Resident Evil_ Extinction - Keith R. A. DeCandido [70]
That wasn’t what concerned Kmart, though. She was a lot more worried about where the crow was going. It flew and landed on the motel, right alongside several hundred other crows.
It wasn’t a trick of the early morning light. They all had crazy eyes. Almost milky white like the zomboids.
Kmart had lived with watching the world go to hell. She’d watched all her friends and family die, many of them for really stupid reasons, she’d been menaced and almost killed by zomboids, and she never cried or screamed, not once.
At the sight of hundreds of demonic crows, she screamed.
She clambered back into the Hummer. Claire was rousing. “Claire! I think we have a problem,” she said, pointing at the motel roof.
Claire followed her finger and looked at the crows. “Fuck,” she muttered. Then she reached forward and grabbed the PRC. “Carlos.”
“I see it.” Carlos’s voice sounded calm as always.
L.J.’s much less calm voice came over the PRC speakers. “What the fuck?”
Kmart asked, “What’s wrong with their eyes?”
Frowning, Claire said, “They’ve been feeding on infected flesh would be my guess.”
Carlos said, “Everyone stay in the trucks!”
Kmart looked up. More and more crows were arriving, perching on the motel, the motel sign, the unburied car, and anywhere else they felt like it. One or two even landed on the sentinels.
Now Chase came on the PRC. “What’s going on?”
Sounding frustrated, Claire said, “Everyone just stay in your trucks. Roll up your windows and keep quiet!”
The crows kept coming. It reminded Kmart of a documentary she saw on the fairy penguins in Australia that all come in out of the ocean at sunset. The penguins just kept piling out of the water in waves (no pun intended), and that’s what the crows were doing here. More and more kept coming, taking up every available surface.
Another documentary came back to her, and she said to Claire, “They’re territorial. We just have to stay calm and keep quiet.”
“How do you know that?”
Kmart shrugged. “Saw it on the Discovery Channel.”
Claire snorted. “I hope they know that.” Then she grabbed the PRC. “Everyone stay calm, keep quiet, and don’t move. If we’re lucky, they’ll get bored and move on.”
L.J. said, “Yeah, and if we ain’t lucky, we’re in a fuckin’ Alfred Hitchcock movie.”
Otto added, “Claire, you look a little like Tippi Hedren, actually. In fact—”
When Otto’s pause went on a bit too long, Claire said, “Otto?”
Whispering into the PRC, Otto said, “We got one on the hood.”
Looking over, Kmart saw that one crow had indeed landed on the school bus’s hood. It seemed fascinated by the crack in the windshield, a lot more than it was with the wire mesh that protected the bus.
Again, Otto’s whisper came over the radio. “Everyone stay still and quiet.”
More crows started flying to the bus hood.
“Fuck,” Claire said. She clambered all the way into the front, settling into the driver’s seat.
Kmart sat next to her and tried very hard not to panic.
Then, for the second time in five minutes, a loud noise made her jump out of her skin. This time, it came over the radio, and it sounded like a can clanking to the floor of a school bus.
A little kid’s voice—Kmart couldn’t tell who it was—said, “Sorry” in a whisper over the PRC, but that was quickly drowned out by the crows on the bus hood cawing.
And then all the other crows cawed back in unison in response.
“We are so screwed,” Kmart said, even as the crows started to fly into the air and circle the camp.
Claire was turning the Hummer’s engine over. “Fire them up. Let’s get out of here!”
All the other vehicles sprang to life. Chase started the Enco truck, either Betty or L.J. started the ambulance, Mikey fired up the news truck, Otto the school bus—which caused more cawing—and Carlos was probably driving the 8x8.
The crows kept circling…
L.J. Wayne knew he was going to die, and soon. He just didn’t want it to be this way. After fighting zombie-ass motherfuckers