by Leito, Chad
She didn’t ground him, because, as she said, the broken bones were enough. That day he learned to listen to his mother’s warnings, and that the crows, even if they were demons, were there to help him.
Asa stirred more as he slept. Crows began to gather around his home, their sharp talons clacking on the roof over his bedroom. Half a mile away, Harold Kensing was now back in his vehicle. A sticky note on the passenger seat had Asa Palmer’s address written on it. The ink looked like blood.
One of Asa’s most recent encounters with the crows had been right after he saw the electron-microscope image of the Wolf Flu virus on Time magazine.
He was in his room, getting dressed before school and a crow landed right outside his window and the phone rang at the same time. His mother got the phone in the other room, and Asa continued to dress while the black bird watched him from the other side of the glass. Asa put on his clothes, fixed his hair, and would catch glimpses of the bird staring at him from right outside his window.
When he went into the kitchen for breakfast, his mother was still on the phone. She was smiling, and curling the phone cord around her index finger as she listened to the male voice coming through earpiece. Asa sat down at the table behind the plate his mother had fixed for him—eggs, ham, cinnamon toast, and a large glass of milk (he hadn’t had a big breakfast like that since she had passed). He cut his ham up and dipped it in the egg yoke while he watched his mom.
She looked over at him, her blue eyes that she had given to him sparkling. “Oh, that would be so great. Asa has grown so much!”
There was talking from the other end and Asa took a drink of his milk.
“Yeah, I do. I miss him.”
Asa took another bite.
“Okay. Uh-huh. Bye-bye, Conway.”
She hung up the phone and Asa spoke with his mouth full:
“Who was that?”
“An old friend of your fathers.”
He wanted to ask more questions, but she called her work immediately after and told her that she was taking a personal day. She started chatting with the secretary, and before she hung up the clock on the wall said 7:15 and Asa knew that if he didn’t get moving that he would miss the school bus. He kissed his mother, gathered up his backpack and walked outside.
Dozens of crows were scattered around the neighborhood. Some sat on rain gutters, or telephone wires, and all of them were watching Asa. He walked to the bus stop and tried to pretend that they weren’t there for him.
When the bus doors opened ahead of him, Asa stepped on. He walked down the aisle and noticed that Amanda Pearson, the girl who had started the rumor that Asa was possessed by the devil, was holding her Bible to her chest and watching as Asa walked by. He sat a few rows backed from her, and watched as she pointed out the window to the crows and whispered to the girl next to her. They giggled and stole a glance back at Asa.
Asa rested his backpack atop his legs and buried his head in the rough fabric. Crows are normal, they can’t prove anything, he thought.
When the school bus pulled into the middle-school entrance, it had gotten worse. Hundreds of birds were on the roof, perched on tree branches and telephone wires. It wouldn’t have been that bad if crows had just followed Asa, but when he moved, their heads turned in synchrony. Hundreds and hundreds of tiny necks all rotated, pointing the birds’ beady eyes in the exact direction that Asa was walking.
In each class that Asa had, the teacher had to go and close the blinds. Otherwise, he or she would not have gotten anything done that day; the amount of birds was becoming absurd, and the students were noticing. Amanda’s rumor was well known throughout school; she had been spreading it since they were in kindergarten. Many of the children didn’t believe that there was something supernatural going on between Asa and the crows, but that day, even some of the teachers thought twice about it. In Asa’s math class before lunch, their teacher gawked at the birds staring through the window before shutting the blinds; she had never seen so many birds in one place before. She knew the rumor that was going around amongst the students—that Asa was possessed by the devil and that the crows were his followers—and she was deeply religious. After twisting the blinds closed, she looked white as a sheet, stumbled through half the lesson, and then told the class that she was feeling ill and that there would be no homework. She sat for the rest of the class period muttering prayers at her desk with her eyes closed. She refused to look at Asa for the rest of the year.
By lunchtime, there were tens of thousands of birds outside the school, and the number was growing. They were flying in from all directions. They cawed, and walked on the roof with their talons, and pecked on the windows. No one sat with Asa in the lunchroom that day; his friends seemed to have disappeared and everyone else had no problem openly talking about Asa and staring at him. He looked down at the lunch that his mother had made him. On his napkin, she had written I love you in black ink. He would have been embarrassed had one of his friends found the note, but secretly, he loved finding them; she would sporadically write them throughout the year as a surprise. He suddenly missed his mother. He kept his head down and ate his lunch, pretending that no one was staring at him. He wondered whom his mother had been talking to that morning.
Halfway through lunch, the assistant principal, Mr. Mear, came and asked Asa to come to his office. The math teacher that had prayed through most of the class was sitting on a bench right outside Mr. Mear’s office; when Asa passed, she buried her eyes in her hands. Her fingers were covered in silver rings with fish symbols and crosses, and she wore bracelets with Bible verses stamped into them.
Asa entered and the Assistant Principal shut the door behind them. He was a balding, plump man, and he was sweating profusely. His leather chair squeaked as he sat down and he reached back behind him to shut the blinds; the crows had flocked to the West side of the building to get a better view of Asa.
