The Broken Ones (27 page)

He had just a moment of swimming, sliding vision—seeing the huge gray avian head twisting, looking for a way under. Then dark stars swallowed his sight, and he slid into unconsciousness.

Chapter
16

T
he girl was dreaming of custard. She liked custard. She could eat it all day. She hated green vegetables and tried to say so, but the words always came out as a grunt or a groan. But this dream was happy. In this dream, she could speak. She’d asked for custard, and had received a clean white bowl that was sooo big—

“Taryn?”

—and the custard was soooo yellow, and in this dream she didn’t need Miss Zo-zo to feed her, she was feeding herself! And then—

“Taryn?”

She blinked awake. Someone was touching her shoulder. She opened her mouth to ask who was there, and a noise came out.

“It’s okay, Taryn. Sorry to wake you.”

There were two people standing in her room. It was night. Night was for sleeping. Everything was blurry. She didn’t think she knew these people. She couldn’t see them, because they were blurry.

Taryn asked,
Who are you?
but another noise came out.

Then one of the someones put her glasses on her face and all the blurry vanished. Two men. The man who had put her glasses on her face was small and wrinkly. Like the pixie from the book that Miss Lucy read. In the book, he was a nice pixie, and this man looked just like him. When he turned, Taryn saw that he had a silver tail on the back of his head, just like a pony’s! Taryn looked across the dark room to see if Becky was awake, because Becky liked ponies. She called out to Becky—

“No, Taryn. No,” the pixie-man whispered, and put a warm finger on her wet lips. “Don’t wake her. We just want you.”

Taryn liked his voice.

The pixie-man smiled. “And we have something for you. Look.”

She followed his long, thin arm and looked at the other man. This man wasn’t small. He smiled and held up a big pink jacket.

“Wa?” Taryn thought it was the most beautiful jacket she had ever seen. “My!”

“Shh, yes. It’s yours. But you have to be nice and quiet. Will you be nice and quiet?”

Taryn nodded hard. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.

“Then let’s put it on,” he whispered.

Taryn wanted to jump and hoot, but she was good. Nice and quiet. She put one arm in, then the other. Outside the window, she could see, up up, some stars.

“Nigh-time!” she said.

“Yes,” agreed the pixie-man. His hands were soft as he slipped her shoes on her feet. “We’re going on a nighttime trip.”

The jacket was warm. Taryn smiled. She was going to see the stars.

Chapter
17

S
tars were diamonds, the moon a fingernail. The air was ice-cold. “How do we kill a rabbit?”

The sun had not yet risen, and the sky in the east was a smudge of light no particular color. His new daddy was in a good mood. Oscar followed the man as he walked over tufts of grass that tinkled and snapped under their gum boots. Oscar could not remember ever having been so cold. Frost covered the paddocks, and loops of frozen dew hung from fence wires like dark-gray pearls. The air was so still that the man’s voice, only a whisper, was almost shockingly loud. Oscar’s six-year-old heart pounded, because he carried a gun.

It was heavy, the rifle, very heavy, and his small bare fingers felt numb. But he refused to let the weapon slip or drop. The man carried a similar rifle. Both had scopes. The man’s was a Weatherby, he’d explained yesterday after they arrived at the farm, “And yours is a Marlin. Like the fish.” They’d gone to the shed behind the farmhouse and the man had shown Oscar how to load the magazine, how to screw on the silencer made by a “friend of a friend,” how to unfold the two legs of the bipod, how to lie on the ground and tuck the stock into his right shoulder with his left hand, work the bolt, and sight through the scope. Satisfied, the man had said, “Tomorrow we hunt
conigli
.” This morning he’d been pulled up from sleep like a fish hauled from a deep sea, disoriented and a bit fearful. Daddy helped him dress, tucked two magazines into his pockets, and handed the black-and-silver rifle to him. Shivering and excited, Oscar had followed him out into darkness.

