Pearlie the Park Fairy
Saphira's New Assignment – Chapter 1
"Why do you get up five times a night?" Azula asked her fellow park fairy Karo as she prepared herself for another day as park fairy by making certain her gold trimmed, black vest, boots and the rest of her uniform looked intimidating. "My dreams are alive with the sound of flushing!"
"The ol' prostate keeps acting up." Karo said as he combed his hair and pushed his glasses up his nose. "You know that I think we got screwed by the cosmic whatever runs the show when we got assigned to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone as park fairies. How does this hole count as a park since persons seldom come here."
"Karma? You sound like a wood nymph or an overly wild elf." Azula straightened her hairpin and fluttered her transparent rose colored wings. "Hurry up. We have park inspection." Karo and Azula lived in a set of holes carved out of a tall oak tree and Fairy HQ punished them as a set. Karo was Azula's cousin and they had grown up together, served in the same park and ended up in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone as park fairies for the same reasons. They made the best of it and had arranged the hole in the tree into a nice home they tried their best never to leave. Karo had shown his talent for scavenging by finding as much lead as he could use as shielding against the invisible dangers of the 'zone'.
"I didn't do anything wrong as far as I can tell." Karo fixed his Fire Nation gold hairpin in place. "Fairy HQ disagreed with you when you took such stern measures with the rats. As I remember; you tied the most disorderly ones to a board and I merely poured water over their heads."
"I had to teach the worst of those rats a lesson to keep the others in line. Fairy HQ wants all the parks in Fairyland in perfect order but then they limit my methods. The elders took no account of practical difficulties and so they punished me. Guilt by association meant you were punished as well."Azula complained as she checked her black and red robes and double checked to make certain Karo had not mucked up his collar. "You bring this up all the time and my answer is always the same."
"The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone? Always seemed a bit harsh of a punishment in my eyes." Karo fluttered his wings to stretch them and get some blood flowing into them. Fairy HQ and the Fairy Elders defined the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone as an involuntary park. The persons had abandoned it after the nuclear disaster and it had reverted to its natural state. This made it a draw for tourists wishing to see wildlife and naturalists wishing to study the ecology of the region as it might have been before human meddling. Karo never understood the reasoning behind the inclusion of the Exclusion Zone as a park and he griped a good deal about his lot as a prisoner within it.
Azula fluttered her wings. "We have to visit the Sarcophagus and count the birds living there. We haven't done a count since early spring and if Fairy HQ doesn't receive an update for the beginning of summer we might get a visit from that jackass Gobsmack." She looked at Karo. "I keep hearing life is fragile but it bloody well astonishes me with its determination to keep living in places sanity would rule out. Those birds absorbed a radiation dose which could kill a person in a week and yet go about their business as if it doesn't matter." Azula never expressed any remorse for her harsh treatment of the rats in her park and accepted her posting here. The Fairy Queen herself had insisted on this punishment and Fairy HQ made sure she served it. Fairy HQ struck her as an idealistic, out of touch group of meddlers who completely missed the point when it came to keeping order. Azula knew order came from a stern and rigid hand applying set rules with strict punishments for breaching them. She liked her posting in the Exclusion Zone since Fairy HQ left her largely alone and she seldom had to make any effort to keep order.
"Can't we simply lie about the numbers?" Karo suggested.
Azula patted Karo's back as a kind of morning ritual that meant 'watch my back'. "We have park patrol."
"Message for the Chernobyl Park Fairies." Just as they opened the round wooden door, they found a dragonfly hovering in front of the cozy hole in the mutant oak tree the fairies in charge of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone called home. He buzzed around with urgency and kept repeating his message. The Delivery Dragonfly dropped a yellow envelope off just outside the front door and left swiftly in an act of self preservation.
Azula picked up the yellow envelope and snickered. Karo remembered the snicker as the same one she had used when the Fairy Elders had ordered them to come here.
"Gobsmack the Head Goblin" Azula began.
"This won't end well." Karo tightened his hands into fists. "Kill me now and I'll try my luck making a living as an intestinal parasite." Gobsmack had the responsibility of keeping Azula and Karo in check, giving them tasks and reporting to the elders on their conduct. Azula regarded him as a needless bureaucratic meddling civil servant with bad taste in clothes (although she used other words which were ruder). She made certain Karo spent most of the time with him which made Karo very miserable, uptight and gave him stomach complaints. Karo knew Chernobyl consisted of a poisoned realm and could never be fixed by any form of magic. Gobsmack always wanted improvements made to the abandoned parks and fields of the Zone to please persons despite the fact more than a day in said park or field would kill a person. Gobsmack always filed his report which stated all of the bad things in the park. Karo doubted Fairy HQ would ever let them leave.
"Fairy HQ...blah blah blah" Azula read dully through the introductory prose which said little and summed up the last paragraph. "Saphira and Ludwig will come here as punishment for severe misconduct."
"We're not a park" Karo uncurled. "We're the land the persons said no one should ever live on since they could develop parts in odd places."
"Yes..." Azula dryly intoned. "How badly did these two screw up to get sent here."
"How big is Russia?" Saphira complained as her long black hair streamed out in the cold Russian wind.
