Storks

by Alan Spencer

  "A friend of ours called and said you were back in town. I got the boys together, and we came up with a plan. The whole family has waited years for this moment. We're going to take you to the marsh. There, we've got a boat waiting. It's not for you. You're going to swim. We're going to give you a head start, Carter. We're going to have ourselves a little hunting game. And if you get eaten by a gator, it's no skin off my ass. It'll be skin off of your ass. By the end of the day, you're going to be dead, whether by gun, gator, or teeth."

  Dean was sweating in his zeal.

  Carter had to come up with a plan. The cops might not be able to save him in time. He was on his own. He wasn't that seventeen year old with a smoking gun in one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniels in the other. He was a responsible adult, and today was his day of atonement.

  They drove through Green Marsh Park. Dean parked under a set of thick trees, what would be hard to see by the carefree eye. They got out of the vehicle, and the sons pushed him on closer to the marsh. There were two pontoon boats tied around a set of nearby trees.

  Dean Munyard pointed his shotgun at the water. "Hit the water. Swim like your life depended on it, because it does, son. I'll give you an honest head start. And while you're swimming, I want you to think about Kimberly. Think about the kind of life she could've lived if it weren't for what you did to her. Be grateful for the years of life you enjoyed. She's dead and buried, and you're alive. You got off easy. Today's my chance to set things right. Throughout human history, people have had to take matters in their own hands. I'm one of those people. Now get in that water and swim."

  Carter didn't resist. Taking them on with guns pointed at him, he'd lose, no matter how fast he moved. He needed space between him and his enemies. He could escape, find help, and end this matter. The Munyards were too angry to be thinking straight.

  They were giving him back his advantage by letting him go.

  When he hit the water, the family gave a sick laugh. This was fun for them. It twisted his stomach to hear it. Good people turned bad by tragedy. You could either let the horrors of life turn you into a monster, or you could try and do something positive for the world.

  The Munyards weren't the type for positivity.

  More people were going to die because of a mistake he made as a dumb teenager.

  Carter paddled fast, hitting the water with determination. A million thoughts were cycling through his head, mostly about the variety of wildlife that could take his life or the shotgun family at his back.

  Storks were the furthest thing from his mind.

  DAYCARE ATTACK

  Bethany Carson watched one end of the playground at Greenwich East Play Place and Daycare. She clutched her heavy duty walkie talkie and spoke into it. "Stephanie, how's your section? Everybody playing nice?"

  Stephanie, with a sharp crackle of the receiver, replied, "You don't have to ask me every five minutes how I'm doing. I can see you from across the yard. I'll wave to you if something goes wrong. I could even call out to you."

  "The boss wants us in constant radio contact after that lawsuit with Kyle Redman."

  "He scraped his knee for God's sake! The boss isn't here, so screw him. He's just covering his ass. They're just kids. It's the parents you have to worry about. I'd rather change a dirty diaper and watch crazy kids play on the playground then deal with adults with inanimate objects permanently shoved up their asses."

  Bethany laughed at her co-workers candor. Stephanie had a way of putting things in perspective.

  Then Bethany screamed, "Oh my God!"

  Five seconds, maybe not even that long, the sky turned black. So many moving specks. They blotted out the sun from the sky. The flapping of wings. No bird cries. No warnings. Just the air accommodating their expedient flight. Swooping down in masses of hundreds, the kids on the playground were picked up by ten to fifteen storks apiece. Lifting the kids up by stabbing their beaks deep into their skin. Startled cries of children accelerated. Not a single kid remained in the playground. They were up in the sky.

  Bethany met Stephanie in the center of the playground near the monkey bars. Necks craned to the sky, they watched the fifty some odd children flail about the sky. They didn't fly out long before one-by-one, the storks dropped the kids from five hundred feet.

  The two women ran inside screaming and called the police.

  CREATING DISTANCE

  Carter paddled harder in the water, praying he didn't disturb the marsh waters and invite a gator to chew his ass. He kept thinking about poor Kimberley Munyard. He hated himself for what he did. If tragedy could define itself, her death would be that definition. Nothing he could do. That's what everybody said after she was carted away in an ambulance. She was already dead. Nothing. He. Could. Do.

