The Academy: Book 1 (6 page)

             
When they arrived at home, the sound was deafening. The birds were cawing from every direction, and when Asa walked over the front yard to get to the door, the birds had to move to make room for him. They were covering nearly every surface for a square mile; every telephone pole, every car, every home, every blade of grass, every street sign and every fence was covered in birds. Still, thousands of them flew overhead.

             
Asa saw that a man across the street was staring at him as he entered his home.

             
A tall, black man was sitting in the living room. The Alfatrex Industries symbol, a black viper, was stitched upon his breast pocket. Asa was not yet familiar with the company.

             
The man was tall and black. He was lean, and his forearms had veins running all down them. A cluster of scar tissue sat just below his left eye. He stood when Asa entered and smiled warmly. “Hello, Asa.”

             
He introduced himself as Bill Hallstead, but Asa, for some reason, didn’t believe that ‘Bill’ was the guy’s real name.

Asa sat down at the kitchen table with the man while th
e crows swarmed around the backyard. Asa rolled up his shirt, and watched as the man rubbed an alcohol covered cotton ball over his arm. He took a syringe, and injected the fluid into Asa’s arm. The shot burned, but Asa didn’t show it on his face.

After that, “Bill” got up and left. He said goodbye to Asa and his mother and when he opened the door to leave, the cawing was almost deafening.

Asa heard the man’s car start, and listened to him drive away. Right after the man who claimed to be Bill Halstead left the residents, so did the crows. They cleared out the sky, and the fences, and the telephone poles, and by evening the sky was clear and the streets and trees in Dritt county had an appropriate, expectable amount of birds occupying them.

Chapter 3

Take a Deep Breath: It’s a Long Way to the Bottom

While Asa Palmer stirred in his sleep, three things happened at once: the first was that the electricity surged off in Dritt County, turning off Asa’s alarm system and everything else that was plugged into a wall. This was a common occurrence; Dritt Utilities, like every other company, had to cut back in ways that they weren’t accustomed to because of the Wolf Flu. The second thing that happened was the crows began gathering in the woods behind Asa’s house. They were scattered among the branches, all looking in the same direction. The third thing that happened while Asa slept was that Officer Harold Kensing killed the engine of his cop car in front of Asa’s home.

             
The officer opened up the driver’s side door to his cop car, and admired all of the crows around; there hadn’t been that many to visit Dritt since the day that Asa had been sent home from school. Harold stepped onto the concrete, shut the door behind him, and almost toppled over.

             
Compared to how he looked now, Officer Harold Kensing had seemed healthy a few hours ago. As he stared at the bedroom window that guarded Asa from the outside world, the bags under his eyes were covered with thick, purple surface veins, and his face was dirty, and scabbed in places. Under his neck, two new bruises were forming; these hadn’t been there when he pulled Asa over. They were fresh. They gave the impression that someone had just choked him—maybe there had been threats made. Blood was gathering at a sickening pace behind his neck skin.

In the moonlight, even the crows could tell that the man looked sick. One flew down from the roof and began to tap wildly on the window to Asa’s bedroom. Harold took no notice of it: he had gone through so many excruciating traumas over the past few days that most of his sanity was gone. His boots slapped on the walkway up to the front door, but no one in the neighborhood was awake to hear it.

Tap! Tap! Tap!

Tap! Tap! Tap!

The crow sat on the bushes outside Asa’s window and rammed its beak into the glass in three beat successions.

Tap! Tap! Tap!

Asa was tossing and turning in his bed, lost in a deep sleep. He was dreaming that his mother was alive, and that she was talking to someone on the phone while he ate his breakfast.
What had she said his name was? Convoy?

It was something like that.

Tap! Tap! Tap!

But then Bill Halstead showed up.

Tap! Tap! Tap!

             
But that wasn’t his name, was it?

Harold made his way up to the front of the drive when he noticed the crow tapping on Asa’s window. It was perched atop the bushes, banging its beak into the window. The animal stopped, looked at Harold, and then went back at its work.

Tap! Tap! Tap!

“Shhhhh,” Harold whispered, and he held the barrel of his gun up to his mouth like a grade school teacher will hold up her index finger when she’s trying to quiet rowdy children. “You’re going to wake people up!”

Tap! Tap! Tap!

“Hey, stop it!” Harold stumbled over his boots and his back rammed into the brick wall of Asa’s home. He didn’t feel it; he was numb all over.

Tap! Tap! Tap!

Harold bent down and picked up a rock from the flowerbed. It was hard and covered in dirt. He weighed it for a moment, and then slung it right at the bird, putting his massive body in his projection. His aim was dead on, and a smile filled his pasty white face as the rock turned in the air. The crow “Kaw!”ed, erupted in a cloud of feathers as the rock hit, and then fell to the ground.

Harold was giggling when the thousands of talons left the roof above. In his dumb, almost dead state of mind, he didn’t realize that they were headed for him.

Millions of birds were flying in from all directions. All of them were crows. It was the most crows to occupy
Dritt since that one day…

Asa was mumbling in his sleep as Harold Kensing was screaming outside. Asa didn’t stir. “She talked to Convoy, or Conmay, and then the crows came. That was the day.” He shifted on his pillow. The alarm clock on his dresser was off, and showed no time. The sun would be rising in the East in another half hour. “It was the same day that he gave me that injection. The black man with the veins in his arms. The scar on his face. That was the day that the crows came. They covered the ground.”

Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap!