The sad answer to that question was 'bloody big' but Ludwig chose to remain silent on that. Hour after hour on the back of a dragonfly revealed trees, pine trees, the odd railway to nowhere and trees. Saphira had given up on giving the place a scale and assumed it would end in an ocean somewhere. She had screwed up big time to lose her spa, her position as second fairy and get a training seminar from the park fairies in Chernobyl. Technically Chernobyl was a park but not the kind of park made for pleasant visits but rather the kind of park made to keep people at a distance because the oak trees had an abnormal biochemistry. Saphira hung onto the dragonfly hoping the flight would soon end.
It didn't.
Hour after hour dragged by as Saphira contemplated her fate and wished she could shove Ludwig the bat off the dragonfly but he could fly so he would not make a nice splat noise in the Siberian wilderness. Saphira had tried one too many times to scheme against her cousin Pearlie and Fairy HQ and Gobsmack decided she merited punishment. She had anticipated the typical stern warning and then the need to bribe Gobsmack. She had not anticipated that Chernobyl needed a spa fairy.
Fate puked on her. On the surface, this was a promotion since she would have a spa that would service a huge area. That the huge area had no persons and constituted a toxic zone didn't count in the equation. That she had to learn new names for new toxic isotopes didn't matter – Cesium had a half life of - so what?
Pearlie and Opal had a nice life in a lush city park.
She had to spend part of her life in a nuclear disaster zone.
She had to cope with fairies even more neurotic than Jasper. The Chernobyl park fairies had a reputation for being insufferable and not quite mentally right.
The head park fairy Azula could kill with an insult. She had her assistant Karo who could kill by sheer incompetence. Saphira knew them both by reputation and by the lecture Gobsmack had given her. Azula had a promising career as a park fairy but went overboard on the quest for order and done unspeakable acts to raucous rodents. Saphira had made trouble for Pearlie and usually suffered a few inconveniences and scolding from Gobsmack. Gobsmack made sure to tell her that Azula would simply slug her in the face (or far worse) if she tried to pull anything but he didn't elucidate on the far worse bit. Karo had grown up as half elf and half fairy but trained as a park fairy and served with Azula. Karo had all it took to become a great park fairy but he had followed Azula's orders one too many times. She imagined like all elves, twenty years in a nuclear wasteland had turned him quite odd.
Three or four time zones later, the dragonfly began a slow turn south.
"Prepare to jump!" The dragonfly said politely.
"What happened to service with a smile?" Saphira asked sarcastically.
"Welcome to Chernobyl." The dragonfly banked suddenly. "Grab your bags, your bat and prepare to depart."
The Sarcophagus as the Soviet engineers had named the containment structure offered plenty of fine places to explore for the curious fairy. Karo didn't have curiosity but Azula enjoyed being witness to the massive manner in which persons had screwed up. The Sarcophagus wasn't dead: it had swifts, swallows and blackbirds nesting in the steel roof. They flew in and out of the bus sized holes in the roof. These holes weren't acts of carelessness but existed to allow heat out should the dead reactor come back to life. The thick concrete walls provided protection from the elements and kept the destroyed mess of dust, steam pipes, graphite and machinery from spilling out. Even persons found the scale of the Soviet nuclear reactor intimidating, the two park fairies found it almost beyond their ability to grasp and had developed mental defenses to cope with it. Azula the Park Fairy unlike Pearlie the Park Fairy had always had sociopathic tendencies and her lack of empathy for most living things allowed her to get on rather nicely. Karo grumbled and complained and then fell into bouts of depression until Azula gave him busy work such as tending to roses (a civil engineering project in the Zone).
Reactor Four had contained one hundred and forty tons of Uranium fuel in a concrete cup like room the size of a two story house filled with graphite. A botched safety test had caused the reactor to explode and in an irony of physics had scattered all of it over a vast area. Azula and Karo had a higher level of protection flying over the huge but empty reactor cauldron than venturing into some parts of the nearby woods. Persons spent months collecting the fuel rods and graphite from the woods nearby. Long before they had finished the clean up; the forest had died. In spite of this massive cleanup effort, Karo or Azula would stumble on a piece of reactor sitting in the middle of a dead patch of grass in a field from time to time.
"We have guests coming over." Karo fluttered his wings to emphasize his point.
Azula knew better than her winged assistant. "No one gets a post here unless they screw up. Reveal yourself to persons and get a nice landfill to run, you murder a few rats and impale their heads on a spike and get sent here." Azula fluttered her transparent rose wings. "Fairy HQ only sends the really incompetent fairies and elves to serve here."
"You murdered rats?" Karo landed on a huge upturned steel lid that once had contained all of the badness inside reactor four.
"One has to enforce law and order." Azula said dryly. "Quit worrying! I left a note so our guests would come here to find us."
The reactor lid Karo walked across had the name Yelena as a kind of dark joke only persons understood. He had gone with Azula to care for the exclusion zone because no sane fairy or elf would go there and because he went everywhere Azula went for protection – his more than hers. He found the abandoned reactor site and the whole exclusion zone a dark and dreary place but Azula needed his help to tend to the park. She had some unpleasant duties including caring for the birds living in the reactor vault since Fairy HQ kept information on births, deaths and mutations. She did her duties out of a desire to avoid idle boredom not duty. Karo held the clipboard, kept a sharp eye out for anything big and took notes.
"Ew!" A voice rang out in the damp, dark and dank reaches of the sarcophagus.
"If that is the voice of the new arrival," Azula fluttered over a radioactive graphite block. "Your hair does grow back – kind of."
