Lucretia and the Kroons (6 page)

The Kroons snapped at each other and tussled. The new male slammed Pit’s head against the floor. Pit raised his head immediately and bit into this other one’s shoulder. It screeched as Pit bit a second time. Loochie gasped at the ferocity of their fighting. Both of them looked at Loochie quickly and then attacked each other again. They were fighting over her. She didn’t want to still be there, on the floor, when one of them won.

The room felt like some nightmare version of her place. The layout of the kitchen was the same as hers. The oven went against the wall adjacent to the window. The fridge against the wall behind her. The same space where cabinets ran along the wall beside the fridge. Identical. But here the oven was gone. A gas hose ran out from the wall but was attached to nothing. The fridge was still here but its doors had been torn off, the racks inside gone, too. Garbage bags were piled inside. They dripped a sour yellow liquid, gave off a smell of rotten milk or meat, the worst odor in this place yet. The kitchen cabinets were there but all the drawers had come out long ago, and the remaining cabinet doors hung at odd angles. It was like her place but not her place, a nightmare version, and she wanted to escape.

She could just go right back out the kitchen window, she thought. Climb out onto the fire escape and make her way back down to her place. Be back inside and leave the Kroons behind and never think of them again.

But what would happen to Sunny if she did?

That was the terrible part. Of course Sunny would be abandoned. Left to whatever fate the Kroons had in store for her. Maybe Louis was right and they would burn her body. Maybe she’d be alive when they did it. But her urge to flee was even stronger than her concern.
Just get away!
That’s what she was screaming in her head. It was cowardly to consider—saving herself and sacrificing her best friend—but consider it Loochie did. And she might even have done it, too, if the two male Kroons weren’t in a heap right before the kitchen window. They screeched and gnashed at each other. Loochie had no choice but to make a different move.

If this place really was laid out like her apartment then the room to her right would be the same as her mother’s bedroom. No exits in there, only windows that offered a six-story drop.

She’d have to cut left. First thing she’d see was the bathroom but there was no point hiding in there. If these things could bash each other with such force they could surely smash through the bathroom door. Next there would be a room just like her bedroom, but that also offered no escape. She would have to go into the living room and from there she could at least
try
the front door. Maybe Louis was wrong about how it had been boarded up, or how securely. Maybe she could get it open. Or, her second choice, she could try climbing out the windows in the living room. The building’s air-conditioners ran in a straight line down each floor. They came preinstalled, not sitting in the window but actually embedded in the walls. They looked like a series of pegs sticking out the front of the building. As insane as it seemed, she might sneak out the window and make her way down from one to the next. It would be like the climbing wall in gym class. Even if she only made it down one floor she could break the window to Sunny’s apartment and get in. Those were her only choices. A scary plan, but at least it was a plan.

First she had to leave this damn kitchen.

Loochie felt the dirt and garbage on the floor through her socks. She worried about stepping on broken glass. But forget about getting her sneakers again. The Kroons were fighting right beside them and she wasn’t going to risk getting closer.

That girl
ran
.

She fled the kitchen and passed the bathroom. The door was shut and she didn’t bother
trying to open it.

Loochie slowed in front of the second bedroom. Her bedroom. The door here was dirty and hung by only the bottom hinge. The door was shut, the room was dark, but from inside Loochie heard the flapping of wings. Dozens of small wings. Or could it be hundreds? As if all the pigeons in Queens had come to this apartment, to that decrepit room, to roost. At least she
hoped
they were pigeons in there. She couldn’t see. But if she’d had any thoughts of hiding out in that room she let them go.

She ran down the little walkway and entered the living room. She heard a cracking sound. It was wood splintering. The living room wall was coming apart. Small pieces of it splintered, something bashing at it from the other side. A grunting sound came through the wall and a terrible crash. A piece of the living room wall shattered. A hole appeared. She could see into the kitchen. Pit was on the other side. He peered through the hole, which was the size of a pizza pie. He scanned for Loochie. When he saw her he jerked his head backward and his face disappeared from the hole. He was coming around, coming after her.

