by Alan Averill
At the far end of the bridge, they encounter a tunnel. The grey, overcast sky shines a bit of light into the entrance, but after they move a hundred yards or so inside, they turn a corner, and the faint glimmer of early morning is swallowed by the dark. Samira hears Tak patting around in his pockets before a bright flash briefly illuminates the darkness.
“It’s my flint,” he says, his voice loud and echoing in the near silence of the tunnel. “I lost my lighter somewhere. I could try and make a torch, I guess. Maybe soak a shirt with some gasoline and—”
“No. Let’s just go.”
Tak places a hand on her shoulder and squeezes gently; she finds the contact reassuring. Then they’re moving again, two small travelers passing through one of the fabled circles of hell, their journey illuminated every few seconds by a bright flash of sparks.
Flash. Uncountable cars have slammed into one another, creating a twisted, meaningless tangle of metal and glass. They clamber over and around it, trying to tell themselves the puddles of warm liquid their hands keep finding are nothing more than spilled transmission fluid.
Flash. There’s a small arm on the ground, its stubby fingers curled as if they were trying to grasp an egg. The owner is nowhere to be found.
Flash. A dusty shape runs past them and away from the city. Samira thinks it’s a dog, and her mind immediately settles on the poor creature she called into being back in the Beautiful Land. Tak thinks it’s more likely that the animal was an abnormally large rat. Neither of them speak their thoughts aloud.
Flash. A row of corpses in spandex biking shorts are lined up against the side of the tunnel. Each has been shot once in the forehead. The man on the far right is wearing a pair of old brown glasses, which are somehow undamaged.
Flash. A young teenager in a puffy parka lies on the hood of a SWAT van. His mouth and eyes are open, and his legs are gone. One headphone of his MP3 player has fallen from his ear, letting Samira hear the faint bass beats of a Snoop Dogg song.
Eventually, the flashes of Tak’s flint are replaced by a dim glow on the horizon. They make for it with purpose, moving around cars and leaping over small piles of people until they are both sprinting as fast as their legs can carry them. When they finally emerge from the tunnel and into the familiar grey light of a typical Seattle day, they turn to each other and embrace fiercely. Samira can feel Tak trembling under her grasp and knows that her own body is doing the same.
Most of the downtown buildings are smoking, and one tall skyscraper on the western edge of the city seems to have partially collapsed. Dirty smoke pours out of the football stadium, where Tak sees what appears to be a giant mound of bodies smoldering at the fifty-yard line. In the middle of Puget Sound, a massive ferryboat is engulfed in flames, making it seem as if the ocean itself has begun to burn. But all of that, all the burning, all the destruction, is not what has Tak and Samira’s attention. Instead, they are riveted by the sight of the birds.
…Because they are everywhere.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of the creatures swoop and caw and soar through the glass canyons of the city. Some huddle on the streets, tearing at bodies with their sharp beaks. Many more cling to the sides of buildings with black goo dripping from their eyes and something like smiles on their otherwise blank faces. As Tak and Samira watch in horror, a young woman appears in the upper window of a nearby skyscraper. She utters a heart-piercing scream and leaps, her dress billowing around her as she tumbles through the air like a wet sack. Before she can hit the ground, a pale creature comes swooping out of the gloom and snatches her in its talons. The woman’s scream grows momentarily louder, but then fades as the bird zooms into the dark smoke that now envelops the entire city.
“Christ,” whispers Tak. “Ah, Christ.”
Samira extends one trembling hand and places it in his. The sight of all these creatures has given the entire scene a vague, almost unreal quality, and she finds this comforting. It’s like it’s not happening anymore, and the feeling that she has lost all control somehow grants her courage she did not know existed.
“What now?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
“You said she was in the police station, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s that?”
“Downtown. It’s right in the middle of…everything.”
“We’re gonna die down there.”
Tak squeezes her hand, enjoying for a brief second the warmth of her smooth fingers. “That’s not a certainty.”
