sirius-star eyes and a dark mane of hair. Tears paint her cheeks. Her bear heart in tatters; she places Dee in a bundled bassinet. She stands with her arms outstretched like a great oak—open to guidance and comfort, open to the whole glittering universe. She begs under her breath, a prayer, a whisper from the womb. The prayer is to something she can’t see but feels in her marrow, a plea that the world she had always believed in, a world of sprouting seeds and yellow-backed bees, will take care of the tiny, helpless hatchling. A black feather—soft as a broken heart—flitters down from the evergreens around her. A last touch, mother and child, skin to skin. There are no words, but a feeling as powerful as an ocean inside her compels her to do this, to take off her shoes and feel the grass beneath her toes. To leave her infant alone under a shiver of stars. A hair-thin thread between an act of blind faith and an act of unforgivable neglect. She walks, the longest walk of her life—a walk of the plank—from the bassinet to a dark cellar door, its cold metal lock waiting for her. The world crumbles in unison with her heart, craned necks, ruby eyes, snowing ash. A wolf howls. And the moon grieves for a mother who just made the biggest sacrifice of all.

  “I love you, Dee!” I called to her.

  “I lav you, Astee!” she yelled back. And then she stretched out her wingspan. Beautiful Dee. Seventy percent water like the planet that birthed her. Dee, who had the cunning of a crow and the heart of a musk ox. Formidable as owl, fish quick and filled with the buzzy dynamism of insects. Like her moss, she had survived the end of worlds. She was a hybrid, a mix of things, akutaq, soil skinned and stitched together with the stories I shared with her.

  And I have never been prouder of anything in my whole life.

  Dee looked one more time, down at the dizzying drop and around her at the majestic trees she loved more than life itself. A breeze ruffled her hair and she closed her eyes and emptied her lungs.

  Dee jumped.

  The crows cried out. The gorillas and the orangutans whooped and hollered. And the Insect Creature hissed—a quick, insistent sssss. Two wings jetted out from its back, whirring violently. The Changed Ones heard, responding. One, hawklike and nearest to the Insect Creature, dove from a branch. Dee—made of stone, made of my heart—dropped, down and down, her flightless body clumsy, a mountain goat tossed off the cliff by golden eagle. The Changed One smacked onto rock-hard dirt below Dee. She hit its back with a hard thump. She slid off the greasy plumage above its spine. Dee slumped to the ground. The hawk thing peered down at her with darting head movements.

  Dee didn’t move.

  And then she did.

  Her legs whipped her up into a crouch. Her arm swung out in a cobra strike.

  Red poured from Dee’s beautiful hands. Hands for protecting the ones she loves. The hawk Changed One’s eyes rolled. A triangular wedge of glass stuck out the side of its warped head like a surrender flag. Its body crumpled. Dee moved like a cat now, crouch and slink.

  The crows all called out to her in a loving cacophony. She called back to them. She scampered, apelike, toward a creature with see-through skin.

  It towered above her. A compound eye focused. Claws lifted, open at their hinges. It saw in an optical mosaic; thousands of miniature images made up a picture of Dee using her eagle eyes to scan its head. The Insect Creature whipped out a claw to snatch Dee. She ducked, the claw sailing above her burnt meringue of a hairstyle. She lunged at it, smashing her fist—a fist that had bopped a grizzly’s nose, wrecked gymnasium walls, pounded out an earthy hole for orphaned baby bunnies—into the throat of the insect. A sharp snap left the creature’s neck dangling unnaturally. That’s the problem with transparent skin. It makes finding the most delicate bone of the spine too easy.

  But Dee was still surrounded, outnumbered. The dying creature emitted a chemical that rose in warning tendrils. The One In Charge, the Insect Creature by the Chateau doors, was now closer to Dee.

  “Go!” came its cold command.

  The Changed Ones activated. Dee saw them coming for her. She pulled something from her sealskin jacket. A square vial. She shook it around, flinging a few drops of liquid toward a heron-like horror that was coming right for her. It recoiled and screeched.

  Dee sniffed at the air, adrenaline rocketing through her. Then my head filled with a noxious smell, a smell that breaks into your brain to boop you right behind the eyeballs.

  Feral cats burst from the bushes. Some yowled, trotting forward, sniffing the air, keeping their distance from the fray but unable to help themselves. Curiosity nibbled at them like peckish piranhas. They smushed their heads against discarded lumps of trash, rolling around the ground.

  Migisi swooped and dove at an imitation raptor.

  Another Changed One dropped in front of Dee. I wanted her to run. Dee deepened her squat, claiming the earth beneath her. And then she made a noise.

  “Eko.”

  The Malayan tiger burst from the nearest trash pile in a streak of orange and black. He bit the neck of the Changed One with his fangs, clamping down on the weakest and most delicate part of a thing in transition. Then he tore out its throat. The creature convulsed weakly on the ground. Eko let out a jungle bellow. His brothers leapt from the shadows, taking on other Changed Ones. Red eyes rolled. Tigers dodged and swiped and growled.

