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Blue Earth: Chapter one

I

At one time, Max had been too interested in other things to have ever bothered with the subject of heroin. He was too busy studying for high school exams and competing for top spot in the varsity baseball championships, too busy fighting like a male stag in rut for the favor of Liza Marinello, the captain of the girls' basketball team. He was too busy trying to keep his two younger brothers--Jake and Tony, eight and nine, respectively, his mother would often say at company parties where she worked--out of trouble. At one time, Max would have laughed at the idea of having been offered, and he would have waved off the idea as though it were some obscure waft of imaginary smoke.

Max breathed in the bitter alchemy of scents as they drifted into the dark and grimy alley, scratching mechanically at a nonexistent itch on his arm. Smells from the Caribbean diner and the greengrocer store coalesced into the long back street between them, adding to the rotting, mildewy scents rising from the garbage cans. The cramps in his stomach were becoming unbearable now. They seemed to be having a raucous party with the throbbing pain in his head, shaking hands grudgingly like a pair of old boxing partners. He knew he had to get his paws on the stuff, and quick.

He pulled the ratty old hoodie over his feline face, darkening his yellow, aimless-looking eyes. He pushed off of the brick wall with one stiff paw, the other bunched into the one whole pocket of his blue jeans. He coughed once, bringing up a mass of bile which he promptly spat out. As he stood, the sounds of the joints in his legs popping added to the night-sounds of the city, filling his ears and making the pain in his head more unbearable. He walked closer to the street, wiping away the thin stream of mucus that ran down his nose. He meandered his way around the junk and garbage that festered and seemed to grow like some smelly disease whenever he slept, which was becoming less and less often.

He looked out into the street, lit by the slightly-yellowish car lights, speeding back and forth. He saw snow falling like heavenly dandruff in the bright light of the lamps that dotted the sidewalk, periodically highlighting other denizens of the night as they walked to and fro, sometimes glancing at Max with disapproving looks, but mostly they went their own way with a contemptuous air of self-absorption, and Max wanted it like that. Their faces always reminded him of his predicament, and even though his life had dramatically changed, it didn't mean he liked it.

He was about to walk out into the lamplight, maybe pick a few pockets if he was lucky, when he heard the steady footfalls of heavy boots in the dark behind him, echoing off the walls like dubbed drum beats. He turned and saw a tall--absurdly tall!--husky walk slowly toward him. He was wearing a black shirt with a large red diamond placed at its center. Over this he wore a dark, olive-green vest that had way too many pockets to be of any conventional make. A pair of dark grey denim pants clung tightly to his long legs, covering his immense cowboy boots. He had a nice, thoughtful face, and Max wondered how far he could push himself with a nice, thoughtful person.

"Hey, mister," he said, turning and stepping to the side, leaning against the brick wall. "You got some change on you?"

"Plenty of it," the husky said. His voice was low and rough, and he walked slowly onward. Max could now see that he was wearing a huge black fedora. Part of its brim had been bent up at the side and down at the front, covering the husky's eyes.

Max stepped in front of this new alley-mate, forcing the husky to stop a few yards in front of him. "You know, I wasn't really askin' if you got some, man," he said. He flipped the hood off his head and stared hard at the husky, who he could tell was staring hard at him from beneath the brim of his hat.

There was an annoyingly long silence, an anxious quiet that made Max mad, but he forced his face to soften and his eyes to become smooth and caring. He took a small step closer to the husky and said "You don't have to give it to me straight up, you know. There are other ways, right?"

A slight grin spread on the canine features, exposing a set of very bright, very sharp teeth. He nodded, agreeing in silence.

"What do you say?" Max asked, roguishly tipping his head to the side. "Two hundred bucks for ten minutes?"

The grin disappeared from the husky's face. In its place was a blank and unidentifiable expression that Max had never liked. He remembered seeing that look on his father one time, but that was a long time ago, in spite of what his digital watch said. The husky hung his head and stood there, motionless in the half-dark.

