The Academy: Book 1 (3 page)

From behind him he heard snarling and screaming and then two gunshots.

BANG! BANG!

The snarling stopped, but the screaming did not, and Asa guessed that Harold had killed the dog. Asa kept running. He hurdled over some bushes at the entrance of the woods, landed, slipped, and fell in the dirt.

BANG!

A bullet flew over his head and he could hear that the screaming officer was running after him. Asa looked ahead of himself and saw a maze of tree trunks and bushes with vines with thorns crawling over them, all above the leave-strewn ground.

Asa pushed himself up with his hands and ran deeper into the forest. Two more gunshots rang out behind him and then he heard officer Harold tumble over into the dirt. “My gun! Where is my gun?”

Harold was crying and screaming now. Howling. And by the time he had gotten to his feet and found his firearm, Asa was a hundred yards deep into the black night.

Harold got up and fired a couple more shots into the dark.

“Nonononononono! Where did he go? He can’t have gone far!”

Harold sprinted out into the dark forest, moaning, with his handgun in his grip. His breath wheezed in and out of his tired chest. He didn’t know it, but Asa had made a sharp turn at a creek ahead of him, and Officer Harold
Kensing was headed in the wrong direction.

              Asa ran through the woods.

             
His eyes were now adjusted to the dim light and he dodged through the trees and the bushes. Wolves howled in the distance, but that didn’t bother him. He had ran cross-country in junior high and he used to jump the back fence behind his house and jog out in this forest for miles after his mother went to sleep. He jogged the most when she was sick; it was a way to take his stress and anxiety and burn it in his legs and abdomen as he kicked away miles of earth beneath him.

             
It wasn’t a stress reliever now.

The more he ran and the
more the reality sunk in. He dug his tennis shoes in the dirt and increased space between himself and the maniac officer who had pulled him over. Asa could see the pale skin, and the freckles, and the yellow teeth, and the drool on Harold Kensing’s chin in his mind’s eye. He could hear the officer’s voice and the way it reverberated in nervous tones. He could feel the barrel of the gun pressed against his ear and he pulled up his hand to swat it away while running, even though nothing was there.

What had he been talking about? Was he mad? Was that all? Was there nothing more to what had happened?

Asa thought that this was likely, but he still had a dull fear in his gut that the threats had meant something—that the pale man with the sunken-in eyes had been a sane man who had seen something so awful that he was growing unhealthy with fright and had agreed to kill a fourteen year old named Asa Palmer that he did not even know. He remembered the words that had been spoken:

“They’ll find you anywhere. They’ll send someone else like me to do the job, or maybe they’ll do it with their own hands. Close your eyes. That’s good. You’re about to die.”

“They want you first.”

Asa kicked his speed up a notch and moaned through heavy breaths. He figured that he was a little over five kilometers from where he had been pulled over and had a rough sense of where his home was from here. Even in the dark, he knew these woods.

Why would anyone want me dead?

Asa had no real enemies. He certainly hadn’t wronged anyone with enough power to threaten to kill a police officer’s family.

And he knew no one with black gums.

That chilled him in a way that nothing else had. Asa didn’t know why. It was ridiculous, but the image of some murderer licking his lips with a black tongue wouldn’t leave his head.

Asa saw the back of his neighborhood coming into view ahead. The whole block was dead black, with no lights on in the windows. Asa knew that most of the houses had been vacated. People were leaving Dritt Texas to be with family in other parts of the country while others were simply dying. The town looked noticeably different than it had two years ago, before the Wolf Flu left Latvia and made its awful march through the rest of the world. Cars sat in front of vacant houses on four flat tires. Weeds and waist high grass stood in unattended lawns. Windows were smashed, and hungry people who were out of jobs searched pantries that didn’t belong to them.

And what was that dog? Asa’s mind asked from nowhere. He had just remembered it as he reached his back fence. The animal didn’t have any outrageous features. He was a large animal, yes, but sometimes dogs, like people, grow bigger than others. Officer Harold
Kensing’s stature had proven that. But still, Asa’s mind was stimulated trying to recall things about the animal. It had four legs, a tail, two ears, a snout, two eyes, and black hair. In those ways, it was a plausible animal. But small things about the canine stuck in Asa’s memory. It didn’t walk like a regular mastiff, labored and heavy as it lumbered along. The animal had been light on its feet as though it were a terrier, or even a cat. And the top of the dog’s head was far bigger than normal. The top of it looked as though it had undergone some kind of mutation and it was holding a brain the size of a softball in there. Asa had only seen the blue eyes for a second, but he couldn’t convince himself that they weren’t in some way more knowing than an animal’s should be.
They seemed sentient.

What happened back there? Did the dog just smell trouble
and come and decide to help me out? The animal rammed into the car just as the gun went off. A coincidence?

Asa couldn’t say so with a clean conscious. It was too much. An officer pulled him over, knew his name, told him that there were people after him and was about to kill Asa when a huge dog comes in from seemingly nowhere, rams into the cop car, and fights off the giant officer to give Asa just enough time to get away.

No way. There’s something going on.

But what’s the answer?

Asa’s head was thudding. He jumped the back fence and walked up his lawn towards the kitchen door. He didn’t know how to make sense of what had happened that night and he felt debilitatingly tired all of the sudden. His heart had been pumping him full of adrenaline, working three times as hard as usual for the past hour now and he needed a chance to rest.

