Dead Birds (A Newt Run Module)
By Chad Inglis
Copyright 2012 Chad Inglis
Smashwords Edition



He found the first bird in an alley, half-buried in the snow next to a dumpster. He was drunk, and bored, but the sight of what had been done to it cut through both of those, leaving him hollow; the bird's head was torn off at the neck, and its breast feathers and wings were covered in dark, matted blood. 
For a moment he thought it wasn't real, that it was just some plastic toy or wax replica, but no one would make a toy of a headless pigeon. Besides, the blood was real, he knew that much, and so were the torn veins and the bones showing at the wound. Those were very real, and looking at them his insides began to twist until all at once he threw up what little he had in his stomach and began to back away. 
He didn't know why the sight had upset him so badly. In his time he'd seen much worse, but there was something about the bird that shook him. Looking at it was like staring into a pit, a dark, formless hole, and all he wanted was to get away from it. He left the alley and turned onto the street, trying to lose himself in the crowd and the sound of traffic and flood of neon, but all of it was dulled for him, and he felt he might as well be walking in a dream. 

"My name is John Hollister and I've been on the street off and on 5 years now," he says. "Was in a program for a while, but I couldn't keep it up. Fact is I like drinking. It's as simple as that. Them at the center say it's going to kill me, but as far as I'm concerned that's no big waste. We all gotta die of something. But I guess finding that bird had an effect. Sobered me up some, maybe. I started asking myself who'd do a thing like that, and what for. I know, who gives a shit about pigeons right? Well I didn't either, until I found out that I did. Sometimes life is like that."

He was leaning against the railing halfway across 3rd Bridge, smoking. When he was done he flicked the butt away and watched it disappear in the sluggish, icy water. Not far away, caught in a clump of trash floating downstream, was another dead bird. Its head had been removed at the neck, and one of its feet was missing. Seeing it, a sharp, metallic shiver passed through Hollister, and as the bird slipped beneath the bridge, he turned and darted across the road to the opposite railing. A second later the bird and the knot of garbage emerged, but Hollister stayed where he was, staring, until it was out of sight.
The next week, stumbling into an alley to piss, he saw his first ring; in his haste to relieve himself he hadn't noticed it, but now it held him, a perfect circle painted on the wall in blood. He stepped back, nearly stumbling as his heel caught something on the ground behind him. He bent down, blinking through a haze of cheap wine, and discovered the bird. Like the others, its head was torn off, and he realized then that the ring had been painted in its blood. The thought struck him as absurd, and he laughed once, thickly, before his stomach turned over and he had to repress an urge to vomit.
He thought he should bury the bird, but it didn't seem right without its head. He spent some time groping around on his hands and knees, and at last he across the head in a nearby trash can, as if the killer made a point to clean up after himself, but had forgotten the body, or didn't think it was worth throwing out. The bird's head was small and very soft, and nearly weightless in his hand. Hollister took it and the body with him when he left the alley and buried it in the park on Felt Street. From there he went to the shelter and found an open cot, where he lay awake for a long time, staring at the gray expanse of ceiling, and the faint, blue/white after-image of a ring that hovered in the air above him wherever he pointed his eyes.
He spent the following afternoon walking in the alleys behind the central station. The day after that he patrolled Nascent Street, and the tight confine of back entrances and parking garages in the banking district, but it wasn't until the third day that he saw another ring, scrawled on the side of a two storey home near 4th Bridge. He looked everywhere for the bird or birds that had been killed to paint it, but all he found was a single feather lying in the gutter half a block away that he wasn't even sure belonged to a pigeon. 
Over the next few weeks he spent the greater part of each day combing the town for rings. Sometimes, finding one, he might also come across a bird, or a part of a bird, but not always. There was no pattern that he could see, no sense in any of it. Some of the sites, like the one near 4th Bridge, were clean, as if a team of forensic experts had been contracted to remove any trace of what had been done, while at others the evidence was everywhere: trails of loose feathers or a spattering of yellowish shit on the snow, a body or maybe a head, its black on red eyes like thin soap bubbles, already deflating. Hollister never found anything that might lead him to the person responsible, but it was clear (to him at least) that whoever was killing the birds was someone who'd spent time on the streets; they knew the alleys too well, the entrances to the unnamed spaces between buildings, and the iron-grilled stairwells that could be scaled, at night, to roofs where thin columns of steam rose from faulty pipes and the only views were those that overlooked the back of apartment complexes, other roofs, further alleys. 
