Breed

by Chase Novak

  The EMT workers emerge first, carrying Xavier strapped to the gurney, covered up to his chin by a sheet that is slowly turning red. Next to emerge are the two police, who place Cynthia under arrest, read her her rights, and lead her out of the house, each of them touching her on the back.

  One of the baby pigeons ventures out from its nest and hops along the beam. It quickly loses its balance and falls straight to the floor. It does not even flap its wings or make any other attempt to stop or cushion its fall. Luckily, it lands on the mass of drop cloths directly below.

  The older pigeons are in a state of extreme agitation, vocalizing and moving their heads quickly back and forth while ruffling their feathers. Despite their obvious concern, it takes a few moments for this worry to be transmitted through their nervous systems and converted to an actual action. First the horrible fact of the fallen chick must be absorbed, then the other chick must be secured in the nest, and, finally, the two adult birds must swoop down to the floor, landing a few feet away from their baby, who is lying motionless.

  The adult pigeons hop this way and that, but they do not go directly to their inert young one. Thousands of years of roundabout, suspicious, circuitous movement cannot be undone by one fallen squab, but eventually the two adults arrive at the mound of tarps and drop cloths, and just as they do there are two separate signs of life, one reassuring and one completely unnerving.

  The reassuring sign is that the downy little pigeon, sensing the proximity of its parents, shakes and shudders back into animation, rights itself, and starts to scramble off the tarps that broke its fall.

  The unnerving development is that a bare arm emerges from the side of the heap. The arm is slender, dark, and alive with purpose. With suddenness and blind accuracy, it grabs the pigeon chick. The adult birds coo and flutter with the gravest concern, and now the leaden lump of old tarps begins to heave as a tremendous agitation ensues beneath it.

  “Oh man,” Rodolfo says, more in annoyance than amazement. “Don’t tell me.”

  Emerging from the pile are two teenagers, a boy and a girl, both essentially undressed. The boy is broad-shouldered, muscular, with a Chinese character tattooed on the side of his neck. He is wearing a pair of dark gray briefs and holds the pigeon chick in one hand and a bottle of some kind of booze in the other. The girl is slight, pale olive in complexion, furtive. She has the manner of a trapped animal, though one that might cause more fear than it feels. Her hair is short and looks as if she has just cut it herself using a child’s dull scissors. She lifts a corner of one of the tarps to cover her nakedness.

  “WTF, Max,” Rodolfo says to the boy. “I told you about coming here.”

  By way of an answer, Max grabs his crotch. He holds the baby pigeon in front of his face, moving his eyes as the chick’s head turns this way and that and tightening his grip as the chick tries to twist free.

  “Put it down,” Rodolfo says. “Put the fucking thing down.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re freaking out my guests.”

  “Your guests?”

  “What are you—stupid? Put it down, man, I’m not kidding.” Rodolfo starts to walk toward Max, and Max, perhaps as a way of freezing Rodolfo, opens his mouth and prepares to ingest the frantic chick, whose pinkish feet fearfully throb like two frightened, scaly hearts.

  “I’m hungry,” Max says. There is a dull, clobbered quality to his voice, as if he has been huffing gasoline, or has suffered a blow to the head, or is simply not very bright.

  “Give it to me, Max,” Rodolfo says, his hand extended.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Max says.

  “You should go away,” the girl says. “We were here first.”

  “First of all, Emily, you never tell me what to do. This is my house.”

  Emily looks around and makes a joke of looking very impressed. “Wow. Nice crib, man. Really, this place is the shit.”

  “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Get some clothes on.”

  “Like this?” She drops the edge of the tarp that she had been holding and throws her shoulders back, puckering her lips in a jokey but painful imitation of an old-fashioned seductress. Her skin shows bruises everywhere—her thighs, her ribs, the insides of her arms, her neck, as if she has been frantically groped by someone with ink-stained fingers. The neglect and adventure of her life is all over her, like the signs of a fatal disease.