A new bird had taken the place of the one that Harold Kensing had taken out with a rock. The sound came in loud and clear in the dark bedroom, but Asa was still sleeping. “Conlay, or was it Conman? Or Convoy? She talked to him, the crows came, and then the black man with the scar under his eye… He’s the one… He gave me my vaccine…”

Harold Kensing was screaming, walking backwards, and swatting the birds with his huge hands. They were swarming him, thousands of crows were flying around his body, landing, and pecking at any surface they could find. For some, they got beakfulls of Kevlar and clothes and boots, while others found soft, penetrable flesh. Blood was falling to the grass in drops from the black, sharp beaks. He lifted his firearm and tried to pull the trigger but it wouldn’t budge. “The safety,” he muttered. He kept his eyes shut tight, and swatted away two birds that had perched on his face. He disarmed the safety, and at the same time, a crow stabbed a sharp beak through his eyelid.

Harold was crying and screaming, and the gun went off, putting a bullet through his left foot. He collapsed to the ground.

Asa’s eyes shot open and his heart was pounding. A second gunshot rang out through the night and he stood up from his bed.

Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap!

He split open his blind and saw three crows perched atop the bushes, tapping frantically at his window.
By now, he knew to listen when the crows tried to communicate. Behind the birds, a cop car was parked crookedly in the street with one wheel on the curb. Asa’s mouth opened as he saw a bloody figure rolling over the grass, being attacked by crows. The person stood up, swatted the crows away, and for a fleeting moment Asa could recognize the face of the man who had been sent to kill him—Officer Harold Kensing.

Harold
Kensing collapsed over his own feet while he was running blind through the cloud of black wings and beaks and talons. The birds were relentless, and even more came down from the sky to attack.

“No,” Asa said. The birds had to be telling him something; something bad was out there and he had to run.

He opened the door to his bedroom and dashed out into the living room. Through the back windows he saw a sea of black, with crows covering every surface in the backyard. He threw open the door and stepped outside.

As always, the crows were staring at him, their tiny black eyes were drawn to something about Asa’s face.
Something that he inherited, perhaps. He ran across the back lawn and heard another gunshot erupt from the front of the house.

Asa jumped the back fence, and started out for the woods. The crows moved out of his way as he ran, and thousands followed him. In all the commotion, he didn’t see the huge, black thing flying through the trees above.

He sprinted, dodging trees in the dark and trying to wake himself up enough to make a plan.

I can’t go to the police; there’s not a proper law enforcement agency in this town. And when they find Harold dead in my yard

(please don’t let him be dead, please don’t let him be dead)

             
that Amanda Pearson girl will come in and testify that I brought the crows. They’ll believe her, won’t they? Why not, it’s true, isn’t it? Everyone at school knows that the crows treat me differently. And there probably won’t be an appeals case either: In Dallas a week ago, an officer killed a man accused of murder in a holding cell. No trial or nothing. The officer died a week afterwards: he had the Wolf Flu. They’ll do the same to you. They’ll get some guy who’s just about gone to do the job. Why not? It’d save a broke government a lot of trial money.

             
As Asa ran, it grew even darker in the forest. The birds covered each of the spidering webs of branches above, and they flew overhead in such thick, dense groups that it blocked out the moonlight. The sound was unbelievable; there were millions of crows screaming right at Asa. Asa moved forward, and a crow stomped its talons into his chest. Asa ran to the side, and another crow stepped out in front of him. He tried to go back, and found a blanket of crows blocking his way.

             
They want me to stay here.

The crows overhead grew so thick that Asa had to stop running; it was too dark ahead to dodge the trees.
The sky above was so dense with crows that they completely blocked out the moonlight. The boy of fourteen years and eleven months stood there and felt the bark of a tree right in front of him that he couldn’t even see. The cawing grew louder and louder, and the morning grew darker still. Asa felt like he was in some kind of a cage. Everywhere he moved, they pushed him backward by flapping wings. The cawing was so loud that he couldn’t hear himself breathing. He closed his eyes because there was no point in keeping them open. He made a wish for Harold Kensing without much hope.

The cawing stopped and the light came back.

Asa looked up. All of the birds were silent. Millions and millions of crows sat throughout the forest; they covered every spot that snow had on the day that he fell from The Tower. Each of their shiny black eyes above their beaks were pointed right at him. He felt that it would be inappropriate to breathe. The branches swayed in the wind, but the birds held their positions. They sat poised upright on moving bark.

Asa didn’t even hear him coming. Even in the silence, he had not heard it.

It was like getting hit with a truck.

The birds and the branches and tree trunks around Asa were moving so fast.

No, I’m moving.

Asa was being carried by a man wearing all black
. The man was short, and lean, and hard as marble. His arms were as thick as tree trunks. He was covered in head to toe in black, thick fabric that clung tight to his body.

              Asa kicked and jerked and screamed, but it didn’t matter.

             
The man bounded over a line of bushes and in one leap while still holding Asa, and continued to sprint in the forest.

             
Asa wondered what color the man in black’s tongue was.
Surely these are the people
that officer Kensing spoke of. Surely these are the ones who will get me at all costs. And I’m going to die before I know what happened last night—before I know about the dog and what they want and why I’m wanted.

             
The trees were speeding past Asa at what felt like forty miles per hour. The birds were still, and Asa was amazed at how many there were. Incredibly, he thought that there were more in the trees and the sky and the ground than that day he had been sent home. The man (or thing) that was holding Asa was dodging in and out of the trunks and leaping over brush at a sickening pace. His legs moved in a blur, like a leopard’s. Asa stayed still and stopped fighting; he thought that falling into a tree at that pace could be fatal. Asa looked behind him and saw dirt shooting up behind this man’s impossibly fast moving legs.