by Colin Meloy
The children of the Unthank Home for Wayward Youth were revolting.
The children, their faces solemnly downcast, nodded consent. The dogs were released to the avenues of the Wastes; the stevedores began corralling the group of Unadoptables toward the drab gray building in the background. They followed the same gravel road as Elsie and Rachel’s parents had driven when they’d first seen the Home. The building, its lights illuminating the windows from within, came closer into view. Faces were at the glass, watching the oncoming procession.
And then the windows began to break.
The contingent stopped sharply; everyone’s heads swiveled in the direction of the breaking glass. Unthank moaned a loud “NO!” as several metal footlockers were vaulted from what would be the second-floor dormitory to land with an explosive crash on the ground below. The sound of a hundred voices joined together in a loud cheer could be heard emanating from now-empty window frames; more footlockers followed, through more windows. Then came a bed frame, lumbered to the wide windows by a pack of children who pitched it, with some difficulty, to the ground below. The mattress had been set on fire. It landed on the ground in an eruption of sparks and broken glass.
The children of the Unthank Home for Wayward Youth were revolting.
The riot spread like a virus to the boys’ dormitory on the third floor; glass showered over the ground below as more objects were thrown through the windows. A crew of boys, their faces wide and smiling, looked out from one of the shattered frames and taunted Unthank and the stevedores with raspberries and shouts of derision.
“Welcome back, Unadoptables!” shouted a girl from the second-floor dorm. Another yelled, “Here’s your welcome home party!”
A window broke; out of it flew a rectangular box that hit the ground with a staticky pop. It was a loudspeaker; it continued to broadcast harsh bursts of static, like a disembodied head still imbued with a few last flickers of life. Then it lapsed into silence.
Unthank had grown ashen pale as he watched the agitation carry over to the tall windows of the machine shop. In a short matter of time, pieces of metal pipe, liberated from their machinery, were being launched through the glass as a wild conglomeration of children, girls and boys, convened in the shop and proceeded to tear it to pieces. The front doors were flung open and Desdemona, followed by Mr. Grimble and Miss Talbot, made her panicked retreat from the rebellion growing within.
“Bradley!” she shouted. “They are destroying it all! This is not how I wanted!” She ran as fast as her dress would allow toward the crowd of stevedores and their group of detained children. She was out of breath by the time she reached Wigman; she steadied herself on his thick arm. Unthank, still deeply traumatized by the scene that was playing out before him, shot her a bewildered glance.
“Bradley?” he asked. “You call him Bradley?”
Desdemona looked away; she pushed herself closer to Wigman, who put his arm around her protectively as he continued to stare, transfixed, at the ongoing commotion.
“Wait a second …,” Joffrey murmured. Puzzle pieces, long separated, began to find their way together in his mind as he stared at Desdemona and Wigman, cradled together. “It was you!” he finally yelled at Desdemona over the crashing of the insurgency. “You were the one who tipped him off! You brought him into this!”
But there was scarcely time for recriminations; orange flames were spitting from the topmost windows of the tall gray building. Through the emptied windowpanes, they could see that the children had built a great bonfire of chairs and tables in the girls’ dorm and had quickly set it alight. By the time the flames began to find their way to the windows, the children of the Unthank Home had streamed from the open front doors and out into the gravel drive. Once collected there, they turned—they were easily a hundred strong—and began running pell-mell toward the Unadoptables and their captors. The flames issuing from the building’s windows provided them an ominous backlight. That, combined with the look of absolute rage on their faces, gave them the likeness of furies released from the depths to wage chaos on the living world.
CHAPTER 24
Rebellion!
Darla threw her head back and let out a harrowing scream, a scream that seemed to straddle the gulf between the cry of a woman and the howl of an animal. It reverberated through the trough of garbage and rattled the screens of the discarded computer monitors and television sets. It pierced deep into Prue’s eardrums as she used the creature’s momentary distraction to continue her backward scramble up the pile of junk. She’d barely made it a few feet away when she saw Darla reach down to remove the blade from her foot. She made a pained grimace as she did so, eyeing Prue the whole time.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” the fox-woman said. “That’s only going to make things worse.” She threw the knife aside casually.