"I am Saphira and I once ran a spa for the most fashionable guests," The dainty fairy in the blue spider web skirt hovered over Karo. She looked exotic with her long, straight black hair, blue jeweled earrings and nearly perfect wings. "They sent me here because Fairy HQ wanted me to provide my exclusive services for the fairy folk here."
"All two of us?" Azula flew next to Karo. "That you tried to run Pearlie the Jubilee Park Fairy out of the park by flood, pestilence and sheer nastiness had nothing to do with it then?"
"Indeed." Saphira said curtly. "Ludwig!"
"I should help you find a decent place to stay." Karo offered. "The Sarcophagus provides shelter but the radiation shortens the lifespan and some of the trees have taken to eating small creatures. You must take care around here."
"What happened here?" Saphira asked with irritation.
"A botched safety test," Azula fluttered next to the dark looking fairy. "They wanted to test safety features on the reactor to see if they worked and they found out they didn't. The reactor exploded and spewed radioactivity over a wide area. Fairy HQ considers the Exclusion Zone a park of sorts but persons never come here unless they want an abnormally high white blood cell count."
"Ew!" Saphira said sarcastically.
"Indeed Mistress." Ludwig flapped overhead with Saphira's luggage strapped to his back. He still wore his red tie and glasses and hoped to continue his services as a kind of butler.
The Exclusion Zone had some attractive features since short lived, small creatures like birds didn't live long enough to suffer the worst effects of the radiation and the area around the reactor offered a kind of refuge for wildlife. Even a pack of wolves had made the Exclusion Zone into a home. Unlike the civilized realm of Jubilee Park, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone had a wild edge that made an African Safari or shark diving without a cage seem like tame alternatives. Between wild creatures, mutant trees and radioactive areas that could kill a living thing in under an hour, a fairy had to take care. Azula had a fondness for the haunted regions of the abandoned city of Pripyat and the reactor and Karo liked not having to worry constantly about persons seeing him.
Ludwig felt instantly dirty. Radioactive dust hung in the air and he noticed the dead trees downwind of the reactor complex. "Mistress? We should go no?" He had their luggage tied on his back and he wanted to rest his weary wings but he didn't want to do so inside a dead nuclear power plant.
"You!" Saphira snapped her fingers, "you with the green wings! I need your help to find a place to stay."
"Go Karo!" Azula held her hand out and Karo handed her the clipboard and pencil. "I'll fake - er - finish these counts. I'll be home later."
"Welcome to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone," Karo flapped his wings enthusiastically as he flew over the city of Pripyat and the gray, collapsing Soviet era apartment blocks. "I would hope you would enjoy your stay but that seems like a remote possibility. I heard Japan has a park like this too. I suppose persons have their reasons."
"Why did the persons leave this city?" Ludwig huffed under the load of the bags but managed to keep up. He felt an eerie chill come over him and a mood of dull horror pervaded this place. He saw no persons and the animals acted as if they had nothing to worry about. Rats darted across the cracked and aging pavement of the streets looking in piles of person's junk for food.
"The nuclear reactor down the road blew up." Karo said sadly as he repeated the story in briefer form. He found it odd that a bat from the English speaking world had a German accent but let that slide. "The persons poisoned this place and no one could live here anymore. Radioactivity causes all sorts of health problems for living things like persons, owls, cats and fairies. You probably shortened your lifespan by a decade or two by entering that building. On the plus side, you won't have to save for retirement. I hate this place. The persons once rode that Ferris wheel, had weddings in the park and now no one comes near here unless they want to study mutant spruce trees that grow sideways. We came after the persons had gone and this place had gone back to the wild. Azula loves this place."
"We have to find a place to set up Mistresses spa," Ludwig said urgently. "All those fairies who need their nails buffed!"
Karo landed on the limb of an old oak tree in the back yard of a church that defiantly resisted the weather and wear all these years.
"Why did you come here?" Saphira asked as she landed next to the odd little fairy.
"A long story," Karo walked toward the hole in the tree that served as home for him and his cousin Azula. "My cousin and I graduated fairy school with Opal and Pearlie. We got a prime job running a city park but the rats became unruly and Fairy HQ didn't approve of the measures we took to keep them in line. They sentenced us to run this place. The name means Wormwood in Russian by the way."
"Are you going to invite us in?" Saphira said bluntly. "I seem to remember you from fairy school. You were the half elf on your mother's side? Karo is it?"
"Of course, but Fairy School had more University credit courses." Karo motioned politely. He remembered Saphira from Fairy School and she had not treated him well. "Can I offer you some tea?"
No one ever visited and so Karo and Azula kept their two bedroom hole in the oak tree in a permanent state of chaos. Saphira had to pick her way through piles of books stacked on tables and chairs hacked out of the wood of the tree. Saphira had to stifle the urge to say 'ick' when she saw a cup of mold on what passed for the living room coffee table. The house consisted of a set of rooms connected by tunnels that Karo fondly referred to as Chernobyl's Arboretum and Subway."
"Stuff grows weird," Karo said as he stared at the cup of mold. "He began as a cup of coffee or a cup of tea. I forgot what I invited you here for."
"Tea?" Saphira said with irritation.
"If we have any," Karo pushed a pile of magazines off a couch carved in wood with ruddy brown corduroy cushions. "Have a seat."
