Okay, sweetie, her mother’s voice said like Mercy was six and it was time to wash up for dinner, time to come back from the dark side.
She wasn’t really contemplating suicide. Just curious, that’s all.
She could no longer hear Caleb, so he was either well up the mountain or perhaps his vocal cords had finally given out.
Or he’s doubled back and once you turn around, there he’ll be, grinning and calling you a bitch.
Victor was probably with him, too. That way they could take turns with her until she was too exhausted to fight back and then they’d double-team her before beating her to death and throwing her over the side.
She had heard something behind her but it couldn’t be him. That was too cruel, too nightmarish, too damn unfair. She turned slowly.
The surrounding trees stood still and dark like giant bodyguards. The crows continued grazing. They went about their scavenging in peace, slowly moving to grant each bird equal access to every spot of grass. A bird or two flapped into the air for a moment before settling back again, but there was no tension in them like birds usually had when anything got close to them. Birds were small and vulnerable. They took few risks. They had wings, after all. Better to fly away. Only pigeons crowded around people. They had learned in the big cities that people were slobs who dropped food everywhere like deer droppings. Those birds never got tense, just crazed for food.
If only I had wings, Mercy thought.
She had thought the same thing when she sat in the hospital room where her mother spent her last few days. Her mother’s chest strained to suck in enough air to keep living, sounding like a high-pitched whistle. Her head lolled back and forth on the bright white pillow and her eyes rolled in their sockets. She was loaded with morphine. The doctor said she was in another world at this point, a constant dream state. But sometimes when Mercy would look up from a book, her mother would be staring at her, eyes wide. Those eyes tried to convey what her voice no longer could. Her final noises were phlegmy chokes and that whistling sound like a little kid with a gap between his front teeth might make.
Mercy wanted to run from her room, hide somewhere, and sleep for days, years. She wanted to sprout wings and leap from the large hospital window, fly far from this hospital and her dying mother, fly to the other side of the world if she could.
But she didn’t have wings. All she could do was toughen up.
Be the toughest bitch you can be.
Tough bitches were strong and rational. They didn’t ponder death or daydream about flying fantasies that would never come true. They accepted the conditions of their situation and did whatever was necessary to survive.
The doctors had wanted to sedate her mother even further, essentially send her into a coma. They insisted it would be less painful for her. Once the muscles relaxed, her breathing would slow and stop and she’d be at peace. Dad had almost agreed but Mercy stopped him. “She wouldn’t want you to,” Mercy had said. “She’d want to tough it out.”
She had toughed it out like a true bitch until that last gasp that stiffened her whole body as if Death had seized her and then she collapsed into the bed, finally at peace.
Whatever was necessary to survive.
Right to the bitter end.
She took a deep breath and didn’t wince at the pain in her nose from the cold air or the misery running rampant throughout the rest of her body. She could be tough. Had to be. She had only to figure a way out of here, down off this fucking mountain.
The evergreen rustled as if an animal were crawling up the trunk. Maybe that’s all it was. But she knew better. Even before Victor Dolor stepped out of the tree as if emerging from another dimension, Mercy Higgins knew she had waited too long to get tough.
Now, it was either do or die.
FORTY-SEVEN
She was a blacked-out figure set against an impossibly bright moon that was far too big, as if this mountain’s peaks grazed the edges of the upper atmosphere. The moon’s light bathed over his own face and that was good. She could see the smile on his face and read the predatory determination in his eyes. He didn’t need to see hers to know she was scared out of her mind, even contemplating a leap from the cliff.
That would be a shame, but he’d get over it. Once Caleb made his way back down, Victor might throw him off the edge, too. Then he could put all this shit behind him and refocus his attention on the approaching Dark Days.
Then he saw the crows.
They completely covered the ground between him and Mercy. Normally loud and very social creatures, these crows were almost silent and pecked at the ground while moving with complete awareness of all the other crows. If not for the strong moonlight reflecting off their backs, the crows would bled into the ground and make it appear to ripple as if alive.
“Stay away from me,” Mercy said. Her voice shook as if she were cold.
“I certainly hope you don’t plan on jumping,” Victor said. “It’s a long way down, but the fall might not kill you.”
She sobbed once and then spoke with more fierceness than she really had. “If you don’t stay away, it won’t be me falling off this cliff.”
Victor laughed. He trailed the beam of his flashlight over the black bodies of the crows. “People all over the world are afraid of crows,” he said. “Farmers blame them for destroying crops. Cultures in all corners of the world associate crows with death. A gathering of crows is even called a murder. It’s because crows were commonly found on battlefields, picking at the flesh of the newly dead. That started their reputation as evil messengers.”
Victor pushed his foot through the birds to take a very short step toward her. While he spoke, he continued this almost imperceptible advance. “You could fall and not die, but it wouldn’t be long before these crows found you and began to feast. They’d probably start with your eyes. Can you imagine what that will feel like, having your eyes pecked right out of your head? It wouldn’t kill you. You could still be alive for quite a while before they finally torn you open enough for the blood to really flow.”
“Stay where you are!” Her scream was pathetic, the panicked growl of the beast at bay.
“I like crows,” Victor said. “They are misunderstood creatures. They are survivors. They travel in broods of thousands and communicate with several hundred different calls. They defend each other, including crows unrelated to their brood. They mate for life. There are, actually, the best example to Man for how he should live. And once the Transition begins, crows will forever endure as a symbol of why humanity fell.”
“What transition?” Mercy asked.
She was stalling, of course, but Victor didn’t care. There was nowhere for her to run. He stopped about halfway to her.
“Crows are not evil messengers from Hell, they are extremely intelligent creatures that can intuit future events. Crows didn’t simply find battlegrounds where the dead had fallen; they swarmed the places where a battle would soon transpire and waited for the bloodshed to begin. These crows are not simply feeding here, they knew something was going to happen at this spot. They are waiting for the real feast.”
Mercy stilted her body into something resembling a fighting stance. She held a broken flashlight. Victor continued his approach.
“There are a hundred crows crowded on this mountain ledge, perhaps more. But crows rarely travel in such a small number. The others are around somewhere, waiting for whatever big event is about to transpire. But we know what that is, don’t we?”