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  Dedicated to the people of New Mexico

  ’ll get to the point: one day, ten thousand birds fell dead from the New Mexican sky.

  The next morning, I toiled away in my little lab behind the Reptile House of the Rio Grande Zoo. I worked on a cute little guy named Terrence, a horned lizard. I’d rescued him a few weeks ago from an elementary school in Albuquerque’s south valley, where a bunch of kids had taken him hostage in a cardboard box and tried to feed him sticks for a week. Horned lizards eat meat. A teacher called the zoo when she found the lizard cowering in a corner of the box, and they sent me to collect it. Horned lizards have gray bodies stippled with craggy scales and heads armored and horned. They look like miniature dinosaurs lost in our modern world. I have a soft spot for misfits.

  A horned lizard’s only defense is staying low to the ground and hoping it doesn’t get noticed. I stayed low to the ground myself, in a metaphorical sense. I’d been born with gigantism, and after nearly forty years of a raging pituitary gland, I stood eight feet tall. The disease elongated the bones in my face, and my hands and feet had grown disproportionately huge. I looked like a statue of a gaunt titan from an old, dead civilization.

  I’d been feeding Terrance ants—their venom would help rebuild his ability to autohaemorrhage. Horned lizards aren’t fast or mean. They just try to hunker down and blend in with the desert around them. If a predator comes after them, they puff out their bodies and hope their horns and armor put off their attacker. And if everything else fails—if the damned world just won’t leave them in peace—they shoot a stream of blood from their eyes, called autohaemorrhaging. That was life: you eat poison day in and day out, hoping to be left alone, until you get pushed and pushed and end up doing something truly horrific.

  As I dribbled a few ants into Terrence’s terrarium, the phone rang. I picked it up. “John Stick.”

  “It’s me.” The slurred voice belonged to Melodía Hernandez, my friend, whose speech contorted around tumors in her face. I could count my friends on two fingers. I’d made my other friend as a kid and met Melodía in college. In the fifteen years since, I’d shied away from getting to know anyone else.

  “This better be important,” I said. “I have a no-human policy before noon.”

  “You haven’t heard. Of course not. How could you? Spiders and snakes don’t report the news.”

  “Heard what?”

  “New Mexico could have seceded from the union and you wouldn’t know it.” Melodía had a nice, middle-ranged voice, always edged in sarcasm. After a conversation with her, you came away feeling cut up. “Aliens could have come to back to Roswell. An earthquake could have knocked down the Sandia Mountains. John Stick would be sitting in his dark room, miserable as ever.”

  “I’m hanging up. Call me if we get nuked. I might care.”

  “I need you to do me a favor.”

  I chuckled at her.

  “I’m serious. I need you.”

  I pushed out another laugh, but her plea gave me that warm sick feeling. The feeling when I first saw Terrence huddled in his box. The feeling when I came home from work every day to find my pet tarantula tickling the side of his terrarium in his excitement to see me. I had a tough outer shell, but Melodía made me warm and gooey.

  “Tell me about this favor,” I said.

  “Yesterday, at exactly noon, every bird in the Bosque Del Apache fell out of the sky. Dead. Thousands of them.”

  The Bosque Del Apache, a nature reserve a couple hours south of Albuquerque, put my state on the map. The Bosque was particularly renowned as a winter nesting ground for migratory birds. Imagining all those birds dead sank my guts with a totally different sick feeling. In late February, tens of thousands of birds would have been nesting there.

  “They can’t all be dead,” I said.

  “Every single one. At exactly the same second. Geese in mid-flight. Cranes wading through the marsh. Bald eagles eating snakes. Ducks quacking. Boom. Dead.”

  “That’s—” I searched for a word but didn’t find one, so I let the miles of empty phone line do the talking.

  “Yeah,” Melodía said. “It is.”

  “I suppose you’re doing the post-mortem.” She worked at the University of New Mexico as an ornithologist.