"If you have tea?" Saphira had known a bumbling green eyed, black haired elfish fairy who hated nature in fairy school but always considered him beneath her dignity and avoided talking to him. She slowly sat down on the ugly couch.
"We don't have much but we scrape by." Karo began to search the cupboards. "You should have guessed that even on a nice spring day like today you haven't landed up in one of the beautiful garden spot. Of course we don't have to worry about..."
"May I help make Mistress's tea?" Ludwig tugged on Karo's cape.
Karo pulled out a green tin box of tea bags. "I can manage this. Best before July 1985?" Karo looked into the adjacent living room. "Sapphire? Can you live without the tea?"
"Saphira." Saphira corrected Karo.
"We have tea but...was 1985 a good year for tea?" Karo drank coffee or what passed for coffee in the Ukraine which probably meant pencil shavings or Soviet Army surplus tank rust. "Can I sell you on a nice cup of coffee?" Karo heard the front door open and slam shut.
"I'm back!" The amber eyed fairy said as she marched in and looked at the sophisticated Saphira sitting on the couch. "Let me explain a few things. According to Gobsmack's letter, you tried to glue your cousin Pearlie to one of the slides in the playground of Jubilee Park so persons would see her." Azula put her hands on her hips as she stood in the entrance way of the house. Saphira had no doubt Azula would have slugged her or maimed her for such a thing and remained quiet as she sat. "Pearlie ran quite a nice park in quite a nice city. Karo and I did some of our training there some years ago during the Summer. She drove us nuts with her gentle compassion and caring nature and delusions of optimism but the folks at Fairy HQ hold her in high regard. You should have acted with a little more calculated decorum – sucking up as it were."
"Get to the point." Saphira wound her hand as if to motion Azula to make her point.
"Avatar!" Azula snapped her fingers. "The persons movie – have you seen it? About the planet Pandora and those tall blue persons. We have a copy."
"No!" Saphira began to realize Azula wasn't making a point very quickly and that Gobsmack had vastly understated the mental instability of the pair.
"Well!" Azula walked toward Saphira. "Welcome to Chernobyl. We have no blue persons but this place doesn't forgive mistakes. Don't make any and you live."
Ludwig entered the room with a tarnished coffee pot and a few things that looked like biscuits on a tarnished tray. "We made coffee."
"Either coffee or boric acid," Karo said apologetically. "The bat guy can work wonders in the kitchen. We barely have the ability to make food."
"Ew!" Saphira looked at the beaten up tableware. "You don't have silverware with less rust."
"That's boric acid dude." Karo told Ludwig as he poured out the coffee carefully into cups. "An honest mistake as all our groceries have Russian writing on them."
Azula uttered a phrase she would come to regret. "So? Do you need a place to stay?"
"The Russian fairy mob still offer that service where the cap someone for a fee?" Azula asked Karo the next morning as she sat in the kitchen at the table. "Saphira has gotten on the last of my nerves. I thought I had no social skills and I wouldn't need them in the middle of a nuclear wasteland. I like living alone."
"Why drag me along?" Karo sat across the table from Azula pushed his glasses up his nose.
"I needed your help," Azula tapped the table.
"Ew!" Saphira yelled. "You have a dead squirrel on your front door. Disgusting!"
"Mistress does not like such things!" Ludwig cried out in panic.
Azula balled her hands into tight fists. "Grr!" She walked out on the branch that provided a porch for the home, kicked the squirrel off the branch and it struck the ground with a dull thump. "Wait until the dead tabby cat season begins."
"You have lots of dead animals?" Ludwig asked.
Azula shrugged. "They require much less care."
Ludwig looked down at the squirrel and found himself struck by a sudden fit of decency. "Shouldn't we at least bury him?"
"I came out here for a breath of fresh air and I didn't expect to see that!" Saphira moaned and did everything she could to sound disgusted. "Have you no pride in your work? Can't you try to keep this park decent?"
Azula decided to make her point subtly "Karo? Can you come out here please?"
"Another one bites the dust?" Karo walked out and looked down at the squirrel. "At least the Russian mafia has stopped dumping corpses off here."
"Karo can talk to plants." Azula patted him on the shoulder. "He's half fairy and half elf – which half is which I don't know. When you talk to our oak tree, what does it tell you?"
"It complains a good deal." Karo scratched his head. "It grew up here – of course. It hates the Germans for invading Mother Russia and has a German rifle round lodged in it. It witnessed the accident at the nuclear power plant and got a sunburn and now the water tastes funny. I quit talking to it because it's awfully depressing to be perfectly honest."
"Why do I care?" Saphira complained.
"I have talked to other plants." Karo continued. "I don't anymore because most of the time I only get one word in reply. Brains! Brains!"
"Ludwig!" Saphira hollered across the kitchen.
One day with Saphira had convinced Azula that Gobsmack the Goblin had decided to punish her not Saphira. She lived in a nuclear wasteland but she had come to enjoy her work since the Exclusion Zone was one of the lowest maintenance parks in the world. The radiation danger kept persons away and the animals and plants made little demands on her time.
"I can't read the Russian writing on this package." Saphira held out a silver foil package which felt like it contained rice.
Azula muttered something about sending a brick directly through Saphira's skull.
Karo came out of the washroom. "I wouldn't eat that." Karo said in his easy going manner. "You have in your hand one of the packages of food from the Russian Space Program. You can eat it – I mean in the sense you'll survive ingesting it – but you won't enjoy it."