“I don’t know,” whispers Samira. “It looks pretty damn certain to me.”
An idea begins to form in Tak’s head, and he pulls on Samira’s hand, leading her away from the freeway and back toward the tunnel. She stumbles along behind him, listening as he starts to talk.
“Okay, so bear with me here. Judith said…She said that once you use the Machine, the birds have trouble finding you. And that makes sense. I mean, they could have killed me when I was driving in Australia, but they didn’t. And they could have killed you on the operating table, but they didn’t do that either. They left you alive.”
Thinking about the table makes Samira reach up and rub the holes in the back of her head, an action that shoots shivers up and down her spine. “Yeah, okay. I’ll buy it.”
“Okay. So maybe we can get in, grab Judith, and get out before they really know we’re there. I mean, there are still a lot of people in the city, so it’s not like they don’t have other things to focus on.”
Tak enters the dark of the tunnel and sparks his flint anew. Samira follows behind, scratching furiously at the back of her head. After a minute or so, they find themselves back at the SWAT van with the teenager on the hood. Tak grabs him gently around the shoulders, then turns to Samira. “Here, help me.”
She slides around a bumper that has been sheared off and finds herself staring at the boy’s missing legs. It’s not real, she thinks to herself as she places her hands under the stumps and helps Tak lift him off the hood and onto a bare patch of asphalt a little ways away. Not real. None of it is real. She glances up at Tak, sees the spark of a newly formed plan burning in his eyes, and knows he is telling himself the same thing. It’s the only way they can possibly function amidst such horror.
He opens the door of the van and reaches for the ignition. When he doesn’t find what he’s looking for, he jumps out and sparks the flint a few times until he locates the body of a SWAT member. Patting him down, he comes away with a large flashlight and hands it to Samira. She turns it on, sees much more than she wants to see, and decides to leave the beam focused on Tak.
“Got ’em,” says Tak, as he pulls away from the body with a set of keys in his hand. “Okay, let’s check the back of this thing.”
“What are we looking for?” asks Samira, as they move to the back doors of the van and throw them open.
“Guns,” says Tak. “Explosives. Batons. I dunno. Some kind of weapon.”
“I don’t think we can shoot all those birds.”
“I know. They’re for us.”
Tak clambers into the back of the van, digs around for a moment, and returns with a pair of automatic pistols. Samira puts the flashlight into the crook of her arm and checks the action on the weapon by clicking it back and forth a few times. She then pops the magazine free, finds it full, and slams it back into place. Finally, she clicks the safety off and holds it warily. Tak has done the same, and now the two climb into the van without another word. He takes the driver’s side and cranks the ignition, half-expecting to find the battery dead or the engine fried. But the van roars to life with an almost cheerful sound.
Tak turns to Samira and places his hand over hers as the engine chugs and the smell of exhaust drifts into their nostrils. “Okay. So we’re gonna drive into the city and find the police station. Then we get Judith, throw her in the back, and get the fuck out of here. If we’re quick—”
“And lucky,” interrupts Samira.
“Yeah. If we’re quick and
lucky, the birds won’t find us before we’re on the road to Montana. There’s nothing between here and there but empty space and asphalt. If we stay off the major highways, we might be able to get there in one piece.”
“Okay. Let’s just do it, then. Let’s do it before I lose my nerve.”
“Hell, Sam,” says Tak as he clicks on the lights and begins to maneuver the van out of the tunnel. “I lost my nerve a long time ago.”
The van pulls out of the tunnel and down the cracked surface of the interstate. When it reaches the downtown off-ramp, it hesitates for a moment, as if something inside the metal guts of the machine thinks going down there is a bad idea. But then Tak pushes the gas, and the van heads into the heart of the beast.
chapter thirty-one
The city streets are slow going. Cars and office furniture and naked mannequins and a thousand other pieces of modern civilization lie in the streets like a bizarre college art project. Much of the material is on fire, creating thick clouds of harsh, toxic smoke. Each time they drive through one of these clouds, Tak and Samira try to breathe as little as possible—the smell is indescribably awful, and the slightest whiff burns in their lungs like hot ash.
