The Absence of Sparrows

by Kurt Kirchmeier

  An icy chill ran through me as I lay there on the ground, wondering what the heck had just happened, and completely unaware that Pete had slid to a stop as soon as he realized I was no longer with him. I jumped as he grabbed my arm and tried to pull me up.

  “Shh!” he whispered, as if anyone would hear the sound of rustling rhubarb leaves over the ear-splitting wail that was coming from the Messams’ backyard.

  “Get it open! Get it open!” Lester now screamed. It hardly sounded like Lester at all, though. It barely sounded human.

  Get what open? I wondered as Pete pulled me again. I went with him this time, jogging at first and then running again, despite the fact that I could tell Lester was in no shape to follow.

  A full block away and we could still hear him, whimpering, almost painfully pleading. We stopped for a minute.

  “He’s injured,” I said stupidly. “Bad, I think.”

  “No crap, Sherlock,” Pete replied. “Why did you stop?”

  “I thought maybe you could outrun him on your own,” I told him.

  “And leave you there?” he asked me.

  I shrugged. “I left you.”

  “Yeah, well, you came back.”

  “What happened?” I asked. “What was that sound?”

  Pete shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “We should get home, though.”

  I reached up to take off my ninja mask, but Pete told me to leave it on for now, just in case anyone saw us.

  “We left the wagon,” I said.

  “Forget it,” he told me. “We’ll have to get it later.”

  “What about the generator?” I asked him. “Did you see it? Was it in the garage?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t see anything.”

  EIGHTEEN

  I was still so shaken up by the time we got home that I couldn’t even climb the tree back up to our open window. I tried, but my arms had all the strength of a pair of pipe cleaners. My legs were no better.

  “You’ve climbed it a hundred times!” Pete said impatiently.

  Couldn’t he see how bad I was shaking? I felt like I might throw up and pulled off my ninja mask just in case. It had been making me feel claustrophobic anyway, like a mummy wrapped up way too tight.

  “You go,” I told him. I hadn’t even gotten my breath back yet from all the running. “You can sneak down and open the back door for me.”

  “Are you crazy?” he said. “Do you want us to get caught?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t climb it,” I said. “Not right now.” I could barely even stand up. “Maybe if we just wait a few minutes…” I leaned back to steady myself against the tree trunk. My back still hurt from my fall by the twins’ firepit, but it was my brain that had suffered the worst of the bruising. I kept seeing that blackened cat skull, kept hearing the awful sound of Lester screaming, as if he himself were being burned alive in some hellish firepit.

  “Dad’s a first responder,” Pete reminded me. “He might get called. Heck, he might’ve gotten called already.”

  “Crap,” I said. I probably should have thought of that, but I hadn’t.

  “Here, I’ll give you a boost,” said Pete. He went down on one knee and cupped his hands together.

  I took a deep breath and tried to will strength to my jellied limbs. Pete was right; I’d climbed it a hundred times.

  I stepped onto his makeshift platform expecting a gentle lift up to the branch that I otherwise would have needed to jump to reach, but instead he tried to launch me, taking me by surprise. My knee buckled at the sudden jerk, throwing me off balance. I windmilled my arms in desperation, but all I found was air.

  Pete swore, his cupped hands coming apart as the two of us collapsed to the ground in a pile.

  “You’re hopeless,” he said a second later. “Just wait by the back door.”

  And with that, he scurried up the tree like a squirrel on a mission, disappearing through our window before I’d even managed to get back to my feet. I hobbled over to the door and waited. A few seconds passed, and then a few seconds more. A full minute went by. I began to worry. Was Pete just messing with me, or had something happened?

  I was just on the verge on convincing myself he’d been caught when the knob began to turn. I started to let out a sigh of relief, only to realize that it wasn’t Pete on the other side of the door.