  “Look at you,” Rodolfo says, shaking his head.

  “Mind your own business,” Max says. “We’re starting our family.” He brings the pigeon chick close to his mouth—it’s only an inch or two away from being devoured—then suddenly stops, frowns, turns it this way and that.

  “If you eat that,” Rodolfo says, “I’ll rip your arm off and beat you to death with it.”

  “It’s dead,” Max says.

  The twins, in the meantime, have gathered closer to Michael, instinctively gravitating toward him, the only point of safety in a world that has tipped into the grimmest sort of madness. Michael puts his hands over their eyes, but even as they cleave to him, they will have no part of the blindness with which he seeks to protect them—they have had enough of the darkness.

  “You was squeezing it too strong,” Emily says, nodding sagely while half covering herself again.

  “Sorry,” Max says to Rodolfo. “I was going to give it to you.”

  Rodolfo is standing just inches away from Max now. He slaps him hard on the head. In the empty house, the sound is particularly resonant, as if someone has furiously hit the arm of a leather chair with a razor strop. The blow sends Max reeling back. He gets entangled with the tarp and nearly falls, and as he scrambles to keep his balance he accidentally drops the dead pigeon. It lands on its back, its prehistoric little feet pointing toward the demolished ceiling.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Max says, bowing his head, clearly afraid to make eye contact with Rodolfo.

  “Is it dead?” Alice asks Michael, who nods his head.

  “Why are they like this?” Adam asks, indicating the three teenagers with a gesture.

  “I don’t know,” Michael whispers. “I’m sorry.”

  Rodolfo picks up the dead bird. He shows no squeamishness or any particular emotion about picking up something dead. He glances at it before tossing it to Max.

  “It’s yours,” he says. “Don’t waste it.”

  Max catches the thing and smiles cravenly. “Eat up while it’s still fresh,” he announces. And a moment later he has stuffed the entire chick into his mouth. It is more than he can comfortably chew. His cheeks balloon out, and his eyes widen and swell, and moments later he is wincing and shaking his head.

  “You no like?” Emily asks, laughing.

  He shakes his head emphatically no, and then opens his mouth and, using his finger as a kind of scoop, tries desperately to get everything of that little pigeon out, though it is a mass now of blood, down, feather, bone, beak, eye, tiny avian organs, and saliva.

  Rodolfo says to Emily, “You would have his child?”

  “So give me yours, bitch,” she says.

  Max is trying to retch up a bone lodged in the back of his throat; it feels to him as if he has swallowed a dart. He makes huge hacking sounds, but nothing comes up except a bit of pale yellow bile.

  Suddenly, the front door flies open with a crash, which is followed by the sound of pounding feet rushing toward them with the fury of a river that has breached its dam. Alex Twisden has found his way in and is dragging one of Rodolfo’s crew behind him—a fleshy kid with ice-white hair and bare hammy arms protruding from a cutoff blue-jeans jacket. The kid makes a last-ditch dive, tackling Twisden and bringing him down face-first. But Twisden, despite the sickening thud with which he hits the floor, seems undeterred. With a dexterity and grace that is half beautiful and half terrifying, he catapults to a standing position and whirls to face the boy who brought him down. With gestures so quick and efficient they seem dev
oid of anger or any other emotion, Twisden grabs him by his jacket and hoists him up, as if the boy—who is shouting now, and snarling, and flailing his arms—weighs no more than a kitten. Twisden shakes the kid a couple of times and throws him against the door frame just as the rest of Rodolfo’s crew comes running in. Two of them are bleeding from whatever confrontation allowed Twisden to make it into the house in the first place, but all of them are shouting and ululating madly, boosting their own courage as they make a run at Adam and Alice’s father. They are not afraid; they are doing what comes naturally to them.

  “Daddy!” Alice cries, instinctively reaching out toward Twisden, until she sees the look in his eyes and shrinks back.

