Cataract City (11 page)

“We probably need other things, like … steaks and eggs and potatoes. Vitamins are just one thing.”

“Popeye lives on one thing. Spinach.”

“No, Popeye eats spinach to get strong so he can save Olive Oyl. He probably eats lots of other stuff—just not on camera.”

“Oh.”

I unwrapped the Three Musketeers bar, broke it in half and held the pieces out to Dunk. “You pick.” The chocolate was stale with a whitened waxy film but still, it was the best thing I’d ever eaten. Once the rush wore off I realized how hungry I still was, and thirsty, and scared.

We lay down and stared at the sky. Dunk held the bird on his chest, wrapped in the rag. A red light flashed across the sky.

Dunk said: “Plane or satellite?”

“I don’t know. Which goes faster?”

“I’ve never been in a plane,” Dunk said. “Or a satellite.”

“We took a plane to Myrtle Beach on vacation,” I said. “And to Disney World.”

“I used to ride my bike to the Point, where the river bends out before the Falls, y’know? I watched the planes come in. Some you couldn’t see until they were just about on top of you. They came out of the clouds real low, a big
whooosh
and there they were. Sort of like sharks, you know? A shark coming at you in the water—you can’t
see it until it’s just about in front of you. The grey planes looked especially like sharks. Scary but kind of cool.”

The baby bird went up and down on his chest with each heavy inhalation. “Hey, Owe?”

“Yeah?”

“You think it’s true what Bruiser said?”

“About what?”

“Those dogs.”

“In the satellite?”

His face was still held by the sky, but I could tell this was pretty important to him. Could be he’d been sitting on it all day.

“Maybe, Dunk. I don’t know … but not for sure.”

“No?”

“How far is another planet from here? Real far from where we’re looking, but maybe not. And a satellite goes pretty fast. Maybe they just drifted through space and landed on another planet.”

“You think they could have?”

“Why not? A planet we don’t even know about. Maybe it’s sunny all the time there. Maybe the water’s red.”

“Red?”

“Or purple or gold. Anything but blue. Maybe the sun is blue. Maybe meatballs grow on trees.”

He laughed. “Meatball trees.”

“Or maybe it’s a lot like here, but a long time ago. Like back in caveman times. Or … or nobody and nothing. Just the two of them.”

“I guess they’d be scared.”

I bent my knees and wrapped my arms around them. “But they’d already travelled through space, right?” I said, resting my chin on my kneecaps. “They climbed out of that broken satellite and breathed that fresh air and I bet it was pretty great. Mahoney said they were mongrels, right? They never had someone to feed
them. They could hunt and kill and drink water from streams.”

“Gold water.”

“Yeah, gold.”

“What would they hunt?”

I turned to face Dunk, resting my cheek on my knees. “I guess the same things they would hunt here. Rabbits and rats. Squirrels.”

“You think they’d have rabbits on that planet?”

“Maybe. Or maybe there the rabbits are big as cars. Maybe bears are small. Maybe you could hold a shark in your palm there.”

“So they would run away from giant rabbits.”

“And hunt tiny bears. Or maybe there are animals we’ve never seen.”

“Things with tentacle faces. Things with lots of teeth.”

“Harmless things, too. Things that look like baby chicks, only ten feet tall.”

“A ten-foot-tall baby chick?”

“No, just a yellow fuzzy thing who happens to be ten feet tall.”

“Can it talk?”

“I guess, but not in a language dogs would understand.”

I tried to think about fuzzy ten-foot baby chicks, but I kept thinking about things with tentacle faces and lots of teeth.

“Owe?”

“Yeah?”

“You think things might hunt
them
?”

“… I guess so. But they travelled far and they were still alive. That has to count for something, right? So yeah, things hunt them. So what? Things hunted them here, too. The dog catcher, right? They just kept on going.”

“Kept going, mmm, yeah.”

“And maybe they found someplace safe. Or I don’t know, maybe the whole planet is run by dogs. They get to be, like, kings of Dog Planet.”

“Why would they be kings? They just showed up.”

“Well, whatever. Maybe one of them gives a very inspiring speech and they make him the president.”

“Of the whole planet?”

I shrugged:
why not?

“Hey, Owe?”

“Yeah?”

“Meatball trees would be awesome.”

“Totally. Eat them like apples.”

“Oh, man! Big greasy apples … We shouldn’t talk about food.”

