Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

No. That wasn’t quite accurate. There had been a fire. It had not been here, however. The fire had occurred elsewhere. The man in black and his winged companion were only being informed of it.

Reconnaissance. Sometimes it was unreliable, and sometimes it struck a little close to home.

The man in black picked up his coat, absently plucked lint from the sleeve, and slipped it on. The blackbird regained its perch on his shoulder.

The man sighed. The boy was not stupid. That much was certain.

In point of fact, the boy was very smart. But Billy Peterson was not nearly smart enough to tangle with an army of one.

The simple truth of it was that Billy had appeared at the Rodgers’ household at a most inauspicious moment. He had seen the blackbird lay three eggs in a nest made from a Slinky, a measuring tape, and a man’s toupee.

And he had heard the man in black utter words over that nest.

The same words the man now uttered over a nest made from a bath towel, and a baseball, and a length of jump rope.

A nest like a hundred others, all across town.

Billy stared at the blackened remains of the Rogers’ nest. The eggs were cracked and open, like broken black cups. The things that had grown inside were dead. That was very good.

Billy loaded his BB gun. He did not feel like a murderer. Still, he felt he should take the scorched nest to the cemetery and bury it.

Maybe he should do that with the pink bird, too.

Billy had noticed the bird just this morning. He had watched it take flight from a nest on the Jefferson’s roof, tiny veined wings fluttering.

The pink bird was hard to miss.

And the sounds it made. A series of shrill skreeghs.

Well, Billy had never seen a pink bird. Never heard one, either. Maybe it was a pet. Mr. Jefferson had a daughter who went to school with Billy. A sharp-tongued girl named Joleen who hated Billy. Maybe the bird belonged to her.

The pink bird came straight at Billy. It dive-bombed him, circled high and came at him again.

Usually Billy did not shoot at birds. Old bottles and cans were his favorite targets, maybe a discarded monster model now and then. But when the pink bird came at him a third time, he shot it out of the sky.

Wounded, the bird crashed to the ground. It beat the dirt with one broken wing, unable to right itself.

Billy approached the bird cautiously, because now he recognized the sound of its skreegh. Now he recognized its words.

“Billy… Billy… help me—”

He nearly screamed. The pink bird was some kind of freak. He stared down at it. Angry blue eyes stared up at him. Human eyes.

The pink bird was not a bird at all.

It had no beak. Only a mouth.

“Billy… I need to get to the mine…”

The bird had Joleen’s mouth… and Joleen’s voice.

Though it was not really like Joleen’s voice at all.

“.. .the mine, Billy,” the voice said. “I have to go. I have to fly… follow the trail… follow the others to the black river… find the home of the three-headed dog and…”

Billy was frightened. He wanted to run.

He did.

“Billy, you little—”

He ran faster. He outran the awful tiling’s words.

Billy ran all the way to Gordon’s house. He did not notice the broken pane in the kitchen window. He burst into the house without thinking.

No one seemed to be home.

And then Billy heard a voice coming from upstairs.

The voice of the man in black.

The day before, Gordon had said that the man was only playing a prank to scare them away from the mine.

The man did not sound like he was playing a prank now. Gun in hand, Billy crept upstairs, following the man’s voice. He could not understand everything the man said. At times the man whispered too low for Billy to hear. Other times he used words that Billy didn’t understand.

But Billy understood most of the words he heard. Most importantly, he understood what a soul was.

He’d heard his parents talk about souls taking flight to heaven. He’d never heard them speak of souls taking flight to hell, the way the man in black did. Normally, Billy would have thought that such talk was a bunch of mumbo jumbo. But when Billy looked into Mr. and Mrs. Rogers’ bedroom and saw the nest with the three hideous eggs and the big ugly blackbird perched over them, he was so frightened that he might have believed anything.

The bird saw Billy before the man did.

One quiet clack of its beak and the man in black turned to face the boy.

He smiled at Billy, winked at the bird.

“This boy is troublesome,” the man said. “Kill him.”

The bird’s black wings flapped like torn shadows as it rose from the bed.

Billy pulled the trigger and a BB punched the creature hard in the chest.

The bird dropped to the bed.

The man in black screamed a harsh, “No!”

Before the word was out of the man’s mouth, Billy had grabbed the nest. He charged downstairs and ran all the way home.

He noticed many strange things as he ran. He saw many broken windows in his very quiet neighborhood. He spotted many tangled nests resting on the rooftops.

Each nest was a crazy quilt of everyday items. Clothes and ribbons, telephone cord and clothesline, sharpshooter medals won in battle and bits of dismembered dolls long buried in sandboxes and weatherbeaten cowboy hats worn by boys who rode wooden ponies. But one thing was the same—every nest that Billy saw cradled one blood red egg for every occupant of the house on which it perched.

Billy wondered what would happen when those eggs cracked open. He remembered the things the pink bird had said “…the mine, Billy. I have to go. I have to fly… follow the trail… follow the others to the black river… find the home of the three-headed dog and… ”

The mine… a trail.

A black river and a three-headed dog.

A trail to hell.

And a pink bird. A creature that carried Joleen Jefferson’s soul.

There was no nest on Billy’s house. This was a good sign. Maybe it meant that it wasn’t too late.

Billy got a few tubes of BB’s from his room. Then he opened the safe and stole his father’s hand grenade.

He pedaled to the mine, all the while telling himself that he was crazy. He didn’t want to believe that there could be other things like the pink bird. But when the egg in his backpack started to crack, and when he heard another voice, the voice of Gordon’s dad…

Billy held tight to his BB gun.

He watched the skies. There were no birds at all.

He listened. Not a single chirp, or caw, or skreegh.

Billy managed a deep breath.

By the time he gulped it down, the sky was alive with sound.

The sky was a rich red scream.

Hidden by the surrounding forest, the man in black watched the cave.

The blackbird sat heavily on his shoulder. Sharp talons speared his flesh. The bird’s blood dripped down its thin legs, between its talons, soaking the man’s clothes, mixing with the blood that flowed from the puckered wounds it had torn in the man in black’s flesh.

The man in black did not mind the pain. He was an army. Armies engaged in war. There was pain in any war.

There were also captives. They flew above the man’s head now, following him to the cave. Hundreds of pink things born of the blackbird perched on the man’s shoulder. Hundreds of them flapping overhead, screaming in fright as their blue-veined wings drove them toward a horror they would never escape.

Hundreds of souls bound for hell.

Hundreds of captives bound for a world of pain.

This was a small town. Nothing more than a trial run. The man in black would have liked a larger challenge.