Chapter 21 – Follow the Parrot
Brother Pine is mute as he escorts me back to my cell. While I don’t want him to say something that might reveal his plans, I really need to talk to him. I have so many questions to ask him, and I’m sure he has plenty in return. He must not have been able to even grieve the death of his parents. How hard has it been for him? He must have felt totally alone.
The sleeping prisoners are now all awake, banging on their black cell doors and screaming, though I can’t hear them. Each face I pass is one of despair. I hope to see someone I recognize but no such luck. There was never a chance a member of the House had somehow miraculously escaped alive, is there? It would probably take the Brothers and Sisters a while to get everyone hooked back up to all those machines.
I shuffle back into my cell without a fuss. Brother Pine remains silent. I sit down on the hard bed as the door appears. My brother’s face vanishes. I’ve missed Dylan so much, and here he is, alive and well.
I watch as people walk up and down the corridor. Mostly, it’s just Brother Pine and a Sister of about my own age. They both carry black cases and boards with paper on them, and appear to look quite flustered. Once or twice, I spy Sister Faun gliding along, casting me curious glances as she sweeps past my cell. I hope she can’t hypnotize me through the doorway. No prisoners are herded past. That means no one has died.
The lights flicker off again later on, a time which I assume is night, and I go back to thinking of my brother’s words. A silly bird that likes to annoy the gardener is the key to my escape. How would a parrot help me? I suppose it could peck a Brother’s face off and cause a distraction that allows me to escape. I really need to talk to Dylan again but it’s impossible. Another power failure would cause a lot of suspicion.
Sleep refuses to come. The bed is uncomfortable, certainly. It’s as hard as rock, but that isn’t really the reason. I have so much to think about. How would I escape? What would I do when I did escape? Even that isn’t the reason why sleep evades me. For some reason I can’t stop thinking about my sixteenth birthday. It’s not for a while yet. My mother would have made a meal. She would serve her famous blackberry pie for dessert and I would get blackberry stains on my shirt like I used to do and she would sing happy birthday. More likely, I would have still been pining over Brian and would've been miserable, but I would have still had my family.
I’m always pining for things I can’t have. First, it was Brian and now its freedom, but freedom to do what? Carry on the Casper legacy? How could one man do that? Yet one man had done it before, the original Casper. He’d started a whole House on his own as the world lay in ruins. If he could do it, then so could I. As Dylan will be escaping with me and he’s the eldest, he would take on most of the responsibility. I’d be his deputy. We’d have to find Skye, and convince her to join us. We’d need somewhere new to live, as far away from the old House as possible.
How I despise the gods! They’ve killed my family. They’ve massacred billions and ruined the world. Yet there is no rhyme or reason to what they do. No wonder there was a group out there dedicated to finding The God Cannon and wiping them out. I’m not sure if I even consider myself a member. While they never exactly invited me to join them, Harold and Father did tell me their story, so I suppose that makes me a member. So, there’s just Dylan and myself, maybe a few others out there that I don’t know the identity of. If we were to get out of here, and if we were to restart the House of Casper, then we would be able to find The God Cannon. That was the only way we could ever live in peace.
So I have a plan now; kill the gods. There is a huge problem with that, though; I don’t know where The God Cannon is. Harold had been the only one who knew where it was. Harold is dead and with him his secret. So what do I do now?
I’ll scour the country, just like Harold and those before him. I’ll seek out the other hidden god slayers. I’ll search and I’ll hunt until I find answers.
“Yes,” I murmur. I’ll do anything I can to find The God Cannon. The gods need to die and if it takes me the rest of my life to make sure that happens then I’ll so be it.
I had a deep, refreshing sleep that night. It had felt good to sort out all those plans inside my head. Now that I know what I want to do with my life, it makes me feel lighter. I still don’t know how I will escape from this place, but that’s only a plan waiting to be revealed. Dylan has a way out. He just has to tell me in some way that doesn’t involve any more blackouts.
I’m neglected for the first part of the next day. Not a soul stalks the corridors. All I can hear is the grille in the wall doing whatever it does, pumping air into my cell or something. I’m given more time to think, and I have to be glad there’s only one repurposing machine available, though that does beg the question; why only the one? Surely two or more would be more efficient? Never mind that, I scold myself. Just be grateful they only have the one, otherwise I’d be dead now and another personality would be riding my body.