  “Ben?” said my uncle Dean, looking out at me with obvious surprise. He had an unlit cigar sticking out from the corner of his mouth. Pete stood behind him, wearing pajamas now rather than clothes. He must have quickly changed before coming downstairs, most likely just in case Mom or Dad saw him outside of our room. He could have lied about why he was up.

  “What on earth are you doing outside at one in the morning?” Uncle Dean asked.

  Lying wasn’t something that had ever come particularly naturally to me, and neither did thinking on my feet. I was more of a brooder, long on thinking and late on action. I averted my gaze to the ninja mask still in my hand, as if the guise of the shadow warrior might somehow inspire me instead of just incriminating me further. Uncle Dean waited a moment for me to say something before finally turning to look back at Pete.

  “Just got up for a glass of water, huh?” he said.

  That must have been what Pete had told him. Uncle Dean had probably even believed it. Unfortunately for us, though, Uncle Dean had already made up his mind to go outside and smoke a cigar. It was just bad luck and stupid coincidence that when he opened the door, he found me standing there.

  “Well, I was going to get some water,” Pete replied, “so technically I wasn’t lying.”

  Pete can be a real dope sometimes.

  “It was just a dumb dare,” I said as the ponderous gears in my brain finally clicked and engaged. “Pete called me a chicken. He said if I wasn’t scared of turning to glass, then I wouldn’t mind standing outside in the dark for ten whole minutes to prove it.”

  Uncle Dean looked skeptical. “What’s the mask for?” he asked me.

  I shrugged. “Ninjas aren’t scared of anything.”

  “He was supposed to come in through the window,” Pete added. “But he’s a numbnuts. He fell and hurt himself, so I had to come down and let him back in.”

  “You all right?” Uncle Dean asked me.

  “It’s my back,” I said. “I landed funny.” The fact that I actually was in pain probably helped me sell my story.

  Uncle Dean shook his head at us. “You turkeys should know better,” he said. “You’re not eight and nine anymore. What if you’d fallen harder and had to go to the hospital? Your mom and dad have enough to worry about already.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too,” Pete agreed. “It was stupid. You’re not going to tell Dad, are you?”

  Uncle Dean sighed. “I suppose not. But only on the condition that you both walk the straight and narrow from here on out. Capiche?”

  “Capiche,” we agreed in unison.

  “Good,” said Uncle Dean. “Now, get to bed before I change my mind.”

  We went, both of us treading as quietly as we could. It was clear now that Dad’s CB radio must have stayed quiet. Maybe it wasn’t his turn in the first responder rotation, or maybe Constable Sheery had simply decided that where the Messam family was concerned, it might be best to send someone who carried a pistol and a badge; whatever the case, I was grateful to fall into my bed without having to answer any more questions.

  “I bet it was an animal trap,” said Pete after a moment of quiet. “Set up in the grass. Lester probably forgot about it when he saw me and then accidentally set it off.”

  The idea hadn’t even occurred to me. It made sense, and definitely explained what that loud snap sound had been before Lester started screaming. It also explained why he’d been yelling “get it open.”

  “God,” I said. “We could’ve stepped on it.” The realization sent a cold shiver up my back.

  “Yup,” Pete agreed, “we could’ve.
If you think about it, it’s actually a good thing we snuck out. Thanks to us, that trap is no longer a danger to anyone else.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said. Better Lester than another innocent animal, I supposed. Maybe there was such a thing as karma after all.

  NINETEEN

  The trap belonged to James Messam, who hunted sometimes. It was one of those big metal ones with interlocking teeth. The twins had apparently set it up without their father’s knowledge or permission—to catch a coyote, they told Constable Sheery. A rabid one that Lars claimed had tried to attack him the night before.

  “Rabid coyote, my butt,” said Pete.

  “More like another stray cat,” I added.

  Constable Sheery had come by in the morning to have coffee with Dad—as he sometimes did—and had filled him in on everything that had happened, mentioning along the way that the twins had chased off a “burglar in a ski mask.”