Max sighed and gave the husky an annoyed look. Hey, if you want to you can always shut your eyes; that's how I get by, he thought. He was, as a matter of fact, in the process of saying this when a strange sound made itself heard through the honking and bleating of car horns. It was soft at first, but it was so foreign to him that he quickly distinguished it from all the other noises. To Max, it sounded like the whirring drone of helicopter blades. He soon realized that the sound was coming from the husky; the husky was laughing.

After a few moments more of that helicopter sound, the husky threw back his head and burst out into full-scale, uproarious laughter. It was a deep, rich sound, and it made Max madder than ever. He didn't like being made fun of, and he didn't like being laughed at, and worse yet, he didn't like being turned down. He took a few steps closer to the husky, threats and insults building on the tip of his tongue. Just then the husky tipped up his head, and Max caught sight of his eyes.

They have to be contacts. Dear God, they better be contacts.

"You really think you're all that, don't you?" the husky asked him, a broad, sinister smile hanging tightly over his teeth. He shook his head once, and he continued on his way, brushing past Max as though he were...well, what? A lowlife druggie who would prostitute himself for money to deepen the sickening hole he was in?

Max shook his head, clearing himself of this one thought. He reached out a hand and grabbed onto the husky's shoulder. "Hey, man! You can't--."

Suddenly the husky whipped around behind him in a flash of white and black. Max felt a pair of massive, powerful paws dig into his back, and in a moment he felt a gust of wind, then an explosion of pain as his back struck the wall of the building, driving the air from his lungs. He doubled over and clutched at his knees, seeing little needlepoints of stars fading in and out. He tried to take in a deep breath when one of those massive paws wrapped its long fingers around his neck and another just below the armpit, jerking him up against the wall. The husky's face filled his vision; a huge, grinning mouth lined with huge, dazzling teeth; a pair of unnatural eyes that glittered with a dangerous intelligence. Max felt the husky's hot breath wash over him, a nauseating odor that smelled faintly of summer rain, but more like rotting meat.

For a moment, he tried to push away from the husky, but the paw holding his neck tightened and jerked him upward, clearing a space of half an inch between his shoes and the ground. A low, rumbling growl filled his ears, drowning out everything else. It was like the sound the Earth would make if it was being split apart.

Suddenly, Max saw an otter in a red coat and sweatpants walk by under the light. He suspected the otter would continue to walk on about his own business, but instead the otter, by some random chance of light or curiosity, glanced into the alley and stopped dead in his tracks when he saw them. His brownish-beige face was full of dumb shock and surprise.

Max pleaded with his eyes. Please help me. Please get him off me...

Suddenly the otter's eyes narrowed into slits and a snarl was poised resolutely on his muzzle. He walked on, shouting with a rigid, dogged voice. "Hey fags, get a room."

Max felt his stomach go cold, as though he had swallowed a whole tray of ice cubes. His limbs became limp, almost senseless with helpless fear. No...No, please come back! Please--.

That helicopter-laugh drifted low and soft into his ears, like the water of a brook sidling into a larger lake. Max felt the husky's hot and damp breath wash over him, and the smell of putrid meat filled his senses like a dark red cloud. His stomach churned painfully at that smell, and as a tear squeezed itself slowly out from beneath his eyes he began wondering, not for the first time, if his decision to strike out on his own really was worth it.

He risked a look up into the husky's terrible face, trying desperately to avoid looking into those horrible eyes. He noticed the symmetry in the black and white fur pattern; the black forehead, the elongated ovals of white above the eyes, the white beginning below the eyes, intruded upon by diagonal angles of black that faded to a silvery grey just below the eyes, the black top of the muzzle ending at a pitch black nose. For one brief, hysterical moment, Max thought of the barrel of a huge black-and-white gun, and he was staring down its abysmal, oblivion-filled end.