"You have to be kidding." Saphira rolled her eyes.
"No," Karo pointed at the label. "Cheese and potato perogies. They need to save weight when traveling into space and so they dehydrate the food. When you are in space, you add water or recycled urine or vodka depending on your tastes. When the reactor blew up, it contaminated all the local food but they had to feed the thousands of workers building the containment building so the best way to do that was to use space food." Karo tapped the label. "The best thing about these things – never go bad."
"I was wondering," Azula seethed as she sat on the couch. "When will you find a place for your spa?"
"Hoping to get a wing polish?" Saphira said sarcastically as she paced the living room in front of Azula. "I suppose that might be a bit girly for a fairy like you."
"Mistress!" Ludwig said excitedly. "Chocolate."
Karo looked at the package. "Not quite chocolate. Try for beef flavor bullion cubes or rat poison."
"I need a suitable and upscale site for my spa," Saphira explained to Azula as if Azula was a complete idiot. "Spa guests need to feel comfortable and need an atmosphere of class, sophistication and luxury."
Azula found this very amusing. The city next to the nuclear power plant had come off the drawing board of some vodka soaked Stalinist and was a Soviet era showpiece until the reactor blew up. Soviet minders took western reporters to see this place in order to show them how advanced Soviet society had become. Western reporters could see that Soviet Russia could do anything the west could accomplish although making a car that didn't suck evaded them. Many of the buildings had begun to fall apart and the classiest building in the town was the railway station although the roof had blown away in a winter storm.
"I can't believe the Fairy Queen punished me by sending me to this hole." Saphira wined.
Ludwig tried to console her. "But Mistress you will have a chance to prove yourself and then you can return to Jubilee Park. We'll make do."
"I rigged our crystal ball to get persons TV." Azula said rather randomly. "Actually I rigged a person's TV to get crystal ball broadcasts. Amazing what you can do with a piece of Uranium and a paper clip. We get satellite TV from all over the planet and maybe something violent in the genre of cop show might settle your mind. After a day listening to you complain I need some gratuitous violence to calm me down."
Saphira and Ludwig decided to rest after Ludwig had shifted all the magazines off a lounge chair which had an equally ugly brown fabric but which looked passably comfortable. She had not enjoyed her first day with Azula the Park Fairy and Karo the Halfbreed. She sat down and Ludwig hung off a rusted student desk lamp on one of the oak tables next to the lounger.
Azula found a Korean channel that had a cop show with plenty of violent shooting and angry mobsters.
"Can I ask why you have a dead squirrel outside your tree!" Gobsmack complained as he popped into existence on the branch outside the front door. As a goblin, he had the power of teleportation but something about high levels of radioactive isotopes in the wood of the tree or the lead lining the inside never let him teleport inside. He had to make certain Saphira had arrived and had not run off to some more pleasant place like Pakistan to set up shop. As a supervisor, he was an insufferable pratt and with his squeaky clean blonde hair and his overdressed and overly formal and irritating style of management; he had one good virtue in Azula's eyes – he seldom stayed long. He had no interest in Azula's park because persons had no interest in it, Azula made no effort to make him at all comfortable and so unless Fairy HQ wished him to take a quick peek, he stayed away.
Azula answered the door. "What about it?"
"You have to take care to keep this place presentable and look after the living things." Gobsmack lectured Azula who only pretended to listen. "Even though persons don't come here; you have all the small creatures to care for."
Azula wasted no time. "The squirrel is dead. How much more can I do for it?"
"It looks seedy!" Gobsmack answered back. "I find it disgusting."
"Karo!" Azula yelled. "Tell Gobsmack what happens if we dig holes in the ground."
Karo answered between bites of his dinner which consisted of a toasted muffin. He stood on the branch with Gobsmack and looked down at the squirrel. "You want me to dig a hole? I'm not that stupid. The Exclusion Zone doesn't have one of those toll free Call Before You Dig numbers and things under the ground can wind up killing you. Old World War II shells can pulp you to mush. Soviet persons buried the nastier bits of nuclear waste in shallow pits to hide their mistakes – so they told no one where these lie. I've seen fumes rising out of cracks in empty fields that have dropped birds in mid air. The soil has its own hazards which include long lived radioactive poisons and the burly groundhogs who make it a policy to beat you up and drop your unconscious body on the edge of town if you infringe on their territory if you're lucky. They've been known to skin you and make you into cushions."
Gobsmack looked at Karo. "I see." He pointed at Karo. "Do you know that it is your job to properly care for the animals here and that means..."
A fox sniffed the air as it prowled the tall grass beneath the oak tree. Karo saw a flash of red as the fox dashed to the squirrel and dashed away with it.
"Things like that sort of take care of themselves," Karo told Gobsmack in a matter of fact way. "I see." Gobsmack said less enthusiastically.
"After a few close calls, we have learned to avoid spending time on the ground." Karo told Gobsmack. "Can I offer you something to drink?"
"Gobsmack!" Saphira yelled in a shrill voice that made Azula jump. "How come I have to spend time with that half breed and this drill sergeant of a fairy!"
Gobsmack ducked into the house in the tree with his hands behind his back. "Fairy HQ has made its verdict. I worked for a more lenient sentence but the Fairy Queen would not hear it."