I rolled onto my side. If I curled up and held my stomach, maybe it wouldn’t growl so much. Sounds came out of the darkness. Some like nails clawing into rotten wood. Others like the
click-click
of naked bones.

A slow, steady breathing wrapped around my shoulders then went out again, hugging the trees and sliding along the ground like the never-ending exhale of some huge creature with lungs the size of football stadiums. The heart of the woods beat through me: a soothing
thack
, a giant underground muscle pumping green blood through every root and into every tree, everything connected to everything else under the dirt.

I dozed and woke with Dunk settled next to me. He’d draped the blanket over us. His breath feathery on the back of my neck.

I fell into a deeper sleep and awoke with Dunk’s fingers clutching my chest.

“Something’s out there.”

The worry in his voice sent a spike of ice down my spine. The fire was dead. My feet were swollen and numb inside my sneakers, the blood pooled.

“Listen,” Dunk said urgently. “Can you hear it?”

The pressure of my held breath pressed against my eardrums, making it hard to hear anything. I forced myself to let it out in a shuddery hiss.

There were the usual clickings and rustlings that I’d almost gotten used to. But another sound, too. A soft noise atop those familiar ones, and beneath them at the same time.

“What is it?” I whispered.

Dunk blew on the coals, stirring the embers. An orange shine lit his face and gave me some confidence. He reached into the backpack. The light of a solitary star winked off the pistol’s silver barrel.

The sound approached then drifted away, switching places to come at us from a new angle.

It’s Bruiser Mahoney
.

The thought snagged in my mind, a sticky black ball covered in fish hooks. Bruiser Mahoney was out there, alive but not really. He’d stalked all day and night and finally caught up. Sniffing us like a bloodhound, lumbering on all fours with his spine cracked out and shining like a half-buried centipede through the dead grey skin of his back. His dentures shoved past his sun-blistered lips and his face swollen with blood, his eyeballs two rotted grapes staring out of the piggy folds of flesh to make him look like a giant prehistoric slug. His fingernails matted with shreds of the tent he’d clawed free of. He’d followed us without stopping, blundering at first but becoming more aware, strides lengthening as he pursued us through the undergrowth. And now he was here.

You ever see an old clown, boys? Clowns don’t die. But sometimes they come back … oh, yessss …

“It’s him,” I said. “It’s Bruiser.”

“It’s not. It’s something, but not that.”

Except it
was
Mahoney. His hair hung in tangled, mud-clotted ropes. His stomach ballooned up with gas and his joints twisted
with rigor mortis. Bones sticking out of his skin where he’d broken them on rocks, not noticing that he’d done so or not caring. The sounds suddenly made sense. The first was the rubber-band sound of Mahoney’s naked muscles: with the skin stripped off his arms and legs, his tendons had cured in the sun and now they creaked when he flexed them. The sucking sound was Mahoney’s rotted lungs.

God rot me, boys …

His lungs were filling and emptying—not because he needed to breathe, but because his body was still mindlessly doing what it had always done.

God’ll rot you, too, soon enough …

Would he eat us? Or just tear us apart? His rage seemed so unfair. We couldn’t have taken him with us—he weighed a million pounds.

The sticks caught. Firelight pushed back the darkness. Dunk stood, baby bird in one hand, gun in the other. Did he even know how to shoot? You could only learn so much from watching
The Equalizer
and
Magnum, P.I
.

Firelight bled to the edge of the clearing, flickering against the thickets. My heart was pounding so hard, my body so keyed up, that I saw everything in hyper-intense detail. Every dew-tipped blade of grass. The knife-edge serration of every leaf. My eyes hunted for the gleam of Bruiser Mahoney’s black eyes, my nose probing the breeze for his decaying stench. A gun would do nothing against him. It might chip off a little hide but you couldn’t kill something that was already dead.

“Over there,” Dunk said.

It skulked out of the bushes, sleek body pressed to the ground. Its fur shone like pewter. Its skull was a sloped wedge like a doorstop, eyes midnight-black, the yellow tips of its canine teeth showing.

“Just a coyote,” said Dunk. “A stupid coydog.”

I’d never seen one up close. It was about the size of a springer spaniel. But there was nothing doglike about it, at least not like the floppy-eared, slobbering, ball-chasing dogs in our neighbourhood. This creature was built for wild living, a coiled tension in its every movement. It didn’t run circles around the kitchen yelping for kibble: what it caught, it ate, and if it didn’t catch anything it starved. A ball of muscle was packed behind its jaw, built by cracking bones to lap up the marrow. It made no sound at all: its next meal could be anywhere, so it had learned to creep silently.