He struggled to get out of the vice-like hold the husky had him in, but each time he moved he felt those huge paws grip him harder and that hellish breath on his face. He was afraid that if he continued to breathe in that smell, he'd be seeing the tuna sandwich he ate earlier that evening he had by chance found on the ground at his feet.

"Here's the plan, Stan," the husky said, his large, toothy mouth barely moving as he spoke. "You're going to run as fast as you can, and if you can get out of my face in less than five seconds, I won't rip your balls off and stick you like a bitch. We got a deal?"

Max whimpered and looked out into the lamp-lit street. It was only eight feet away, but for all it was worth it may as well have been eight miles. He waited for somebody to glance into the alley and help him, but nobody did, as he expected. He wondered if he should cry out, to shout and scream and kick out at his assailant, just as he had been told to do by his parents and his school. Maybe he'd be let off with a few smacks before his tormentor ran away, afraid of getting caught.

Suddenly a mind-numbing pain lanced up from his groin, traveling in a fiery path throughout his whole body. He began to whimper as the husky's paws tightened around his crotch, yelping as he was roughly jerked upward.

"Do we have a deal?" the husky said, emphasizing this last word with another ruthless tug on Max's privates. The young white tiger nodded crazily, wanting to be away and gone from this horrifying psychopath. There was a long moment of suspenseful anxiety when Max thought that the husky wouldn't let go, but a moment later he felt that hellish force disappear. The icy knot of pain still remained in his stomach and groin, however, and when the fell to the ground after the husky freed him completely, he clutched helplessly at his stomach as though the pain would force his innards out.

He sat there, holding himself and trying not to cry (he had read enough novels to know that the bad guys never quit if they see you in a moment of weakness). Suddenly the tip of a huge cowboy boot thudded dully against the wall at his left. Max looked up and saw that the husky was glaring down at him from beneath that umbrella-like hat. The red eyes with those three-pronged pupils stared down at him, glinting in the dark with malicious aptitude, and as Max stared up into those eyes he thought he could hear--dimly, faintly, yet still there all the same--the grinding and hammering of invisible machines and cleverly made gears.

The husky leaned down until he was level with Max. His voice was like the sound of an approaching thunderstorm a few miles away, announcing its grievous presence. "Five seconds, kid," he said. "Waiting on you."

The pain in his stomach and crotch was like a harsh, throbbing ache, but he managed to push himself off the ground by levering himself up with his paws on the wall. He knew when the husky tapped the wall beside him that he wouldn't let him run out of the alley into the lamp-light, so he made to go deeper into the dark. There was a connecting back alley at the end of this one, forming a sort of trash-filled "L" between the buildings. He stumbled for a few feet, but instinct-borne panic fueled him with enough energy to force himself to run down the garbage-infested canal, hopefully into the connecting street to the left. His ragged shoes, a pair of the few things he still had from the life he so wanted to leave, struck the paved surface with soft explosions of sound that he could barely hear. The only thing that he could hear were the husky's words, cycling over and over in his head like a song on a bum CD.

_ Five-seconds-kid-waiting-on-you...five-seconds-kid-waiting-on-you...five-seconds-ki--._

Max was three feet away from an overfilled garbage can--a reddish substance that might have been ketchup was caked on its side, spilling over and mixing with a floury assortment of orange, blue, and black fungi--and was about to hide behind it when a loud thunderclap exploded off the walls around him. There was a moment of confusion, which was instantly replaced by terrified shock when his vision was filled with dark red, and a hot streak of agony exploded on the side of his face as though someone stabbed him with a red-hot poker. The force of whatever it was that struck his face drove him sideways, making him spin on his heel as he collided with the garbage can, spraying a tattered collection of garbage over the street and against the wall.

Max lay with his arms and legs splayed out in the trash-ridden ground, feeling a warm liquid gush into his open mouth. It was bitter and sweet, and after a few moments he could also taste the salty stain of tears. A few moments later the redness faded to black and he lost consciousness.

