Young Writers Society

Sometime around evening, the sky was chalked-up white and there were two Crows on their stomachs in the woods. They lay flat at the top of a slope, the moisture of the earth and leaves seeping quietly through their skin. Occasionally, one would drop an offhanded remark for the other to snatch before it tumbled down into a shallow ditch. This, usually, was the Crow with the fire. Now and then, she shifted the weight of her torso from one elbow to the other just before soreness could translate to prickling numbness. The Crow beside her was motionless as a fallen tree, and she marveled at his deliberate stillness, the wind rearranging his leaves of hair, over and over again, as many times as it passed them by.

The Crow with the fire had a father who used to tell her the wind was in pieces. His face was a smudge of existence in her mind and his voice was the fog. She remembered it so well it seemed to obscure everything else, a gentle authoritativeness, almost like a hand.

“Imagine it as a human,” he would offer, shrinking the topic of discussion down to proportion. “We see through our eyes, but the wind can transfer the faculty and see with any part of him at any scope he likes. One moment he could be watching you through his ear and the next his vision would be in a patch of skin.”

As though to assert for himself, the topic of the past discussion passed a hand over the collection of trees. The ceiling above their heads bristled in a whispered roar and all around them bits of fallen greenery lifted and swirled into their faces. Swatting at the debris leftover from the previous fall, the Crow with the fire raised her head, searching the other side of the road.

The Crow beside her noticed her change in position and turned his eyes in the same direction. “He’s alright,” he assured her seconds later, pointing. “Over there.”

“Dagger?”

“Who else can I mean?”

A quick grin blinked onto her face before she followed Tee’s example, squinting into the swaying brush of a cedar. The tree was of medium height, surrounded by a rumpled ring of others at the edge of the road. She bit her lip when she saw the boy’s boot, protruding from the swinging disarray of soft noise.

Her father’s words revolved in her head, pulsing. “But the wind still has an intact body, just not an intact presence.”

Dagger was still in the cedar, which meant their formation hadn’t been broken yet and they were all for the go. His face wore a placid mouth and naturally large eyes, fixed on the left point where the road vanished around a bend. There was a lightweight rifle laid across his lap, almost casually.

Tee gestured towards the boy with his chin. “That’s about as unconventional as unconventional gets,” he muttered to her. “He’s twenty feet in the air.” She couldn’t help smiling at the thought, even though there was a tinge of uncertainty that made her doubt Tee had meant the comment to be a joke.

The word ‘Crow’, really, was an acronym: Conventional Raiders Of War. There were currently nine of them and they had all unanimously agreed that the word ‘Crow’ did a good enough job of justifying itself to suffice.

Carrion-pickers.

Scavengers.

In a way, the Crows were like the wind.

When the Crow with the fire had first come across them, a wall of winter was making itself known through the shedding layer of fall plaster and they had been wandering towards the east border, accumulating eyes and beaks and wings that collectively created a feathered something as a whole.

She had been walking to nowhere behind them. From an observer’s perspective, the Crows didn’t appear as an organised group of people but rather a somewhat mechanical ensemble of pieces stumbled upon and gathered up at random and, in most cases, by chance. Up until then, the man they all called Axehead had been the only invitation. Being unofficially pronounced a good scrounger, he was generally self-sufficient and preferred to work alone, which made the invitation necessary.

“Would you like to stay?”

It was that simple.

Previously, Arrow had asked her where she was from and she had been vague, saying she was from the road, which was not true but not uncommon either and therefore was accepted without much afterthought. Following that was the question of where she was headed. There was no answer to that, so she had simply shrugged the words off like rainwater. That’s when Arrow posed the question, and she had agreed.

Unlike most others, she had never stolen away for a brief time or developed her own yearly pattern of changing ensembles and changing people.

Axehead spent the winters in the alleys instead of with the others, being the scrounger that he was, and Flick had a habit of removing himself from the Crows every fall in time for harvest if their location was conveniently near his uncle's farm. Arrow tried to arrange the route so they would be in the right place at the right time. They never camped too far from Axehead's alleys in the snow and they covered the same few roads the two autumns of four Flick had been absent, collecting them in spring and winter respectively.

Then there were the others who managed their departure schedules with somewhat apprehensive inconsistency.

Java, who’d never been accustomed to staying in one place for more than a month, had slipped away many a time at night with his kid brother in tow. On most occasions, their excursions were solely made for the purpose of obtaining food, and if that was the case, they would be back by morning. There were, however, a few longer disappearances, but Java held his whims accountable and he always returned with Dagger. Gradually, it became an accepted fact that he never planned on leaving for good.