  One by one, Rodolfo’s gang of cast-off, fearless friends pile on Alex. He strikes out with his hands, his feet, his elbows, but despite his strength and his pitilessness—there is blood everywhere, there is crying too—he cannot get free of them.

  “Come on,” Rodolfo says, shoving Michael and the twins deeper into his old house. “Back away.” He herds them past Max and Emily; past the adult pigeons, who continue to hop and flutter mournfully; and toward a sheet of plywood that has been covering French doors leading to the back garden. Rodolfo rips the wood down—nails and splinters fly—and then, stepping back, he rams his foot through the glass and mullions, creating an opening just large enough for them to barrel through. “Go on,” he says, his voice trembling with urgency. “He’s hard to hold.”

  Then: “Wait,” Rodolfo says, with a hand on Alice’s shoulder. With his forearm, he knocks away some of the jagged glass, and then, with a quick nod, he gestures for them to make their way through.

  Adam is the first one, and then it is Alice’s turn. She whispers Thank you before maneuvering through the shattered French door, closing her eyes and holding her arms straight up, trying to protect herself from the deadly-looking shards that make going through the window seem like entering a shark’s open mouth.

  “You’re next, Teacher, let’s go,” he says to Michael, and Michael makes his way through the smashed windows, but because he is larger, he is not able to fully escape the tear and bite of the glass that remains, and as he lands in the spongy, half-frozen grass behind the house, he is picking out triangles of broken glass that have pierced deeply into the weave of his coat.

  The back garden has, aside from its small lawn, a ruined outdoor fireplace, junked lawn furniture, a stone cupid missing its head, and broken bricks where a bit of patio used to be. What was once grass trod on by a family that might have at least imagined happiness is now a delinquent frozen patch of uncared-for lawn that’s degenerated into a botanical feral state, a chaos of sticker bushes, knotted vines, and voluptuous weeds. And half covered by all the growth is a jumble of bones, most of them small and difficult to identify, but one at least clearly a pelvis, and another a small skull with large canines.

  “Go!” Rodolfo shouts down at them. Behind him are the dim shapes of his friends doing their best to wrestle Alex to a standstill.

  Stumbling over the bones, the twins and Michael rush toward the tall wooden gate in the corner of the garden, but it is bolted shut and they must scramble over it—no problem for either Adam and Alice, but a challenge for Michael, who must try it four times, with the twins, invisible now on the other side of the fence, urging him on in increasingly desperate tones.

  But at last—with visions of Twisden hurtling across the yard and grabbing his legs—he hoists himself up. The toes of his shoes bang frantically against the gate’s wooden planks as he pulls himself higher and higher, and, after balancing for a moment with his knee on top of the gate, Michael flips himself forward and lands between the twins, and the three of them just stand there, wondering what to do and where to go.

  Rodolfo and his crew, accustomed to chaos, to sudden exits and constant danger, have scattered in all directions.

  Michael catches his breath and looks at Adam and Alice; their eyes are trained trustfully on him, and this trust, which seemed such a benediction before, now sends a chill through him. How can he ever protect these two? How can he even know whether he is about to deliver them directly into the arms of their furious father? How can he know if he is in the process of forever ruining his own life?

  The three of them go to the front of the town house, hoping there, at least, people will be present, witnesses, and that will make them marginally safer.

  Is he still in the house? Have the wild boys and girls knocked him unconscious, tied him up—killed him? Michael scans the block up and down, back and forth, looking for Twisden. There is a mail carrier; here comes a dog walker with eight, nine, maybe ten dogs, little and brown, black and white, big, shaggy, and gray. There is a mother’s helper pushing a stroller with a plastic rain guard covering her little passenger, who sits there like a tiny pope, his pudgy fingers splayed.

  And there is Twisden, sitting on the fender of a battered old Volvo parked directly across the street. He can be wherever he wants to be. He can take these children whenever he thinks the time is right.

  He slides off the front end of the car as softly as a shadow moving along a wall.