  Pete and I had been eavesdropping from the top of the stairwell. We both breathed a sigh of relief that only one of us had been seen, and that the ninja mask had been misidentified. It meant that the twins wouldn’t know who to take revenge on—not that Lester was going to be taking revenge on anyone anytime soon. Constable Sheery said that his leg was mangled so bad that they had to transport him to Paulson, where he’d probably be staying awhile to recover from emergency surgery.

  “One twin down and one to go,” Pete joked.

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky and Lars will turn to glass,” I said.

  “Doubt it,” Pete replied. “Most likely Lester will just get better and then come back meaner than he was before.”

  “Probably,” I agreed, although it was hard to imagine what meaner would even look like when it came to the twins.

  Constable Sheery talked to Dad about the glass plague as well, saying that there was a phone number people could call now if they lost somebody. The government was compiling a database and trying to work out some sort of system for emotional and financial aid.

  “It’s chaos,” Constable Sheery said. “Absolute chaos.”

  “If there’s anything I can do…” said Dad.

  “I’ll let you know. In the meantime, you just worry about looking after your boys. Have you sat them down yet? To go over the ifs and maybes?”

  “Not yet,” Dad admitted.

  “Well, I wouldn’t put it off for too much longer if I were you. We’ve been lucky here in Griever’s Mill. Paulson, too. A lot of other places have been hit repeatedly, and they say that the numbers are always higher each time. Chicago lost sixty in the first blackout, then ninety, then three hundred.”

  “Bloody heck,” said Dad.

  “Yes, sirree,” Constable Sheery agreed. “I hope our good pastor is preparing himself. Could soon be a lot of folks in sudden need of services for the shattered.”

  “Let’s hope not,” Dad said gravely.

  There was a moment of silence, and then the clink of a coffee cup being set on a saucer. “Anyway,” Constable Sheery continued, “I guess I should probably make tracks.”

  We heard him get up from the dining room table, and so we crept back into our room before he could pass by the stairwell and see us. We kept listening, though, from just inside our door.

  “Where’s that brother of yours this morning?” Constable Sheery asked. He was in the front entryway now.

  “Not entirely sure,” Dad told him. “He said he had to see a man about a horse.”

  “Hmm, not literally, I suppose. Might not be a bad idea, mind you. I doubt we’ll be seeing many fuel tankers rolling through in the next little while. Speaking of which, how much gas you got in that truck of yours?”

  “Almost full,” Dad replied.

  “Good,” said Constable Sheery. “Keep it that way if you can. Waste not, want not, as they say.”

  Dad said that wouldn’t be a problem since he wasn’t going to be working for the next three weeks anyway. “Booked it off months ago,” he added. “Who knew?”

  “Some vacation, eh?”

  “Some vacation,” Dad agreed.

  Pete and I watched from the window as Constable Sheery got in his cruiser and drove off. Dad was at our door a few minutes later, asking if he could come in.

  “Sure,” I answered as Pete sat down on the edge of his bed and picked up an Uncanny X-Men comic, as if he’d spent the last little while just reading.

  Dad looked down at him as he came in, his eyes narrowed skeptically.

  “Constable Sheery thinks that I need to have a talk with you boys,” he told us. “But since you were listening in, I guess you already knew that.”

  Pete tried his best to put on an innocent face, but Dad wasn’t buying it.

  “I wasn’t born yesterday,” he said, his hands on his hips now.

  “Fine,” said Pete, “but we didn’t hear everything.” As if eavesdropping had degrees of severity and hearing only part of a conversation was sort of like almost committing a crime.

  “I’m sure,” said Dad. “He was right, though. I’ve been putting it off, and I shouldn’t. It’s too important.”

  “It’s okay,” said Pete. “I already know what you’re going to say.”

  Dad raised an eyebrow. “Is that a fact?”

  Pete nodded. “You’re going to say that if something happens, we’ll have to stay strong and look out for each other, and that we’ll have to stop acting like kids and start acting like grown-ups. Like men.”