  “I need you to drive down to the Bosque. Get some samples and bring them back to me.”

  Normally, if somebody called me at that hour making demands, I’d have hung up on them. Melodía, however, was not normal. She’d been born with a mass of tumors in the left side of her face that swelled it to twice the standard size. Normal people gave her a hard time when she went outside. I’d seen the stares, the snickers, and the gasps. She’d had garbage thrown at her from passing cars, cruel normals called her ugly, freak, and mutant, people followed and harassed her. I’d suffered the same treatment my whole life. It had turned my shell extra hard, but pummeled Melodía into a jelly. Every jab hurt her ten times more than an average person. After a few decades of abuse, she’d developed a bad case of agoraphobia. She practically lived in her lab in the basement of the university’s biology building. In the old days, we would both have been carnival spectacles. In modern society, we tried to stay out of the way. She was the kind of friend I couldn’t refuse.

  I groaned into the phone.

  “It sounds like an earthquake when you do that,” she said. I had a very low voice.

  “You want me to drive hours for you, shovel dead bodies into my truck, and haul them back to your lab so you can study them and publish findings and get awards for being a genius? Fine. But first, the magic word.”

  “Please,” she sung. “Pretty please.”

  I gave her my best resigned sigh.

  I donned my Rio Grande Zoo jacket and cap, and hit the road. Interstate 25, a raised freeway that cut through the city like an axis, suspended my truck high above Albuquerque, a wide, flat city that stretched from the foot of the Sandía Mountains on the east side to a string of five dormant volcanoes on the west. Beyond, the tortuous mountain desert spread in every direction, from Mexico to Colorado and Arizona to Texas. A human could map that desert, but they couldn’t fathom its scale: the diversity of life it held, the pine-scaled mountains, the river valleys cut by eons of current, the llano nodding with sienna grasses, the red cliffs, the lattice of caverns beneath it all. I’d lived in that desert all my life.

  As I drove south, the sun crested the mountains and sprayed the city with light, as if the dusty collection of adobe plaster and strip malls were the Seven Cities of Gold finally discovered. The ice blue sky hung above the freeway as it traced Isleta, Los Lunes, Los Chavez, and Belen, a line of villages with McDonald’s signs across from two-hundred-year-old adobe churches, dirt alleys meandering along the black top Interstate, chicken pens beside driveways with well-washed hotrods. Past the villages’ perimeters, the rough desert lay dotted with clumps of scrub and low-l
ying cacti. These towns clung to the banks of the Rio Grande, the river that flowed from Colorado through New Mexico to Texas, where it formed the border with Mexico for a thousand miles before it reached the Gulf.

  It took me an hour to reach the Bosque del Apache. I didn’t speed since the birds would stay dead. The Bosque boasted fifty thousand acres of mountains, woods, desert grasslands, and floodplains irrigated by the Rio Grande. The park consisted of driving loops, hiking trails, picnicking spots, and paved paths that led tourists from their parking spaces to observation platforms where they could ogle the birds and maybe read an informative plaque or two.

  At the entrance to the park, a ranger piled corpses beside the welcome sign. Their white plumage twitched in the desert wind. Emerald and black ducks hung from the rain gutters of the visitor’s center. Birds of all stripes lined the dirt road, as if someone had snowplowed the way clear. I could have collected my pick of dead bodies without even entering the reserve.

  The road carried me in a loop around the marsh. It dipped low over soft ground with billowing brush on both sides. After a few hundred yards, the left bank dropped away and the marsh spread a quarter mile to the west. The gray Chupadera Mountains loomed beyond. State and county vehicles packed the observation parking lot. Humans in earth-toned uniforms and wading boots milled around in the water, taking tall, careful steps. The entire marsh, from one shore to the other, bobbed with feathery death. The waders lifted sodden bodies from the water and cradled them back to shore, where other rangers loaded them into the backs of pickup trucks. They’d already filled one with a gray mound of corpses.

