Page 54 of Two for Joy

Romeo dreamed of the magpie.

He screamed at it, chased it, threw stones, and in his anger, he released the last stone too early, and it didn’t land anywhere near the magpie, it hit the roof. One of the square slates slipped and hurtled towards the unaware magpie.

Romeo’s mouth opened in shock, he couldn’t do anything, he’d seen this moment played out before, over and over, and every time he felt it right in his chest.

But this time it was different.

The magpie moved at the last second.

It skipped out of the way, made its mocking call, then flew away. Romeo’s heart didn’t break beneath his ribs. He didn’t shiver as a cold realization that he’d always be a monster set in. It was a good feeling.

He hadn’t killed it, and it had listened, it had left him.

His good deed was complete.

He touched the smile on his face, so alien because it was real. He wasn’t faking it to please others or grinning because it was expected. He actually felt happy, more than happy, he felt proud. he’d done something good, something he could be proud of, and his first thought was telling his mother.

He wanted her to smile at him, to praise him, to congratulate him for turning his back on his messed-up biology and doing what anyone else would’ve done. He’d done something normal when his heart and mind were telling him to do the opposite. He ran to the front door, knew his mother was in the kitchen, but then he heard the squawking, the chattering, and froze. He’d learned to identify his magpie’s call, and that wasn’t from his one.

It wasn’t the call of one magpie, but dozens. He could hear them behind the house. Somewhere in the trees. Not mocking laughter, but angry, sinister. The other magpies sounded more like machine guns, violent, cruel. Romeo ran around the house, heading towards the trees.

He got close enough to see them, so many, swooping down at something on the ground, then returning to the trees. They took turns, they pecked, poked, stabbed, in a frenzy.

He waved his hands, yelled till his diaphragm ached, and unlike his magpie, the rest flew away from him, leaving only one. One torn apart on the ground, twitching, still alive, but in agony. He knew he couldn’t save it, knew it was going to die in his hands and he couldn’t do a thing about it.

He saw the tree in the distance, the dozens of magpies all watching him, blood on their beaks, chattering to each other.

They hadn’t accepted Romeo’s magpie as one of them.

They knew it had changed, couldn’t understand it, and without understanding came fear, and fear led to frustration, then anger, before finally violence. It died in the same hands that once saved it.

Abandoned by Romeo, then rejected by its own species.

Romeo woke covered in sweat. His hip ached from the position he’d been lying in, and he quickly sat up, leaning against the wall. His breathing came in pants, but he couldn’t get enough, his chest felt tight with the need to breathe.

Both him and Chad weren’t coping with their new lives post-countdown, and there was only one solution.

He needed to get out of there.

He needed to reunite the monster with the magpie.

Chapter Ten

Romeo left the concrete coffin and was marched back to his cell. There were bruises on his ribs from the beating Fred had given him. He’d barely noticed the pain in solitary, blamed his aching on the cold, and concrete, but in the light, he saw the angry marks on his flesh.

His TV had been taken, and he was told his visits had been suspended for two weeks. Two weeks without seeing Chad. He thought solitary had been bad…

Will tried talking to him, but Romeo wasn’t interested. He lay on the bed and tried to work out how to escape a prison where he was always handcuffed and followed everywhere by two guards. Then there were the locks, the gates, the walls with razor wire, the electrified fences. The more he thought about it, the more desperate he felt, and when he closed his eyes the desperation was still there when he slept.

He dreamed about the magpie. It didn’t matter if the bird died when the slate landed on it, or when it was attacked by the other magpies. The message was still the same, the magpie still died.

Romeo hated the nightmares.

He remembered Chad had nightmares in the farmhouse.

Romeo had enjoyed picking apart Chad’s messed up dreams, trying to understand them, to see them through Chad’s big bright eyes instead of his own dark ones.

Chad hadn’t loved his mother, and he didn’t love his fiancé. Both were okay, understandable, even justified, but in Chad’s mind, that absent love made him heartless, it made himwrong.

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