Corvidae (Part I)

In the wake of unbelievable calamity, a woman encounters both wonder and living nightmare on her long journey home.

***Content warning: This episode deals with themes of disease, pandemic, social upheaval, and the threat of sexual violence. Listener discretion is advised.***

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Transcript

[Eerie woodwinds music]

NARRATOR

Episode Twenty-Six: Corvidae, Part One.

(Sound of blue jay singing)

NARRATOR

The rain falls, hard and chill, soaking the parched dust and scant weeds of the dying prairie until it has turned to slop. This is the face of winter now, cold torrential rains more often than snow, an occasional false reprieve to the near-endless drought. False, because the deluge is only a different variety of calamity, drowning rather than nourishing, and soon draining away to leave the earth thirsty once more.

Leah Gardner walks alone through the rain, toward the hollow husk of an old gas station. She is following the lifeless highway northward, bound for what was once Montana, but is now only another nameless expanse of land slowly being reclaimed by wilderness.

She thinks, as strange as this changed world seems to her, and to others like her, it is not in fact much different than it has ever been. If anything, that creeping return of wildness to the artificial, sterile environments of glass, concrete, and protean petroleum is a sign of returning vigor and vitality to a long-sick world.

And yet, she muses darkly, it took such misery and ruin to achieve that change.

Some said the death came from beneath the thawing ice and soil of the Arctic, or even the Antarctic, that it was some ancient virus from a time when the Earth and its life was wholly unlike what humanity knows – or knew. Others claimed it was an artificial pathogen, released by carelessness or even by malicious design. And then there were the truly wild theories, about extraterrestrials and shadow governments, about infernal machinations and divine punishment. Least heeded of all was the prevailing scientific view that it was merely the product of natural evolution, some catastrophically mutated version of avian influenza, or perhaps even of some less threatening common virus. But regardless, it had struck so swiftly and with such staggering lethality that no one ever seemed to find a definitive answer before the long-heralded collapse had already begun.

Society had cannibalized itself so quickly that Leah cannot help but think it was the violent germination of a seed already planted, years or even generations prior, and subtly nurtured all that time by the dark-hearted and the short-sighted, and that the deadly plague was more catalyst than cause.

She huddles into her dark green rain poncho, pulls down her hood farther, as a gust of driving wind whips the frigid rain into her face. It is at the moment, she guesses, about forty degrees, but when nightfall comes it may fall below freezing and turn the moisture to a treacherous glassing of ice, perhaps even bring a rare bit of snowfall.

Reaching the gravel lot of the gas station, about a mile out from the nearest town, she approaches the glass double doors cautiously, peering intently into the stygian gloom beyond for any sign of motion. She has met a few survivors since she left Dallas, some friendly and some less so, but she has been wary of all of them. And that distrust has saved her life more than once.

So, she hesitates outside, shading her view with one hand and pressing her face toward the clouded, dusty glass. Out of the murk within, something ruddy blossoms then fades, flickers fitfully, and she recognizes it as a small fire. Indistinct shadows shift between her and the newborn flames, but the door is too begrimed and the interior space too dim for her to discern the figures with any certainty.

She is about to turn around and walk away, seek out other shelter, when one of the shadows rises and approaches the doors. As calmly and unobtrusively as she can, she reaches for the handle of the Buck knife under her poncho.

The door opens inward, and a smallish blonde-haired woman who looks near Leah’s own age of thirty-two gazes out at her.

Hi, the woman says flatly.

Hi, Leah returns.

They stand there, looking at one another, eyes guarded and measuring. Then a second shape emerges from the shadows behind the blonde woman: a little Black girl with close-cropped hair, who Leah guesses to be about eight or nine.

Hi, Leah says again, smiling this time.

The blonde woman introduces herself as Dru, still expressionless. The girl says nothing at all, and Dru explains that this has been the girl’s way ever since they first met outside the sprawling grey corpse of what was once Omaha.

Leah, catching the girl looking at her, flashes her yet another smile. This time, the faintest hint of a like response touches the corners of the girl’s mouth, but does not fully emerge.

The rain begins to fall harder, drumming loudly against the pavement and the gas station rooftop.