I need to talk to the parrot again. Perhaps it knows some words that might help me escape. It’s unlikely, but Dylan had said the parrot was key to my escape. All I need to do is to find out how.
Just when I’d been thinking of him, he appears; Brother Pine. The door disappears and he comes in, a foul frown on his face.
“What’s up with you?” I ask him. “The gods disappointed you?”
“The gods never disappoint me!” he roars, but then calms down a bit. “My fixing of the repurposing device is going more slowly than I anticipated. It is a pity the only other person who knows of its workings broke both his arms in a fall last night.”
Did I detect a wink there? I’m sure I did.
“Sister Faun and Brother Pine are angry with me for taking so long, but I am only one man and the gods see that I am doing my best,” Brother Pine goes on. “I am grateful that they know I have the ability, though.”
“You’re not doing a very good job at it,” I mumble. I can’t help myself. It’s funny riling him up. I used to do this to Dylan a lot.
“The repurposing device is the most complicated piece of machinery we have,” says Dylan sorely. “It has parts that cannot be replaced when they are damaged but must be fixed to a high degree. The water leaking from the roof was an unfortunate coincidence.”
“It worked out great for me, though.”
Dylan gives me a look that says, “lay off it” and I laugh. The laughter feels so good after so much tension, anger and grief.
“How much longer do you think it’ll be before you’re finished?” I ask. “I want to relish the time I have left.”
I watch as he tries to calculate his words. “Tomorrow morning. Then I will be rid of escorting you back and forth to the cave garden.”
I don’t see the logic in that. Surely Brother Pine could finish much quicker if he wasn’t, like he said, escorting me back and forth to the cave garden. I’m about to ask such a thing, but restrain myself. Dylan knows what he’s doing, or I hope he does. He’s been pretending to be a legit Brother for years now and he’s still alive so he must be doing something right.
He peers down at me. “You keep me from my work, but for some reason they think you’ll be more cooperative if you’re shown around by your dearly departed brother.”
“It works,” I say dryly.
He pulls me to my feet and says, “The sooner you’re gone, the better.”
As the lift sets off, I work out a few more questions in my head. There has to be a way to ask my brother what he meant about the parrot. I need to be careful. I don’t want to get him into trouble. I’ll never forgive myself if I get him killed.
“Do you like the cave garden?” I ask casually.
“Not really,” he admits. “I don’t like nature all that much apart from my butterflies. I prefer to be working with machines and finding out how things work. Besides, there are other people to tend to the cave garden and it is my duty to tinker with machines, so I don’t really have time for it anyway.?
??
I sigh. This is going to be hard work. “But you must go there occasionally, just to unwind, I suppose. It’s very beautiful in there, especially that parrot they have.”
“That parrot is bothersome and loud!” Brother Pine says. “Up until two months ago it was as quiet as the dark in the caves. We had been forbidden from teaching it words, and then suddenly it gains a whole new vocabulary! Nobody down here taught it all those strange words so who did?”
The gardener had said much the same thing to me yesterday. Nobody had taught the parrot and yet it had learned a lot of words such as “sky” and “rotter.” Wait a minute. I needed to listen to what they said carefully. Nobody from “down here” had taught the parrot. But what if somebody from up above had taught it? That was it! Somehow the parrot is able to get to the surface, maybe to a village or something, and somebody has been teaching it how to speak. It always comes back here because it gets decent food but it has a secret way of getting to the surface through the caves. If I can find that secret way then Dylan and I can get out of here. He could’ve escaped already but he’d been waiting for me to be taken out of a coma and brought to the repurposing room so he could rescue me.
Rotter. The parrot had called everyone a rotter. That had been Skye’s favorite swear word. She loved to call people that. How could I have been so stupid? The parrot hadn’t been saying “sky”, as in the blue stuff up above you; he was saying “Skye!” Skye had to be the one who the parrot was secretly flying to and learning words from. That meant she had to be close to wherever the parrot’s secret entrance ended up. So she is alive! Not that I doubted it. To know she’s out there and so near makes me want to cry.
I’m confused about how my escape will play out. Even now it seems impossible. How will I find this hidden entrance? What was it? Was it an unknown tunnel or a crack made by the earthquake? It’s probably the latter, as the parrot learning words happened to coincide with the earthquake. Even so, how could I locate the entrance without the gardener or any other Brother or Sister seeing me? There hadn’t appeared to be that many there yesterday, so I suppose I could get away with it.