  A ranger or two gave my vehicle a brief glance as I drove on, but to the casual observer, I was simply another normal person in a pickup truck with dark windows and an extended cab. They couldn’t tell that I’d removed the driver’s seat and sat in the back, where I’d tilted the seat so that I could sit relatively comfortably and still reach the steering wheel and pedals. The lower position also gave my neck a little relief, though I still had to hunch.

  I parked beside a quiet stand of spruce pines that screened me from view of the marsh and its crew of normals. I gathered up a couple of northern shovelers, ducks with broad, flat bills and iridescent jade heads. Their bodies hung heavy with death. I slipped them into sample bags and noted their location with a black marker. I found a dove dead in its nest and bagged that too, and a few steps farther into the brush, a Canada goose with its wings tangled in a thicket. While I worked to free it, the weeds rustled behind me.

  A man leaned against the trunk of a cottonwood in an olive windbreaker, with clean new hiking boots and a shiny watch. Each leg of his khakis sported a crease down the front. He was an average looking Anglo, not too bald, not too old, not too skinny, not too muscular. He had eyes and hair the color of your average dormouse.

  “You the mortician?” he asked. “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”

  “What was that? Greek?”

  He gestured at the insignia on my jacket. “A zoo man who doesn’t know his Latin.” He shook his head in a dumb show of sadness. “What is the world coming to? Where have our values gone? And all that garbage.”

  “I don’t use the Latin names for animals. It’s rude.”

  “Touché,” he said. “I like your style.”

  “I don’t have a style. I’m working a job.”

  “Zoo keeping dead animals now? Can’t afford to feed the live ones? Kidding.”

  I glanced at his white-collar outfit. “You’re not a ranger.”

  “Nice sleuthing.” He crossed his arms and watched me.

  I bagged my goose, marked it, and walked it back to my truck where I nestled it in with the other bodies before opening the driver’s side door.

  “Leaving?” he asked. “Got everything you need?”

  “No offense”―I let my giant’s voice rumble the air―“but why don’t you go find another state park to lurk in? Nobody here wants to chitchat today.”

  “I’m here on business,” he said, “just like you.”

  I gave him one of my unfriendly giant stares.

  “Your business has nothing to do with the zoo,” he said.

  “Is that a fact?” I asked.

  “It’s a guess.”

  “I’m doing a favor for a friend. As far as anybody should care, including you, I’m not even here.”

  “You’re a good friend,” he said. “You wanna be an even better friend? You’ll follow me.”

  I slammed my truck door. “First, tell me who you are and why we’re talking to each other.”

  “I’m Jacob Charon. Chief biologist at a genetics research lab east of the city. Typhon Industries. Mass deaths are pretty interesting to us.”

  “Never heard of you,” I said.

  “That shocks me. We’re big-time. We study animals, just like you. As far as avialae go, we harbor a certain type of rare finch. Indigenous to the Galapagos Islands. Drinks blood. Geospiza difficilis septentrionalis. Common name of vampire finch.”

  “I’m a reptile and arachnid guy,” I said.

  He shrugged. “As to the second question, we’re talking to each other because at times like this, people shouldn’t just go about their business. They should take a moment. Death on this scale―it should give us pause.”

  “Like I said, I’m just collecting samples for a friend.”

  “You’re not a person of your own.” He nodded as if we were in staunch agreement. “You’re just your friend’s friend. You don’t feel anything unless your friend tells you to.”

  “Death is normal,” I said.

  “Ten thousand birds falling dead at the same second. That’s not normal. It’s either the biggest scientific coincidence in history, God’s wrath has gone Old Testament, or we humans did it. Which one is your money on?”

  “Didn’t you say you had something to show me?” I didn’t really care if he did or not. I just wanted to get back in my truck and go find a quiet place to harvest dead birds.

  “You have to earn it,” he said. “It’s the diamond at the bottom of this bloodbath. I won’t hand it over to just anybody.”

