Pick o' the Day: The Grackle Catcher (cont.)

            When morning finally came, it came cloaked in sadness and gloom, for though the sun rose as usual, its warming rays could barely penetrate the roiling thunderclouds that threatened to unleash an angry torrent upon the city.  But for the time being, they only threatened, as if some unknown, yet more powerful, force was holding them back.  And they held back, grudgingly, though not quietly, with grumbles and growls of low thunder signaling their growing impatience.

            And it was in this dismal early morning gloom that a milk truck driver was forced to stop ten feet from the loading dock as he was backing up because of the enormous pile of jumbled milk crates that blocked his way.  After letting go with a few choice curses, he climbed down from the cab and started restacking the crates.  As the pile began to shrink, he heard a faint moaning coming from its base, and he realized, to his shock, that someone was trapped underneath!  He immediately called for help, and with the assistance of a couple of B-U-T-T-S night stockers, he quickly uncovered the body of an unconscious man who was curiously dressed in old-fashioned bib overalls, over a red union suit, with brown leather huaraches covering his otherwise bare feet.  They called for an ambulance, and in a matter of minutes, the man was being hauled away by paramedics in search of a hospital that was willing to take on yet another, painfully obvious, charity case.  One after the other declined to accept the patient, saying they were “full up” or giving some other lame excuse.  Finally, the paramedics, close to panicking due to the fact that the man’s vital signs were rapidly deteriorating, decided to take him to the only place from which they had never been turned away, an obscure facility called The Blessing Street Shelter for the Chronically Hopeless that tended to the poorest of the poor, the most forlorn derelicts and outcasts of the city, where most came in such serious shape that they were beyond hope for a cure, but who were given, at least, the chance to die with a bit of dignity under the care of a gentle and sympathetic volunteer staff.

            By noon, the B-U-T-T-S parking lot was again beginning to fill up with shoppers, but the eeriness caused by the ominous and oppressive storm clouds, compounded by the mysterious absence of the grackles, caused many to decide to turn around and leave before even getting out of their cars.  Lester Guy, late as usual, began his afternoon shift by cruising around the lot on his Segway.  Because he thought they made him look cool, he refused to take off his sunglasses, but the gloom caused by the impending storm made it difficult for him to see and caused him to run into more than one stray shopping cart.  Merle Zitsky arrived shortly after Lester, went directly into the store, and shut himself up in his office.

            At the same time, more than twenty miles away, in a lush, green forest of ancient Loblolly Pines, there arose into the sky a different sort of dark cloud than the type that currently blanketed the region.  And this cloud, immense by any standards, began to move in a flowing, undulating, but nevertheless deliberate manner towards the city.  As it moved, it stretched itself into a thinner, and eventually miles-long, line of black, flapping wings.  When it began crossing over a highway, hundreds of people pulled over and got out of their cars to watch the unprecedented movement of more than a million grackles, and many of the people wept and crossed themselves as it took more than an hour to pass over them, like a biblical plague heading directly for the heart of the city.

            After crashing into his fifth shopping cart, Lester finally resigned himself to taking off his sunglasses.  And when he did so, he noticed that the few shoppers in the parking lot were standing, looking, and pointing at the eastern sky.  He looked to where they were pointing, and it was then that he saw the strange, fast-moving black cloud that was rapidly approaching.  As he stood there, mouth agape, the plague of grackles arrived with a roar of flapping wings and ear-deafening screeches.  The lead birds began to circle high above the parking lot as the rest poured in, eventually creating a great and terrible tornado-like vortex that terrified the shoppers and caused them to run for cover.  Lester was frozen with fear, and in his terror, he did not realize, until it was too late, that he had become the very center of the whirlwind.  Despite his growing panic, he remembered that he was carrying a sidearm.  He drew it and pointed it at the sky, but before he could pull the trigger, a grackle dove and knocked it from his shaking hands.  And then a devastating deluge of hot and sticky-white bird droppings descended upon him from above, coating him from head to toe, as he futilely attempted to fend it off with flailing arms.  He screamed and then began to run, but he fell before he went ten feet and was immediately covered by hundreds of vicious and angrily pecking birds.  Within a minute, his screams were silenced, but the pecking went on for at least fifteen more.  And when the feathered mass rose back up and joined the swirling vortex, nothing was left of Lester but a skeleton inside of a uniform, and it had been picked as clean as a whistle.

            The few customers inside the B-U-T-T-S store, along with every employee on the premises, were watching in horror as Lester met his doom.  But none were as shocked, as terror-stricken, or as filled with dread as Merle, who had run out of his office to join the near-hysterical crowd of onlookers when he began hearing their screams.  As he, along with the rest, witnessed the demise of Lester, he alone knew and understood what was really happening, and why.  And he knew the birds would be after him, too.  After all, one does not keep a million grackles, swarming and swirling in a stupendously powerful whirlwind, waiting outside for long.  Already, the wind and vibrations generated by the birds were shaking, and cracking, the glass storefront.  Suddenly, one of the largest panes of glass shattered to pieces, and in flew a slew of grackle scouts, swooping and diving above the fleeing crowd, looking for one human in particular.  And that human was high-tailing to the back of the store, knocking others to the floor as he did so, including any little old lady who had the audacity to get in his way.  One large woman he knocked over was carrying an umbrella, so he grabbed it, along with her overcoat, that he had to yank off her body, before ducking through the double doors that were marked with an “employees only” sign.  He hurriedly pulled on the woman’s overcoat as he ran to the back door of the building.  Panting, he cracked the door open and peeked outside.  Seeing no birds, he opened the umbrella and, holding it close over his head, stepped out onto the loading dock.  He intended to try, disguised as a woman, to make it to his car, which was parked in the employees’ lot approximately 50 yards from the back door.

            He fought the urge to run so as to avoid drawing the birds’ attention, and he was more than half way to his car when he sensed a sudden and drastic atmospheric change.  Turning back to look, Merle watched in horrified amazement as the great and terrible grackle tornado moved with a roar over the top of the big-box store, blowing dust and debris everywhere as it came directly at him.  It moved with a speed he could not match, and in an instant, he found himself, like Lester before him, trapped in the eye of the storm.  But, unlike Lester, who had received his justice there on the ground, Merle discovered that the grackles had a different punishment planned for him.  The umbrella was jerked from his hands, and he felt his arms pulled up and out as they were tugged on by countless birds.  In a moment there were flapping grackles clinging to every square inch of his body, with more grackles on top of those, and more on top of those, until he felt his body lifting off the pavement.  He was utterly helpless as he was taken up into the air, and in seconds he found he was hundreds of feet above the tree tops.  And then they let him go.  And for the few seconds of his screaming freefall, he futilely flapped his arms in a comically bird-like fashion.  And after he came to his horrific end, they picked his broken and bloody body up in the same manner as before and dropped it from a thousand feet one more time, just for good measure.
            Then it was over.  The raging whirlwind of grackles quickly dissipated in less than a minute as the birds flew away in all directions.  And soon after they were gone, the skies flashed with lightning and crackled with thunder, and the long-threatened, but ultimately earth-cleansing, deluge of rain began to fall.


(Next week:  The Grackle Catcher concludes as Hank, struggling to stay alive, receives an unexpected visitor. )