The door vanishes in front us, and the two of us head out into the cave garden. I give a sigh of relief when I don’t see a single soul. The vantage point of most of the garden is pretty much clear from the lift. I see the gardener, watering some flowers as usual, and I hear the parrot screaming away like it’s having an argument with itself. This seems like the perfect opportunity for an escape.
“Stupid man,” Brother Pine groans. “The irrigation system automatically waters the plants. He’s just wasting his time.”
“I thought he’d been repurposed to see to the garden?” I ask.
“From what I can tell, the repurposing doesn’t last forever. When a Brother or Sister gets into their late years their personality starts to degrade. I suppose it’s sort of like what normal humans get when their memory starts to go.”
I think he’s trying to remind me of Ronald Casper, our father’s father, the previous mayor of the House of Casper. He’d started forgetting things, his name and where he lived and how to go to the toilet. In the end Grandfather Ronald had wandered into the river by The Glass Palace and drowned. It had happened shortly before I was born, but Father had spoken of it with great sadness.
Brother Pine points towards me. “You have your appointment for repurposing tomorrow, so try to keep your body healthy. Do some exercises. A few walks around the gardens will do nicely.”
“Yes, sir!” I say.
He smirks. “I have to return to the repurposing room, but I’ll be by to collect you later. I hope you have a fruitful time.”
With that he leaves, and I find myself confronted with the monumental task of trying to find an escape route. First things first, I need to find the parrot and see if I can somehow get it to lead me to where it gets out. I can hear it making a noise somewhere further into the cave garden but I can’t see it. I suppose I can always try calling it, but I don’t know if it has a name or not. Skye would’ve named it. But what would she have called it? Something silly, something…
I smirk. “Rotter!”
I walk further into the cave garden, towards where I think I can hear the parrot making the most noise. I continue calling out “Rotter” and hope that’s its name.
I discover him perched on top of a sheep, which is standing idling by a tree with a clump of grass in its mouth. The sheep doesn’t seem to mind the bird on its back, though Rotter is making quite a considerable racket. Is he singing?
“Is your name Rotter?” I ask him.
“Rotter!” the parrot squawks. “I am Rotter!”
“Do you know Skye?”
“Skye!”
“Girl...Skye...with a pig!”
“Albatross!” Rotter yells.
I smile. The parrot does know Skye. It feels good to know I haven’t just been blind guessing.
I hold my arm out and the parrot hops onto me. It settles itself nicely, even though it is painful for me, and looks up at me with mournful brown eyes. It’s a beautiful creature, so full of color and life. It doesn’t deserve to be stuck down here.
“Can you show me the way out?” I ask him.
The parrot doesn’t respond. It just starts nuzzling one of its wings.
“The way out?” I repeat.
The sheep starts to move away, leaving a vile stench in its wake. I notice it has done its business on the grass, so I move myself further into the trees to be away from the smell. Maybe the sheep was putting Rotter off? It’s certainly putting me off.
I lean against a tree with yellow bark and once more fix my eyes onto the parrot.
“Take me to Skye!” I order. I figure it’s worth a try.
“Skye tickles!” Rotter squawks. “Skye tickles!”
“Take me to Skye,” I demand. The parrot gives me a zoned out glare and takes off through the air.
“Wait!” I call out, running forward as Rotter’s wings narrowly make it past the branches of a tree. I keep him in my vision as he flutters from treetop to treetop. He’s heading in a direction that is about halfway along the cave garden from the entrance to the farm. I assume he’s leading me to something, otherwise he wouldn’t wait until I caught up with him each time.
Eventually, we reach the side of the cave where a mass of phosphorescent green moss slithers up a rock. Rotter is pecking at the moss, eating it. I sigh. Has he taken me all this way just to show me this moss?
“Mineshaft!” says Rotter. He claps along the rock on his sharp talons and shimmies into a crack in the side of the cave wall that I hadn’t previously noticed. The parrot vanishes. The crack is almost invisible. If you weren’t actively looking for it, you wouldn’t even notice it was there! What a clever bird. The crack must have opened up during the earthquake caused by the gods and the parrot had used it as a means to escape. If I were him, I would’ve stayed away but Rotter is just an animal. He’d stay where the food was the best.
