Flight (40 page)

Coughing and crying, her bleeding friend
painfully pulled himself from the water and slipped a leg over the
railing. As soon as his second leg was over, Prissi stretched her
head away from her body and added the contents of her stomach into
the muck flowing along. When she was finished, in between huge
breaths, she asked, “Can you run?”

“Like the sirocco.”

Hearing feet pounding on the concrete, Prissi
looked back to see a silhouetted swarm of zies coming down both
sides of the subway tunnel.

“Go. Find your friends. I’ll try to amuse
them.”

Jiffy looked forward to safety and back to
the threat running down the tunnel.

“How?”

Prissi shoved Jiffy, “Charm. You know, my
forte. Go!”

Running, but in an ungainly way that favored
his injuries, Jiffy disappeared into the murk. As soon as she
couldn’t see him, Prissi spun herself off the railing and began
flapping back toward the zies. Seeing her approach, the demented
gang’s cries grew louder and shriller. They prepared their weapons
as Prissi herself prepared to fly past them. Some of the adhd-ites,
too excited to contain themselves, threw their rocks and bottles
too early. Those missiles Prissi easily dodged except for a hefty
rock, which she caught like a soccer ball. The leader and several
others had climbed over the railing so that they would have a
better chance of stabbing Prissi with their poles. A couple of
meters shy of entering the gauntlet, Prissi flung the rock at the
narrow sweaty wedge of the leader’s head. The creature’s ice-pick
point pupils doubled in size and intensity just before the rock
landed, then, when the missile connected, winked out. The being
dropped to its knees like a pole-axed steer, staggered, let mgo of
the railing and tumbled off the platform into the water. As Prissi
swept past, she grabbed the pole from the thing’s fist, canted her
wings and skimmed along the roof of the tunnel. Twice her legs were
cudgeled by a zie’s pole, but not with enough force to bring her
down more than a half meter. The enraged teener flew through the
screaming gauntlet and passed out of the tunnel into the old
station. She aimed toward the zies’ camp. As she swept over the
campfire, she swung the leader’s pole. Fiery brands flew into the
badboard hovels. By the time Prissi made a wide sweeping turn at
the far end of the station, the village was ablaze and the
villagers streaming back out of the tunnel mouth were spewing
sounds beyond anguish.

While most of the residents raced to their
burning hovels, a handful, either from cunning or indecision,
hovered restively by the tunnel entrance. To avoid passing through
their weapons a second time, Prissi swept wide to the right, then
flew alongside the wall at the south end of the station. Coming
upon the remaining zies from the side, Prissi used her pole to
knock two more in the water. As the drowning zies yawped for help,
the hysterical winger executed an Immelman turn and smashed another
frothing zie across the shoulders before swerving into and fleeing
back into the tunnel.

Almost blinded by the bolts of adrenaline and
epinephrine jolting across her vision, Prissi sped down the inky
tube. As the dusky narrow space grew ever darker, the flashes
dimmed and Prissi felt safer. Slowing her pace, she sucked huge
gouts of the damp fetid air into her lungs. She touched the tips of
her thumbs to the ends of her middle fingers in an attempt to slow
her body chemistry. Prissi’s efforts might have worked given more
time, but when the bleeding, enraged, hawk-faced zie leader
launched herself off the railing where she had been waiting for
revenge, Prissi’s body went berserk. With screams, growls, and
tears exploding from her, Prissi began tearing at the hands locked
around her calves. She beat her wings as her nails shredded the
skin on the zie’s hands. Even as the two combatants sank into the
diseased water, her efforts had no effect on the insane woman’s
grasp around Prissi’s legs. Prissi thrashed forward even as she
despaired that her wings were getting soaked. Losing her balance,
the woman’s head slid under the water. Prissy shifted her weight
backward to keep it there, but neither the woman’s hold nor her
teeth, which she had embedded in Prissi’s thigh, loosened until the
zie had drowned.

A horrified Prissi pushed herself away from
the lifeless form, whose fat lower half already looked as if it
were bloated from the drowning. As the body slowly drifted away,
the repulsed, quaking Prissi clawed her way up the railing and onto
the walkway. Her wings felt like they weighed a thousand kilos.
Dripping goo-thickened greasy water, sobbing, making sounds that
were not words, Prissi pulled herself along the tunnel’s gloom.