“Are you feeling okay, Asa?” the man asked. “Because if you aren’t, you could go home.”
“I’m feeling okay,” Asa said.
Mr. Mear jumped at the sound of pecking on the window behind him. “Because,” Mr. Mear went on, “we could call your mother right now, and she could come get you. I’ll tell your teachers not to even give you makeup work.”
“Mr. Mear, I’m feeling fine, I…”
Mr. Mear began to groan and shake his head. The cawing went on outside, and the birds continued to peck at the window. “Just say that you’re sick, boy! How am I supposed to run a school with all these birds outside? I don’t know what you did, but I’m letting you off easy. No punishment, just say that you’re sick. Call your mom.”
“I didn’t make these birds come,” Asa said. “What does that even mean? How could I do that?”
Mr. Mears pushed the phone in front of Asa. Asa called his mother.
On the drive home, his mother was ecstatic. She was telling Asa that there was a doctor at the house who was going to give Asa a much-needed vaccine.
“A vaccine for what?”
“The Wolf Flu.”
“Oh, mother! You don’t really believe that science fiction garbage, do you?”
“I think that it’s just a good safety precaution,” she said. She began to hum and they kept on driving.
They drove in silence as the birds swarmed around them. It was impossible to count, but Asa guessed that there were millions of them now. When they flew in groups, they made huge shadows on the ground. The roofs that they passed were black with birds, and they followed the car like a storm cloud. Asa saw that some of them took short cuts, and flew over neighborhoods so that they would reach Asa’s house before the car did.
When they arrived at home, the sound was deafening. The birds were cawing from every direction, and when Asa walked over the front yard to get to the door, the birds had to move to make room for him. They were covering nearly every surface for a square mile; every telephone pole, every car, every home, every blade of grass, every street sign and every fence was cover
ed in birds. Still, thousands of them flew overhead.
Asa saw that a man across the street was staring at him as he entered his home.
A tall, black man was sitting in the living room. The Alfatrex Industries symbol, a black viper, was stitched upon his breast pocket. Asa was not yet familiar with the company.
The man was tall and black. He was lean, and his forearms had veins running all down them. A cluster of scar tissue sat just below his left eye. He stood when Asa entered and smiled warmly. “Hello, Asa.”
He introduced himself as Bill Hallstead, but Asa, for some reason, didn’t believe that ‘Bill’ was the guy’s real name.
Asa sat down at the kitchen table with the man while the crows swarmed around the backyard. Asa rolled up his shirt, and watched as the man rubbed an alcohol covered cotton ball over his arm. He took a syringe, and injected the fluid into Asa’s arm. The shot burned, but Asa didn’t show it on his face.
After that, “Bill” got up and left. He said goodbye to Asa and his mother and when he opened the door to leave, the cawing was almost deafening.
Asa heard the man’s car start, and listened to him drive away. Right after the man who claimed to be Bill Halstead left the residents, so did the crows. They cleared out the sky, and the fences, and the telephone poles, and by evening the sky was clear and the streets and trees in Dritt county had an appropriate, expectable amount of birds occupying them.
Chapter 3
Take a Deep Breath: It’s a Long Way to the Bottom
While Asa Palmer stirred in his sleep, three things happened at once: the first was that the electricity surged off in Dritt County, turning off Asa’s alarm system and everything else that was plugged into a wall. This was a common occurrence; Dritt Utilities, like every other company, had to cut back in ways that they weren’t accustomed to because of the Wolf Flu. The second thing that happened was the crows began gathering in the woods behind Asa’s house. They were scattered among the branches, all looking in the same direction. The third thing that happened while Asa slept was that Officer Harold Kensing killed the engine of his cop car in front of Asa’s home.
The officer opened up the driver’s side door to his cop car, and admired all of the crows around; there hadn’t been that many to visit Dritt since the day that Asa had been sent home from school. Harold stepped onto the concrete, shut the door behind him, and almost toppled over.
Compared to how he looked now, Officer Harold Kensing had seemed healthy a few hours ago. As he stared at the bedroom window that guarded Asa from the outside world, the bags under his eyes were covered with thick, purple surface veins, and his face was dirty, and scabbed in places. Under his neck, two new bruises were forming; these hadn’t been there when he pulled Asa over. They were fresh. They gave the impression that someone had just choked him—maybe there had been threats made. Blood was gathering at a sickening pace behind his neck skin.
In the moonlight, even the crows could tell that the man looked sick. One flew down from the roof and began to tap wildly on the window to Asa’s bedroom. Harold took no notice of it: he had gone through so many excruciating traumas over the past few days that most of his sanity was gone. His boots slapped on the walkway up to the front door, but no one in the neighborhood was awake to hear it.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
Tap! Tap! Tap!
The crow sat on the bushes outside Asa’s window and rammed its beak into the glass in three beat successions.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
Asa was tossing and turning in his bed, lost in a deep sleep. He was dreaming that his mother was alive, and that she was talking to someone on the phone while he ate his breakfast. What had she said his name was? Convoy?
It was something like that.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
But then Bill Halstead showed up.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
But that wasn’t his name, was it?