He canvassed the people in the central station, mostly men, who lived in shelters built of cardboard, or else dozed in sleeping bags while all around them swarmed the morning commute and the sound of leather shoes pounded the linoleum like a hard fall of rain. He asked the men he met at the shelter and the staff members there, and any panhandlers he came across on his daily walks, scouring the streets for a killer that no one but him seemed to care about, or even wanted to acknowledge; people were reluctant to talk about the rings, and if they did they usually blamed them on stoned teenagers, or conceptual artists with too much time on their hands. One man, a graying former soldier he met in a park, told Hollister that it was all just a marketing stunt. 
"You'll see," he said. "In a few months they'll be on billboards, hocking shoes."
"I don't think so," said Hollister. The man shrugged. 
"You're really worried about it you should talk to Maria."
"Maria who?" asked Hollister, lighting a cigarette.
"Who knows?" said the man. "Just Maria. You never been to talk to her?"
"Should I been?"
The other man shook his head.
"Not unless you were looking for something. She lives up in a shack by the river, just before Last Bridge. Ask her."
"Yeah? How's she gonna know better than anyone else?" 
"She has a way," said the man. "You think I could get one of those cigarettes off you?"
Hollister handed him the pack, and they smoked in silence until they day grew too cold and they left the park, heading in opposite directions.
The next morning he woke up early and walked to Last Bridge. He had no trouble finding the place, a small shack built of plywood with a sheet of blue tarp for a roof. There was another, nearly identical structure on the opposite side of the river, and a third, a little smaller than the first, crammed into the narrow gap where a concrete embankment met the underside of the bridge. Hollister had no way of knowing which of the three Maria lived in, and chose to try at the first one only because it was the closest.
A crow was perched on the shack's roof. It watched him approach and only hopped away once he reached the door, taking to the air in an indifferent flutter of wings. Hollister knocked, feeling stupid, and wishing that he'd brought something to drink.
"Come in," said a woman's voice, very muffled, as if her mouth was full or the walls were much thicker than they looked. Hollister opened the door, and ducked his head under the low roof. 
There was almost nowhere for him to move: the interior of the shack was packed with bundled stacks of paper and plastic bags filled with what looked like garbage. There were dozens of chipped and mismatching dishes and cooking utensils, butcher knives, a broken clock radio and something that might have been the hollowed-out interior of an air conditioner. There was barely room to stand, and the smell, of mould and damp paper and unwashed skin, nearly sent Hollister reeling from the door. 
A thin laugh stopped him, and an old woman emerged from the room's dim corner. She was much older than he'd expected, older than a homeless woman living alone had any right to be. She was dressed in layers, a large black coat with fraying cuffs and a brown woolen cardigan with at least two t-shirts underneath it. Her hair, a dark, smoky gray, was piled in a loose coil at the back of her head. 
She sat down on a garbage bag and smiled, the skin of her forehead creasing. 
"Was expecting someone but wasn't expecting you," she said, rocking herself back and forth with her thin arms around her knees. 
"Sorry." 
"You sit down," she continued, and taking it as an invitation Hollister cleared a space and sat down on a stack of old newspapers, which caused the old woman to laugh. She swayed slightly, looking at him, waiting. 
"I came about the rings," he said, and the old woman nodded. 
"Yes," she said, waving a small hand in front of her face. "I see them, time to time, in the cracks, but also once when I was walking, not far from here. You can go and see it if you want. Probably still there. In Northside. Many rings in Northside."
"Do you know who's making them?" 
She shook her head, and stopped rocking. 
"Can't see his face. His face is all shadows and twisting, like it's really two faces running together, or trying to. Maybe trying to twist apart."
"I need to find him," said Hollister.
"Find him? But he's on his way out."
"Out of town?"
The old woman frowned, and muttered something that Hollister didn't catch. She stood up with difficulty, and picked her way amongst the piles of trash to the opposite corner. She clicked her tongue on the roof of her mouth in frustration, tossing aside a number of bags until she found what she was looking for. 