Slowly, hesitantly, Dru asks if Leah is hungry, if she wants to join them inside. Leah nods, and the three of them retreat into the little building, with its disordered shelves and long-dried coffee dispensers. At the back, the little pile of burning firewood and torn packaging gutters unhappily.

Leah points out the dangers of making an unventilated fire indoors, of insidious carbon monoxide and other noxious fumes. Looking a little embarrassed, Dru admits she hadn’t even thought of that, only of warming and drying themselves after getting out of the bitter rain, and maybe of heating their meager dinner.

With obvious reluctance, she lets the fire die. Then the three of them sit around the embers, eating a cold supper gathered from what remains on the shelves and has not expired: bags of salted nuts and jerky, an odd assortment of cheap canned pasta and soup.

As the day fades toward into a bleak leaden dusk outside, they make their beds, Dru and the girl sharing an oversized sleeping bag and Leah extracting a couple of tightly rolled blankets from her backpack.

Good night, Dru says, as they lie waiting for sleep.

The simple goodwill in these words, long unheard, bring sudden and unexpected tears to Leah’s eyes.

Good night, she says back softly.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

She dreams of the man she met when she was crossing Nebraska. Twenty miles outside of Kearney, they had crouched in the belly of an empty grain and listened to the autumn wind moan eerily over and through the corrugated sheets of cold-rolled steel.

His blue eyes glinted in the firelight as the fever-eyed writer tells her his belief that the plague is the land’s revenge for the crimes perpetrated upon and against it. The shifting reflections of the small blaze danced in that blue, danced with the naked desire that kindled there every time he looked at her. But he did not voice that desire, made no move to touch her, and she was grateful for the fire and the ill-cooked meal of eggs and canned baked beans that he shared.

Where he had gotten that found, she did not know and did not ask. And he laughed as he crouched over the fire, fattish and seeming old despite his thirty-odd years, laughed that he had been lucky the air of the metal bin was not filled with old grain dust, which could ignite as disastrously as gasoline vapor – a thing she had never known before. And he had pointed at the smoke that drifted up and through the roof vents, telling her how he had once heard of a whole family that had died from an improperly vented fire and the carbon monoxide poisoning it had brought.

He had been gone when she woke in the morning, had even left a paper plate loaded with more beans and eggs for her. They were cold by then, but she had silently mouthed thanks into the still air of the grain bin before filling her belly with them.

But in the dream, it is not his food that is left behind, but his staring, milky-eyed corpse. And from his dead lips come pleas for her to eat him, eat him and become like the crows, for they alone can survive what the world has become.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Leah wakes before daylight, rolls over in her blankets to find that her two companions remain asleep. Rising quietly, she begins to pack away her blankets when Dru asks sleepily if she is leaving.

Without turning to look at her, Leah affirms that she is.

A moment’s pause, and then Dru asks where she is going.

Montana, Leah answers, and adds that her adoptive parents live there.

Things won’t be any different in Montana, Dru says.

No, Leah replies.

Dru’s voice softens a little as she asks if Leah and her parents were close.

No, Leah says again.

It is only as she is finished packing and is rising, ready to leave, that Dru asks her to stay with them. The girl, she says, needs more than one guardian, and at least one better suited to the responsibility than she is.

Falteringly, Leah says that she doesn’t think they’re heading the same way, to which Dru replies that they aren’t heading any particular way, not really. She told the girl they were moving west, toward California, chasing a rumor that things were less dire that way, but she admits that she never really believed it.

We just needed a goal, something to move toward, you know? she says, sounding so worn and weary that it makes Leah’s heart ache.

Leah nods, and then she slowly slips her backpack off her shoulders, and sits near the end of the large sleeping bag, by the ashes of the previous evening’s ill-advised fire. Over the top of the sleeping girl’s head, Dru smiles at her, and Leah smiles back.

Outside, the rainfall intensifies, and the breaking dawn scarcely lights the land.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

They stay in the gas station another full day, too intimidated by the unusually long rainstorm to leave a dry shelter that still contains some edible food. Against their better judgment, they even indulge in some of the candy bars, melted and resolidified in their plastic packaging.

After this rare feast, they like back on their beds and the two women simply talk, while the girl listens and drowses, her face as inscrutable as her past.