Loochie sprinted through the living room. She was looking for the front door. But the faster she ran the more distance she needed to cover. She was in her stocking feet but the floor felt cool and wet. Loochie looked down. She was standing in grass.

She looked around, trying to get her bearings. She was in a park. She looked back confused. She was standing in a field of patchy grass. She saw trees in the distance. She looked up and instead of the ceiling she saw an overcast, gray sky. Behind the cloud cover there was a hazy sun the color of phlegm.

She was in a
park
.

But, to make it even more confusing, she could still see the living room wall that Pit had smashed through. And through that hole she could still see the horrible kitchen. She was in a park
inside
6D. Her hands trembled and her chest clutched up again. She didn’t understand. How could this be? It couldn’t.

From where she stood she could see the walkway she’d just run through. Pit came
rushing out a second later. He shot straight toward her. He, too, was running through the grass. Seeing him in the half-dead grass made her believe what she was seeing more. If he was in it then she really was too. He came straight at her. He picked up speed. If he reached her he would tear the skin right off her bones just like he’d snatched the sneakers off her feet. She had to move, but to where? The only choice seemed to be to go deeper into this impossible place.

A line of trees was visible to the north. There was nowhere else she might hope to hide. She took off in that direction. Loochie was fast. The fear helped speed her up. As she moved toward the trees she was filled with a sense of familiarity. Just as she’d recognized the layout of the kitchen, she felt she knew this park intimately, too. But how, exactly, she couldn’t say.

Pit tore across the field in a frenzy. So rabid that when he hit a little dip in the ground he tumbled over and sprawled out in the grass. Loochie heard him making some new call, a high-pitched squeal that sounded like a toddler having a tantrum. Pit fell into the grass and Loochie kept moving. She reached the trees and disappeared among them.

The trees ran in two perpendicular lines for two hundred feet, cutting the meadow in half. As soon as Loochie entered the cover of the trees she made a sharp left rather than coming out the other side of the rows. She ran between them. She had the idea that she could trick Pit, lose him, if she did this. She doubted a man, a thing, with only half a skull had more than half a brain. Once he was up again he might keep running straight through the trees and go out to the next meadow on the other side. Meanwhile she would be doubling back toward the open kitchen window.

She couldn’t run so well. The roots of the trees were overgrown and thick and they threatened to trip her up. And there were little stones everywhere, cutting into her soles. Her socks weren’t much protection. Her feet hurt but she didn’t slow down. She tried not to breathe too loudly even though her chest burned from the effort.

Finally she had to stop. She had to catch her breath. She lay down on her back, heaving, with a hand over her nose and mouth to mute the sound. In her own ears her every breath was as loud as a broken muffler. Out there, in the meadow, she heard the Kroon’s high-pitched squealing. Then it seemed to echo. Playing once then again and again. As her breath returned to normal she realized these weren’t echoes. They were replies.

Loochie sat up to check her aching feet. They throbbed like she’d been cut, but they seemed okay. She watched all the yellowed blades of grass in the meadow. Every few seconds they swayed. There was a breeze. Coming from where?

The high-pitched squeals came again. Loochie wanted to get up but found herself paralyzed. Her knees and elbows had locked up from fright. Hadn’t she been trying on wigs in her mother’s bedroom an hour ago? That already seemed a lifetime ago. She must be dreaming. None of this made a lick of sense. Yet somehow she knew she wasn’t. The rough ground beneath her, the squeals of the Kroons, the pain in her feet, all of it too real for a dream. She was awake. And that meant all of this was truly happening. If she was to survive it, she couldn’t stay still hoping to wake up.

She straightened her mother’s wig to steady herself. Loochie got to her feet. She needed to get a better idea of what was happening out there. A strategic view. She would have to climb one of these trees.

She was trembling again. She was used to climbing fire escapes, but hadn’t ever scaled a tree. It didn’t help that this was an insane tree in an insane woods in an insane park that had appeared—insanely—in this apartment.