  He'd dated Kimberly Munyard for four months. It was two days after the fourth of July, and the firecrackers were still popping and Roman candles kept coloring the night sky. They were at The Munyard's house. Dean was a trucker, and he was out of town driving his rig. Dean's mother was cheating on him and was at another man's house. That's why The Munyard brothers invited their friends to the house. They were partying in their backyard, the house being secluded enough nobody would call the cops at loud music blasting or kids drinking beer in the open air. Kimberley had taken him away from the party. She laid out a blanket and showed him the condom she'd stolen from one of her brothers (not that she told Carter that small detail). He lost his virginity to her that night. She wasn't a virgin, and she guided him how to touch her, where to kiss her, what to say, and how to say it. It turned out she'd had sex with a lot of guys before Carter.

  Afterwards, Carter guzzled beers with the Munyards and felt like any adolescent who lost his virginity to a girl. Invincible. They lit fireworks until the supply ran out. Drunk, and ready to party, Bruce Munyard showed everybody his father's .45 caliber pistol. Bruce unloaded it and re-loaded it. Yes, it was real. Yes, the safety was off. Then he invited somebody to squeeze off a round.

  Without thinking, high on his buzz and his lost virginity, Carter snatched the gun, raised it up in the air, and popped off a round. It was nothing. Everybody raised their beers and cheered. Kimberly threw her head back and howled, making her hand into a gun and acting like Carter. The badass.

  Kimberly, with her drunken gait, brought him in close, and whispered, "I love you, Carter."

  It didn't sound right. The sound was like a piece of gravel hitting a windshield on the highway. Then Kimberly was on the ground and not moving. A hole bled out from the top of her head and out her chin.

  She was dead.

  The bullet had fallen back down from the sky and killed her. The bullet Carter had fired into the air.

  Carter, forcing himself not to sob from the memory or else lose his breath, located a bank, and sloshing through mud, he sprinted down a long straightaway of trees to a mansion. The roof had collapsed. Many of the windows were shattered. The front door was gone. Bird shit had slimed every inch of the exterior. More interesting, not a single bird was around.

  That would change soon enough.

  POLICE, WE NEED HELP!

  Calls lit up the console. Receptionist Glenda Ross was helpless to answer them. Her pink, pulpy eye sockets bled between the panel's buttons. Gouged out by the long black stork beaks after breaking through the room's windows. The lines of blood branched out farther and farther down the console. Red seeping into the electronics, the machine gave a hiss, shot up a line of smoke, and then a big burst of sparks. The fire spread slowly about the room. The storks perched on Glenda's face gave no notice. They kept at their pecking order. First, the eyes, and once they'd been gobbled up, they flensed the flesh on her face until she was a skeleton with blonde hair. Those exposed teeth began to unclench, the skull shuttering in pain. But it was really the stork who'd punctured through her belly and crawled up her neck and out the mouth as if her throat gave birth to the bird.

  In its beak glistened the fetus of Glenda's unborn child.

  Glenda
was going to name it Robert.

  Sheriff Snead, the old coot who wished he'd snuck more than one hit of bourbon in his morning coffee, had barricaded his office door. Two of his deputies, Rogers and McChord, were blasting their police issues at the wall. The desk braced against the door was doing little to prevent the storks from entering the office. Beaks punctured the door as if it wasn't wood but cheap cardstock. Angrier, bent on destruction, the beaks shredded the wood. Pieces kept hitting Sheriff Snead and his cowering deputies. The door was more and more see-through by the second. The birds congregated outside the diminishing barrier.

  Ten.

  Twenty.

  Thirty.

  Forty angry storks.

  And more were coming!

  Once the damaged door collapsed, the storks flew away. Out shattered windows, beyond the holding cell where a wide eyed Jeremy Locke was sobering up after causing a ruckus at The Old Mine Bar after drinking a few too many pints, the storks escaped.

  Sheriff Snead was about to hit the radio and call in reinforcements. The deputies were still scratching their heads at what had happened.

  The slightest sound that barely registered on their ears came next.