There are also bodies—lots and lots of bodies—and that is the most disturbing sight of all. Most have the single-hole entry wound of the birds, but as Sam and Tak slowly roll toward the police station, they find many that have been put down by their fellow man—as if even the end of the world couldn’t stop people from trying to settle old scores. A few blocks from the freeway, they come across a bright yellow school bus pockmarked with hundreds of bullet holes. The body of a man is lying on the front of the bus, his throat slit wide. A handmade sign propped in his lap reads simply: MOLESTOR.
Tak and Samira say nothing as the van rumbles down the street. A couple of blocks in, Tak reaches over to the radio and turns it on. He rolls the bar up and down the dial, finds nothing but static, and clicks it off. A moment later, the van lurches to the side as it runs up against a particularly large mass. Tak floors the gas and clears the obstruction after a few seconds. There’s an odd smell in the air when he does so—something like burning tires mixed with shampoo—but neither one of them bothers to look back to see what they hit. It seems better not to know.
Eventually, they turn west and drive under the tracks of the city monorail. After a couple of blocks, they come upon the train resting silently above them. Samira cranes her neck, sees a single bloody handprint on the front window, and immediately regrets the decision. She snaps back into the passenger seat and turns her attention to her own hands, watching herself peel the skin from the cuticles around her fingernails and wondering why they don’t seem to hurt anymore.
They enter the heart of downtown a few minutes later, a public square surrounded by office buildings, department stores, and high-end shopping boutiques. In the center of the square, between a small water fountain and an overturned espresso stand, a young man with dreadlocks is throwing bodies onto an ever-increasing pile. As Tak inches past, his progress slowed by a burning Dumpster in the middle of the road, the dreadlocked man looks up from his work. At first he seems surprised to see another living soul, but then he smiles wide and gives Tak the thumbs-up sign. “Christian burial!” screams the man, his voice raw and hoarse and somehow horribly cheerful. “Gotta give ’em a Christian burial!”
As Tak drives on, he glances in the rearview and sees the man grab a dead woman by the hands. Her skirt hikes up past her thighs as he drags her across the cobblestone square, and he takes a moment to adjust it before heading for a fireman hanging from a traffic light.
“How come the birds aren’t eating him?” asks Samira without looking up. Her fingers are a bloody mess; Tak briefly considers grabbing her hands but knows it’s probably futile.
“I don’t know,” responds Tak.
“Do you think he’s a time traveler?”
“No. They probably just haven’t gotten to him yet.”
Talking about the birds seems like a bad idea, almost like inviting a vampire inside the house, so they stop. As for the winged creatures, they seem to be ignoring the van altogether. Tak can hear them swooping and cawing overhead, and occasionally spies one huddling on the sidewalk with a chunk of something red and meaty in its beak, but they either can’t see the van or don’t care.
Two blocks from the police station, their luck runs out. The street is filled with a particularly large pile of rubble, and Tak has no choice but to go up and over a set of newspaper boxes on the sidewalk. He manages to clear two of them, but the third hangs up in the undercarriage. He taps on the accelerator a few times and feels the van rock back and forth, but can’t get enough traction to clear the obstacle. After a minute of revving, he throws the van into reverse and tries to back up, but this only serves to get them stuck further.
“Dammit. Come on. Come on, we’re so close!”
“T-Tak?” says Samira in a trembling voice.
“What?”
“Tak, look…. Look!”
He glances up and sees a bird watching them. This one is smaller than the others, making Tak wonder if it’s some kind of juvenile. The little bird tilts its head one way, then the other, its black eyes expanding and contracting like a camera lens searching for focus. The top of its head is translucent white, and Tak can see what appear to be little red worms writhing under the surface of the skin.
“Tak?”
“I know.”
“It sees us.”
“I KNOW!”