  Fifth Avenue is less than two hundred feet away, and they speed toward it on the south side of the street while Twisden keeps pace with them on the north side.

  “Daddy, Daddy!” Alice screams. “Leave us alone!”

  Her cries arrest the attention of a few passersby. Some stare, but no one tries to interfere, or intercede.

  “Just come here,” Twisden shouts over the traffic noise. “Okay? Come on, honey. What are you doing? What are you afraid of?”

  “You, Daddy,” Alice yells back. Her face reddens, but despite the emotion she doesn’t break stride. In fact, they are all of them running faster and faster—the race is on to get to the Fifth Avenue light before it turns red again.

  “Yeah, Dad,” hollers Adam, emboldened by his sister’s outburst. “You can go fuck yourself!”

  “Adam!” Twisden says, almost leaping in front of a rattletrap of a plumbing-supplies truck, “how dare you use that kind of language!” He stands now on the other side of the street, his fists on his hips, his head shaking censoriously.

  It seems to Michael that something is preventing Twisden from making a full-out attempt to grab the kids. Some part of him is wary of what others will see, what they might think or even do. Twisden’s plan is to wear them down, to keep pace with them, to make it impossible to get away from him until one of the kids, or both of them, or maybe even Michael himself is so exhausted and discouraged that surrender will seem the best option. Maybe that’s what the death instinct is… not a drive toward death itself, but the brute, inexorable reality of death gnawing away at life until it just snaps.

  “Come on, quick,” Michael says, pulling the kids forward and dashing across Fifth Avenue just as the light goes to green and the herd of automobiles begins its charge, as if once they are past this one light they will never have to stop again. Car horns blare their owners’ displeasure as a few of the drivers must wait an extra half second for Michael and the twins to make it to the west side of the street.

  Here the sidewalk is somewhat narrow. A few feet away is the pale gray stone wall bordering the eastern edge of Central Park. Between the pavement and the wall are wooden benches, freshly painted bright green, and occupied, for the most part, by young women from the Caribbean, bundled against the cold, with hoods and scarves and earmuffs and gloves, talking to one another while they keep an eye on the swaddled infants in their care. A few of these young women, with their lonely eyes and weary smiles, watch as Michael and the twins run past them. Michael is the first to clamber over the wall, fighting off the chaotic tangle of the immense, empty forsythia bushes just on the other side of the wall. Scrambling to get his footing, he reaches over the wall, grips Alice under her arms, and lifts her.

  Twisden is there, closer than ever, walking along the sidewalk next to the wall, his hands in his pockets and his lips pursed, as if he were whistling
. How did he gain on them so suddenly? Can he really move this quickly? And if he can, what hope is there?

  As if to answer the question as soon as it crosses Michael’s mind, Twisden is now just a few feet away. Escape? There is no escape. Hope? There is no hope.

  “Dad!” Adam screams, feeling the nearness of his father, hearing his breath, smelling him.

  Michael quickly lifts Adam to bring him over the wall, but he hasn’t acted quickly enough. And he is not strong enough. And today, it would seem, is not his day.

  Nor does it seem to be Adam’s. His father’s hand closes around his ankle with the heartless stubborn strength of forever, and he is captured.

  Alex turns Adam around and clasps him fiercely by the shoulders, holding him up so that the tips of their noses are practically touching. Heat ripples off Twisden, as if he were burning inside. “Is this the little boy who told his father to go fuck himself?” he says.

  “No,” Adam says, barely.

  “Is this the little boy who tells family secrets?”

  “Adam!” Alice screams.

  Michael must restrain her to keep her from climbing over the low wall and getting caught herself. He pulls her toward him. They back up, stumbling, nearly falling over the twisted vines armored against the winter, cold and hard.

  “Give me my daughter,” Twisden says, his voice boiling, yet inside that rage there are ripples of doubt. How can he hold on to the boy and catch the girl? What are people seeing right now? What are they thinking?

  “Dad, please,” Adam says.