Biohazard

18

There was a sudden wild squawking and chirping and trilling and we all looked skyward. Even the Clansmen. Except there was no sky. Above the surrounding buildings it was black and the air was thrumming with the flapping of hundreds of thundering wings. Janie was on her feet, zipping her coat shut and covering herself when they came. I threw myself at her, knocking her down as two- or three-hundred birds came swooping down in a single shrilling mass. There was nothing to do but cover my face and roll into a ball, covering Janie’s body with my own.

The birds came down.

The world was a cacophonous storm of cawing and pounding wings. I felt them beating around me, feathers filling the air. Beaks pecked me, clawed feet tore my skin. There were so many I could not breathe. I was going to suffocate in feathers and bird shit. As I lay there with Janie, I thought I heard her scream and I was certain I did. I was gasping for breath. Crying out as beaks drilled into me again and again. With one hand I swatted at them and they pecked away at my palm, my fingers until they stung and bled. The air was thick with them, with that awful humming and fluttering and squawking.

And about the time my mind began to unreel from the crowding of birds, the feel of oily feathers and nipping beaks and the gagging stench of dander and rot…they lifted. They pulled away and were gone.

Then I looked finally. They weren’t gone at all.

They were attacking the Clansmen.

It was incredible but it was happening. Something about them had drawn the birds. I saw ravens and crows, buzzards and even a few huge vultures, as well as mutated forms with greasy green wings and scaly, knobbed heads, leering red eyes and hooked beaks that almost looked like sickles. They went right after the Clansmen and clawed them with their feet and pecked away at their gas masks, their mottled heads and yellowed hands. They hit them from every direction.

One of them tried to run with twenty or thirty birds on him, some circling and dipping in for attack, but most clinging tight and pecking away mercilessly. He looked like some kind of contorted, grotesque scarecrow that was finally getting his due from the birds he had frightened away for so long. He finally went down and the birds settled over him, pecking him until he was writhing red meat. I was astounded and I was pretty sure the others were, too.

Another Clansman who’d been making a pretty good show of himself by batting away birds with a swinging chain, their broken bodies littered at his feet, suddenly let out a piercing, guttural cry and…disappeared. He vanished as a flock of birds simply enveloped him. The crows and buzzards and the rest just kept cawing and squawking as their beaks rose and fell, coming away stained red, yanking out strings of tissue. It was an appalling sight. When he was down, crushing a few of his attackers beneath him, the birds kept at it, crowding in, fighting for space like piglets at their mother’s teats. The sound of the Clansman being stripped was simply awful…moist tearing sounds and crunching noises and pulpy hammering as beaks dug deeper for hot goodies.

It went on for about twenty minutes. We did not move. We didn’t dare.

After a time, many of the birds flew off, but most stayed and discovered the corpses and remains of Fisher’s people and began to feast. And that’s when I figured it out. Of course. What did vultures and buzzards, crows and ravens have in common? They were carrion-eaters. That’s probably why they had come in such numbers in the first place…to feed on all the corpses in the streets. But when they came-separate species flocking together for reasons I could not hope to guess at-they discovered the Hatchet Clans. They decided they looked tasty.

But why was that?

The Clansmen were hideously infected and disfigured by some creeping fungus, but they were certainly not dead, not soft and greening. But there was something that attracted the flock.

Something.

The birds were still everywhere, happily feeding, fighting amongst themselves for the tastiest bits, but they were paying no attention to my posse.

“All right,” I called out in a calm, cool, non-threatening tone of voice. “We’re going to leave now. Just everyone stand up and follow me out of here. I’ll get up first.”

Tensing, I slowly got to my feet, breathing nice and slow, trying not to gag on the stink of the carrion birds or what they were eating. A raven flew over my head, unconcerned. A huge buzzard pulled a stringy red flap of meat from a corpse’s neck, chewed it down, and made a sharp hissing sound at me. Its jaws yawned wide and it hissed again, then it got back down to its meal. I started breathing again.

The Clansman were nearly reduced to skeletons by this point. The one that had tried to run wasn’t much more than that. A raven was pecking through a gash in the gas mask, tearing out pink scraps while a pair of crows sat atop the bloody exposed ribcage, spreading their wings now and then, cawing, and digging out some juicy morsel overlooked.

Around me, the others began to get up. Very, very slowly. They were seeing that they were dead center of the feeding grounds now. The birds were everywhere. Lined up atop wrecked cars and trucks like soldiers in ranks. Flying though the air, circling high above and not very high above at all. Buzzards walked around with chunks of red, ragged meat hanging in their jaws. Vultures were pecking their entire heads into the body cavities of sprawled corpses, shaking their entire bodies as they ripped at something within. When they pulled their heads free, savagely gulping down morsels, they were red and dripping.

I led my people forward, thinking the whole time, this is either gonna work or we’re all about to die in the worst way imaginable. But I did not hesitate. Years back, in Youngstown, I’d known a guy named Roger Sweed who worked at the zoo with the big cats. He claimed that when you had to deal with them you never showed fear. When you were in their areas you had to act like you belonged there. So that’s what I was doing now: just threading my way amongst the corpses and birds, being perfectly casual and disinterested in what they were doing. Which was not real easy when a raven plucked an eye out and stood there watching me, the eyeball dangling from its beak by the optic nerve.

I walked on, my empty Savage in one hand and Janie’s hand in the other.

There was bird shit and feathers everywhere, scattered bits of human, dead birds lying in tangled heaps and others dragging injured wings that scampered away as I approached.

Birds squawked at me, but I ignored them. I moved through breaks in their ranks, paying no attention to the ones that flew just over my head. Flies lit off corpses and scattered limbs and viscera, huge buzzing clouds of them. They droned at my ears and crawled over my neck but I did not swat at them. The entire time I thought the birds would attack at any moment.

But they never did.