"Here it is," she said, and held up a rock. To Hollister it looked like a common stone, the same that could be found anywhere along the river, except for a slight, orange discolouration, as if it was covered in a layer of rust. The old woman sat down with the stone in her lap and reached into another bag for a plastic bottle, half-filled with what Hollister guessed was water. She opened the lid and began to pick at the stone with the end of her nail. It came apart easily, a number of good-sized flakes dropping one after the other into the mouth of the bottle. When she was satisfied, she shook the mixture and handed it to Hollister.
"What is it?" he asked. 
"It'll help you see where he's going," she replied. He looked dubiously at the orange flakes drifting in the liquid, but she urged him to go on, making sipping motions and laughing until he drank from it. Then he coughed, choking, and nearly sprayed it back at her; it was some kind of moonshine. 
"A little warning next time," he said, and she laughed again, standing up. She motioned him to follow her. 
Outside a light snow was falling. A mass of clouds the colour of dead skin stretched across the sky, and the drab riverside and small collection of shacks stood very heavy in the gloom, like monuments from some forgotten graveyard. Hollister spat darkly onto the ground; his throat still burned from the alcohol, and there was an odd taste of metal in his mouth, and a trace of rotten meat. 
Carefully, the old woman made her way from the river, stepping around rough patches in the ground, shards of broken glass and frozen clumps of shit that may or may not have been left there by cats, or feral dogs.
"You see a lot of strange things now, so close to the end," she remarked. "Saw a boy come round earlier and dump a ferret out of a box. Thing looked like he'd beat it half to death, its back legs both broken, and he just comes out here and dumps it. So you tell me where that comes from, what's the sense in that."
"I don't know," said Hollister.
"And it's worse with the rings," she continued. "Much, much worse."
She guided him into Northside, turning onto a deserted street that ran parallel to the tenements. She knelt down by the curb and busied herself brushing a space clear of snow. When she was finished she leaned forward to gaze at the cracks in the pavement. She traced one with the tip of a trembling finger, muttering to herself in a hushed, brittle voice. Hollister felt himself growing tired, numbed by the cold perhaps, and the wide, empty street that seemed to him somehow unreal, as if all of the buildings were only facades and behind them were men with cameras who stood filming them from the windows. He watched the old woman at her work, and listened to her, although he couldn't catch any of the words. His eyes grew heavy, and he was about to nod-off when she suddenly stopped speaking. Hollister blinked, trying to rouse himself, and saw that Maria's finger was hovering over the pavement at a point where two cracks intersected each other. 
"Hard to see," she said at last, looking up at him. She lifted her arm and he helped her get to her feet. "Very hard to see anything. The rings make holes where the future should be."
"You can't find him?" he asked. 
"You can find him. Don't know what you'll be able to do with him. Probably nothing."
"Where?" 
"The rings are never in the same place twice. Remember that. It means you can't find him where he's been. Only where he's going."
"What do you mean?" he pressed her, but that was all she could, or would tell him, and at last he helped her back to the shack. Hollister asked if she needed anything but she simply waved him away. He left her then and walked on his own into Northside. He found his head was spinning slightly from the drink she'd given him, and he stopped at the first coffee stand he came to, paying for a cup with the loose change in his pocket. The boy working the stand was kind, and asked him if he wanted toast with the coffee, explaining that it was on the house. Hollister thanked him, and as he waited for the toast to brown over the gas flame he thought about what Maria had told him, and the only part that seemed useful was the fact that there'd been a lot of rings in Northside.
He ate his toast in silence and when he was finished he thanked the boy again and started walking. Northside was not large, just a few square blocks of small roads and alleys centered on the tenements, but even so the streets were busy, crowded with people shopping at open air stalls, young mothers with fat babies strapped to their bellies and off-duty miners standing in loose groups in front of bars, laughing and spitting onto the snow. The buildings were all old, and the roads looked like they'd been bombed or gouged with pick-axes. Most of the heating pipes were faulty, leaking tendrils of steam that blurred the edges of things, so that the streets took on the quality of shaky, digital photos.
Hollister came upon a group of kids painting a mural in the narrow laneway between two tenements. They worked quietly, making a series of hastily sprayed images that at first appeared to be people, but which were later revealed to be corpses, an army of the undead with their mouths agape, and hollow, staring eyes. As they added more detail, Hollister saw that each of the bodies was dressed in clothes exactly like the ones the boys themselves were wearing, as if what they were really engaged in was some kind of morbid group portrait.