Prue risked a quick look over her shoulder; the crest of the hill of trash was maybe thirty feet away. The floodlights from the carnival created a kind of white lining along the top. Curtis couldn’t have gotten far.
“CURTIS!” Prue screamed.
The lowing wail of a train engine overlapped her cry, obscuring it. The circus train was leaving, and the night was filled with the sounds of the engine’s rattle and whine. She tried again, though her voice was hoarse from exhaustion.
“Oh yes,” said Darla, approaching again. She favored her right leg now; dark blood seeped from the wound in her foot. “Please, bring your friend. He’s next on my list. That’d make my job quite a bit easier.” The rain was coming in thick sheets now, and Prue could feel the water pouring in streams from her brow. It dripped over her lips and into her mouth, which was slightly open as her breathing came in deep, heavy bursts. Darla’s fur was oil-black and looked to have the consistency of oil, the way it clung to her skin, the way the water poured over it and fell to the ground.
“CURTIIIIS!” Prue screamed again.
Darla, comically, chimed in. “CURTIS!” she yelled, cupping her long claws around her mouth. “Come join the party!” She then cocked her head, saying, “Strange, he doesn’t seem to be hearing.”
“You won’t get away with this. They’ll come for you.”
“And who’s this mysterious ‘they’?”
“Owl Rex. The bandits.”
“I have some information for you. Owl Rex flew the coop.” She chuckled at her own joke before continuing. “Totally MIA. As for your bandits, they were gone when we got to their little encampment.”
“Gone?”
“I’d love to take credit for that, but there were only three of us Kitsunes and, what, a hundred bandits? No, no. They’d all disappeared. Lots of smoke and fire. No bandits. Someone else did that tasty bit of culling. You flatter me if you think that we three took out that entire camp.” She laughed. “Shouldn’t have said anything. Oh well, you’ll be dead in a few seconds anyway.”
Something cold and sharp jabbed at Prue’s palm. Looking down, she saw it was a section of metal rebar, jutting up from the heap. She quickly slipped her fingers around it and pulled it free: It was a rusty three feet long and sat reassuringly heavy in her grasp. She swung it out in the direction of the approaching Kitsune, and the creature flinched.
“Put that away,” Darla said.
“Leave me alone.”
“I can’t do that. I have a job to do.”
Prue swung again. The bar whistled in the air before Darla’s outstretched claws. “I won’t let you. I won’t. I’ll stop you.” The words were flowing from Prue’s mouth in nervous fits. The pounding of her heart beat a kick drum in her ears.
The creature cracked a wide smile. Prue swung the bar again. Darla feinted right and pounced.
Prue leapt sideways, catching herself against the slope of the hill with her elbow. The hot weight of Darla’s body collapsed onto her, and it crushed her to the ground. She felt the end of the rebar bite through the fabric of her coat at her waist; a blister of pain tore through her. She yelled out; she could smell the sour bre
ath of the fox-woman above her.
Instinctively, she kicked and was surprised to feel her left boot find purchase on the creature’s underbelly. The thing yelped; her weight lifted momentarily and Prue, the rake of the slope to her advantage, rolled away. The piece of rebar still clung to her side. It wasn’t until she’d managed to get a few feet from Darla that she realized it had, in fact, pierced her skin. Blood was welling up in the space between her naked waist and the cotton of her shirt.
She began to run. Her ankle was stiff; she hadn’t realized how little she’d been using it on their walk through the underground. The pain was now flashing anew. She could hear Darla righting herself behind her, cursing the girl as she gave pursuit. The shack in the center of the trough was only a handful of yards distant. She could make it, she thought. If only she had a little more time…
Darla’s twin sets of claws seized her shoulders. The thick wool of her coat tore, and Prue screamed to feel the sharpness burrow into her collarbone. The full weight of the Kitsune’s body was now bearing down on her back. Prue tumbled forward. Both of them hit the ground and rolled the final yards to the bottom of the trough. They came to a stop in a wide tussock of grass, landing in such a way that Darla was able to straddle Prue’s chest, immobilizing her, as she lay pinned to the hard earth.