* * * * * * *

The tall husky's grin never wavered as he lowered the pistol, white smoke drifting up from its silver barrel and into the cold night air. He put the gun, a .44 revolver whose once-famous name had been lost two hundred years ago, into the lining of his grey pants, throwing his black shirt over it. He adjusted the brim of his fedora, tipping it further over his eyes. He took a deep breath, inhaling the late November chill as it swept in from the North, tasting the myriad of scents as they were sucked into his nostrils, licking his lips distractedly. Then, with a final glance at the prostrate tiger lying in the garbage that littered the black back alley, he turned on the heel of his unpolluted, dirt-free cowboy boot and walked determinedly out under the white-gold light of the lamp.

He passed a young hedgehog girl in a short skirt and winter jacket, who pulled the ear-buds of her iPod out of her ears long enough to mutter the word "Jerk" under her breath.

The husky stopped with a twitch and looked over his shoulder at the young girl, whose surprised gasp matched perfectly with his sudden movement, as though a week of rehearsal had been put into the act. The husky grinned and walked on, hooking his thumbs into the pockets of his pants. The girl bundled her jacket tighter about her body and trundled off in the opposite direction, her designer shoes matching in step with the beat of her heart.

In the back alley, over the sidewalk, in the lamplight, the snow continued to fall.

II

For Max, the world was a vague blur, punctuated with infrequent bursts of light and pain. He would wake up, see the distant objects fading in and out of focus, and ultimately give up trying to stay awake and fall back to sleep. He saw the men in white pass him by smoothly and silkily like he was in the middle of a ballroom waltz strictly for men in white. He could feel many pairs of smooth hands prodding at him, rubbing at his body, mostly at his face, and when they did this the pain would flare up again and he would try to shrink back from them but he couldn't move, so he tried to go back to sleep.

One time, Max was awake long enough to see that he was in a strange bed, little tubes snaking out of his arms. Men came in and started asking him indistinct questions. These he took to be more dreams, and he went back to sleep with no answer.

This time, Max woke up and decided to keep his eyes open. His vision was one big mass of blurred shapes, but after a short while things began to come into focus. The room was white, but it was a familiar shade of dark that for some reason felt so cozy to him.

He couldn't remember a thing. His memory was just a fuzzy black hole, taunting him as he tried to grasp at its contents. He found out, though, that thinking too hard or for too long made the pain in his head worse, so he stopped trying to remember. The bunk he was laying on was hard, but he knew he had lain on harder things in the past two years. His left eye felt as though it were gummed shut, and the other one felt so heavy it could only open up into a small slit. The ceiling was white and tiled, and a metal frame wound at an angle above him. Something buzzed past his nose, and as it slipped upward in the air and alighted on the metal frame he noticed that it was a ladybug. It skittered on the metal aimlessly, just busy moving, trying to get from A to B as quickly as possible, wherever the hell B was supposed to be.

Max turned his head a little to the right, bringing up a small wave of pain in his head and his stomach. A large bulky machine with dials and knobs winked complacently while a bunch of transparent snakes rose up and sneakily hid under the white sheets of his bed. His one good eye looked down a little further, and he noticed that he was wearing an oxygen mask. On the far wall was a solid white door, and beside that was a landscape painting of a rundown house. It had been taken over by huge clumps of grass and flowers, and in the foreground taking up most of the space was a rickety old wheel. Max wondered what in the hell people saw in art like that. He then understood that he was in a hospital.

Above the white door was a clock. It read five minutes to twelve 'o' clock. Midnight magic hour, Max thought distractedly. He closed his eyes for a moment, and fell back to sleep before he knew what was happening.

III

"What do you think, Stu?"

Stuart Benedict took a deep sigh, breathing in the sanitary smells of the hospital. He glanced at Rudy Draven, the lab technician, a recent transfer from Vermont, and the more he looked at the youthful features of the twenty-two year-old fox, the more he thought of the kid that just came in. That lucky kid, who had been found in an alley half-dead, bleeding from a gunshot wound in the head. He thought about that kid and subsequently thought about his own grandchild. Not for the first time, he began wondering if this was the right profession to be in.