  “And how do I earn it? Do I follow your tracks through the leaf litter? Because that sounds pretty easy to me.”

  He grinned, showing me teeth neither straight nor crooked, too white or too yellow. He didn’t have dimples, and his smile was as unremarkable as everything else about him―besides his personality.

  “You’re feisty. I like that. I’ll tell you what. We’re colleagues. I study animals; you study animals. I’ll scratch your back. You scratch mine.”

  I didn’t study animals. I fed them, cleaned their cages, and watched over their young. But I didn’t argue. “Sure. Absolutely.”

  “When my back itches,” he said, “you’ll be there?”

  I tried not to glare at him. “Whatever you say.”

  He grinned again and waved for me to follow. He led me down a shallow ditch, knee deep with bramble and weeds. My feet found mud at the bottom. Charon clambered up the opposite bank, and I took it with a deep bend of my knee. At the top, in a small raised clearing, lay a white-plumed whooping crane, as tall as a normal, the most endangered bird in North America.

  “You don’t want this for yourself?” I spoke quietly, without meaning to. The clearing with the white downy body at the center felt holy even to a cynic like me.

  “Nah.” Charon shoved a stick of gum in his mouth and smacked his lips. “You keep it. I’m here doing another type of study altogether. Just give me a ride back to my car.”

  I lifted the crane’s body, as light as a fossil, into my arms, and slipped it into a bag before marking it.

  Back in my truck, he directed me around the southern loop and past the western side of the marsh, lined with trees. Feathered clumps hung from the limbs like Christmas ornaments. A sandhill crane with sienna wings and a red crown lay across a picnic table like a pagan feast. Near the table sat a rich person’s shiny car.

  I pulled in
beside it. Not far away, a tumult erupted. Men yelled. What sounded like a rabid sheep brayed and bleated. As a zookeeper, I’d heard it all, but never a sound like that in all my years. Something beat against the insides of a van or truck, rocking it on creaky shocks. Glass shattered. A few more yells rang out before quiet settled over the preserve.

  Charon stared out the window with a veiled expression on his average face. “Curious.” He shifted his eyes to me.

  “What the hell was that?” I wondered aloud.

  Charon shrugged. “Who knows? Arbor eram vilis quondam.”

  “Enough Latin,” I said. “This is your stop.”

  “That it is.” He cracked his door and sprang from the truck. “Thanks for the ride, zookeeper. Looking forward to our next meeting.”

  I didn’t tell him that I didn’t make a habit of meeting people―that this pure-chance encounter broke my routine and would never happen again. I wanted him out of my truck. “Thanks for the bird.”

  After he’d shut the door, I drove toward the northern loop, which wound around a small farm. I figured I’d find some different species there, maybe even spot a live bird or two to show Melodía that there had been a few survivors, proving the whole thing wasn’t as bad as she thought. I didn’t want to prove her wrong so much as I wanted to demonstrate that the world wasn’t completely awful. It was just pretty bad. We’d been in a fifteen-year long debate about that distinction.

  At the intersection of the north and south loops, I passed a white cargo van set back in a thicket of shrubs and trees. The front windshield had fissured into a web of cracks and both front doors stood ajar. Something had ripped the upholstery of the front seats to shreds. The stench of carnivore musk leaked in through my vents.

  Two men stood nearby: one middle-aged and thin with a lot of loose skin on his face, the other meaty and young with broad shoulders. They wore black uniforms, Kevlar vests, and sidearms. The older one wound a bandage around the younger one’s forearm. Beside them, a pile of bloody gauze sat in the dirt.

  I’d found the source of noise Charon and I’d heard earlier. It looked like the two soldiers―or security guards, or riot police, or military mercenaries, or whatever―had been carting a wolverine around in their van and it had finally snapped and turned the tables. I wished the beast well and drove on by. I had enough weird events to ponder already.