“A little higher,” he says. “Yes, right there.”
He escaped with his storks from the Graveyard before the Juvies could capture them. He survived a plane crash. And now Starkey is a war hero. Never mind that no official war has been declared—he has declared it, and that’s all that matters. If others out there choose to behave like this isn’t a war, then they deserve what’s coming to them.
“I’m not feeling it,” he says. “A little harder.”
Starkey is the savior of storks. He and his brigade of unwanted babies who grew into unwanted kids have now grown into an army bursting with righteous rage against a system that would permanently silence them. Society would have them dismantled, their parts going to “serve humanity.” Well, now humanity is getting a slightly different sort of service from them.
“You’re not very good at this, are you?”
“I’m trying! I’m doing everything you say!”
Starkey lies facedown on a massage table in a room that used to be the executive office of a power plant. The plant was gutted years ago, leaving nothing but a rusty shell within a chain-link fence, miles away from anyplace anyone wants to be. It’s a weedy corner of northern Mississippi, as overgrown and unloved as a place can be. The perfect hiding spot for an army of six hundred.
Starkey pushes himself up on one elbow. His masseuse, a pretty girl whose name he can’t remember, looks away, too intimidated to meet his eye. “A good back massage should hurt as much as it soothes,” Starkey tells her. “You have to work out the knots. You need to leave me loose and limber and ready for our next mission. Do you understand?”
The girl nods, overly obedient and too eager to please. “I think so.”
“You said you’ve done this before.”
“I know,” she tells him. “I just wanted the chance . . .”
Starkey sighs. This is the way of things around him now. They climb over each other like rats to be close to him. To bask in his light. He can’t blame them, really. He should applaud this girl for her ambition—but right now all he wants is a good massage.
“You can go,” he tells her.
“I’m sorry . . .”
She lingers, and he contemplates the moment. Starkey knows he could take a detour with this afternoon and maybe get something other than a massage from this eager girl. Whatever he wants, he knows she will oblige . . . but the fact that he can have it so easily makes it so much less desirable.
“Just go,” he tells her.
She slinks away, trying to do so quietly, but the rusty hinges on the door complain when she opens it. Rather than making the door squeal again, she leaves it open. Starkey can hear her clambering down the metal stairs, probably in tears at her failure to please him.
Alone now, he rolls his left shoulder and checks the bandage there. He took a bullet in the last harvest camp liberation. Well, not really. The bullet grazed him so slightly, it couldn’t even be called a flesh wound. Yes, it drew blood, and yes, it will leave a scar, but as wounds go, on a scale of one to ten, this one is somewhere around one-point-five. Still the bandage makes it look worse, and so he wears a tank top that clearly displays the bandage on his upper arm for all the storks to see. Another war wound to go with the one farther down that same arm. His ruined hand, the hand he smashed to free himself from handcuffs back at the airplane graveyard. Smashing his hand saved him. It freed him to escape with the storks and start his war. Considering that he was once on the fast track to be unwound, giving up one hand seems like a bargain. Now he keeps it in a very expensive Louis Vuitton glove. That day at the Graveyard was early July, and now it’s September. Less than three months have passed. Although it feels like a lifetime ago, his body measures the time properly, even if his mind doesn’t. His broken hand still aches, still oozes, still requires a nice dose of painkillers every once in a while. It will never heal properly. He will never use that hand again, but it matters little. He has hundreds of other hands to do the work for him.
He looks out of the cracked, grimy windows that overlook the gutted power plant floor, now lined with bedrolls, folding tables, and the various necessities of the Stork Brigade’s nomadic life.
“Keeping watch over your subjects?”
He turns to see Bam, his second-in-command, coming into the room, carrying a few newspapers.
“Some of the tabloids are now suggesting that you’re Satan’s spawn,” she says. “A woman in Peoria claims she saw a jackal give birth to you.”
Starkey laughs. “I’ve never even been to Peoria.”
“That’s okay,” she says. “I don’t think there are any jackals in Peoria either.”
She drops the newspapers on the massage table. Starkey is pleased to find that he’s on the first page of each one. He’s seen his face on the newsfeeds and the public nimbus, but there’s something very visceral about seeing his face in hard print.
“I must be doing something right, if the crazies think I’m as powerful as the Antichrist.”
He leafs through the newspapers. The legitimate papers have more legitimate takes on him, but none of them are silent on the subject of Mason Michael Starkey. Experts try to psychoanalyze his motives. The Juvenile Authority goes rabid at the mention of his name, and in schools across the country, riots are breaking out, stork against nonstork. Everywhere, other kids like himself are demanding equal treatment in a world that would rather they just go away.
People call him a monster for lynching “innocent workers” at harvest camps. They call him a murderer for brutally executing doctors who perform unwindings. Let them call him whatever they want. Each label just adds to his growing legend.
“There’s a new supply of ammo coming in today,” he tells Bam. “Maybe some new guns, too.” Then he watches her closely to see her response. Not what she says, but what she feels. Her body language. He can tell that she’s bristling.
“If the clappers are going to supply weapons, maybe they could teach these kids how to use them so they don’t accidentally blow their own brains out.”
That actually makes Starkey laugh. “They send kids out to blow themselves up for their cause,” Starkey reminds her. “Do you really think they care if a few storks shoot themselves?”
“Maybe not,” Bam says. “But you should care. They’re your beloved storks.”
This gives Starkey pause for thought, but he tries not to show it. “Our storks,” he corrects.
“If you care about them as much as you say you do, you would take measures to protect them from themselves . . . and each other.”
But Starkey knows what she’s really thinking. If you care about them, then you’ll stop attacking harvest camps.
“How many storks died in the last attack?” he asks.
Bam shrugs. “How should I know?”
“Because you do,” Starkey says. A simple statement of fact. He knows she keeps track of such things to use against him, or maybe just to torture herself.
Bam holds eye contact, but her feigned ignorance fails her. “Seven,” she says.
“And how many storks did we add to our numbers?” Starkey asks.
Bam clearly doesn’t want to say, but he waits until she spits it out. “Ninety-three.”
“Ninety-three storks . . . and two hundred seventy-five nonstorks freed from harvest camp hell. I think that’s worth the seven lives we lost, don’t you?”
She won’t answer him.
“Don’t you?” he demands.
Finally she casts her eyes out of the window, looking down on the hundreds of kids on the power plant floor. “Yes,” she concedes.
“Then why are we having this argument?”
“We’re not arguing,” Bam says as she turns to go. “No one argues with you, Mason. There’d be no point.”