He reached up and found the spare key he kept hidden atop the window jam, unlocked the kitchen door, and stepped inside. The burglar alarm went off and he pressed the code and silenced it. He locked the door behind him, set the alarm, and felt somewhat safe for the first time in hours. He thought about calling the police, but what if they were the ones after him? And even if they weren’t, everyone knew that nothing good came from the post
Wolf Flu Dritt County Police Department.

He poured a glass of water and walked to his bedroom. He locked the door behind him. It was completely dark inside his room and he used his hands to feel his way over to his bed. He placed the glass of water on the nightstand and felt the revolver he kept in the cubby below the top surface to make sure that it was still there.

He didn’t know what to do, but he knew that he must sleep. He didn’t want to make a rash decision while his brain wasn’t working at full capacity. Besides, it could wait for tomorrow. Surely they’d understand if he slept before calling it in. If he decided to contact the police, he’d say that he was in shock and not thinking right the night before.

He lay his head down on his pillow and pulled the blankets up to his shoulder.
It’s probably true. I’m probably going through minor shock.

He closed his eyes and thought of how it didn’t bother him to be sweaty and dirty in his bed. He was fine with it. He needed to rest. His breathing calmed, and random visions began to play in his mind. He was drifting off to sleep and dreaming when his eyes shot open and the thought occurred to him. He had no way of validating it, but something inside of him knew that it was true.

             
That Dog had been sent to save me.

2

Crows

             
Asa was having odd, fast moving dreams while he slept that night. Harold Kensing was on the move; his mission wasn’t completed yet.

Asa
was stirring, and visions of crows flashed in his mind.

             
The animals acted different about him.

             
Sometimes, when Asa was scared of them and didn’t want to believe that there was something profoundly bizarre going on, he would tell himself that the crows’ actions were merely coincidence. But, when coincidence after coincidence after coincidence happens, this view gets harder and harder to believe. Asa had no other options. What was he supposed to think: that the crows cared about him more than other people?

             
People always thought that how the crows treated Asa was odd. People would whisper about how many of the crows stared at Asa, and they would ask him if he had bird feed in his pockets sometimes. He got picked on for it, because the children knew that he was different; the birds didn’t treat anyone else quite like him. One particularly religious girl in his grade school had started the rumor that Asa was possessed by the devil, and that the crows were worshipping him. In many of his peers’ minds, this view still reigned.

             
In public, Asa had brushed the rumor off as absurd—he said it was nothing more than silly, childish superstition. But at night, while he was lying in bed, it gave him chills. He didn’t own a Bible, but he had a picture book with Biblical stories for children in it; the stories included Daniel and the Lion’s Den, Noah’s and the Flood, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (Asa’s favorite) along with some more of the popular ones. When Asa was scared and alone at night, he would pick this book off of his bookshelf, hold it to his chest, and try to convince himself that the devil had nothing to do with why the crows watched him.

             
Some nights were better than others.

             
The rumor never left Asa’s mind, because no matter how much he tried to logic it away, he could never answer the question:
Why do the crows treat me differently?

             
His mother the crows watching Asa too, but was never scared of them. Asa could remember playing in his sandbox in his backyard one morning when he was four years old. The crows sat on phone wires and fences overhead, looking down and watching him. One swooped down and sat on the handlebars of Asa’s tricycle. It looked at Asa, cocked its head, and seemed to smile. Its feathers jutted out at its neck, and the thing’s talons were razor sharp against the metal of the bicycle.

             
Asa just continued to play as he always did when the crows came to watch him. He was driving his toy trucks through roads in sand mounds that he had made. Sometimes the crows would interact with him and help him play. Sometimes they would sit on his shoulder, or in the bucket of the toy dump truck that he was pushing and Asa would drive them around. But on this particular day, they just sat there staring at him.

             
Asa heard a sob coming from the house and looked up. The kitchen window was open, and inside, his mother was standing at the sink. Tears were trickling down her cheeks as she looked at all the birds: there were hundreds of them, all of which stared at Asa. Their eyes were beady and round, and they opened their mouths slightly so that they appeared to be smiling. Some were perched on the arms of the lawn chairs, six or seven sat atop the unused doghouse that they had, and even more gathered on the branches of the big oak that shaded the back yard.

             
Asa stopped pushing his trucks at the sight of his mother crying. “Mama, what’s wrong?”

             
She smiled. “I’m just so happy,” she said. He saw that those weren’t tears of sorrow, but ones of joy.

             
“Why, Mama?”

             
“Your Daddy sent the crows to watch over you, Asa. They’re your guardian angels.”

             
His mother continued to watch from the window, Asa continued to play with his trucks, and the birds continued to stare adoringly at him.

             
From that day forward, Asa was torn between the idea that the crows were either angels or demons. The fact of the matter was that they treated him in a way that they didn’t treat anyone else. Not all of the crows, just some. The ones that
loved
him (Asa didn’t know what else to call it) would listen when he spoke. Sometimes, when he was alone and he ran across a crow, he would ask it to do something. There was something different in the eyes of those that loved him. “Go fly over to that branch,” he would say, and some would, while others just stared at him, or flew away, or pecked at the earth.

             
Once, when Asa was seven, a crow saved his life. It was late January, and the snow had fallen to cover the earth six inches in a white blanket. Growing up in North Texas, Asa was ecstatic to see the snow; it wasn’t every year that snow came, and it rarely ever grew as thick as it had that day. School was cancelled and his mother didn’t have to go into work.