The Academy: Book 1 (5 page)

             
But, there was nothing to grab onto. He fell and fell and fell and his screaming was halted with the impact and the snap of a bones.

             
Snow puffed up around his broken body and then resettled around him. Wings were flapping somewhere, but Asa didn’t notice. Asa lay in the snow, looking up at The Tower above him. He was thankful to be alive. He tried to take a breath, but it wouldn’t come.

             
The snow was falling even harder. Whatever path he had made on his first trip out was now covered. At first, he had been thankful for this because it meant that his mother wouldn’t be able to prove that he had gone out into the forest without permission. Now, with horror, he realized that it also meant that his mother wouldn’t be able to find him.

             
He panicked, and again tried to breathe.

             
Nothing.

             
He sat there, opening and closing his mouth until finally, his lungs were able to fill halfway with cold, beautiful air. His diaphragm had taken a hard impact, and it took it a second to wake up and help Asa breathe again, if only shallowly.

             
He began to cry, and he looked back and saw that the path he had walked in his rain boots was filled in; the snow had erased it, as if he had never been there. As the adrenaline wore off, he felt an excruciating shock run throughout body. He hurt everywhere, but his ribs and leg hurt the most. Some warm liquid was running along his chest inside his jacket.

             
He tried to scream for his mother, but only a whisper came out. He found that he couldn’t fill his lungs with air, but could only breathe shallowly.

             
The snow kept falling, trying to bury him.

             
He tried to move his legs and found his left one miserably broken. He bit down on his lip and writhed in the pain. The thing on his ribs wouldn’t allow him to sit up.

             
The snow was still falling, dancing as it came down to bury the injured.

             
Asa looked around the barren trees above, desperately, trying to think of something. He dug his hands into the snow, dimly aware that his right mitten had come off sometime during his fall, and tried to pull himself up into a sitting position.

             
The pain felt like getting stabbed and the warm liquid inside of his jacket began to run faster. His body wasn’t working right. He moaned and cried and felt that his left leg was already being buried in the snow.

             
“Mama,” he whispered. His face was pale and his lips were numb. “Mama, please come help me, Mama.”

             
But, despite his efforts to scream, she could not hear him.

             
The pain was becoming too much for him. He gritted his teeth and looked at the branches above. They seemed to sway above him, and the whole world felt like it was turning upside down. Asa thought that he was dying and then he passed out. There were no tracks to find him and he was a mile away from anyone else.

             
He continued to bleed in the snow like that for a quarter-hour before his mother found him.

             
“Asa! Asa! My god, Asa! What has happened?”

             
Asa’s eyes slowly opened and he saw his mother standing above him. She was wearing only a long sleeve shirt and pants. She had no jacket, and above her nose and on her ears and cheeks she was bleeding out of thin gashes. “Mama!” Asa tried to say, but nothing came out.

             
Then, he passed out again. When he awoke, he was in the emergency department and a doctor was shining a light into his eyes. He had two broken ribs and his left leg was broken in three places.

             
His mother told the hospital that she had been there with him when he fell, that she had seen it. When they got home and were away from scrutinizing ears, she told him the real story.

             
She had been sleeping in her room when an incessant tapping at her window woke her. She sat up and saw that it was two-thirty, thirty minutes passed when Asa was supposed to wake her. She called throughout the house for Asa and when he didn’t answer, she went outside to find him. The crow grabbed at her right when she opened the door, it flew at her face and shirt, and tugged at her with its beak until she was following it. It urged her towards the fence. The snow was coming down in sheets. For reasons that Asa didn’t know, she knew that the crows were good, and that they could be trusted. She let the crow pick at her face, and guide her with hectic cawing to her son, whom she found almost buried beneath The Tower.

             
She didn’t ground him, because, as she said, the broken bones were enough. That day he learned to listen to his mother’s warnings, and that the crows, even if they were demons, were there to help him.

             
Asa stirred more as he slept. Crows began to gather around his home, their sharp talons clacking on the roof over his bedroom. Half a mile away, Harold Kensing was now back in his vehicle. A sticky note on the passenger seat had Asa Palmer’s address written on it. The ink looked like blood.

             
One of Asa’s most recent encounters with the crows had been right after he saw the electron-microscope image of the Wolf Flu virus on Time magazine.

             
He was in his room, getting dressed before school and a crow landed right outside his window and the phone rang at the same time. His mother got the phone in the other room, and Asa continued to dress while the black bird watched him from the other side of the glass. Asa put on his clothes, fixed his hair, and would catch glimpses of the bird staring at him from right outside his window.

             
When he went into the kitchen for breakfast, his mother was still on the phone. She was smiling, and curling the phone cord around her index finger as she listened to the male voice coming through earpiece. Asa sat down at the table behind the plate his mother had fixed for him—eggs, ham, cinnamon toast, and a large glass of milk (he hadn’t had a big breakfast like that since she had passed). He cut his ham up and dipped it in the egg yoke while he watched his mom.

             
She looked over at him, her blue eyes that she had given to him sparkling. “Oh, that would be so great. Asa has grown so much!”

             
There was talking from the other end and Asa took a drink of his milk.

             
“Yeah, I do. I miss him.”

             
Asa took another bite.

