We Are All Crew (10 page)

And then I’m thinking about people that aren’t even there: faces of people rushing past the Bentley window on the morning commute to school, the ones His Eminence calls “a bunch of wackos.”

My stomach hurts.

Then I realize Seabrook is no longer kneeling next to me. He’s inching toward the Shrub King, who’s flicking his lighter next to the cardboard box beside him.

Seabrook grabs Shwo-Rez by the arm. Shwo-Rez bellows. Seabrook pulls him over like a sack of pale flab. They struggle for the lighter, Seabrook astride Schwartz. The doctor raises his arm and brings his fist down hard onto Shwo-Rez’s jaw. Shwo-Rez drops the lighter on impact, and its flame snuffs out in the grass.

Seabrook hits him again.

A guard comes running through the boxes. “You there!” he shouts. “Put your hands on your head and come out of there!”

Seabrook lands a final blow on Shwo-Rez’s jaw, and the Shrub King stops moving. Then Seabrook scrambles back toward the tree line, where I’m waving at him like crazy.

“Halt!” The man with the gun shouts. He fires a single shot.

The bullet catches Seabrook in the back.

It sounds like someone pounding a melon with a rubber mallet.

A red mist fills the air as the impact of the shot throws him to the ground.

The man with the gun lowers his shoulders and charges toward Seabrook, who pushes himself to his feet and stumbles into the woods next to me. Wind whistles in and out of his mouth.

“Come on,” he moans between breaths. “We’ve got to move.”

But he doesn’t move.

He leans against me.

I think he might have passed out.

I can’t drag him.

The guard is coming.

the metal crate

The guard chasing Seabrook stops. He turns and walks in the other direction. Some of the other guys in black push their way through the boxes, rolling this big metal crate on wheels. It’s taller than all of them, and the top part is made of mesh. They wheel it up to the edge of the woods where the doctor is lying against me.

Then they back away.

I can’t see where they went. All I see is the big metal crate.

I shake Seabrook, but he doesn’t budge. His breath is really whistling now, like he’s got asthma or something. I elbow him and slap his cheeks.

There’s a loud hissing sound and a pop, and fire leaps up out of the crate.

Some of the sparks hit the gas-covered boxes, which explode, blowing rags of flame across the box city.

Then these little black things begin to boil out of the crate. Living things. They make chattering noises and swarm up like a big plume of giant bugs.

They swarm at us.

I scream at the doctor to get up. He must have seen the creatures too, because next thing I know we’re running into the forest.

The chattering things follow. A big wall of them whooshes through the forest, mirroring fiery wind that’s blowing through Shrub City like a photo negative.

We nearly run into Kang, Arthur, and Esmerelda, who have noticed we aren’t behind them anymore and are waiting for us at the bottom of a hill.

“Move,” Seabrook says. Something is clogging his throat. The wave of chattering things is crashing through the trees behind us.

Esmerelda takes the lead, and we run through the thick trees, which thankfully don’t claw at us like the monsters from the first day. Sometimes the chattering things are so close that they’re almost on us.

Arthur trips.

A black thing lands on his back and scurries all over him with little lizard feet. Arthur’s mouth looks like it’s howling. He plucks the chattering thing off and flings it to the ground. He sprints past me, little red half-moons all over his arms and legs. He’s bawling.

Then the fire disappears, and the chattering creatures fade into the distance. We’re alone in the dark.

We stop to rest. I’m soaked with sweat, my chest is on fire, and I’m more scared than I’ve ever been. My pain and fear reservoir is gone. I can’t conjure up . . . anything.

Soon, though, I see something flickering through the trees. It’s the river. Esmerelda says we we’re only a few hundred feet from its banks.

Arthur stands at the edge of the clearing, peering into the woods in the opposite direction. He isn’t crying anymore. He scratches absently at the little wounds he has all over his arms and legs, but his mouth is pursed and his eyebrows hang low, and he stands there like you couldn’t knock him down with a sledgehammer.

Seabrook isn’t talking. He’s collapsed on his stomach in the clearing, breath rattling in his chest.

“Are you okay, Doctor?” I ask.

“What’s, like, the matter with him?” asks Esmerelda.

“He’s been shot. In the back, I think.”

Kang kneels next to the Doctor. “I’m all right,” Seabrook mutters. Even in the darkness, I can see a big purple circle covering his right shoulder. The back of his green army shirt is soaked.

He props himself on an elbow. “Look,” he says. His voice wavers. “There’s nothing anybody can do about this until we get back to the boat. So let’s get moving.”

So we press on through the woods. I begin to hear the familiar gurgle of rushing water. It’s weird how quickly you get used to something—I never thought I’d be so happy to smell that dead fish smell again.

Upriver and around a bend, a light glows. Voices shout orders. Flashlight beams sweep through the trees. I guess the Green Police believes the chattering things have made a meal of us, and now they’re looking for the
Tamzene
.

We find her anchored where we left her, in the shoal hidden behind cedar branches. Everyone climbs aboard. Seabrook starts the engine without turning on the lights and pilots the boat back into river.

We’re a mile away before Seabrook turns on the deck’s floodlights. Most of the supplies are gone: the refrigerator is empty, and the boxes of equipment Kang keeps lashed to the deck are missing. Shrub People, I bet. They also bogarted a good bit of the hemp from the hold.

Seabrook stands behind the wheel and guns the engine until we’re careening downriver at full speed. He’s pale, and his face is shining with sweat. The blood drips from a small black hole above his right shoulder blade into a pool on the floor of the cabin.