“Go on,” Dunk said sharply.

It melted into the darkness.

I woke with razor blades slashing my guts.

Air hissed between my teeth in a tea-kettle shriek. The slashing gave way to a steady pulse and grind: a clock’s worth of rusted gears meshing in my stomach.

I crawled to the bushes. Dots burst before my eyes in crazy gnat-swarms. My gut kicked and I puked so hard that everything went black. My nostrils filled with bile, thick strings of drool swaying from my lips. I’d hardly thrown up anything, just a sad yellow mess in the clover. It was awful, feeling sick and starving at the same time.

I sat cross-legged, knees hugged to my chest, listening to terrible wet retching sounds from the trees. Dunk walked out wiping his lips. The skin around his eyes was butter-yellow and his hands were shaking.

“Must have been something I ate,” he said, and managed to laugh.

The sun tilted over the scrub and tinder-wood, glinting off shards of granite in the rocks but not giving any heat. I was so thirsty. I wiped sticky white paste off my lips and smeared it on my jeans. I ducked behind some bushes and unzipped my fly. The colour of
my urine shocked me: dark yellow, like I was pissing tea. I didn’t know if I was sick or if it was the extra vitamins my body was getting rid of, the ones it couldn’t use.

Dunk breathed heavily, bending over and bracing his palms on his knees.

“We should get going, Owe.”

“I’m so thirsty.”

“Me, too. Maybe there’s a stream soon, like the one we crossed yesterday.”

I thought about that stream with its Chia Pet rocks and muddy bottom. I wouldn’t have drunk from it then, but if that same stream were running in front of me now I’d guzzle it dry.

We packed everything up, though there wasn’t much left. The baby bird lay on its side in the rag, peeping softly.

“Must be hungry,” Dunk said. He picked it up.

“What does a baby bird eat?”

“No idea. Let’s go.”

He walked ahead, hopping over rocks and stomping through low bushes. I had to pump my legs to keep up. Even if Dunk was sick—and he was, at least as sick as me—it wouldn’t slow him down. He had that same machinelike intensity I’d seen the day we’d met in the schoolyard. He’d keep pushing until his body broke to pieces. It didn’t matter if his opponent was another kid or Mother Nature herself.

The sound of rushing water was so sly at first—an almost imperceptible gurgle that knit with the rustle of the leaves. Dunk pushed an armload of whiplike willow branches aside and there it was.

The stream was much narrower than the one we’d crossed the day before. It was clear with an undernote of heavy blue, which might have been the darkened reflection of the sky on its surface. It
bent like a gooseneck around an outcrop of ragged-edged rocks and continued on through some willows.

It looked like heaven.

We stood by the bank, dumbfounded. Dunk turned and gave me a sideways smile.

“It’s probably okay to drink,” I said.

“Aren’t we supposed to boil it?”

“That’s only water that’s not flowing, like a pond or a lake.”

It was as if, since there were no adults around, we had to try to act like grown-ups and make the grown-up choice. Which was stupid because we were kids and we’d make a kid’s choice: we would drink the water no matter what.

We dipped our Coke cans, our hands trembling with anticipation. It was all I could do not to plunge my head in the stream. I tilted the can to my lips and tasted the water behind my molars: clean and sweet with the residue of Coke at the bottom of the can.

Had water ever tasted this good? Had
anything
? It hit my stomach like iced lead. I threw some up, took two deep breaths and forced myself to keep drinking. The buzz inside my head subsided.

We drank until our bellies were swollen and let go of giant, watery belches. Dunk wet his fingertips and let a few droplets fall into the baby bird’s mouth.

We hopped over the stream, water sloshing in our guts. I was still starving but I felt a thousand times better. I spotted a heron downstream, balanced on one leg like a ballerina. White tail feathers and a monstrous air sac pulsating from its blue breast. Seeing me, it made a hoarse stuttering cry full of pips and croaks like rust in a pivot. It muscled itself into the air, arrowing into the lightening blue, and a part of my heart went with it, wanting to see what it saw, to know if we were near a house or a road or
if—as I feared—there was nothing but marsh and scrub and hungering bugs.