             
“Okay. Uh-huh. Bye-bye, Conway.”

             
She hung up the phone and Asa spoke with his mouth full:

             
“Who was that?”

             
“An old friend of your fathers.”

             
He wanted to ask more questions, but she called her work immediately after and told her that she was taking a personal day. She started chatting with the secretary, and before she hung up the clock on the wall said 7:15 and Asa knew that if he didn’t get moving that he would miss the school bus. He kissed his mother, gathered up his backpack and walked outside.

             
Dozens of crows were scattered around the neighborhood. Some sat on rain gutters, or telephone wires, and all of them were watching Asa. He walked to the bus stop and tried to pretend that they weren’t there for him.

             
When the bus doors opened ahead of him, Asa stepped on. He walked down the aisle and noticed that Amanda Pearson, the girl who had started the rumor that Asa was possessed by the devil, was holding her Bible to her chest and watching as Asa walked by. He sat a few rows backed from her, and watched as she pointed out the window to the crows and whispered to the girl next to her. They giggled and stole a glance back at Asa.

             
Asa rested his backpack atop his legs and buried his head in the rough fabric.
Crows are normal, they can’t prove anything
, he thought.

             
When the school bus pulled into the middle-school entrance, it had gotten worse. Hundreds of birds were on the roof, perched on tree branches and telephone wires. It wouldn’t have been that bad if crows had just followed Asa, but when he moved, their heads turned in synchrony. Hundreds and hundreds of tiny necks all rotated, pointing the birds’ beady eyes in the exact direction that Asa was walking.

             
In each class that Asa had, the teacher had to go and close the blinds. Otherwise, he or she would not have gotten anything done that day; the amount of birds was becoming absurd, and the students were noticing. Amanda’s rumor was well known throughout school; she had been spreading it since they were in kindergarten. Many of the children didn’t believe that there was something supernatural going on between Asa and the crows, but that day, even some of the teachers thought twice about it. In Asa’s math class before lunch, their teacher gawked at the birds staring through the window before shutting the blinds; she had never seen so many birds in one place before. She knew the rumor that was going around amongst the students—that Asa was possessed by the devil and that the crows were his followers—and she was deeply religious. After twisting the blinds closed, she looked white as a sheet, stumbled through half the lesson, and then told the class that she was feeling ill and that there would be no homework. She sat for the rest of the class period muttering prayers at her desk with her eyes closed. She refused to look at Asa for the rest of the year.

             
By lunchtime, there were tens of thousands of birds outside the school, and the number was growing. They were flying in from all directions. They cawed, and walked on the roof with their talons, and pecked on the windows. No one sat with Asa in the lunchroom that day; his friends seemed to have disappeared and everyone else had no problem openly talking about Asa and staring at him. He looked down at the lunch that his mother had made him. On his napkin, she had written
I love you
in black ink. He would have been embarrassed had one of his friends found the note, but secretly, he loved finding them; she would sporadically write them throughout the year as a surprise. He suddenly missed his mother. He kept his head down and ate his lunch, pretending that no one was staring at him. He wondered whom his mother had been talking to that morning.

             
Halfway through lunch, the assistant principal, Mr. Mear, came and asked Asa to come to his office. The math teacher that had prayed through most of the class was sitting on a bench right outside Mr. Mear’s office; when Asa passed, she buried her eyes in her hands. Her fingers were covered in silver rings with fish symbols and crosses, and she wore bracelets with Bible verses stamped into them.

             
Asa entered and the Assistant Principal shut the door behind them. He was a balding, plump man, and he was sweating profusely. His leather chair squeaked as he sat down and he reached back behind him to shut the blinds; the crows had flocked to the West side of the building to get a better view of Asa.

             
“Are you feeling okay, Asa?” the man asked. “Because if you aren’t, you could go home.”

             
“I’m feeling okay,” Asa said.

             
Mr. Mear jumped at the sound of pecking on the window behind him. “Because,” Mr. Mear went on, “we could call your mother right now, and she could come get you. I’ll tell your teachers not to even give you makeup work.”

             
“Mr. Mear, I’m feeling fine, I…”

             
Mr. Mear began to groan and shake his head. The cawing went on outside, and the birds continued to peck at the window. “Just say that you’re sick, boy! How am I supposed to run a school with all these birds outside? I don’t know what you did, but I’m letting you off easy. No punishment, just say that you’re sick. Call your mom.”

             
“I didn’t make these birds come,” Asa said. “What does that even mean? How could I do that?”

             
Mr. Mears pushed the phone in front of Asa. Asa called his mother.

             
On the drive home, his mother was ecstatic. She was telling Asa that there was a doctor at the house who was going to give Asa a much-needed vaccine.

             
“A vaccine for what?”

             
“The Wolf Flu.”

             
“Oh, mother! You don’t really believe that science fiction garbage, do you?”

             
“I think that it’s just a good safety precaution,” she said. She began to hum and they kept on driving.

             
They drove in silence as the birds swarmed around them. It was impossible to count, but Asa guessed that there were millions of them now. When they flew in groups, they made huge shadows on the ground. The roofs that they passed were black with birds, and they followed the car like a storm cloud. Asa saw that some of them took short cuts, and flew over neighborhoods so that they would reach Asa’s house before the car did.