  Crackling.

  There were eggs scattered about the halls outside the sheriff's office. White with neon green marbling. One by one, they cracked, and out came the noxious sulfur smelling gas. Dozens of eggs broke, hissing and spewing noxious gas the color of green fog. Once cracked, the air escaping sounded like Alka-Seltzer hitting water.

  Glenda's body melted to the bones once it was engulfed in the smoke. A sludge puddle of boiling caramel and liquefying organs boiled under her ruined desk chair.

  Jeremy Locke's lungs exploded out his chest, breaking through the sternum cage. When he hit the ground, he was a pink pile of active fizzies.

  Sheriff Snead was about to call in for help on the phone, but all he did was cough up melting guts. He pulled them out his mouth, link by link of viscera, to be able to speak again, to warn the world of the danger that approached them, but he died in moments. He hit the ground mixing with the rancid puddles of his deputies' bodies.

  Outside, the storks soared high.

  AERIAL ASSAULT

  Stork eggs were dropped down into the local residential area like A-bombs. Crashing and breaking through rooftops, landing in public parks, in hospitals, and anywhere where people dwelled, the deadly eggs were unleashed. Townspeople were coughing, melting, and fighting to know what befell them. The streets were flowing with boiling goo. Through the nasty fog, the storks worked unimpeded by human danger.

  Traffic cop Royce Brighton was blasting his 12 gauge at the sky. He hit a stork, watching it blow up. Its guts were human eye balls and three tongues. Before Royce could mutter "Jesus" under his breath, the shot up bird had shit before it had been tore up by bullet spray. The white and black juicy wad spattered him right on the forehead. Acting like a accelerant and igniter simultaneously, Royce was reduced to a ball of flames. His head was burned down to the bone and his brains were cooked into hamburger in ten seconds.

  Ed Allen watched as screaming people carried up high by storks were dropped and landed on his factory lot of cars. The crash of hoods. The shattering of windshields. The breaking of bones. Ed Allen raced inside his office and tried to call the police. Nobody answered. It just rang. Terrified, he grabbed a fire extinguisher and sprayed the storks with its contents when they crashed through his window to attack. The foam did nothing. Before he could think straight, he was hanging upside down from the sky as blood trickled like a waterfall down his face. They had him by the legs, seven storks per leg. Their beaks were stuck in his leg for grip down to the bone. Then they let him go. Falling fast, the man landed headfirst on the steps of city hall.

  The OB ward in Everglades Community Hospital was swarming with storks. Nurses and new mothers were fighting for their lives. Nurse Betty Heffert, the newest and youngest nurse working on the floor, watched as stork after stork flew out of windows with bundled up babies in their beaks. It was just like the cartoon storks on the stickers they put on the bubble gum cigars. Newborn mothers were given one as a funny gift once their babies were born. Nurse Heffert watched aghast as mother's in their beds were pecked to pieces, pecked so hard, arms and legs were dismembered. She held back her gorge watching a woman's head slide about the bloodied floor as birds took turns eating worm sized pieces of flesh from it until there was only a screaming skull remaining. Andrea Love, another nurse, was running across the hall with a baby in her hand when two birds swooped down to snatch the child, then another stork fired through her back like a bullet and shot out the other side. Once the hospital was cleared of children, they started laying eggs. The gas exploding from the eggs killed them all.

  Four miles west, the mall was on fire. Over two hundreds birds shit on it in tandem. Rings of fire spread on the property. Fire eaten bodies fled from the food court, the outlet stores, and the department stores burning to death.

  Baby strollers were ransacked of contents in public areas, the mothers and fathers left bleeding and dying nearby as their young children were stolen.

  The town was rendered silent except for the flapping of stork wings.

  They were returning home.

  The rookery.

  LOLA

  Carter arrived at the mansion's front steps. He had to call the police and make sure if anybody was inside that they stayed out of harm's way. He didn't want the Munyards to hurt whoever lived here too. He entered the residence after several unanswered knocks. Carter smelled the strong odor of bird shit. There was a pile of it on the porch. A human fingernail was mixed with a lock of long blonde hair. The longer he looked at it, the less it made any logical sense. Every pile of shit was similar. A hunk of flesh. A wedding ring. A tooth. Human insides in various stages of digestion.