Harold made his way up to the front of the drive when he noticed the crow tapping on Asa’s window. It was perched atop the bushes, banging its beak into the window. The animal stopped, looked at Harold, and then went back at its work.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
“Shhhhh,” Harold whispered, and he held the barrel of his gun up to his mouth like a grade school teacher will hold up her index finger when she’s trying to quiet rowdy children. “You’re going to wake people up!”
Tap! Tap! Tap!
“Hey, stop it!” Harold stumbled over his boots and his back rammed into the brick wall of Asa’s home. He didn’t feel it; he was numb all over.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
Harold bent down and picked up a rock from the flowerbed. It was hard and covered in dirt. He weighed it for a moment, and then slung it right at the bird, putting his massive body in his projection. His aim was dead on, and a smile filled his pasty white face as the rock turned in the air. The crow “Kaw!”ed, erupted in a cloud of feathers as the rock hit, and then fell to the ground.
Harold was giggling when the thousands of talons left the roof above. In his dumb, almost dead state of mind, he didn’t realize that they were headed for him.
Millions of birds were flying in from all directions. All of them were crows. It was the most crows to occupy Dritt since that one day…
Asa was mumbling in his sleep as Harold Kensing was screaming outside. Asa didn’t stir. “She talked to Convoy, or Conmay, and then the crows came. That was the day.” He shifted on his pillow. The alarm clock on his dresser was off, and showed no time. The sun would be rising in the East in another half hour. “It was the same day that he gave me that injection. The black man with the veins in his arms. The scar on his face. That was the day that the crows came. They covered the ground.”
Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap!
A new bird had taken the place of the one that Harold Kensing had taken out with a rock. The sound came in loud and clear in the dark bedroom, but Asa was still sleeping. “Conlay, or was it Conman? Or Convoy? She talked to him, the crows came, and then the black man with the scar under his eye… He’s the one… He gave me my vaccine…”
Harold Kensing was screaming, walking backwards, and swatting the birds with his huge hands. They were swarming him, thousands of crows were flying around his body, landing, and pecking at any surface they could find. For some, they got beakfulls of Kevlar and clothes and boots, while others found soft, penetrable flesh. Blood was falling to the grass in drops from the black, sharp beaks. He lifted his firearm and tried to pull the trigger but it wouldn’t budge. “The safety,” he muttered. He kept his eyes shut tight, and swatted away two birds that had perched on his face. He disarmed the safety, and at the same time, a crow stabbed a sharp beak through his eyelid.
Harold was crying and screaming, and the gun went off, putting a bullet through his left foot. He collapsed to the ground.
Asa’s eyes shot open and his heart was pounding. A second gunshot rang out through the night and he stood up from his bed.
Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap!
He split open his blind and saw three crows perched atop the bushes, tapping frantically at his window. By now, he knew to listen when the crows tried to communicate. Behind the birds, a cop car was parked crookedly in the street with one wheel on the curb. Asa’s mouth opened as he saw a bloody figure rolling over the grass, being attacked by crows. The person stood up, swatted the crows away, and for a fleeting moment Asa could recognize the face of the man who had been sent to kill him—Officer Harold Kensing.
Harold Kensing collapsed over his own feet while he was running blind through the cloud of black wings and beaks and talons. The birds were relentless, and even more came down from the sky to attack.
“No,” Asa said. The birds had to be telling him something; something bad was out there and he had to run.
He opened the door to his bedroom and dashed out into the living room. Through the back windows he saw a sea of black, with crows covering every surface in the backyard. He threw open the door and stepped
outside.
As always, the crows were staring at him, their tiny black eyes were drawn to something about Asa’s face. Something that he inherited, perhaps. He ran across the back lawn and heard another gunshot erupt from the front of the house.
Asa jumped the back fence, and started out for the woods. The crows moved out of his way as he ran, and thousands followed him. In all the commotion, he didn’t see the huge, black thing flying through the trees above.
He sprinted, dodging trees in the dark and trying to wake himself up enough to make a plan.
I can’t go to the police; there’s not a proper law enforcement agency in this town. And when they find Harold dead in my yard
(please don’t let him be dead, please don’t let him be dead)
that Amanda Pearson girl will come in and testify that I brought the crows. They’ll believe her, won’t they? Why not, it’s true, isn’t it? Everyone at school knows that the crows treat me differently. And there probably won’t be an appeals case either: In Dallas a week ago, an officer killed a man accused of murder in a holding cell. No trial or nothing. The officer died a week afterwards: he had the Wolf Flu. They’ll do the same to you. They’ll get some guy who’s just about gone to do the job. Why not? It’d save a broke government a lot of trial money.
As Asa ran, it grew even darker in the forest. The birds covered each of the spidering webs of branches above, and they flew overhead in such thick, dense groups that it blocked out the moonlight. The sound was unbelievable; there were millions of crows screaming right at Asa. Asa moved forward, and a crow stomped its talons into his chest. Asa ran to the side, and another crow stepped out in front of him. He tried to go back, and found a blanket of crows blocking his way.