“How do we kill a rabbit?” Daddy repeated, whispering as they
walked. The farm was in drought, Oscar learned last night, and the rabbits were fearless and numberless. A plague.

The night before, from his sleeping bag in the spare room, he’d heard his new parents sitting with Uncle Andino. There had been the loud pop of a cork from a bottle. More talking: something about a trial finally over. Corks and drinking usually meant good news, Oscar had thought, but the voices weren’t happy, so he wasn’t sure. But today the man’s talkative mood was impossible to ignore. Maybe he just had a funny way of showing happiness.

“He is no fool, rabbit. And nature has given him lots of help. Big ears for hearing. He is brown, like the grass is brown. And he is fast. His eyes work better than yours or mine at the dawn and the dusk. He knows these paddocks better even than your Uncle Andino, much better than you or me. Where rabbit comes from, far across the seas, everything eats him. Hawks, wolves, owls. So he has eyes each side of the head”—the man touched each temple—“to see all round. But we don’t have eyes like the owl, or sharp teeth like the stoat. No? So what is our advantage?”

Oscar thought, and said, “We have guns.”

Sandro shrugged, a satisfactory answer. He took Oscar’s gun and held fence wires down with one foot and up with his hand, letting the boy climb into a new paddock. He handed back the rifle.

“Guns, yes. That’s part of it. Guns and scopes, so if we do it right we can kill the little fellows before they even know we’re there. That’s good. Nothing likes to die feeling afraid. But people have been eating
conigli
for thousands of years, long before guns. Do we just eat rabbit?”

Oscar thought about this. “No.”

The man looked at him from the corner of an eye, and nodded again. “What other animals do we eat?”

Oscar saw shapes shifting on the glowing horizon.

“Cows.”

“Cattle,” Sandro agreed.

“Sheep. Chickens. Fish.”

“Yes.”

Oscar fell silent, thinking. He willed his frozen fingers to grip the gun tight. He knew the man wanted an answer, and Oscar wanted to please him. He was a policeman, and made Oscar a little afraid.

“Ducks?”

Sandro smiled. “Yes. Lots of things. What do we do before we eat them?”

“Cook them?”

The man laughed. “And before that?”

“Kill them?”

The man nodded. “We kill them. We kill everything. Rabbit, cattle, fish, seals, ducks, insects, little tiny bacteria, giant whales. Everything. Even each other.” The man fell quiet for so long that Oscar wondered if he’d forgotten his new son was even there. Then he whispered, “The difference between us and the other animals is we kill even when we’re not hungry. That’s our advantage. We are good at killing, because we enjoy it.”

Oscar frowned. “Do you enjoy it?”

“Every man does,” Sandro replied after a long moment. “You just have to decide how much. Shh, now.”

The man motioned for Oscar to follow quietly, then stopped at a large tuft of grass and nodded ahead. Oscar looked. Beneath the fence line was a cutaway of dirt and a dark, almond-shaped hole. The burrow entrance. The east was behind them, and the stars overhead were fading. The man nodded. Oscar lay down. The ground beneath his belly was cold. He felt his heart tripping fast in his chest as he set up the gun. He did what they’d practiced yesterday afternoon: tucking the butt tight against his shoulder, steadying it with his left hand, gently lifting the bolt, drawing it back, and locking it forward with an oiled click. The man leaned over and peered through Oscar’s scope, checking. Oscar could smell the oil in the man’s hair, and the pleasant scents of soap and tobacco. The man leaned back and nodded.

Oscar squeezed one eye shut. The view through the scope juddered with every heartbeat. In this half-light, the crosshairs were barely visible over the black eye of the set entrance. Oscar’s small index finger slipped over the cold metal of the trigger. Thoughts and instructions swirled in his head like bright embers above a bonfire, impossible to control.
Gun, recoil, rabbit, gun, I’m going to shoot a rabbit, steady, breathe in, hold my breath shoot a gun, rabbit—

“Remember,” the man whispered in his ear. “Don’t jerk.
Squeeze
.”