A voice fizzes from the radio in the cabin, the one Seabrook says he uses to listen in on the Green Police: “
Opponents warned that poking new holes in the tundra would devastate this cathedral of nature. In Oklahoma, which has been a top-five oil producing state for more than eighty years, most people are puzzled by these apocalyptic predictions, as they live in harmony with more than one hundred thousand oil and gas wells.
”
⁶

Kang touches Seabrook’s other shoulder, but Seabrook shakes his head. “No, Kang,” he snaps. “Not until we’re clear of those boats.”

Esmerelda’s eyes won’t stop moving. They dart from the old-fashioned gunwales to the mushroom-shaped smokestack, then to the hold, and finally the wake. She has green eyes, and her skin is freckled and deeply tanned. She looks even more beautiful in the barium-colored light, which makes her reddish locks and her eyes glow.

“All right, like, what the fuck is this place?” she whispers to me. “And, like, who the hell are you people, and what is this boat thing, and what are you doing out here?” She keeps asking questions, leaning closer to me, but I back off because my breath smells like day-old Salisbury steak.

Arthur collapses in a corner and falls asleep. The little red crescent moons all over his arms and legs are beginning to dry and get crusty.

I try to explain everything to this chick, but nothing comes out clearly. Finally, I say, “Look, the doctor will explain everything to you when we’re safely away, okay?”

I leave her standing in the center of the deck and go lean on the side of the cabin next to Arthur, watching the woods rush past. I’m drifting off to sleep when I feel something pressing on my hip. Suddenly I remember the disc I pocketed, the one that had fallen out of Shwo-Rez’s cigar box. I take it out and look at it.

What I see freaks me out more than any soldier in black or Shrub Person or chattering thing.

It’s a circular patch—the kind Boy Scouts wear on their uniforms when they learn how to start fires and tie knots. The design is stitched in thick thread at the center of the circle: the profile of a snarling cat with long, fierce fangs. On the left side of the cat head is a large letter C; on the right curls an S. Circling it:
Duty to God, Country, and Species.

I stare back at the woods and feel cold.

The same design is painted on the Bitchin’ Poster that hangs over His Eminence’s desk in his office.

his eminence

Want to know what I have to live up to?

Picture this: His Eminence, all of eighteen in the ’70s, six-foot-two with good looks and publicspeak, already impressing the hell out of everybody and about to embark on a lightning political career when he makes a body to do? F

Chapter Eleven

the things in the box

They could tell the men didn’t want to look at them.

Even through the metal grate, the beings inside the box could tell the two men were terrified. They slumped in their shining gray chairs, hands clasped in steel bracelets behind them. The men looked at the ceiling of the white room, the fluorescent bulbs blotting out every shadow. They looked at the metal floor. They looked at their laps. They never looked at the box.

The things in the box had never seen men like these before. The men they usually saw wore green or gray uniforms with colored ribbons tied around their necks. These men were naked, filthy, and disheveled, one with white hair and the other with gray. They seemed less sinewy than other men, of softer flesh than the others they knew.

That’s good, the things in the box thought.

The shiny black window on the wall blinked on. A face appeared, one the things had seen many times before in these situations, and were now indifferent to. If they had thought about it, they would have considered its immensity, its impossible roundness. But they didn’t think about it.

It spoke in a language they’d heard many times before, one they lacked both the ability to understand and the desire to decipher. Its meaning was inconsequential; the soft men were important.

“
Mr. Schwartz. Mr. Crawley
.”

“Look. F—for the love of God, you don’t need to do this,” said the white-haired one.

“We want to cooperate. We have been cooperating,” the gray one added.

“Jesus. Yes.”

“
Well, you poor dears,”
said the large round face.
“There’s no need to take on so. We’re just going to have ourselves a little chat. I’m Maude Sweetwater
.”

“Oh my Christ.”

“You’ve heard of me?”

“Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck . . .”

“Secretary Sweetwater, ma’am, we are completely willing to cooperate. We had no prior knowledge of any wrongdoing on the part of the representatives of Super Corp., and I am more than happy to turn over—” The white-haired man was sweating now. The things could smell it in their cage. It excited them.

“
Super Corp? Oh, your little federal indictment. Oh, Mr. Schwartz, we don’t care a whit about that, dontchaknow
.”

“I don’t. I . . . I’ll sign anything, Ms. Sweetwater. It’s what I do best. Gray-Aide. Chuck. Chuck’ll tell you.”

“
Well, I appreciate that, Mr. Schwartz, I really do. But all I care about is Doctor Marion Seabrook
.”

“Who?”

“She means the wraiths, Great Shwo-Rez—um, Bob. The wraiths.”

“
A couple of men and two boys recently paid you gentlemen a visit. They were on a boat. I’d like to know what happened to that boat
.”

“The wraiths?” said the white-haired human.

“
The boat, gentlemen. Where is it
?”

“I don’t . . . I don’t . . .”

“
Ammospermophilus homoedo
.” That was particularly familiar to the things in the box.

“What?”

“
It’s a breed of squirrel. Long name for a little squirrel, am I right? Ha ha. Well, this little squirrel used to be a very rare species found in the Midwestern United States and the Pacific Northwest. Thought to be entirely extinct by the dawn of the twentieth century—one of those poor, sweet, innocent victims of the Industrial Revolution. There wasn’t a whole lot of human contact with the ammospermophilus homoedo, gentlemen, except for one relatively little-known incident that happened ’round about 1850. A wagon train—the Soup party, named for Mordeci Soup, the head of the party—was making its way across Kansas to Colorado when it had an encounter with this rare breed of squirrel.

“
It wasn’t until 1855 that the remains of the Soup party were discovered by another wagon train. Twenty-eight men, women, and children, their bones strewn among the wreckage of their wagons, mixed up with the clean, white bones of the horses, just baking in that hot Kansas sun—licked clean, mind you. A couple of skeletons of children were discovered a good ways away from the wreckage. Apparently some of them tried to run and were cut down.