  “You think you could handle that?” asked Dad, crossing his arms in front of him. “Because it’s one thing to say something, and another to actually follow through on it. Nothing comes easy. Not in this world, and probably not in the next one either. You boys need to understand that.”

  “I understand,” said Pete.

  “Do you?” Dad asked him.

  Pete nodded. I nodded, too, even though I really wasn’t sure. How could I be? Dad was talking about being an adult and I was still a million miles away from that. So was Pete, no matter what he might like to believe.

  “Good,” said Dad. “But I don’t think we need to start worrying about any of that yet. You guys have me and your mother both, as well as your uncle Dean. I think the odds of you ending up on your own are pretty slim.”

  “But it’s possible,” I said.

  Dad looked at me like he wanted to say it wasn’t, but he couldn’t. That wouldn’t be honest, and if there was one thing that Dad valued above pretty much everything else, it was honesty. That, and hard work.

  “It’s possible,” he admitted. “But if worse comes to worst, you can always call Constable Sheery, or go to Pastor Nolan. Okay?”

  We nodded.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked. It wasn’t like her to not be around if there was a guest at our house, and the whole time Pete and I had been eavesdropping, I hadn’t heard her voice even once. Normally, she’d have been in and out of the kitchen, offering Constable Sheery cookies or cake or just a refill on his coffee.

  “In the backyard with her binoculars and her notepad,” said Dad. “She’s having a count day.”

  “A count day?” I asked. “But she never said anything to me.…”

  A count day was one where you spent as much time as you could at one location and counted all the different species that came along. It was something that birders everywhere did a few times each year—mostly during migration, though, not in the middle of summer. I usually helped Mom whenever she did one. It was something that I looked forward to.

  “She wasn’t planning on doing one,” Dad explained. “It was my idea. I thought it might put her at ease.”

  “She still could’ve told me,” I said.

  “Next time,” Dad replied.

  I snuck a look at Mom’s notepad a little while later, after she came back inside, and noticed something strange. She’d only written down the names of three birds, and there were only seven checkmarks in total. Usually I could have gotten that many by just listening from inside the house with a window open. Mom mu
st have seen more birds than that. It didn’t make sense, unless she’d started the count and then quit just a short way into it, which maybe she did. The whole point of a bird count was to gather information that could later be passed on to ornithologists for their studies, but with the world going to crap all over, I doubted that bird studies were going to be very high on anyone’s priority list. Why bother keeping tabs on avian populations when our own was plummeting faster than a peregrine in a stoop?

  TWENTY

  When Uncle Dean got back from wherever it was that he’d gone, he had something large and square shaped in the box of his truck. It had a fat wire harness sticking out of it.

  Dad quirked an eyebrow at him when he came inside. “Went to see a man about a horse, eh?”

  “Woman, actually,” Uncle Dean replied. “And who needs horsepower when you’ve got solar!”

  “Where on earth did you get a solar panel from?” Mom asked him, but then she held up a hand to stall his answer. “Wait,” she said, “never mind. I know exactly where you got it from.”

  So did I, or at least I was pretty sure. There was a greenhouse that we always passed on the highway whenever we went to Turtle Lake (our usual camping and fishing spot), and on its roof were six big solar panels—the only ones I’d ever seen. The greenhouse belonged to a middle-aged widow named Mrs. O’Keefe. She brought her car in to Uncle Dean’s garage all the time, always complaining of weird noises that no one else could ever hear.

  I overheard Mom tell Dad once that there was nothing even wrong with the car and that Mrs. O’Keefe’s behavior was “unseemly.” I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant. I just remember that Dad replied by saying, “She’s just lonely, that’s all.”

  “I made her a deal,” Uncle Dean said. “I promised I’d bring it back to her before winter. She doesn’t really need all six of them during the summertime anyway.”

  “And that’s it?” said Dad. “She just let you show up and take it?”

  “Not exactly,” said Uncle Dean. “I also had to promise her something else first.”