The Kitsune fought for breath, her chest heaving in rapid jerks. Her long arms, slick in black fur, lay at her side as her knees pressed painfully into Prue’s shoulder. She spat angrily at the ground and abruptly slashed Prue across the face with her claws.
Three bright red welts instantaneously appeared on Prue’s cheek. Tears streamed down from her eyes. “Please!” she shouted.
“Too late.” She lifted her arm to strike again.
Please.
The grass responded. Little yellow tendrils shot up Darla’s arm, ensnaring her. Suddenly, the Kitsune’s midsection was so crisscrossed with the fibers of grass that she resembled some bizarre model of the human nervous system. She let out a scream; the grass began to wick its way up to her neck. Prue, surprised at the turn of events, was able to push her way from underneath Darla. She began crawling again toward the shack, now only feet away. The claw marks at her face burned; the wound in her side was tacky with blood.
The sound of tearing earth caught her attention, and she twisted around to see Darla rip free of the grass’s clutches. She was doing it with some considerable effort, and her face was showing her very intense frustration. Prue looked down at the tufts of grass at her feet and thought:
Now.
At her command, the grass came alive and slithered about Darla’s ankles and tangled between her toes. The Kitsune stumbled forward, shouting a string of petulant curses.
For now the trash heap was awake with the voices of the wild bracken. Every blade of flaxen grass had raised its voice to Prue, chiming in a cacophonous unison. And they were all looking to her for instruction. A thistle branch clawed at the creature’s calves; more weedy grass grasped her ankles. A maple tree, lost within a stack of hollowed-out truck cabs, shook free and whipped its branches at Prue’s pursuer. From below the earth, a bellowing noise arose as the ground began to break away and the roots of the plants, long buried beneath the heaps of trash, liberated themselves and redirected their strength to the destruction of the half-fox, half-woman.
In the spray of mud, dirt, and metallic detritus, Prue stood and commanded the plants like the conductor of a symphony.
Darla screamed in terror and despair as the roots at her feet began to drag her beneath the earth.
Prue then realized: She was going to kill this woman.
This moment’s hesitation caused the voices of the plants to spiral into confusion. Prue, blindsided by her newfound power, had forgotten herself. Forgotten that the plants, in her control, were bent on murdering Darla. And while it seemed like the right outcome, considering that her own life was very much in danger, it still gave her pause. And it was that pause that threw her. Suddenly, she found she could no longer keep their chiming voices separate and, as a consequence, began to lose control of them. With a violent lurch, Darla broke free of her bonds and moved toward her target.
Before Prue could shake herself from her trance, Darla’s fingers were around her neck and squeezing.
“You stupid child,” said the creature, her long yellow teeth spotted with blood. “No more of your magics.”
“Please!” Prue squeaked. She tried to commune with the plants, but the noise was just too wild in her head, a rat’s nest of intersecting voices, all screaming and shouting. The grasses were seeping back into the earth; the tree swayed dumbly in the wind. Prue felt herself slipping from consciousness.
A darkness was descending over her eyes, a threadbare veil. The world was being erased from her vision. Her pain was disappearing; her body glowing with a quiet numbness. The noise in her mind receded to a static hum, and she closed her eyes. And that was when she heard:
THUNK
THUNK
They were two sounds that Prue would never forget; they would remain etched in her mind until her final dying breath—a breath she was not destined to breathe that day, nor any day in the very near future. But regardless, she would remember the sounds—and though she’d never actually witnessed such an event, she imagined they were not unlike the sound of a butcher’s meat hook sinking, twice, into a heavy, cold side of meat. She was abruptly dropped to the ground, where she collapsed in a pile.
Opening her eyes, Prue saw Darla, still poised to attack, standing above her. The whites of her eyes—half fox, half woman—shone brightly. She mouthed a distressed and surprised gasp. And then she was lifted from the ground.