I peer into the crack. The walls are slightly damp when I put my hand on them, but I climb inside anyway. It’s a very tight fit. I only manage to squeeze through because I’m still growing into adulthood. I suddenly realize that Dylan, with his adult’s bulk, will never fit through here. What will my brother do? I can’t just leave him! Except Dylan must’ve already known that he wouldn’t be able to come with me. He didn’t say anything because he knew that I would never leave him behind.
I will not leave my brother behind.
I turn and climb back out of the crack. When Dylan comes for me, I’ll tell him the crack is too small even for me. We’ll have to think up another means of escape, a way we could get out of here together. I’m not leaving without him.
To pass the time until Dylan returns I have a wander around the zoo. It’s only small, and there aren’t many animals, but I find the place fascinating. Things are still in an uproar because of a missing sheep but I refuse to tell them I’ve seen it wandering around.
I won’t help them.
I find myself staring at an animal. There was a picture of one in a book back at the House but it doesn’t seem to do justice to what sits before me, looking miserable. It is a tiger, striped orange and black and stunningly beautiful. It’s all on its own in quite a small cage, looking forlorn at me as it rests its huge head on its lethal paws.
“We had a cat that lived in the House, once,” I tell the tiger. Its whiskers are as thick as wool. “It was a stray but we all took turns feeding it and all the children loved it to pieces. Then we had a food shortage and the cat was caught and eaten.”
The tiger growls at me, and I stop my story. I’m suddenly fearful that the creature might somehow escape its cage and eat me in revenge for what we’d done to its cousin.
I flash back to the cat’s cries as Uncle Rooster had grabbed it and snapped its neck. It hadn’t deserved such a fate but my family didn’t want to starve either. I wish I could remember the cat’s name.
I see a Brother walking by and I ask him, “Why do you have a zoo?”
The Brother looks at me with puzzlement and says, “We like animals.”
“What do you mean?”
“We like animals,” the Brother repeats.
When no further explanation seems forthcoming the Brother wanders off on his errands and I’m left as puzzled as before. Is that all there is to it? These murdering religious nuts liked animals, so they had a zoo? And they liked plants, so they had a cave garden? It can’t really be as simple as that. There has to be an ulterior motive behind it all.
I look at some more animals, all of them a surprise and a wonder to me. There’s a hippopotamus, which is crammed tightly into a giant concrete box, a panda, which has a curiously large area to play in, several ostriches which try to eat my hand when I move in to pet them, and a pair of wolves with yellow, feral eyes. I can hear more animals baying and crowing around me, but I’ve suddenly grown tired of this place. The animals in here look exhausted and frightened, almost a mirror image of how I feel. I can’t bear to look at these poor creatures any more.
When I leave the confines of the zoo my eyes automatically wander over to where the crack in the wall is located. If I desire to escape I can do so, right this very minute. The thought is very tempting. But I’d sworn to myself that I wouldn’t leave this place without my brother. But could I take the chance that he couldn’t come up with another alternative escape? I’m scheduled for repurposing tomorrow, and I’d gotten the impression that Dylan couldn’t stall his repairs any longer. If I deny myself the chance of escape now and he doesn’t come up with a plan then I’ll die.
I berate myself for being selfish. I have to give Dylan a chance, otherwise I’d never forgive myself for leaving him behind. He’s my brother and he’s all I have. I am all he has. We have to stick together.
The angry expression on Dylan’s face when he exits the lift and sees me waiting for him is agonizing. I know what he’s thinking as if I can read his mind; What are you still doing here? Do you want to die?
He grabs my arm. “You’re still here.”
“I don’t like being on my own,” I say. We have to be careful, and stage our words so they have double meanings. I don’t really think people are listening in to our conversation, but he seems to think so. “I went to see the zoo. They had an animal there that was just my size. It was smaller than you, though. I decided that I didn’t want to see the small animal if you weren’t going to see it, too.”
His eyes widen, and I understand what he’s trying to answer. “You don’t need to wait for me. I’ll have another chance someday.”
I cross my arms, defiant. “I don’t think I will.”
“You’re being repurposed tomorrow,” he tells me. He looks like he’s about to cry, and it breaks my heart that I’m defying him, but he is my brother and I will never, ever leave him behind. “My repairs will be finished tomorrow.”
“Not unless it takes you longer...”
He sighs. “It’s taken too long as it is. I’m a good engineer. I should’ve finished it already.”
I want to tell him to shut up, he’s giving too much away, but I don’t want to reveal myself to whoever might be listening. He has to find a way to stall things some more. He’s done it before so he can do it again. I know I can count on him to do something.