The teener was still sobbing when the subway
opened up again for the Bleecker Street station. She stood stunned
in the shadows just inside the arched mouth, like a befuddled
tourist in a national park cave. As she worked to control the
noises being wrenched from her throat, she scanned the space
ahead.

Prissi could see no village or enclave like
with the zies, which was good. But, there also was no sign of
Jiffy, or his friends either, which was not good. Instead, there
were several lumps pressed close to the tile that might have been
rubbish or humans or some combination of the two. There were a
dozen blind spots behind abandoned stairs and broken-tiled columns
where danger could be hidden. Prissi knew that she needed to be
extremely cautious because it was a certainty that she had no fight
left in her. The events of the last days, one after another, the
attacks, her father’s death, Jack Fflower’s betrayal, the dead zie,
had emptied her out. Her courage was long gone. Courage weak
cousins, bravura and bravado, had followed behind. Her adrenals
were empty. Too numb to fear, too tired to care, Prissi knew that
she couldn’t surmount any more danger. She could only avoid it. She
was too tired to run and her wings were too oily to fly, even if,
by some miracle, her energy were to return. She knew she had to
find a haven with clean water, rags and alcohol to clean her
feathers.

The overwhelmed Prissi bleakly spread her
wings and let herself slump against the slick damp wall as she
considered the odds of finding what she needed.

As They Sew, So Shall She Weep

“Poppet.”

Prissi awoke. Given how crazed she had felt
after her battle with the zies and the death of their leader, she
was surprised that she had fallen asleep.

A fleshy, black and pink hand thrust a
battered Panera Bakery pak in front of her face.

“Poppet. Did you order take-out?”

At first, Prissi couldn’t get her mind around
the question. When she did understand, her insides sagged. The zies
had found her. Prissi tilted her head back to see an immense henna
haired woman with a pendulous wattle, like a chocolate colored
torque. Standing in her shadow was a silent bony-faced wraith with
hands that twitched at each other in a way that reminded Prissi of
a surreal Punch and Judy show.

“Take out? You order. We deliver.”

Prissi shook her feverish head in
despair.

“Are you sure? You look like a bonnet, which
has lost its bee, or, being. As you can see, the more you lose your
B, the more you need a D…as in de-livery.”

The skinny woman reached out to touch
Prissi’s wings. When the fat woman laughed, she made a sound like a
flag flapping in the breeze and the flesh under her chin rose and
subsided like a glassy sea.

“Yes, indeed, your livery is in need of
delivery.”

Prissi recoiled when the bird-like woman’s
hand darted forth to poke at her stomach.

“Take away a y, and why, because your liver
itself needs its chicken removed as well as its r, so you can live
again and forget those zies.”

At the mention of the zies, Prissi thought of
how their leader had died. She groaned and reached toward the bite
wound in her thigh.

When the fat woman’s hand snatched out with
astonishing speed to catch hold of Prissi’s wrist, she didn’t
resist.

“Don’t touch it. You’ll only make it worse.
Come, poppet, we’ll take you out of here and take you there.”

The two women offered supporting arms to
Prissi as they started across the broad expanse of the underground
station. As they progressed, several of the lumps Prissi had
noticed earlier stirred. Eyes without faces stared from the bundles
of rags as they passed by. When one lump started to rise from its
concrete bed, a slight wag of the fat woman’s index finger, as big
as a boudin, suggested it reconsider. It did.

After crossing the station and re-entering
the gloom, Prissi’s two companions walked for hundreds of meters
before stopping. The farther they went, the less Prissi had walked
by herself and the more she had been supported by the two women.
Prissi’s fever began to overwhelm her mind and she let herself
drift until she heard a jingle, a jangle, a click and a door,
nearly invisible in the gloom and blackened wall, opened inward.
The bird lady went first and the fat lady behind with Prissi
sandwiched between the uneven slices.

