Pigeons Dropping

by Rod Drake

After the fact it was named Black Tuesday, the day the pigeons in New York City stopped being pushed aside, kicked and poisoned, and finally took revenge. Like well-trained winged commandos, having waited decades for this moment, the pigeons swooped down on the startled populace with vengeance and blood on their tiny minds. Thousands of New Yorkers were killed in the surprise assault, tens of thousands more were wounded, blinded, missing ears, nose tips and patches of hair as wave after wave of dive-bombing pigeons in teams and solo unleashed a savagery and bloodlust never before observed in pigeons. Patrolman Mitch Brenner emptied his pistol into the sky, dropping several pigeons, and then retreated inside his bombarded police car on West 58th Street to reload, wondering why this happened and how long it would continue, and where his partner was. The aviary terrorist attack that no one could have foreseen or understood hit all five boroughs simultaneously, forcing pedestrians to hide in subway cars and cower in glass-cracked stores as the heavy aerial siege continued for six horrific hours, without stop, without mercy, but with plenty of human blood. Then as the sky darkened with rain clouds, the pigeons simply stopped the attack as suddenly as it had begun and went back to being cooing, waddling, begging pigeons again.

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Rod Drake, author of Party Trick, is pretty sure this is not his first life, nor will it be his last one probably. Check out Rod's longer stories in Flashes of Speculation, Fictional Musings, Flash Flooding, Flash Forward and MicroHorror.