  I couldn’t believe it. Dee had summoned the tigers. Chanel N°5. Those brilliant perfumer MoFos had done an impeccable job of creating synthetic civet piss and Dee had known it would call her cats.

  Movement. A descent from the London plane tree. The great male western lowland gorilla was emboldened by the tiger attacks. He armed himself with rusted hedge shears and lumbered forth, his wrath building to a canter. Family called out to him in hoots from the trees. He was running—a wrecking ball of brawn and brain and blade—full steam toward the largest Insect Creature, who stood at th
e command center of chaos by the Chateau doors. I should have felt relief at the power of an enraged gorilla, at the slim, see-through joints and thin MoFo bones, but I was filled with dread. If other Changed Ones had appropriated the defense tactics of spiders and hawks, what had this thing mimicked?

  The gorilla pounded his chest and roared, brandishing the shears. His mountainous head showcased long fangs. The compound eye took its focus off Dee at the last minute to cock its head at the gorilla. The gorilla, careening toward a boned body, sped up. The transparent creature lifted taller, its claws hanging limp at its side.

  Oh no.

  The gorilla roared, feet away from its target.

  The Insect Creature lifted its abdomen—the pointed segment of its body—up between its stick legs. The gorilla, hurtling forth like a runaway truck, slammed into the insect, pinning it to the Chateau doors. The gorilla impaled itself on the spike at the end of the creature’s abdomen. They both fell silent. The insect barely moved. The gorilla dropped the shears, searching the Chateau with bark-brown eyes. A twitch. Another. The Changed One pumped the gorilla full of its own fluid with a fucking ovipositor.

  No. Oh god, no.

  The gorilla gained strength and lifted a hulking arm, but the Insect Creature pulled its stinger out of the gorilla’s side and struck again, stopping all motion. The gorilla went wide-eyed. And the Insect Creature stepped back, releasing the gorilla of its injection. The gorilla was tranquilized. Quiet.

  But I knew better. I knew what this horrible thing had stolen because of a certain after-hours addiction to National Geographic. It had mimicked a wasp, the Voldemort of Hymenoptera. The jewel wasp. A “she,” since only female wasps have stingers.

  The gorilla was now sedate, glassy-eyed. He started grooming himself compulsively. Close by, so close, three tigers fought Bird Beings, but the gorilla seemed oblivious, as if in a trance. The Wasp Queen waited several feet away, watching the gorilla at first, and then turning her attention to Dee.

  The gorilla leapt into action, a quick run and a slap of both palms onto the ground—thap! King Kong’s roar ripped through the air. The tigers roared back. The gorilla focused on the apes in the trees. Then he charged the base of a London plane tree. He leapt up toward a cluster of gorillas, screaming and shaking his alpine head, slapping his hands against tree trunks. The primates shrieked and cried out in confusion. They hadn’t realized that their beloved was under the mind control of a wasp, a soldier commanded by potent neurotoxins. The jewel wasp commandeers cockroaches in this way. This wasp Changed One had created a blank-brained soldier to do its bidding. The apes ushered each other higher into the trees. They called back to the male gorilla in gentle voices, wondering where their father had gone.

  Dee roared with the tigers. I looked up. She had fashioned a loop out of rusting copper wire, something she had seen spiders do with their silks. She flung the loop around the neck of a Changed One and pulled hard. The hawk creature was thrust to its side. Olan dismantled its face.

  “Dee!” I called to her.

  “Astee!” A proud call, a crow’s check-in.

  I had to keep eyes on everything all at once.

  I looked over to the gorilla who was on fire with an anger that wasn’t his. He was breaking the limbs off trees, snatching at the apes above him. And then he started to climb. Dee was standing with her face to the sky, where crows mobbed at The Changed Ones, pecking at their eyes, taunting them with cell phones.

  And The Wasp Queen, where was she? The terrifying creature—a female wasp made of MoFo bones—had turned to me on the low maple branch. That compound eye stared through its thousand optical screens at the body of a crow. Her brain made quick calculations. She looked at Dee, then back at me. Migisi saw this predatory focus from the air. She warned us all with a scream, Look out! The Wasp Queen commenced a wasp’s skittering run. It was fast. And faster. She was closing in. I bolted. I ran from a kaleidoscope eye and gyrating bones and a mandible of mayhem.

  A claw clamped down. I was a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Big Jim’s fingers constricting around me.

  I called out. “Dee!”

  The claw tightened.

  “Dee! Caw! Caw! Caw—” and then I couldn’t call out anymore.

  The big beautiful blue shuttered black.

  Chapter 32

  Kraai

  Head of the UW Bothell Murder and Sky Sentinel

  Chateau Ste. Michelle, Woodinville, Washington, USA

  I see little pebbles below. Beautiful black beings lying spiritless above the kingdom of Web. I soar above. I block the sight from my eyes. The names their warrior mothers gave them through pearly shell, the sounds they made have lifted me as I fly. I mustn’t remember now.

  I have to fight.

  We swoop between tree limbs, careful of the sharp nest. I shoot past the strength of the maple and strike the head of a Changed One with my beak. It growls and snaps. I’m too quick.