Prissi was so exhausted and feverish that she
was barely conscious of what was happening to her. She finally did
realize that she was being tended to, but in a way that was very
different from the care she had received at Columbia Unitarian
Hospital.

Some brightly burning part of her mind tried
to understand the aches and pains that seemed to come from bruises
and sprains that were being nursed. Those hurts all seemed to be
part of a body that was not quite her own. Somehow those hurts
reminded her of being tickled by Nasty Nancy through a mound of
winter blankets. There were scrapes, scratches and cuts. There
seemed to be dozens of those. She was alert enough that she could
locate one—it was on the right side of her jaw. It announced itself
as a warmth—like holding a potato not long from the oven. Then,
there was the third thing.

It was a hole, a very deep black emptiness.
It had no feeling, but Prissi could tell that it held the promise
of exploding with pain. It took Prissi several moments to
understand that the black hole was where the zie had bitten
her.

Prissi heard murmuring like the sound of
mountain wind through grasses. She felt a tugging at the black
hole. She thought she knew what that was and the thought horrified
her. A black and red swirl, like lava swelling from a volcano
started forming at the edge of her closed eyes’ vision. Prissi
squeezed her eyes even tighter to push the image away, but the lava
oozed past where she was squeezing and began to fill the space
behind her lids.

Prissi bit hard on her lower lip to keep from
screaming. She was terrified at how excruciating the pain would be
if she couldn’t stop the flow of lava. When it became obvious that
pushing back would not stop the molten threat, she thought of other
things, powerful things, that would keep the lava away. Her
fingertips stretched to touch her father’s face, to pat his hair,
to gently hold his feeble neck, his worthless neck.

There was more tugging as the caregivers
beyond her lids tried to stitch the leg wound closed. Tugging and
tugging to close the lava hole.

A sound that began lower than a growl and
ended an octave higher than a shriek erupted from Prissi.

“Yell, poppet, yell. It won’t seal the wound,
but it may heal the wounded. Who did you dance with? That thief,
the hyena? Well, we have just the thing for hyenas, don’t we, Lavie
La?”

As the fat woman talked, Prissi unclenched
her fists and let herself fly away from all that was happening, and
all that had happened, to her.

Been Down, So Long

Bob Tom had fallen asleep as soon as the sun
disappeared. Joe couldn’t blame him. After all, they had been up
early in the morning so Bob Tom could tow Joe the rest of the way
to Albany. They had walked for miles to the train terminal, battled
the bob n hobs, and made their way back to the river. After that,
Bob Tom had flown for kilometers after they headed downstream
before hitchhiking a ride on the salad barges.

Using the light of the moon, Joe studied the
old man. The rough furrowed skin on the Bob Tom’s face reminded the
boy of the naked faces of the Adirondacks Mountains themselves. The
eyebrows, a frowze of white and gray hairs of all lengths, if
enlarged a hundred times, could have been mistaken for one of the
animals Bob Tom hunted. Joe smiled as he thought of those two
trophies hanging on the bare wood walls of a cabin alongside a
bear’s head and a pair of moose antlers. Looking at the riverman’s
nose, a promontory of vein-blasted flesh, Joe didn’t doubt that
that mighty organ could smell scents more mortal noses would miss
as its owner claimed. As if it knew it was being considered, the
nose quivered before making a sudden disturbance that resounded
across the Hudson.

Joe scanned down Bob Tom’s tatterdemalion
clothed, hull-like chest to where his hands lightly held the bottle
the captain had sent back with him after their visit. As the
night’s air was broken by a second racketing snore, the hands,
whose slender fingers and large joints made them look like they
were assembled from Tinker Toys©, tightened on the bottle’s neck.
Joe reached over, slightly twisted the bottle until Bob Tom’s
finger’s loosened, and removed it from his hands.

Joe held the bottle up to the silver
moonlight and wasn’t surprised to see that more than half its
contents were gone. Before finding a safe place to stash the
liquor, Joe studied the bottle to see if he wanted to reconsider
his decision to say no when Bob Tom had asked him if he wanted a
celebratory drink. The boy twisted the cap off, but after smelling
the bottle’s contents, he decided that he would keep the pledge he
had made at the beginning of hockey season.