Then the man made a noise that sounded like a cartoon kiss, a squeaking through the lips that sounded like an enormous mouse. Silence. Another kiss-squeak.

It arrived. It moved silently into the circle of the scope, the glow in the eastern sky just enough to pick its bark-brown fur out from the dirt behind it. Its ears were tall and its dark eyes glittered as it turned its head this way and that, looking for another rabbit. The man kiss-squeaked again, and the curious hare took another half hop forward.

Oscar hesitated. The crosshairs willed themselves down over the animal’s body, dancing wildly.

“So?” came a whisper in his ear.

He squeezed. The gun suddenly coughed—
Ptap!
—and kicked back into his shoulder.

Oscar blinked in surprise, then made himself look through the scope. The rabbit was lying at the mouth of the set, motionless.

He felt his face break into a wide smile, and he turned to the man.

He was nodding, but not smiling.

“You’re a natural,” he said. “Fun, yes?”

Oscar wondered if he should lie, but he knew the man would see right through it.

“Yes,” he said.

“Another?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

He watched Daddy retrieve the body, return, then kiss the air again. Another curious animal crept from the burrow. Click-click—Oscar loaded.
Ptap!
The animal fell. This time he did not feel elation.

“Good shot,” Sandro said. He fetched that dead rabbit and laid its limp, blood-furred body next to Oscar. Its eyes were dull. “Another?”

“Can we go back now?” Oscar asked.

The man shook his head and pulled something from his pocket. It was a box of cartridges.

“Not till you’re sick of killing them.”

He made Oscar chamber round after round, kissing the freezing air again and again, and the little brown bodies fell down.

Click-clicketty.

Click-clicketty … Click-clicketty

Get up
.

But he was so cold.

 … Click-clicketty … Click-clicketty …

Get up. Got to get up
.

Shivering. Lying on the frozen earth, wondering why he could no longer see through the scope. He was so ashamed about crying.

 … Click-clicketty …

Up! Awake!

Through the red sea of his lids, shapes waved like seaweed, or drowned men’s arms.

Oscar forced his eyes to grind open.

A skull lay beside him, staring.

Oscar yelled. He flailed and tried to roll away, and struck his nose against the cold metal of the exhaust pipe and rolled back.

It was not a skull but a face. A face with no eyes. Behind each lid was a black, depthless well that fell into nothing. The dead boy’s empty eyes widened and he, too, skittered backward, away from the underside of the car and out of sight.

 … Click-clicketty. On the cold concrete, Oscar’s phone buzzed and skittered on tiny grains of dirt. He fumbled for it, grabbing with numb fingers. He saw blood on his nails. His head throbbed, and he was so damned cold.

“Hello?”

“Where are you?” Neve sounded annoyed.

“Uh,” he said. “Under the car.”

“Broken down?”

He suddenly remembered the sight of that huge, scaly, taloned foot stepping carefully on the concrete, and his skin crawled. He looked around, turning his head carefully so that he wouldn’t scrape his raw scalp on the ground. Daylight coming through the high windows showed the walls of the garage, the collection of oil tins and boxes, the twisted curls of the garbage bag that held the broken idol. But there was no sign of the creature.

“I’m okay,” he said, and slid toward the side of the car, wincing at the thick, pulsing ache in his head.

Neve continued, “Moechtar came looking for you. Something about a request for a DNA sample from the Roths.”

Oscar carefully poked his head out from the underside of the car.
Above him, the high hopper windows were all shut. The chains that secured them closed were tight, each linked securely over its hook. He blinked. “Did Moechtar sound receptive?” he asked.

“No. He wants to know what’s going on.”

Oscar rolled out from under the car. Everything hurt. As he moved, the scabbed wound on the back of his head opened up and he felt blood creep on his scalp. He stood, and the edges of his vision turned a fragile, sparkling white and a wave of nausea rose from his belly.
Concussion
. His shaking breaths plumed in the cold garage. No giant bird. No scent of dry, dead rot.