  “Blackwings!” I call, and a swarm of black barrels after the Changed One. I snatch up a shard of glass and swoop past the Changed One’s beak again. “Come for me, beast! Come for me!”

  I must be the bait.

  They will have my bones before more of my Blackwing brothers’.

  Blackwings—my sisters, my brothers—are faster, lighter. We use the sky light and the trees. The Changed Ones are clumsy in their flight still, bulky and graceless. The wind says to veer right, I do it. Feather to feather, we whip and dive and swoop and curl and they won’t snatch us. We are the Sky Sentinels.

  It is known.

  Below—mouse sized—I see the Last On Two Legs. She stands side by side with brother tigers. A Hollow. I once believed The Hollows to be empty, blind noise makers, space takers governed by unseen forces. Cruel in their treatment of the Blackwings. Marlik, taken from the sky by a Hollow branch that shot fire. Graak, Cottonwood, Mossem, who ate food, a gift from The Hollows, that curled their insides. But not this Hollow. Dee has changed us. Here’s a Hollow who speaks the language of the big beautiful blue. A Hollow with eyes open, who sees the Blackwings and loves us each and every and all. Our brother, The One Who Keeps, will keep the darkness at bay.

  Graak. Cottonwood. Marlik. Mossem. We forgive and we fly for them.

  Migisi loops above. We hear her calls, tight, urgent.

  I focus on the skin of Web to see the Great Insect. It’s moving! It’s running, fast on thin legs, across the green and brown.

  Dee the Hollow Hatchling turns to see the Great Insect running. Dee screams so loud the whole big beautiful blue can hear.

  “The One Who Keeps! The One Who Keeps!” cries our white-headed warrior from above.

  “Where, Migisi?” I crow. I scan from the sky and see the Great Insect has something in its claw. I focus.

  It’s The One Who Keeps. S.T.!

  S.T. is in its claw!

  Dee runs after it. Her two legs carry her so fast, faster than any Hollow I’ve ever seen. Her face is on fire.

  “Blackwings!” I cry. And they come together, fill the sky like the wings of night, and swoop down the strength of the copper beech. We—Blackwing force—drop down to the grass world, above the kingdom of Web. Flying low—so low—for speed, to chase the Great Insect who has stolen our S.T.

  “Up ahead! Follow!” I bellow. The crows call out, voices urging one another into faster flight. One Great Black Thing.

  We fly at Dee’s strong shoulders and she runs as though she’s airborne. She has wings, this Hollow. Beside her run the brother tigers.

  “The One Who Keeps! The One Who Keeps!” crows cry, filled with legend and hope and love for our Brother Blackwing.

  Dee, the Last On Two Legs, roars—a roar from the heart—running, water beads flying from her. The tigers roar. They run like jungle cats. And all the Blackwings call out. We run side by side, ground to air, Hollow to tigers to Blackwing warriors.

  The Last Hollow.

  Blackwings.

  Tigers.

  A world of legs and wings
but one beating heart.

  United by S.T.

  We’re fury. We’re The Wind.

  “The One Who Keeps! The One Who Keeps!”

  The heart must be light for fast flight. I cannot think of S.T., my brave friend. Straddler of worlds. The One Who Keeps, whom Onida chose to call upon. He’s hybrid, a crow hatched for great things. I try not to think of when we watched over him, when he was new from the eggshell—too quick and curious—and he toppled from the maple branch down, down into the Hollow’s yard with the fat gnome.

  How we all cried out, even me, just a young crow then. How we trusted that he remembered the guidance whispered to him through a sweep of shell, a privilege of the winged. How the Blackwings watched from safe branches, ready to swoop down and take him back. Only we saw the tender Hollow with fat-worm fingers, and the way S.T.’s tiny morning-blue hatchling eyes had imprinted on that big featherless Hollow. So, we watched until the leaves turned coppery crisp and the white blizzard came, and then sun spilled its yolk again. And we knew he’d made his choice to become a Hollow. But we would always be his family—we were all he had after his parents, Graak and Cottonwood, swallowed that wicked Hollow bread. So, we always kept our watch of S.T.; we chased off cats and mobbed marauding owls, even when the bloodhound appeared and stayed and grew into his floppy skin and chased us away. It united our murder; we became strong as guardians. S.T. The Uniter was always destined for something great. Onida told us so. Onida told us that one day we would see. I’ve always known S.T. was different. Mother Nature is deliberate with her palette. When she paints you with unique colors, it’s because she trusts you can handle adversity and inspire others to greatness. I try not to think of the pain inside me, of what we will do without him. Without hope.

  The Great Insect is using its clear wings for speed. But there is a white tent ahead. Big billowing home for The Hollows. A fluttering nest. The Great Insect cannot pass, can run no farther. It turns and we see its terrible eye. The Great Insect gets closer as we fly forward. The tigers use their loudest calls. They run in front of Dee, they close in on the Great Insect. They are circling it. The Great Insect is lifting its abdomen through its legs—and we the Blackwings know it will sting that largest tiger. The tiger calls again and readies to use its teeth on the Great Insect.