Tee, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly as flighty as Java and had a tendency to get lost . The time intervals between his vanishings were normally three to four months, but, as if to compensate for that, he stayed away for weeks at a time whenever he departed. When asked why, he would name off a relative and a companion town some distance back and then share whatever news he’d picked up along the way.

That was the only reason Arrow ever wandered off into any town alone. Of course, news of the Fables and the Check was valuable, but higher up on the list was any credible reports on the progression of the artillerymen. He was never gone for more than a few hours, and the Crows never packed camp until he returned. On safe days, Harpoon would accompany him. Arrow had started off with him and Tee in the beginning, after ducking the draft, so Harpoon’s lisp and absentmindedness didn’t seem to bother him.

Like the Crow with the fire, Harpoon belonged to the road. If you had nowhere else to go, anywhere at all seems like somewhere and you stuck to the people travelling with you.

This was not the case for Scythe, who had somewhere to return to if he ever felt like it. But, simply put, he never did feel like it. He only ever went away sometimes with Java and Dagger on their shorter trips to farmers' fields. To someone like Harpoon, this seemed like ingratitude. He rarely ever spoke to Scythe but had mentioned this to the last newcomer, who assumed Harpoon was telling her merely because of their similar situation.

By then she had changed her name to suit theirs. Everyday was a small relief that there was the shuffling of feet and voices all around her, and she never left, even though she knew Arrow and the others would wait for her, or else move at as slow a pace as possible until she caught up.

The wind ruffled the paper of her thoughts.

A whisper nudged her stiff arm.

“Cutlass.”

Some inexplicable intuition told her that they had finished waiting. She looked towards the right, where the elbow of the road formed a bend, but her vision was cut off by a tree. An array of doubts inside her head erupted into jostling disorder, causing her to shift her weight from her left elbow to the right without her noticing. Her left hand reached into the rucksack, a gaping cloth mouth between her and Tee. Her hand closed around the safety of a glass jar and she glanced up.

Across the road, Dagger’s eyes betrayed a small, frantic fracture of fear. She watched him push the rifle bolt forward, his booted feet dangling, realising how small he was, up there with the wind. His attention darted towards her and Tee before returning to the approaching noise.

How many? Tee signed to Dagger.

The boy flashed three fingers once, as though stabbing the air.

“That's it.” The words were directed to Cutlass but the speaker was facing the road below. “Those are our trucks.” With what supplies they'd been able to scrape together and their proximity to the Check, their focus would've regularly been punctuated by the explosions from the guns if the artillerymen hadn't been reserving the shells until a transport arrived with more. All there seemed to be were a few faded rifle shots, sounding like casually dropped pebbles, here and there.

The convoy was a small scrap of conversation Arrow had picked up in the Check. Like the Crows, the name was strictly nomadic and travelled with the Fables. The Check was always the next town in line to be taken, and most of the region's government soldiers were concentrated there in defence.

That was the rule, and it seemed to outweigh futility. Defend the Check.

The convoy was bound in that direction, carrying supplies for the Fables and for the artillerymen. Fortunately for the Crows, much of the material being transported was flammable, and Axehead had customarily come up with some turpentine oil and three thin-necked bottles of alcohol. Because the glass containers couldn’t be filled to capacity, they’d emptied half the bottles’ contents into jam jars, poured in the turpentine, and cut an old tablecloth into squares to use as stoppers and fuses for later.

There was no later now.

Momentarily, as her hand scrambled in the smaller front pockets of the rucksack for the lighter, Cutlass’ mind returned to her father. “If a human sees too much,”his voice had continued, “he doesn’t see anything at all.” And then, “It’s good to choose what you see.”

It almost sounded as though he envied the wind.

Today, it was the carrier of scattering pebbles, sprinkling the sound into their ears.

Tee was half on his side, his fingers fumbling to load his rifle. Still, with the cover of the woods, Cutlass felt exposed. She could only hear the wheels scrunching on the gravel, a blurred, ghostly rumble. The dust-brown canopies flitted in and out of sight between the tree trunks. They were on elevated ground, but it was not much of an advantage, not nearly as much as Cutlass had first hoped.

“Watch Dagger,” Tee advised. “He’ll motion for you to throw. Aim for the centre of the road.” Hastily, Cutlass unscrewed the lid of the jam jar and pulled a square of fabric from her pocket, cramming it into the mouth of the jar and tipping it over so the strong liquid rushed up to meet the cloth, soaking it partially. It was as colourless as everything she could not remember.