"Saphira? Please stop calling me a half breed." Karo added as he followed behind the goblin.
"Azula! We have some issues to go over!" Gobsmack shouted. "I saw the ghastliest thing when I saw a dead squirrel outside your tree." He stood in front of Azula who kept trying to watch person's television, gave up and shut the set off. "I saw something ghastly – a fox came and made off with his poor body."
"A little to late to quiz me on this don't you think?" Azula sat back with her feet on the coffee table. She had less to fear from fairy inspector Gobsmack than most fairies. She lived in the worst possible 'park' on the planet so he could hardly make her life more miserable or give her a worse assignment unless the persons had a park on the surface of Venus. "Anyway it was what ol' Squirrelly wanted."
"May I remind you of Fairy Regulation Number 405!" Gobsmack tapped his fingers and Saphira drank this all in as she enjoyed watching Azula catch trouble. Saphira had not yet learned Gobsmack made more bluster than real trouble for Azula. He could rant, threaten, write her up and report her but he knew even Fairy HQ would rather ignore this place than put some meaningful effort into turning it into a real park. Gobsmack had enough trouble in his unhappy goblin life than to make a real enemy out of Azula. Azula scared him.
Azula scratched her head. "A park fairy must never...? Come on help me here."
"All unexplained deaths of animals in your park must be investigated." Gobsmack said emphatically. "All of them!"
"All deaths in my park are unnatural." Azula looked at Karo who had stood at the door remaining quiet. "Radiation induced cancers top the list. Kalashnikov rounds place second in the list; but we have had building collapses and the odd suicide. You've given me a job with a future."
"I expect you to have a report on the death of that squirrel prepared when I return next week." Gobsmack pushed past Karo and stood outside on the branch and in a wink and a pop he vanished.
"Tsk. Tsk Tsk. He sounds very unhappy with you dear Azula." Saphira smirked as Ludwig smiled gleefully.
Azula switched the television back on. "You have that kind of dark, spiderweb goth blue dress. You investigate the death of that squirrel."
"Me!" Saphira clutched her chest.
"Use Karo if you want." Azula smirked back. "If that idiot Gobsmack wants to know why a squirrel croaked and you want to curry favor with him then think of it as a means to please him."
"This is your park!" Saphira fluttered her wings in protest.
"You want to suck up to Gobsmack." Azula replied caustically. "I have done this dance with Gobsmack before. He knows no other fairies with come to the Exclusion Zone willingly so even if I don't do it, he will rant and rave and yell. He will tell me that I have become a grave embarrassment and so on. On the other hand I could lie and make up some plausible story but I making him blow his top entertains me and costs nothing."
The next morning found Karo searching a squirrel's nest with Saphira and Ludwig standing to outside issuing commands. This squirrel had lived a quiet life in the oak tree next to the one where Azula and Karo lived but Karo had never met him – of course all squirrels looked alike to him. The squirrel lived in a hole in a tree and Karo imagined he lived alone as the hole had one room, a ratty old pile of leaves as a bed, a pile of nuts and a desk roughly made out of soggy wood but not much else. Only a yellowing portrait of Stalin and a sheet of letter size white paper sat on the desk and peered out over the room.
"When will you two find a place to live?" Karo asked as he sorted through a pile of papers in the squirrel's desk. "I have to sleep on that couch and last night when I went to the bathroom, Ludwig scared the crap out of me because I found him hanging upside down on the shower rail asleep. He has these creepy, glow in the dark eyes."
Ludwig hung from a nearby branch as close to Saphira as possible and said nothing. He had felt fearful and depressed and worried about just how a bat would fit into the wild ecology here.
"This place smells like squirrel," Saphira complained.
"Lucky it doesn't smell like cat." Karo held up the sole piece of paper he could find in the place. "Dear Comrade Beria. That's an unfortunate name." Karo pointed at the top of the letter. "What do you make of this?"
"We can't read Russian." Saphira informed Karo.
"That explains why Ludwig ate a cake of soap for breakfast." Karo shrugged and read the letter. "We expect you to carry out your duties as a loyal member of the party."
"What duty?" Saphira tapped her blue boots uncomfortably. She felt open and in spite of the warm summer sun, she felt cold.
"That's all the letter said." Karo fluttered his wings. "A dead squirrel with a duty? Did you know squirrels lived such a squalid existence?"
"Had no clue." Saphira said drearily as she checked her long black hair with her hands. "I do not associate with riff raff."
Karo held up a black and white photograph of a mustached man. "Say hello to our friend Comrade Josef Stalin."
"A person?" Saphira checked her nails.
"A rather evil one if I dare say so." Karo placed the picture back on the desk and the soggy cardboard at the back fell out and a small red notebook plopped onto the desk. "He ruled Russia way before my time. My cousin Azula got sent here by fairy HQ because she followed some of his methods although she never practiced communism." The notebook looked far newer than the picture and Karo began to look through it.
"Do tell." Saphira sounded utterly bored.
"It began with the rats in a park in a town – well that hardly matters." Karo explained as he looked at notes in pencil written in neat handwriting. The notes quoted texts by Karl Marx or Lenin that Karo had never heard of but Karo thought they looked like the rough draft of a public address. "The city had a rat problem and so did the park. My cousin decided to take stern measures against the more boisterous rats by setting up prisons and devising punishments. Fairy HQ frowned on this as water boarding a rat not only gives you a drowned rat but they consider it completely unbecoming conduct for a fairy." Karo found a small red notebook and began to examine it. "They sent her here as punishment for torturing rats."