Below her was a massive—and very angry—bear. He was holding her aloft in the twin pincers of the golden hooks he wore in place of his paws. His head lolled back, and he gave a loud, expressive roar. Darla, writhing in his grasp above his head, screamed shrilly. Her body, crooked and contorted, seemed to metamorphose violently between her human and fox shapes as she lay punctured on the bear’s hooks. Blood streamed down the bear’s paws and spattered his face. Finally, just as Darla’s body began to heave in death-shudders, the bear flexed his massive biceps and vaulted the body, now assuming its human form, across the junk heap to land with a hollow clunk on a pile of discarded toaster ovens.
“My shop!” shouted Unthank, his voice brimming with anguish. “It’s burning!” The orange light of the fire played on his face. It gave his goatee a devil-like cast.
He seemed to be more concerned with the destruction of the machine shop than he was with the pack of ravenous children, freed from their bondage, running toward him. Roger was keeping a keen eye on Carol, who was still in the midst of the protective Unadoptables. Desdemona clung to Mr. Wigman, who was quick to shore up his stevedores.
“Hold your ground!” he shouted as the hulking men prepared their makeshift weaponry. He had actually given seminars on the quelling of worker rebellions; he was somewhat in his native element. The fact that they were children did not seem to daunt him.
“You want us to, uh, fight ’em?” asked one of the stevedores.
“No, I want you to snuggle ’em,” replied Wigman angrily. “Of course you should fight them!”
Elsie and Rachel found each other in the huddle and gripped each other’s arms. That was when Martha let out a celebratory whoop and fired the first volley of the insurgency: She walked over to one of the stevedores, his attention diverted by the rapidly approaching gang of kids, and kicked him, hard, in the shin. He looked down at her, surprised. “Why’d you do that?” he asked. So she did it again, in the other shin.
By that point, the rebelling children from the Unthank Home had reached the group on the road; they threw themselves into the horde with an unbridled relish, their teeth flashing and hands flying. The stevedores were trying to fend off the attacks of the children without doing bodily harm; it appeared that even these giant men, vicious by nature, recognized the dubious morality of the sit
uation. Wigman, on the other hand, did not bat an eyelash: When a young boy leapt toward him, he grabbed the kid by the neck and threw him to the ground. As if to illustrate his contempt, he then stepped on the poor child’s back.
“That,” he said, “is how one stops an uprising.”
And then he was dogpiled by a throng of kids.
Martha, her goggles engaged, was bear-hugging the upper torso of a stevedore while Carl Rehnquist had dived to grab his ankles. The man soon plummeted, with a howl, to the ground. They disarmed him of his pipe wrench, and Martha set about whacking his neighboring hulk in the shins. She seemed to be taking to the violence with enthusiasm.
In the chaos, Elsie felt Carol’s hand at her elbow. He leaned low and hissed to her, “Get me away from that man!” He evidently meant Roger, who was presently approaching them with a look of intense covetousness etched on his face. She hollered to Rachel, “Let’s get out of here!” Grabbing either arm of the blind man, they began to hustle him away toward a small avenue between two chemical tanks.
“What’s happening back there?” Carol asked as they slowly moved through the warring crowd.
“The orphans have escaped; they’ve set fire to the machine shop! The whole place is going up in flames!” said Elsie, aghast at the chaos around them.
“Good for them,” said Carol, smiling.
A voice came from behind them. “Stop them!” it cried. It was Roger. Caught in the clamor, he’d climbed on top of a metal pylon and was pointing a bony finger at the escaping trio. A few stevedores heard his call and began to lumber toward them.
The children, for all their pluck, were no match for the stevedores. Perhaps it had been a hopeless endeavor from the beginning. Under Wigman’s urging, the giant men began to lay into their young foes with a renewed urgency, and the orphans collectively decided to make a run for it. They were pressed into the gravel pathway that Elsie and Rachel were slowly walking, with the blind man steadied between them. The cascade of children, orphans and Unadoptables, fell over them; it was all they could do to stay upright in the sudden flow.