Dagger gave no signal.

Tee reached around her and pulled a few pieces of table cloth from her right pocket.

“Don't hesitate after it stars up,” he said. “Just run, alright?”

“Yeah,” she breathed.

“Good.” He began to uncork the alcohol bottles and repeat the same procedure Cutlass had on the jam jar, his silence stretched taut, only his fingers moving.

Part concealed in the cedar, the boy raised his hand.

She uncapped the lighter with her thumb and lit the cloth at the tip. The tires of the trucks mashed the gravel. Ground the road to pieces.

The arm dropped.

Cutlass raised her torso completely off the ground with her elbow and sent the fire tracing a tall arc through the air, flames flailing like wings, losing tens of feathers at once. It was watching a suicidal plummet into a shallow river from a cedar, twenty feet above ground, knowing you had been the one who forced the leap.

The bright, smashed ugliness flared up at her, but by then the truck had jerked to a startled halt, the flames doubling in the windows, and Tee had shoved the rucksack full of glass birds in her hands and pushed her to her feet, nearly shoving her over, telling her to run, run, as Dagger splintered the glass and cast a webbed fracture over the driver behind the windshield.

The woods rattled in her ears. She scrambled a few yards to the tree in a running crouch before collapsing on her side, cradling an alcohol bottle in her hand and lighting the cloth fuse, hurling the bottle away from her towards the second truck. It broke to pieces on the canopy and quickly ate through it, infesting the inside like a parasite. Lighting another fuse, Cutlass tossed the third bottle at the last truck following up the rear, missing for her terrified excitement, just as two soldiers tumbled out on their feet.

Unable to control herself, she let out a raspy scream and ducked down. The bottle broke beside a rear tire, which erupted with the sound of a gunshot and sent more disoriented bodies falling out into the open. Then Tee was beside her, muttering furiously, prying the lighter from her unwilling hands. He lit the fuse of a jam jar and lobbed it over the slope, setting the canopy on fire.

She grabbed his arm, shrieking. “Stop, stop it! There 're people inside!”

A rifle shot bore into the top of the slop, sending up a spray of dirt that skipped down the back of her neck, into her shirt. “Get down!” Tee yelled at her. Biting her lip, she buried her head in arms and shrank into the ground. The sound of him returning fire punched her spine.

She had never been on a raid before.

A scream cracked open on the road. It was too far to be Tee's and too low to be Dagger's. Then the thrum of a blast rocked the second truck and a rod of fire tore through the canopy, illuminating everything in a bright haze. Smoke shrouded their shoulders. The scream reared up on it's hind legs. Somewhere inside the second truck, an oil drum had erupted from the heat.

“Can't the wind hear anything?” her brother had asked their father. “Doesn't it have ears?”

They learned from their father that the wind was a mute, and that seeing was enough.

The heat squeezed and burst a second oil drum, which ballooned into a large cloud that billowed into itself, roaring. It consumed the canopy and the tailgate and gnawed on the red ribs. Metallic sounds spewed out of the rising, fiery mass of the disintegrating truck. The shells were blowing.

Hoarse, human voices raked the air like nails.

Cutlass' face was smeared with mud. Gasping, she rolled to the right and crawled to another tree, her cheek against the bark, clutching at her arms, because she was looking now and she couldn't peel her streaming eyes away.

“Goddammit, Lois!” a voice screamed. “Where are you?!” One pant-leg was on fire, but the screamer didn't bother beating it out and rather sprinted for the burning truck. A bullet cut him down and he spilled onto the ground. There was another body writhing. Two. One hiding beneath the truck. Those who could move were scrambling for woods, desperate for the trees. Most headed for Dagger's side of the road. The ribs of the second truck cringed, the dead driver hanging limply over the wheel.

Cutlass looked across the road, at a small cluster of three moving, uniformed people.

And she recognised his face.

She could not choose what she saw. Despite the burning and the smoke that encased every body littered around the wreckage, the shoulder-bruising spittle of the rifles and the obvious stupidity of her decision, she stood up, lost.

There was a meagre droplet of time between then and when a hand grabbed her shoulder and wrenched her backwards. She pivoted slightly, nearly losing her balance, and the name ripped itself out of her throat. “Wicker!”

A bullet stapled itself into the bark of the tree. Her brother toppled upward as Cutlass stumbled, and before she could see anything else, she was being pulled numbly into the woods.