"The kid's damn lucky," he spoke softly to Rudy, fiddling with the hairs of the reddish-brown beard on his pale, untanned face. "Another inch--hell, even half an inch--and he'd be in the morgue right now. There's heavy bruising on his groin and thighs, so I think we can add sexual assault to the list. We also found traces of heroin in his bloodstream."

"What? But he can't be more than...fifteen or something."

Stuart gave a wry grin. The smile felt unwanted, unnecessary on his face, even if it was in response to the irony of Rudy's words. The fox had just started his career in medicine, and already he was shocked to find that the world of medicine wasn't the happy, care-free, germ-free, and drug-free world he was used to. The world of Medicine was an entirely different plane of existence, a topsy-turvy place where you have to keep on your toes if you want to keep your patients and, somewhat less important, your sanity, intact.

"Hard to tell what the kid's age is; he either didn't have his wallet with him or it was stolen. We'll have to wait for him to wake up to ask."

"When do you think that'll be?"

Stuart shrugged, an expression that never looked good on fifty-three year-old doctors yet was practiced so professionally. He reached for another cup of coffee (black, always black and rich with that special stimulant that keeps him completely awake and only half-alive), took a sip, and set it on his desk. He sat back in his uncomfortable chair, laced his fingers into a steeple-like construct, and stared at the wall on the far side of the room. After a small bout of silence, he posed a question to Rudy, who had irritatingly begun to shift his weight back and forth on his shoes like a goddamn see-saw.

"Who brought him in, d'you know?"

"Somebody called Terri Soames."

Stuart sighed again, which Rudy efficiently took to be a sign of exasperation.

"Her again?" was all that the doctor said.

"You know her?"

"She's a humanitarian from another age. She takes in kids--runaways, vagrants, punks, drug users--and she takes them into her own home, believing that getting them together in some sort of homely environment might be the proper kind of treatment."

"Does it work?"

Stuart gave a forceful exhalation that might have been a laugh. He looked up at Rudy and said in an oddly vivacious voice "She's still alive, isn't she?"

"Hmm. Well, what are you gonna do when his parents come around?"

Stuart gave a soft grunt of acknowledgement, another expression that seemed to be used so often by members of the medical profession. Rudy waited for the doctor to answer, but there was another strangely long pause, which he used to think, and as anybody who knew the son of ol' Guitar Crane, he always thought clearly when he shifted his weight on his shoes.

Finally, after a few more moments of dead silence, Rudy started to walk out of the office, his tail hanging limply between his legs like a dead pendulum. He was deep in thought as the tips of his paws touched the brass doorknob, and he heard a sound behind him. It was like a cough, but it seemed more forceful.

"Rudy?"

"Yes, sir?"

"I think you should bring in that pot of coffee from the waiting room."

IV

It was three days later that the doctor, a grey-haired human of medium height, drooping features, and a scruffy red beard with a pair of tiny spectacles that made him look like an old Richard Dreyfuss, came in and started asking Max a bunch of questions. Max expected these questions and he knew the answer to every one of them: I can't remember. Eventually, the doctor tired of having to ask him about whatever happened to him, so he stopped entirely with promises that he'd ask them again when his memory started to come back. Max, who understood that no event can be good when the outcome puts you in the hospital, and therefore had no intention of wanting to remember, agreed.

After that, the doctor started asking him what his name was (Max Trenton), how old he was (fifteen), where he lived (Max thought it over, then decided that the doctor may as well know that, even if the result was going to turn him into Hungarian goulash), and a range of other questions. He breezed through all of them, wanting nothing more than to be by himself and think. The golden sunlight was coming in through the window in the left wall, and Max found it, along with the warmth the sun brought as the beam traveled over his bed, exceptionally soothing, in spite of the cocktail of drugs he had to take to control the raging twin beasts in his head and his stomach. The only problem was that the doctor was standing in front of the window, blocking that soothing light with his shadow, holding that damn clipboard like it was the be-all and end-all of existence.