These trees weren’t at all like the ones she’d seen on trips to the Queens Botanical Garden or Flushing Meadows Park. These trees were like their demented cousins. They were so tall they seemed to run as high as her entire apartment building. Sixty feet straight up, that big. Their trunks were misshapen, bubbling out here and there in thick knots, and their outer bark was gray and ashen, as if burned. In places the bark showed great tears and the inner bark was a sickly white, the color of bones. She didn’t want to climb this tree. She didn’t even want to touch it. But then she heard the calls out in the meadow once again and she had no choice. She reached for the lowest branch of the nearest tree and climbed.

It’s amazing what a person can do when her life depends on it. Loochie scaled that tree from one limb to the next, fearful but quick. Running had been bad without sneakers, but climbing was easier in socks. She was twenty feet up before she looked down. The sight made her dizzy but she shut her eyes and soon she was calm. Then she scooted forward on a limb, going farther and farther, until she was able to peak at the meadow through the tree’s dense leaves.

There were five Kroons out there now. Seventy-five feet away. Pit and Lefty and three more. Two of the new ones looked exactly alike. Twins. And the last of the new ones was low to the ground, as if he was lying on his stomach in the grass. Loochie watched that one. He was pulling himself through the grass. He reached forward and dug his fingers into the dirt and moved ahead a couple of inches. Then, with the other hand, he pulled himself ahead again. Back and forth like this, slow but unceasing. He was missing both his legs but his ratty jeans were full length. The empty denim trailed behind his upper body as if he had two tails.

Pit pointed toward the trees. He barked at the others loudly and they barked back in quieter tones. They were communicating. Coordinating. They spread out and formed a line, fifty feet between each of them. Together they moved toward the woods. The formation would act like a net, one of them sure to catch sight or sound or smell of her.
Did Sunny come through here, too?
Loochie wondered. How had she have avoided these things? She couldn’t imagine Sunny sprinting away, let alone climbing a tree, not as sick as she was. Maybe Loochie was too late. Maybe the Kroons had already taken up her tiny body and … what? Burned it. Cooked it? Her best friend going up in a cloud of smoke. The thought seemed to tickle the back of her ear, like a fly or some other pest.
You’re too late. Sunny’s gone
. But she brushed the words away. She didn’t want to hear them.

As she surveyed the park Loochie’s sense of familiarity returned. From her perch up in the tree, she could see more of the grounds. In the distance, far behind the Kroons, she made out a body of water. It looked like a huge lake. But something was off. From here she could see the surface flickering. The lake was on fire. Or maybe it was a lake of fire. And yet the shape of it, the distance from this stand of trees, were recognizable. Meadow Lake. Flushing Meadows Park. She was in Flushing Meadows Park. Where she and Sunny used to skate around the Unisphere.

The Kroons were creeping nearer. Then all five of them stopped looking toward the trees and snapped their attentions at the ground. They looked at the half-dead grass as if they’d all dropped something important. Just like Pit had done in the kitchen earlier. They scanned the ground desperately. She wondered what it was each of them could’ve been searching for, yearning for, so badly. What had Louis called them? Crackheads. Maybe that meant they walked around searching for cracks in the ground?

Loochie entertained a thought. Maybe she could just climb down and talk with them. Explain that she wasn’t meant to be here. She was looking for her friend and they only wanted to go home. But that would have been as futile as trying to convince Priya, Susan, and Monique that they should let her back into their circle. It would never happen.

The Kroon in the grass had stopped altogether. His arms were straight and his spine
curled back and his head lifted. He was no longer scanning the ground for cracks. He’d spotted her. He was looking directly at her. He watched her for a moment, his eyes like embers. She shook her head faintly, as if begging him not to tell the others. His eyes narrowed and he grinned. The Kroon opened his mouth and barked. The other four, his brothers, changed direction. They swelled toward her.

Loochie scrambled backward along the tree limb, toward the trunk. The leaves hid her, but it didn’t matter. They’d seen where she was. She climbed down, practically jumping from one limb to the next.