  He started to think nobody was inside.

  This place had been abandoned.

  And what was up with the fucked up bird droppings?

  He entered the mansion in the hopes of locating a phone and making sense of it later. Before he could get into the living room, he spotted the woman standing there in a long black dress. She had a shock of gray hair that was about her head in wild frays. Those eyes lit up seeing him. She was Lola Brewster. The local recluse.

  "William." Her voice was meek. A soft word from a timid throat. "William, it's you. You're back from the war."

  Carter didn't hear her say, "I know you desire me. Lie to me all you want. You crave sex."

  "I'm sorry, my name is Carter. Do you have a working phone, ma'am? It's an emergency. I'm very sorry to disturb you."

  The woman didn't say anything.

  "Ma'am, are you...okay?"

  She snapped out of it and finally regarded him like a normal person. "Yes. I'm fine. My house...it's in disrepair. I'm very sorry for the state it's in."

  His heart went out to Lola. She lived alone. Her roof collapsed. So scared and helpless, she stayed here and didn't do anything to fix her house.

  It didn't explain the human pieces in the bird crap outside.

  The vibe of the situation never went a degree above south.

  "Ma'am, is there a phone?"

  "The other room, yes."

  She opened a side room connected to the living room. It was a study. Books lined the wall. A man's office. Law books with fancy gold spines. Some were about war. Others were literary novels, their spines barely legible between the spots of heavy mold. He spotted the phone and walked right to it. Before he realized the phone wasn't connected to anything, Lola Brewster pressed a chloroform rag to his mouth until he passed out.

  She dragged him upstairs, and said under her breath, "My William still loves me."

  DEAN MUNYARD

  Dean searched the marsh waters for Carter King. He was sweating, sucking down hits from his fifth of bourbon, to keep his rage in control. He was so close to losing it. He could've unloaded the shotgun into Carter's head and been done with it. Seeing
him had set him off. He had suppressed everything for years. If he hadn't left town that night, if he had kept his .45 gun locked up, if his wife, now ex-wife, wasn't cheating on him, Carter King wouldn't have fired that gun in the air and killed his daughter.

  A week after Kimberley's death, the funeral and the ruining of his marriage, he stalked Carter King to and from school. The incident was deemed an accident. After a series of court proceedings, Carter was set free. That meant Dean was free to kill him if he so chose. He had a Desert Eagle pistol with him that day. When Carter was walking the swamps alone, something he knew Kimberley and him did after school, he snuck up on Carter and shoved the gun into Carter's mouth.

  "Should I fire a bullet in the sky, or fire it right into your head, you fucking murderer! You killed my daughter, and now I'm going to kill you."

  Unhinged, ready to watch Carter die, he looked into Carter's eyes. The expression of horror. Of apology. Of youth. He flinched long enough for Carter to run away and escape.

  He shouted at Carter, "If I ever see you again, I'll kill you. Next time, I won't hold back. I WILL KILL YOU LIKE YOU KILLED MY DAUGHTER!!!"

  Dean came back to himself and what he was doing right now. Billy and Bob were in the other boat, searching the Everglades for Carter King. Bruce was with him, steering the boat.

  Bruce asked his father, "This is still just a joke, right? To scare him out of town."

  Dean threw back another hit of bourbon. "Of course. It's just to scare him. Nothing else. Just a joke to scare him out of town..."

  WAKING UP

  Carter felt nauseous and groggy. He opened his eyes. It required minutes to focus them correctly. He could hear the sounds of birds. The bad smell. The chirping. The shifting and creaking of wood. The cries of many babies. He saw them through the broken up sections in the ceiling. Nests made of tore up furniture. Wailing, crying, babies wrapped in blankets were tucked in nests like bird eggs. The birds offered the children human fingers, innards, eyeballs, and flesh to eat. The babies weren't taking any of it, of course. This seemed to frustrate the storks who kept pecking at the dead corpses spread about the roof and choosing a new piece of this and that to offer up.