A pair of birds come soaring out of the sky and land next to the little one. They shift back and forth on their feet, then cough up something red and wet on the ground before taking off again. This seems to distract the younger bird for a moment; it turns its attention to the snack, giving it a couple of cautious pecks.
“We have to hoof it, Sam,” says Tak, his eyes locked onto the small creature some thirty yards away. “The station is only a couple of blocks.”
“We’re not gonna make it,” she says flatly.
“Let’s get out and move slow and easy. I don’t think the other birds have seen us, so if we can stay away from that little one, we should be fine.”
He expects her to argue, but instead Samira unbuckles her seat belt and slides out of the van. Tak’s door is wedged up against a light pole, so instead of trying to force it open, he scrambles across the seat and out the passenger-side door, dropping to his feet next to Samira. She has the pistol in her hand and is pointing it at the little bird, index finger shaking against the trigger. Tak places a hand on her shoulder, and the two of them back away from the bird and toward the station.
They move cautiously into the rubble-filled intersection. The little bird is half pecking, half slurping at the meal that was left for it and seems to have lost all interest in the newcomers. Tak and Samira keep their eyes on the bird, moving around the rubble by feeling behind them with their hands. Despite their senses working at full capacity, it seems as if the entire city has suddenly gone quiet—the crunching of their shoes as they scuffle across the broken bits of civilization is louder than bombs.
They clear the intersection and press against the glass doors of an office building. They’re now kitty-corner from the bird, maybe a hundred feet away, and it still seems completely focused on the diminishing pile of meat. They can see the top of the police station now, and though it’s covered in birds, the creatures don’t seem to have any interest in the two of them.
“I think we’re gonna be okay,” whispers Tak.
The moment he speaks, the little bird whips up from its meal and stares at them, eyes narrowing to a pair of black pinpricks. Its beak works up and down a couple of times before twisting almost sideways. Then, without warning, it spreads its tiny wings and comes flying at them from across the intersection. Tak raises his arms and tries to scream, but before the yell can even form in his throat, a loud report rings out and the bird goes flying backward into a heap of feathers and tangled limbs.
&n
bsp; At first, Tak can’t figure out what happened. But then he smells the familiar whiff of cordite and sees Samira’s trembling hands, and he knows she’s shot the thing. The little bird is flopping around on the sidewalk, contorting its body into strange, unnatural positions. The bullet has passed right through the eye and out the back of its head, so by all rights the thing should be dead—but of course, that assumes it’s actually alive and capable of dying. After a few more spasms, it lifts its head to the sky and produces a scream that sounds more like a wounded child than a creature from another world. It’s this noise, this human sound, that finally breaks what remains of Tak and Samira’s courage. Without a second thought, they bolt for the police station.
They scramble over fallen building facades and around panes of shattered glass. They pass a dozen naked corpses with freshly shaved heads and smiles on their faces. They hear the sounds of birds racing and soaring and screaming just above them, but they don’t focus on any of this. Their attention is on the steel-and-glass building that is now less than a hundred yards away. And while they’re aware that dozens of birds are milling around the roof of the station, they don’t have the capacity to worry about such things right now. Their entire world is a set of glass doors engraved with the letters s.p.d.
And then, almost before they know what’s happened, they find themselves bursting through those doors and into a small lobby. Samira trips across a large black mat in the entrance and goes tumbling across cold grey tiles, her bloody fingers leaving small trails in her wake. Tak skids over to her side and drops to his knees, worried that some unseen force beyond a simple tangled rug has taken her down. But then she closes her eyes against the pain and gives him a wobbly thumbs-up sign, and he allows himself to relax just a little.
Outside, the sounds of the birds have grown louder. Tak can hear them milling about on the roof, their talons making thin tik tik tik sounds against the asphalt. As he watches, one of them flutters down and alights on a planter just outside the front door. It taps the glass with its beak a couple of times, as if trying to figure out how the door works, before shaking its wings and flying off.