Dru tells of her life in Omaha, before the plague, how she had barely cobbled together a living as a visual artist and a musician, living in a cheap and ugly apartment and living off of ramen and tap water. Her divorced parents had little contact with her, her father mostly involved in his new life with a new family that seemed to make him no happier, her mother as critical and cruel as ever. She talks about her ex-lovers, men and women, none of them particularly kind to her, but each of them teaching her something about herself. Many had been hard lessons, she says, very hard.

Then she talks of leaving Omaha, taking a car and driving as far westward as the partially filled gas tank allowed. She says it was probably stealing, technically, not having a car of her own – but by then so many people had died or were in the process of dying, she has never been able to feel guilty about it.

It was on the very edge of the city that she had found the girl, walking along the roadside as though in a daze, hugging a filthy little stuffed rabbit to her chest, the same one which the girl cuddles even now. She had tried for what seemed like hours to get some word out of the girl, some explanation of where she had come from or what had happened to her or even merely her name, but in the end, the only question that got a response was when she asked the girl if she would like to come with her.

The girl had still said nothing, only wordlessly moved toward the car, opened the passenger door, and climbed into the seat.

Lucky for her, Leah says.

Lucky for both of us, is Dru’s reply. We all need a reason to keep going.

A moment of thoughtful silence sprawls, and then Leah haltingly begins to tell of her own life. Born in Vietnam to a family she doesn’t remember, she was adopted at the age of three by a moderately wealthy white couple, a corporate executive for a firearms retail chain and a former televangelist’s daughter.

It was not a happy childhood, she says, and not something she likes to think about often. There were occasional ugly words thrown at her in school, but more often it was simply a feeling of not belonging, or of unwanted attention from boys and sometimes from grown men. As soon as she had turned eighteen, she had left for anywhere else, found her way to Dallas. That had not been easy either, suddenly without her parents’ support and alone in a new – and much more expensive – city, and yet in time she had found her way, working as an audio engineer for a small but respected record label.

She too had moved from one romantic disappointment to the next, never seeming able to find someone who both understood her and whom she could truly understand, but in time, she had made peace with this, made plenty of good friends, even found fulfillment and freedom in her single lifestyle.

And then, the plague had come, and shattered it all. Her friends sick, her livelihood and passion stolen away, all of Dallas falling into the same maelstrom of confusion and suffering and violence as the rest of the world.

She had tried to fly home – she still thinks sometimes of her parents’ little hobby ranch as home, no matter how long she has avoided it or how little joy it ever brought her – but the general collapse of the economic and social order had stranded her, with no airlines still operating outside of an emergency capacity.

And so she had taken her little Nissan hybrid, and driven north until she could no longer find a working pump and the battery had died. She called her parents, or at least, called what she last knew their number to be, but had received no answer. Nor had she received an answer from any of the local towing companies that she found on her lagging smartphone internet search, and when she dialed 911, the panicky dispatcher had told her sharply that they were so overwhelmed that they couldn’t even handle real emergencies now.

And so, she had walked, and walked, and walked. And all that remained in her future was walking, until she reached Montana.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

They wake to the sound of boots crunching on the filth of the unswept tile floor. The girl is the first to rouse, and she quickly but quietly shakes Leah awake.

Too late, though. The three men have already emerged from behind the last row of mostly denuded shelves, and are staring down at them in their sleeping bag.

For a long moment, they are all still, simply staring silently at one another, eyes widened in surprise and uncertainty.

Then one of the men tells them, roughly, to get up.

All of the men are bearded, disheveled, and armed. The man who spoke bears a Remington 700 hunting rifle, the other two have a have a hatchet and a machete in their respective hands. The metal glints dully in the dimness of the gas station interior.

Slowly, placatingly, Dru says that they are unarmed.

The man with the rifle snorts a dismissive laugh, as if she had said something appallingly obvious, then repeats his command for them to get out of their sleeping bag.

Leah obeys, and Dru and the girl follow her lead. Spreading her arms protectively, Leah steps forward, shielding the girl with her body. Belatedly and hesitantly, Dru joins her.

The one’s just a girl, the man with the machete says.

Don’t matter, the rifleman, seemingly their leader, replies. We’re taking them both.

Leah asks what the hell they are talking about, unable to keep the quiver out of her voice.