"What brought you to this dump?"
"I helped her." Karo said simply. "She found a way to impose order in an unruly park. You know that life treats us unfairly. You whip one rat with a leather strap and the Elf High Council forces you to leave your home and into exile."
"Are we through here?" Saphira complained bitterly. "This place gives me the creeps."
"Zdanov?" Karo flipped through the notebook and found the name penciled at the tope of an empty page. "What about Zdanov."
"Another Russian word?" Saphira had her arms crossed and tapped her foot impatiently.
"Zdanov the Cat lives in Pripyat." Karo took the book with him and Saphira followed him out of the dank squirrel nest. Ludwig flew overhead and circled as Karo stopped and took a breath of the fresh morning air or what passed for it. "Big gray tabby cat with sharp claws and large teeth."
Saphira looked down at the tall and unkept grass. "Would this Zadanov or whatever fellow kill a squirrel?"
"Quite possibly," Karo played with his gold hairpin. "Zdanov does what most of us do in the Exclusion Zone – engage in criminal activities. He's the local black marketeer or fence or thief. When you need things, he gets them and you pay him what he wants. He's no communist but he's made money working on their behalf."
"We can't visit a cat! A cat would eat me." Ludwig complained. "They would eat the Mistress too."
"He won't eat me because I've been a good customer." Karo told Ludwig as he began to fly out over the church roof. "I'll vouch for Saphira but you should go back home because he may eat you or just kill you. It depends on whether he's had a good night's sleep."
Saphira flew beside Karo and voiced her disgust. "How can you have anything to do with a gangster?"
"You come from a city park and have lawns and plants and trees without cancer." Karo fluttered over a deserted football pitch next to a high school. "The person's left this place to rot and we don't have much so we do what it takes to survive. Do you remember what I said about Zdanov?"
Saphira wanted to say 'ew' as she flew over a half collapsed school with heaps of paper, books, debris and broken lumber spilling out the doors. "What about it?"
"Be quiet." Karo began to descend down to a still intact cinder block tool shed near the back of the school. "Cats don't like our kind. Zdanov won't eat us. Anything else would be conjecture."
The cider block tool shed had a wide metal door that used to slide open and closed but now simply had rusted through on the bottom. Flakes of toothpaste green paint had spilled onto the cracked asphalt of the backyard of the school Saphira looked around and realized 'fixer upper' didn't do this place any kind of justice. Even in the sunshine of a summer day, the city was undeniably depressing, isolated and dirty.
"What brings Azula's helper and his new girlfriend to my house?" A voice spoke in a refined British accent as a huge, gray tabby cat walked through the hole, tail held up high and circled Saphira who turned deathly pale and Karo who kept looking at the red notebook he had found in the squirrel den.
"I'm not his girlfriend," Saphira objected. "My name is Saphira!"
The gray tabby cat circled again and purred then his ginger eyes looked at Saphira. He had a dirty red collar with a dirty brass bell that no longer made any sound."You fairy folk wind up here because you did something bad. Azula and her cousin Karo tortured rats which to me seemed like a waste of a good meal but that's me. Lots of us have wound up here because we did something bad or in poor taste or made someone angry."
Saphira shivered and admired Karo for his calm.
"She tried to reveal the existence of another fairy to persons." Karo said. "Can I cut to the chase?" Karo held up the red notebook he had with him. "Did you know of the squirrel Beria?"
"Krasny the Fox mentioned something about having him for dinner," Zdanov said as he sat on the ground. "He told me he was a day old when he found him at the base of your tree and not very tasty. So? Azula now purging us of communists?"
"He has your name in his notebook of contacts." Karo wondered if he would have to pick up Saphira off the ground as she looked very frail. "You find things for us. Did he have anything he needed finding?"
"This is new! Azula the Park Fairy regards the only good communist as a dead communist. She never took an interest in the death of one before!" Zdanov laughed in a deep booming way. He looked at Saphira who shook in her blue boots. He pointed a claw delicately in her direction and spoke softly. Zdanov fed off of fear and enjoyed tormenting Saphira and smiled broadly with his yellow teeth when he saw Saphira stumble back. He turned back to Karo with a darker look on his face. "Beria wound up dead huh?" Zdanov laughed again. "Beria never asked me for anything. If he needed anything, he died before he had a chance to come to my shop. Why do you care about a dead communist?" Zdanov sat on all fours making himself comfortable in the sunshine.
"Azula has orders from higher up to investigate this."
"The squirrels around here have always harbored communist sympathies – young Karo – you know this so don't insult my intelligence." Zdanov made a point to scratch his claws on the old asphalt. "Order's from higher up will get all you fairies killed: you know the score with the communists. Squirrels fall out of favor or say politically incorrect or don't clap during speeches at the proper time. They do not like meddlers or outsiders."
"I have some napping and some other work to do." Zdanov said pleasantly enough and then his voice became darker as if he were uttering an order. He crawled through the rusted hole of his house. "I bid you farewell and luck in your inquiry."
Saphira and Karo flew off but Saphira had to rest on the edge of the roof of the old school. "What did the cat mean by that?"
