Keene Brian - A Gathering of Crows

Trish heard her spine snap as he took her breath away.

Clutching a 12-gauge shotgun, Paul Crowley stood in his backyard and squinted, peering into the darkness. The air was chilly, and Paul shivered as the breeze rushed over him. He was clad in a dirty pair of jeans and a loose-fitting, faded John Deere T-shirt with mustard stains on it. The stains were fresh— leftovers from his dinner, which he’d eaten in front of the television again, sitting in the recliner and watching a nature program on PBS.

Paul didn’t care much for PBS’s liberal bias, but he enjoyed shows about wildlife and nature, and since he didn’t have cable or satellite, PBS was his only option. Tonight’s program had been about crows. Paul didn’t have much use for the damned things. Nasty little creatures. They carried the West Nile virus and other diseases. In the spring, they rooted through his garden and ate up all the seeds he’d planted. In the fall and winter, they fluttered around in the woods, making a fuss and alerting wild game to his presence. Paul had missed shots at plenty of deer and wild turkeys over the years thanks to motor mouthed, obnoxious crows. When he’d been a boy, Paul’s daddy had told him that a group of crows could kill and eat a newborn lamb. Maybe that was why a group of crows was called a murder. He’d been surprised to learn from the program that crows could imitate a human’s voice. Apparently, they were highly intelligent and cunning. Paul didn’t care. Just because they were smart didn’t mean they were any less of a nuisance.

He’d fallen asleep in the recliner during a segment about scientists training crows to pick up trash, and had slept until the sound of his dogs’ barking woke him, causing Paul to jerk upright and almost tumble out of the chair. That might have been bad. He certainly wasn’t old yet—at least, not what he considered old—but living alone; had he broken a leg or hip or knocked himself out, there’d have been no one to find him.

Since his retirement seven years earlier, Paul had spent every day out in the woods with his six bear dogs. They were mutts—crossbreed mixes of black and tans, beagles, German shepherds and Karelians, mostly. He loved the dogs and they loved and respected him. Each day, except on Christmas, Thanksgiving and Sundays, Paul got up at the crack of dawn, loaded the dogs into his pickup truck and headed up into the mountains. During bear season, he hunted. When black bears weren’t in season, he allowed the dogs to track and run them. They did this all day long, usually returning home just before sundown. Paul enjoyed it, and all of the walking across ridges and hills kept him in great shape. It kept the dogs healthy, too. Each one was equipped with a radio collar and GPS device so he could track them if they got lost in the mountains—which they often did, especially if a mother bear or her cubs gave them a long chase.

He knew the dogs better than he knew most people. He’d come to recognize the subtle changes in their barks and what the differences in tone meant, and that was how he knew upon waking that the dogs were upset by something. He’d stood there in the living room, yawning and blinking and wondering how long the power had been out, and realized that the dogs weren’t just distressed. They were absolutely terrified.

Wondering what had gotten them so riled up, Paul had hurried through his darkened home, grabbed the 12-gauge and rushed outside just as the dogs fell quiet. He checked the pen and found them huddling together at the back, trembling and frightened, their pink tongues lolling as they panted. He whispered soothing words to them and then crept around the property. He couldn’t find anything amiss. There were no signs of a trespasser—no footprints in the wet grass or evidence indicating someone had tried to break into the house. He was just about to go inside when the disturbance erupted again. This time, instead of the dogs howling in fright, it was his fellow townspeople. The cries and screams seemed to be coming from all four directions at once. An occasional gunshot peppered the commotion. Curiously, there were no sounds of car engines or screeching tires or sirens. “I don’t like this,” Paul told the cowering dogs. “I don’t like this one bit. Sounds like somebody’s done snapped and gone on a killing spree, like you see on the news. You boys stay here. I’ll go have a look.”

He tiptoed around to the front of the house and glanced both ways. As far as he could tell, the electrical outage wasn’t confined to his street or block. It seemed to have affected the entire town. The yells and other noises seemed distant, but as he stood there listening, they slowly began to draw closer.

Paul ran back into the house, found his cell phone and started to dial 911, only to discover that the phone wasn’t working. He stared at the blank, lifeless screen and then tossed it onto the counter in frustration. He hurried into the living room and went to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves he’d built into one wall. They were lined with paperback and hardcover books—western novels by Ray Slater, Ed Gorman, Al Sarrantonio, Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour, history books about Vietnam, World Wars I and II, and the Korean Conflict, and nature books, including a massive, two-volume field guide to North American fish and game. In between the books were framed pictures of his wife (taken away from him by pancreatic cancer two months before his retirement) and their son and daughter-in-law (all grown now and living on the West Coast). A few dusty knickknacks occupied other empty spaces. On top of the shelf was a radio that played extreme weather alerts for Brinkley Springs from the National Weather Service, bulletins from the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA, and announcements from local law enforcement and emergency-response crews. He’d bought it on sale at the Radio Shack in Beckley several years before, and it had proven invaluable time and time again, especially during the winter months. One of Paul’s favorite features was the battery back-up, which kept the radio functioning during a power outage.

Except it wasn’t working now. Like the cell phone, the emergency radio sat lifeless.

“Well, if that don’t beat all. Cheap piece of Chinese junk. Don’t nothing work anymore the way things used to.”

Muttering to himself, Paul stalked back out of the house as the noises outside grew louder. Someone ran down the sidewalk as the screen door slammed shut behind him, but Paul couldn’t see who it was. He wondered if they were running to something or away from something. He noticed that the dogs were still cowering in their kennel. Hefting the shotgun, he approached it again. Being in their proximity made him feel more assured.

“That you, Paul?”

Startled, he jumped at the voice, nearly dropping the 12-gauge before he recognized the speaker as Gus Pheasant, who lived next door. Gus owned the local garage, along with his brother, Greg. Although both men were twenty years younger than Paul, he liked them very much and often got together with them in the evenings. Greg was divorced and Gus had never married, so they had their bachelorhood in common. They’d often invited Axel Perry— another widower—to join them, but the old man never did. Paul got the impression that Axel liked to be alone. It was a shame. He didn’t know what he was missing. Although he would have never said it aloud, Paul found that spending time with them made his own evenings a little less lonely. He liked the gruff companionship, liked playing cards and drinking a few beers and arguing sports and politics and women.

“Yeah,” he called, “it’s me, Gus. What in the hell is going on?”

“I don’t rightly know. Sounds like World War Three’s done started though, don’t it?”