The man with the gun smiles, and says with slow and obvious relish that the world is different now, and that things are finally being put back to right. Everyone and everything has its proper place, he says, assigned by natural order, according to God’s divine plan.

And their place as females, he smiles more broadly, is at the bottom.

The man with the hatchet speaks for the first time, his tone a little gentler, and says that they are taking them home, to a real home where they will be safe and cared for and loved forever, where they can live a life of real meaning.

And, he adds, looking at the empty cans of corn and cream of mushroom soup, they have real food there.

Leah hesitates, wanting to refuse, but seeing something behind the eyes of the man with the rifle that tells her doing so would be a mistake. And she has spotted something on his wrist as he shifts the rifle in his hands, something that makes her afraid of more than just the immediate threat of three armed and threatening men. It is a small tattoo, a relatively simple but unique symbol that a teenage boy in Cheyenne described to her, along with other things she only half believed.

It is slightly arcane, and she is not sure whether it is meant to be an ornate and slightly distorted crucifix, a sword, or an abstracted phallic symbol – or perhaps some combination thereof.

Falteringly, Leah assents, on condition that the men promise them protection and safety.

The rifleman replies that, as long as they give no trouble, they will be safe enough. The way he says those last words, safe enough, makes Leah feel slightly queasy. Nevertheless, she smiles and nods reassuringly at Dru, and at the girl, whose dark eyes reflect no emotion back, but seem like light-starved pools in the gloom of the gas station, and leave Leah to wonder whether the girl has any understanding of what is happening around her – or if she understands only all too well.

(Sound effect or music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The name returns to her as they walk relentlessly eastward, away from I-25 and out into what seems to be only sparse prairieland. The rain has ceased, but the sky remains clouded and the day chilly. A sharp wind blows out of the northwest and sheers through their clothes.

They call themselves the Patriarchs, the boy in Cheyenne had said, and they are crazy. The dangerous kind of crazy – holy crazy.

Everyone had seemed insane during those initial months of pandemic and societal disintegration. There seemed to be little interest in finding common cause against the unprecedented plague, and even less in understanding it. Instead, new factions materialized every day, each loudly proclaiming a solution that collapsed under the slightest scrutiny. And those few who did not throw their lot in with the new religions and political cults and nihilistic warlords were too afraid for their lives to offer real resistance.

The men offer names, but she thinks of them only by their weapons. She doesn’t want to know their names, knowing what they plan for her and for the girl – perhaps not today, or even this week, but all too soon.

Breeding stock, the boy in Cheyenne had told her. That is what the Patriarchs will kill and die for. And people like me, he’d said, they call us abominations, fit only to be tortured and exterminated.

The boy had been gone the next morning, but he’d left them the sleeping bag, with a brief note that said it was too big for him on his own – and that he had to be on his own. There was no safety in numbers, the note had said.

Remembering this, Leah walks and eats and sleeps obediently, silent, but wary and watchful, intent on being ready when the moment comes.

Hatchet seems like the kindest among the men, but his eyes are cold, and his kindness feels like a mask, a calculation. Machete is brutish, stupid, and timid, hungry for small cruelties but never daring to risk Remington’s temper, or even Hatchet’s soft reproach.

Remington is easily the worst, though, for there is both cunning and cruelty in him, and a touch of reckless unpredictability. He is the sort of man, Leah thinks, that has been waiting for the end of the world all of his life.

And as they near what the men call Tabernacle City, and the cooking fires darken the sky with smoke miles before they can even see the source, Leah thinks that the world was once full of such men, is too full of them even now, after the crows and the ravens have feasted and grown numerous on the innocent dead left by the plague. 

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Birds have been unaffected by the plague, more or less. This is one of the few things that researchers agreed upon, during the brief period when organized scientific investigation was both still possible and still largely accepted. They could carry the pathogen, but seemed to suffer no symptoms themselves, a drastic departure from the avian influenza which some claimed to be the plague’s origin.

But then, later, came tales that seemed to contradict the widely accepted fact, tales of strange behavior never before seen in birds. And most of these tales seemed to center on members of the corvid family, particularly those with the reputation of carrion eaters – crows and ravens especially. During the precipitous plunge into general madness, many had turned to harassing and killing the birds, with motives ranging from partially scientific to pseudoscientific to wholly superstitious and irrational.

