Breed (27 page)

“And fast,” says Alice.

“This is insane,” says Michael.

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Adam says.

“We didn’t,” Alice adds. “No way. Nothing big. It’s not…”

“It’s not fair,” says Adam.

“It’s not,” says Alice. “He’s crazy. They both are.”

“No one’s going to kill you,” Michael says. “Or hurt you.” But even to himself, his words and the voice with which he delivers them seem weak and unconvincing.

“There’s something wrong with them,” Adam says. “Really really wrong.”

“They used to be nice,” Alice says.

“Sometimes they still are,” Adam says. He is suddenly worried that they have gone too far in their criticisms and that somehow, through some dark magic, their words are going to make themselves known to their parents.

“Some of the parents try not to hurt,” Rodolfo says, nodding sagely. He speaks to the twins as if he were many years their senior.

“I think that’s why they lock us up,” says Alice.

“Wait,” Michael asks. “Lock you up where?”

Adam and Alice fall silent. They have been taught all their lives to keep family secrets, and even now, when they are on the run, the fear of betraying their parents is immense and palpable.

“Guys,” Michael says, hoping for many, many reasons that the situation he finds himself in is not as abnormal as it seems, “come on. Kids have issues with their parents. I had issues with mine—big ones.”

“We don’t have issues,” Adam says.

“We don’t even know what issues are,” adds Alice.

Michael hears something, a throaty flutter, a sudden warning displacement of the air—and the twins hear it too. They all three of them look up toward the sound in the back of the house, in a room in which half the floor has been taken out, revealing the hundred-and-twenty-year-old joists onto which the planks had once been nailed. On the part of the floor that is still intact, there is a heap of tarps and drop cloths, paint and plaster splattered. For a moment, it seems as if something is stirring beneath the pile.…

And there, above, is a family of pigeons, two large gray-and-pink adults with feathers puffed up against the cold, and two pigeon chicks, downy and pale gray, looking not unlike ducklings. One of the adult pigeons is hovering over one of the chicks and regurgitating what looks like spoiled cottage cheese into its wide-open beak.

“Yo,” says Rodolfo, “I never fucking saw a baby pigeon.” He licks his lips, moves forward a bit.

“The parents hide them until they are big,” Adam says. “That stuff the big one is throwing up into the baby is called pigeon milk; it makes them grow real fast.”

“Is that the mother feeding them?” Rodolfo asks.

“The mother and the father both do,” Adam says.

“Amazing,” Michael says. “It’s like they’re giving their babies their own bodies to help them grow.”

“At our house it’s sort of different,” Alice says.

When Cynthia recovers (though not really: she will never recover) from the sight of Xavier—his left arm all but missing, only one bone and some rags of flesh still attached to him, like red streamers on a child’s handlebar grips, and strips of the human meat of him peeled away from his left side—she tries to figure out a way of releasing him from the blood-and-waste spattered cage in which he is kept; failing that, she stumbles up the steps, dialing and redialing 911 on her smartphone, which has been struck dumb by the depth and soundproofing of the cellar, until she is standing in the front hall talking to a dispatcher, a woman with a Jamaican accent who instantly diagnoses the combination of hysteria and catatonia in Cynthia’s voice and speaks to her in comforting but efficient tones, assuring her that an ambulance will be there within minutes, and when Cynthia, almost weeping now, says that perhaps the police need to come as well, the dispatcher assures her that will happen too. She askes Cynthia, “You going to hang in there for me, aren’t you?,” the simple humanity of which so touches Cynthia that she begins to sob.

The EMT workers and the police arrive at the same time. Cynthia directs them all to the cellar, and they find Xavier unconscious in his cage. Cynthia, who has not followed them down but who sits on a graceful, fragile little cherrywood chair pressed against the wall a few feet from the door to the cellar, her eyes shut, her head dangling, and her stomach churning a thick batter of bile, hears the cops and the EMT workers talking, hears them breaking open the cage, hears one of them say, “On three!,” and then hears more talk, murmurs both urgent and indistinct.

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 devoid 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.