On another street he saw a middle-aged woman pushing a head of cabbage in a baby carriage, and a man in a wheelchair dressed in a homemade uniform, complete with medals crafted out of tin foil. He nearly tripped over a stray dog, bone thin and mangy, lying in the snow with what looked like a human hand in its mouth. Later, he watched as two men in suits and dark glasses stepped out of a black sedan. They were both tall, with broad shoulders, and he thought they might have been members of a private security force, secret service agents charged with safeguarding the life of a career politician or visiting foreign dignitary, but all they did was walk into a butcher shop and return ten minutes later laden with bags of meat. 
"It's like a dream," he whispered, and he wondered again about what was in the drink the old woman had given him. He found he no longer trusted his eyes, although he'd been in Northside many times before and had seen any number of strange and inexplicable things, but at this moment they refused to come together, a series of equations adding up to nothing. 
He thought of finding a place where he could sleep off the effects of whatever it was he was on, but then he noticed a tall, thin man with a rough sack slung over his shoulder; the sack was writhing, as if there was something living inside it, and the cuffs of the man's jacket were stained with blood. He entered an alley and Hollister sprang after him, catching up just as the man was removing a bird from the sack. 
The man's face was lost in the gloom, and he held himself very still. All at once he made a quick, jerking motion with his hand, and ripped the bird's head from its body. 
Hollister shouted and started forward, but the man pressed the bleeding wound to the ground and scrawled first one line, and then another across it. Hollister froze, his body lost to him, cut off by a thin, gauze curtain. He watched as the man stood and walked toward him. 
He was around Hollister's age, dressed in a gray suit that at one time must have been fashionable, but was now tattered and dirty, and spattered with old blood stains along the sleeves. His face was gaunt, and there was a month's growth of beard on his cheeks. Despite that, his eyes were clear, and they gazed at Hollister with something like compassion.
"I know how you feel," he said. "Believe me I sympathize. You can't just go around killing innocent birds. It's not done. Moreover, it's not right, not on any scale of morality. I believe in right and wrong, or at least that actions have consequences. That's a given. But I can't allow you to stop this. I can't allow it. It's not something I can permit."
"Why?" came a voice, possibly Hollister's - there was no one else in the alley so it must have been his, logically he knew that, although he wouldn't have been able to say for sure, and he wondered who else it could have been, who besides him would have cared to ask.  
"Why, why, why," mused the man, as he drifted away from Hollister, calmly beginning to write on the wall with what was left of the bird's blood. His hand moved fluidly, the way Hollister imagined an artist's hand must move, painting.
"There is no why. Or not much. The world is bigger than all of us, and we don't get a say in it. I'm not talking about a political voice you understand, voting rights. None of that matters. It's just a game. Because all of this was already here before we arrived. None of us have a say about the world we're born into, what it is or what it entails. I didn't choose this, and neither did you. Neither of us chose to be chained here, in this flesh, inside a broken world. I just chose to get out, because of what's coming. Because I refuse to end along with it. And so that's a choice, and it follows that I can't permit anyone to stop me. Not before I'm out."
So rambling, he finished with the first bird and ripped the head off a second, painting several symbols on the wall, and around them a small ring, a perfect circle that seemed to Hollister to vibrate with some odd, invisible energy. Watching the man work, it was as if he himself was falling away, and he was afraid of this, much more so than he was afraid of the man or anything he might do, because instinctively Hollister knew that if once he lost his grip on himself he would be lost, drifting away as easily as a column of steam, and from that into nothing.
"You have to come to it someday," said the man, nearly whispering the words, but for Hollister they sounded as clear as if he'd spoken them into his ear. "The knowledge that even if it's not real, even if you aren't, that this is all we've got. And even if our life is worthless, it's the only life we'll ever know. And none of us had a choice about it." 
The man finished the ring and fell silent. He winced as if he was in pain, and then he laughed, letting the bird fall from his hand. He moved forward, stepping into the wall, and then he was gone, and all that was left was the bloody ring, and the bodies of two dead birds on the ground, slowly freezing.

"That was two days ago," says Hollister, looking at his hands. "Not even sure if it was real, and I don't care much either. Think I'll let it go now. Let the birds fend for themselves."
"Why?" comes the question, from some interested party, a friend or social worker, a stranger on the street. Hollister shrugs. 
"What's the point? The world is just too strange. Too fucked up to do anything about it."
There is a pause.
"Buried the birds from that alley though," he says quietly. "At least I could do that."