So when the ravens offer Leah the chance she has been waiting for, it strikes her as darkly amusing, underneath her own terror and disbelief. For at this moment, some of the wilder tales which she had doubted are at least partially confirmed.

The rain returns in the afternoon, driving the cold deep into their flesh and their lungs. When evening begins to fall, early beneath a sky of clouded iron-grey, they rest in an abandoned farmhouse, one which has already begun to fall into disrepair and decay. Perhaps it was abandoned even before the plague, but there remains within a sparse collection of furniture: a worn and sagging sofa, a small wooden table and three rickety mismatched chairs around it, a large bed composed of a creaking, wobbly frame and a bare mattress darkened by old stains.

Remington decrees that they will pass the night here, and continue on to Tabernacle City in the morning.

So far, the men have not touched the women and the girl, except to keep them moving at the pace and direction they wish. They even allow them the use of the bed upstairs. But as she lies on the filthy old mattress, Dru beside her with the girl wrapped protectively in her arms, Leah can hear the men talking below. The wind wails and hisses through the neglected windows, through the deteriorating walls.

It is against the Law, Hatchet says, and Leah can hear the capital L in the word.

Remington replies that no one will ever know the difference, and that he has waited long enough. A promise was made, he says, and he’s more than earned his taste.

Not the girl, Machete says. She’s too young.

To this Remington replies that she will be a woman soon enough, and that he is tired of waiting.

It’s against Father Adam’s Law, Hatchet reiterates, voice growing harder.

There is no law anymore, Remington says slowly, except the oldest law, the law of the strong.

It is then that it comes, a sound that at the first instant seems wholesome, then becomes horrible and uncanny. It is only the sound of laughter, raucous laughter, coming from outside and from many throats.

The ravens laugh in the sparse trees around the house, as Leah has never heard a raven do before.

The disagreement downstairs falls instantly into silence, and only after a long moment does Machete ask what the hell that noise could be.

The only answer that comes is a low response that Leah cannot be certain she hears correctly, but which she believes is Remington telling Machete that he already knows.

The front door opens quietly, and footfalls recede into the darkness outside. Rising from the bed and creeping toward the window, moving as silently as she can on the old floorboards, Leah peers cautiously out into the night. The rain has diminished to a mere drizzle, and the waxing crescent moon peeks timidly from behind a gap in the unravelling cloud cover.

She cannot see the ravens, but she can hear them. And all at once, the laughter, mocking and strange, stops, and instead they begin to speak.

Your end has come, they say, raucous and inhuman, your end has come.

Fucking demons, one of the men below cries raspily, and she cannot tell which of them it is. A few moments later, Remington fires his rifle into the trees, and the ravens take wing. Yet even as they fly, they continue to shout the baleful words down at the men. And in the brief time it takes the man to operate the bolt action of the rifle, the birds are descending upon them, swooping down more like hunting raptors than corvids. They claw at the men’s face, beat at them with their broad black wings, peck with their long dark beaks. The men scream and flail, and Remington drops his rifle in the mud to cover his eyes.

At once, Leah hurries back to the bedside and shakes Dru and the girl awake, tells them it is time for them to go. Dru is difficult to rouse, but the girl wakes all at once, catlike, and helps her to roll up and stow away the sleeping bag and the few other belongings that the men have not confiscated.

They slip down the stairs, listening for any sound of the men’s returning into the house, but Leah can hardly hear anything over her own pulse thundering in her ears. The downstairs is dark and silent, and they make their way through the living room and the laundry room, then out the back door. When they step out into the damp night, they can still hear the men shrieking and cursing, and the sound of many wings, and one voice still harshly repeating that message of doom.

The three of them run through the windbreak of aspen and pine, then through the open pastureland. Sometimes they lose their footing on the damp grass and the slick earth, but they rise at once and do not stop running until the farmhouse is far behind them.

And in the dark, dark sky, the winged shapes of the ravens wheel and cry and sing, blood smeared upon their talons and fleck across their wings.

[Eerie woodwind music]

[Sounds of raven croaking, becoming eerie guttural laughter]

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, and arrangement by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]