After a few more questions, Richard Dreyfuss lowered his clipboard and made as if to go when he turned around and asked about the pain. Max answered truthfully. The doctor nodded his head and walked out of the room. He shut the door behind him, but Max was sure that he could hear the sound of a pen scribbling something on a clipboard.

He settled back into the hard mattress, sighing as the womb-like warmth of the sun seemed to clear his head of the rough hailstorm that plagued it (the pain was still there, but at least it was lessened to some extent). He wondered what would happen if his parents would hear about what happened to him. Would they welcome him with open arms back into their lives, knowing full well that he had run away for two years? He didn't need a prophetic eight-ball to know that the answer would be no. The day his parents dropped their stuff to help him wouldn't happen occur if news that Hell had frozen over was reported world-wide. He turned his thoughts around and tried to remember what really had happened to him.

His memory was like a dense, black forest, composed of gnarled and rheumatic trees from a nightmarish landscape, interwoven and tangled with each other to form a massive wall of fuzzy darkness. The problem was that there was always some spot in the forest that he could see, far and distant yet still there, but the constantly rearranging and reshaping branches continued to block the entrance. That spot, hazy and faint, goaded him on every day and night, begging him to uncover it. Why couldn't he remember? Max fell back into the steady warmth of sleep.

The next day there was a knock on the door. Max was in the middle of eating the hospital version of oatmeal and eggs with a side of orange juice, which he found generally tasteless except for the orange juice which tasted as though it had been lost in the refrigerator for the past fifty years and had suddenly been discovered and put in his glass. The door opened, and a human woman peered politely out from behind it. She gave a soft, interrogatory "Hello?" that made Max think of the sounds of elderly librarians as she stepped into the room and closed the door.

"Do you mind if I come in for a minute?"

Seeing as how she was already in the room, Max shook his head, trying to swallow a mouthful of the blander-than-average oatmeal. The woman was thin, a little short, with kind blue eyes and black hair that ended in a pair of ponytails that reached the lower part of her neck. She had high cheek bones and a dark, chocolaty shade of skin, and the teeth in her smile matched the color of her khaki pants and top. She walked over to the side of his bed and sat in one of those uncomfortable hospital chairs.

"Hey, Max," she said, proffering a large and dexterous-looking hand toward him. "My name's Terri. I was the one who found you and brought you here."

Oh hey, great! Thanks for putting me in this wonderful place that makes me think so much of what the inside of an aerosol can might look like. Did you know Richard Dreyfuss works here? Crazy, isn't it??

Max reached out his own paw and took hold of her hand. It was warm, but it was slick with sweat. He looked up into her blue eyes and felt an uneasy stirring in his stomach, a disquieting feeling that something would go wrong. But he mentally shrugged it off and reprimanded himself for thinking it. The woman sat in one of the uncomfortable hospital chairs, leaning on the side and crossing her legs.

For the next twenty minutes, Terri Soames talked and Max listened.

V

He listened as she told him of how she found him lying in a pool of blood and garbage in the alley, how she bandaged him as best as she could with the skimpy towels she had just bought from the store, how she drove as fast as she could (and nearly killed herself and a few needlessly cautious drivers) to the hospital and saw to it that he got the utmost care.

Max sighed and looked straight ahead at the blank television fixed to the wall. He clenched his fists tightly, angry at himself for not being able to remember.

But Terri had also talked to his parents, and that was a problem. He could just hear them now, their voices bouncing off the cream-white walls with enough force to shatter glass, screaming to each other about him like his name was some kind of ancient, Teutonic curse. Yet somehow, he still felt a needle of astonishment drive itself home when she told him that they agreed to have him spend a few weeks at her home. "In the hopes of curing you of your uncooperative tendencies," Terri said. Max sniffed at this, but said nothing. There were so many things running fuzzily through his mind at the moment, he couldn't stop and think clearly enough to speak.