Ken propped up his chin with his hand.
“What do you think?” asked Mike as the waiter brought over two plates of food.
“Two things,” said Ken. “First, you should stop drinking on an empty stomach. Second, I’m never letting you near any of my patients.”
The men laughed and dug into their food.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Crooked Tree - Present Day
THOUGHT RETURNED TO CROOKED TREE FIRST. His body knew instinctively to not breathe. Using the last energy in his muscles, he could draw a deep breath and flood his lungs with fresh oxygen, but that would bring quick death. His cells, confronted with a fresh supply of fuel after having been deprived so long, would explode—tearing themselves apart. He would die in a trillion tiny suicides.
None of that occurred consciously to Crooked Tree. His body handled the process of waking up, sipping fuel from the fresh air leaking into the cave, automatically. Crooked Tree’s ancient synapses awoke thinking only of the boy. This boy was more dangerous than any of his previous conquests. The boy had the power to destroy all families; his sickness would spread like raging fire.
As quickly as his consciousness returned, it began to fade. Crooked Tree drifted back to sleep.
THE NEXT TIME CROOKED TREE WOKE, almost a week later, he noted that his lungs had moved. He reached out with his mind and tried to sense the boy. It was difficult to locate his prey. The world around him seemed overcrowded with souls, packed into every corner. Sifting through all the competing voices, trying to find one particular boy, seemed too complex. He lay perfectly motionless—his body still recovering from its long slumber—when he felt his heart beat for the first time since his awakening. Fresh energy coursed through his core and then died away.
As his new vitality faded away, Crooked Tree realized his mistake. He couldn’t find the boy again because he had regained too much power. His perception had recovered to the point where he was sensing all the signals, not just the strongest. With his focus narrowed, trying to not reach out, he once again sensed the boy. His prey was asleep, dreaming of him, and far away—farther than Crooked Tree had ever roamed.
If Crooked Tree had regained control of his face, his next realization would have made him smile: the boy was undeveloped. His infection was immature, and not yet capable of spreading easily. This would give Crooked Tree time to find the boy and eliminate him before his disease could reach its full potential.
He felt his energy once again seeping away as his consciousness washed away.
CROOKED TREE SAT UPRIGHT and gasped, sucking in an enormous volume of air. He had felt minor bursts of energy since the last time he had been awake, but he had ignored them, sleeping and recovering. This time the power surge was too much, and although the air burned his lungs, he was alive.
He tried to blink in the near darkness, but one eyelid was sealed shut and the other glued open against a paper-dry cornea. His desiccated limbs creaked as he spun his body to find the source of the light. Over time, the rocks sealing his tomb had shifted or ground away, and he had a tiny window on dim stars, just big enough to fit his fist.
While he considered the hole, the starlight was blotted for a moment as a tiny bat streaked through the hole to return to its roost. His hand shot out on its own and plucked the squeaking creature from the air. He brought its flapping form up to his unmoving, unblinking eye and then scraped his bony thumb across its tiny neck, decapitating the little mammal with his slow swipe.
He caught the little squirt of blood in his open mouth and felt the liquid spread through his awaiting tissue.
His eye blinked twice and he spotted another bat swopping into the cave.
Almost half the colony fell victim to Crooked Tree that night before he returned to sleep in his narrow chamber.
WHEN CROOKED TREE AWOKE for the fourth time, he knew that this would be the night of his escape. He wasted no time on bats, and instead began to claw at the rocks around the small patch of starlight. By midnight he estimated that he might just barely fit through the opening, but he was too tired to try. Instead, he positioned himself at the mouth of the cave and snatched the last few bats brave enough to attempt refuge in the cave.
While he waited for his flying refreshments, Crooked Tree reached out and attempted to sense the boy. The boy’s thoughts were elusive, as if he had learned how to disguise his mind amongst the masses, but eventually Crooked Tree was able to hone in on him. Crooked Tree was dismayed to find that the boy had been developing rapidly; closer to outbreak than Crooked Tree would have imagined.
He mustered his strength and pulled himself through the hole, breathing plentiful fresh air and turning his face to the sky.
How many winters does it take for the stars to change? Crooked Tree wondered as he beheld the sky.
The effect was disorienting: not only had some of the stars moved, but hundreds were missing. It took him several deep breaths to realize the issue. Even though the moon had set, the sky looked as bright as if the moon were nearly full. In several directions the horizon glowed, as if giant fires burned. When he closed his eyes, Crooked Tree realized that the directions with the most light coincided with places where he sensed multitudes of human minds. He wondered again how long he had been unconscious in the cave.
He crossed the small clearing and compared the landscape to his memory. Rocks had tumbled from the cliff, leaving the clearing littered with their debris. Some of that he attributed to the attempts to wall him into the cave, but others were too big to have been influenced by human hands.
A breeze lofted up from the valley and Crooked Tree tilted his head back to receive the information it carried. He gagged on the air, it was tainted with foreign, acrid smells. Under the local noises, far in the distance, he detected a rhythmic hissing sound, droning like rushing water.
Reducing himself to shallow, cautious breaths, he stepped through the thick bushes into the forest. Forced to duck and step over crowded limbs, Crooked Tree noted how dense and tangled the forest had become. The inhabitants were different as well—more rodents and prey compared to apex predators. He tilted his head down and listened to them scurry away from his unusual presence. He was glad to find a path that wound through the trees, but still had to hunch over to account for his height.
Moving downhill at an even pace, Crooked Tree made his way to the river while stretching his muscles and cracking his joints. Each breath helped him stand taller. At the river’s edge he knelt and lowered his face to the deep pool carved off the main current in the lee of a rock. The water’s surface bubbled and foamed with foul-smelling contamination, but his thirst overpowered his revulsion. He drank through pursed lips, sipping slowly so as not to overwhelm his tight knot of a stomach.
He drank for hours, pulling in a tiny amount of water with each sip and letting it find its way to his dehydrated extremities. He took long breaks from drinking, propping himself up against the rock and memorizing the new patterns of stars through the gaps in the canopy. Many of the trees were shorn and re-grown, several feet from the tops. Others were dead and leafless, waiting for the next strong breeze to topple them. Crooked Tree wondered what had visited all this devastation on the valley he had once known so well.
When he stood again, thirst completely slaked, he felt firm and plump. He flexed his naked muscles and admired his own form in the dim light. Crooked Tree cocked his head and listened for the hissing he had heard from the from the clearing. It was there, but greatly filtered by the trees and leaves. He was anxious to determine the source of the noise, but it emanated from the other side of river in front of him. Upstream from this point he could find a spot where he could leap across the running water, but that wouldn’t solve his entire problem.