Page 40 of Following Their Heart

“I know!” I radio. “We hear them! They’re using the birds to mask the choppers!”

“But we got fucking radar!” Doc shouts, and then he calls out a “Yee-haw,motherfuckers! Your birds won’t do shit!”

“Negative!” I’m pounding up the stairs to the dorm. My station is the gun tower. “The Radar’s fucked! Tell me what you see!”

“What! How is the radar fucked?” Doc’s practically screeching with adrenaline.

“Nevermind the radar! What. Do. You. See?”

“Fucking birds! Like a storm cloud.Jesus.They’re all different sizes. Has to be every goddamn thing that can fly in the state!” Doc’s usual low-key, New-Orleans drawl is hyped up.

“Direction!”

“South-east, wrapping around with an arm to the west. Jesus!”

“Get inside! Take cover!” A single bird can hit hard enough to knock a man off his bike. Who knows what a thousand birds can do? I want Doc inside that treehouse and protected. “Wait for an opening to fire!”

Up in the dorm, Brawn and Shep are positioned at the windows, Brawn’s facing south, Shep’s facing the barn to the east. They’re locked and loaded and dressed head to toe in armor, mounds of weapons and ammo at their sides. Brawn has a grenade launcher on his shoulder and an assault rifle aimed out the narrow opening of his window.

“Summit!” I call to Scrap. “Get those SAMs ready to fire. Aim southeast! And ignore the fucking birds! They’re using them as cover!” To everyone else I shout, “Base, Treehouse, Tanks! Don’t waste ammo on the birds! Wait for the sound of choppers! If you can’t see, use your ears to aim!”

“Roger!” Scrap calls out.

“Armed and ready!” Rev says over his radio.

Shep and Brawn don’t respond. They’re both craning their necks to look at the tops of the pines. I shove my arms into a bullet-proof vest.

“Save the rounds for the choppers and anyone who rappels out of ’em!” I remind everyone. Then I hook my comm to my belt and jam a helmet on. It’s my last command before the birds close around us like a screaming tornado of beaks and talons.

I’m up the ladder and strapped into to the machine gun perch in record time. Then it’s nothing but the pounding of small bodies as they slam into my reinforced glass dome. It’ll be the same for Brawn and Shep.

The lights from the turret controls highlight the feathers, beaks, and black eyes of everything from hawks and seagulls to bluebirds and sparrows. Every species of bird we have on this mountain tangles together as they zoom into sight and gobang!against the glass.

And there are crows. So many crows. They come in waves of rippling blackness and they block out the night sky utterly. I’m blind and deaf to everything but the chaos of birds committing suicide. Outside the lodge, there have to be piles of carcasses growing by the second.

“It’s a fucking black-out!” I shout to no one.

I work the controls to swivel southeast, the most likely approach of the choppers, but the mechanism jams. I try again, and the gears groan. The dome shudders as it tries to do what I’m telling it. Then there’s a crunching sound, a final shudder, and then nothing but the thudding of feathered missiles.

The tower’s rotation control is dead. Probably gummed up with bone, flesh, and feathers.

“Fuck!” I’m blind, and I can’t aim! And the cherry on top? Above the constant banging of birds on my glass, I hear thewhomp-whomp-whompof a heavy-duty chopper. For it to be audible above the bird-cover, it has to be close. And it’s not in line with my gun.

Cursing again, I unstrap and leap down into the dorm. The visibility is no better down here. Other than a pair of LED lanterns the guys are using to light their arsenals, there’s darkness inside and out.

Shep is on his knees aiming an automatic out the window and up. Because of the damn birds, the window can only be cracked wide enough to poke the muzzle out. That means the gunman has to contort himself to line up a good shot.

Shep lowers into a squat and leans, tracking the sound of the moving chopper with the muzzle. He fires through the birds, and I hear the hit. He made contact with the chopper, but then the metallic bird banks to the left, toward Brawn’s window.

The big guy takes aim. He has to contort too, and it’s harder for him because he’s so massive. He makes do, and tracks the sound of the chopper, but before he can fire, a loudcracksends him reeling back in surprise. The window has a fresh divot where a round did its best to penetrate the ballistic glass.

Cursing, Brawn scrambles back into position and fires off a retaliatory shot. I don’t hear a hit. He missed. And now the chopper’s going behind the lodge, out of range.

We’ll never make any progress chipping away at the enemy like this, and because the chopper is on this side of the lodge, Doc won’t have a clean shot from the treehouse.

The birds are making it impossible to do enough damage to take the chopper down, and this is just one we’re dealing with. Where’s the other? Looking for Cora, no doubt.

I yank the radio off my hip. “Base to Treehouse! Come in, Treehouse! We got a chopper circling the lodge. Do you have a line of sight on the other? Repeat! Do you have a line of sight on the other?”

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