"Party purges." Karo sat beside her. "The Squirrel Communist Party has a tradition of – well – ridding itself of undesired members. It's all very unseemly but if the rest of us stay out of it – we're safe. If we dig into their affairs we could wind up dead."
"Another purge?" Azula stood in the living room and tapped her feet as Karo and Saphira rested their wings on the couch. "What would Pearlie do?"
"She would get them all talking about their differences." Ludwig hung on the student lamp. "She always settles these things peacefully."
Saphira glared at him as she drew a red towel around her as she felt badly shaken after visiting with a huge cat.
"Right." Azula snapped her fingers. "I had taken the opposite approach. The squirrels living here are radical communists but they quibble about the details so they fight among each other. I had no problem with this because for the price of the odd dead squirrel; as long as they fought among themselves they didn't pester me or anyone else. Those who meddle in the affairs of squirrels usually vanish after a time."
"Fairy HQ would never approve!" Saphira tightened the towel around her shoulders.
"Hence my problem." Azula said. "The squirrels consider park fairies or elves or goblins as the Bourgeoisie and the great oppressors of their kind. They all hate us but as long as I kept them fighting and killing each other off, they had no time to try and stage a revolution to get rid of everyone else. If they drive us off, then they would rid themselves of all the other animals living in the Exclusion Zone and turn this park into a communist state. If Gobsmack or Fairy HQ begin poking around, they could upset the delicate balance of power I tried so hard to set up. Those stupid idealistic elders have no idea of the hard realities of running this place."
Karo looked at the notebook again. "Zdanov sells to both sides and yet he said he had no dealings with Beria the Squirrel. He hides a great many things from prying eyes but I doubt if he'd lie about this."
Azula had a thoughtful look on his face. "I don't think he did. Like everyone living here, Zdanov keeps his affairs very private and you had Saphira with you and so he had no desire to spill his guts."
"Why not banish Zdanov?" Ludwig protested. "He sounds evil."
"We need him," Azula snapped. "Zdanov gets us things. If I start banishing everyone in this park who did questionable things to get by; we'd have no park to speak of."
"Did you torture those poor rats?" Saphira asked sarcastically.
Azula stepped up to the delicate looking fairy. "Fairy HQ in no way approves of torture! The fairy elders wants us to deal with all of the creatures living in the park with compassion and fairness." Azula glared at Saphira who shrank back. "I may not share these beliefs."
Saphira turned white.
"A cat nearly eats us this morning and now you want to speak with this Trotsky the Squirrel?" Saphira flew close to Karo as he flew between the trees. "I used to rely on Ludwig to fly me around the park and all this flying is taking a toll on my hair." It had not escaped her notice that all of the city of Pripyat had a slimy coating of dark greasy graphite over it. Even the leaves on the trees had a coating and she began to find herself feeling greasy. She could not fathom how Karo could accept all of this. Elves loved trees and hated environmental abuse but Karo dismissed the stunted trees and pervasive grime as part of life.
"I don't want to speak to Trotsky but I have no choice. I think Ludwig should remain out of sight – we have a large number of very big cats and an equal number of big hawks." Karo landed on the broad branch of a red maple tree. "I dislike squirrels as a matter of principle but Trotsky knows the Communists. He used to head the party but was expelled after the squirrels held their last Party meeting. They chose a squirrel named Tupolev over him as the glorious leader but he still knows everything that goes on inside it. He may not wish to talk to us but I can threaten to have Azula beat him savagely."
Saphira fluttered her wings nervously. "Has Azula ever beaten a squirrel savagely?"
"Hush!" Karo knocked on a small round door at the crotch of the branch of the tree. The door made a creaking sound and Karo smelled the dank smell of death.
"Ew!" Saphira held her mouth.
Trotsky the Squirrel had once enjoyed planned economies, five year plans, acorns, twitching his little, dark brown nose in the fresh spring air and plotting. Karo walked into Trotsky's small little flat and found the furry brown squirrel with a small ax in his back.
"How did he die?" Saphira screamed.
Karo opened the door fully so Saphira could see inside the dark squirrel's home. "Ax in the back – usually does the trick." Karo said in a non committal manner and began examining papers on the Trotsky's desk. "Come in and tell me what you see that strikes you as odd?"
Saphira vomited off the branch of the tree.
"Not quite what I noticed but we can work with that," Karo began carefully searching the small hole in the tree half expecting an ax wielding murderer to jump out of a dark recess in the room but Trotsky had died at least a day ago so he had little to worry about. "No signs of a struggle would have earned you more points in our quiz."
"You have two dead squirrels!" Gobsmack spoke from outside the small squirrel hole and Karo and Saphira jumped back. "We don't let those kind of things happen." Gobsmack stood next to Karo. "What do you have to say for yourself Karo!"
"You have some of that yellow police tape?"
Gobsmack shook his head. "Azula sent you here to find out why you had one murder in your park, now you have two!" Gobsmack could hear Karo rooting through papers.
"This is necessary for the Revolution?" Karo came out of the small wooden door holding a bunch of papers. "What would most of us do if someone came at us with an ax? You don't have to answer that Gobsmack. Saphira needs you to hold her up so she won't faint. You would struggle, scream and make a mess. Trotsky didn't put up a fight; not even a piece of paper or a pen is out of place and he wrote 'This is necessary for the Revolution' as the last entry in his diary." Karo held up a small, hardcover blue book.