Worlds War One

xvii [Ji]

Birds of Paradise? The Flock? Ji had nightmarish visions of offspring from the unnatural mating of man and mallard. Leatherface as played by Donald Duck. Monsters with beaks and devils with feathers, wielding talons instead of guns and steel-tipped pinions perfect for impaling, a quack the last sound he would hear in this mortal coil. It sounded like some kind of joke. But as the Princess had said, this was no laughing matter.

The door of teeth opened, and the squad, now numbering five, stepped forward. Lieutenant Robinson entered first after one last glance back at Drill. Ji caught the look of regret with which she left him. Drill might have been her Hammer, but recent events had broken him. He'd be a liability to the squad, and her.

Ji gave her credit that she'd seen his weakness and had acted on it. The lieutenant might not trust a bunch of Misfits she'd never met before, but they trusted her. She was easy to follow, even into an avian nightmare.

The gullet stretching beyond the door of teeth was absolute darkness. Ji felt like they were being swallowed whole. The lights on the devices on their wrists stabbed into the murk. The beams picked up no distinct details, light sliding off things wet and organic. The smell was the most physical part of the experience, so thick and intrusive Ji wondered if the stench was itself a weapon.

Ji thought about the accident in basic where a fellow recruit had overturned an amphibious vehicle, which had caught on fire and burned him severely before the kid had been finally pulled free by Ji and a few others. The kid's skin where the fire had burned too long had been blackish-red, like barbecue sauce charred on an open grill. Cracked and weeping something yellow and sickly, Ji had managed only to hold back his vomit until they'd evacuated the kid on a medical helicopter. These walls reminded him of the kid's skin.

Whatever had happened to that kid?

Ji had never thought to ask after him.

In this hellish place, alone and overwhelmed, he felt terrible that he'd never followed up on it.

"Safety off," Lieutenant Robinson commanded. "Fingers primed but stay cool. Anyone else but me shoots first, I will shoot second. At whoever pulled the trigger."

Ji followed along a hallway made of the same material, a blackened fleshy surface that extended as far as their beams could penetrate. It was like exploring the charred innards of a spit-roasted pig. Maybe this was Hell, and they were inside the immense body of Satan himself. Perhaps the world was crazy, and one could no longer separate the sane from the sick in the head.

"I don't know about this," Ji heard himself mumble as if it was someone else's sentiments.

"You don't know about anything," Saanvi said. "Now shut up and study."

Ji felt his breathing getting out of control. He had never hyperventilated in his life, but now the claustrophobia of the bizarre situation affected him physically. He was shaking. He'd be as apt to hit friend as foe if he had to shoot. Could he even differentiate ally from enemy anymore? A Ghost was part of their squad. And Saanvi was probably something... else.

The world, such as it was, started to swim before Ji's eyes.

"Airman, Private," Lieutenant Robinson called out. "Flank on Seaman Choi."

Suddenly the Misfits were in a row. Saanvi was in the lead. The lieutenant brought up the rear. Robinson was in command for a reason—right as Ji had begun drowning in nonsense, she had thrown him a life preserver by putting the three greenies in a line. Ji felt better as soon as the other soldiers had positioned off each elbow.

Something moved in the shadows, and Ji will never know how close he got to opening fire. His finger was outside the trigger guard, or else he might've sprayed the target with bullets. Saanvi stood still. The three Misfits grouped in an arc behind her. Lieutenant Robinson moved in a wide curve around them to approach the thing in the shadows from its left. She trained her weapon on whatever skulked in the dark.

"Easy, Badia," Saanvi warned.

"Oh, I'm easy like Sunday morning, Princess Saanvi," the lieutenant promised. "Tell your friend to make no sudden moves. Or we're going to have a funeral come Monday afternoon."

The figure stepped forward out of the shadows. Maybe he was Human, perhaps he was anything else. A mask covered his face, featuring a long, yellowed beak that reminded Ji of cartoon birds he'd watched as a kid. Heckle and Jeckle. Black feathers covered him, in a cap, in a cloak, dragging on the scabbed surface underfoot. The Bird of Paradise was as creepy as anything out of Stephen King.

"You trespass on hallowed grounds, Demon," the bird cried, like screech and tweet made language. It made Ji's head hurt, like trying to pick words out of a song on staticky radio.

"My mission is more important than observing archaic conventions," Saanvi replied, all confident and calm. "We're facing major changes in the Wider World."

"Mot," the bird quailed, the sound like shards against Ji's eardrums.

"Yes. He has already transmuting living flesh in service to decay. We need to get ready for the next assault."

"You do not know if he poses a further threat," the Bird of Paradise crowed. "It will not do to trample eons of convention in a stampede of fear and panic."

"This is unprecedented," Saanvi snapped. "Johnny Rotten took three thousand of our people and appropriated their mortal shells like some carjacker swiping bodies instead of BMWs."

"Our people are not your people," the big bird chirped.

Around him, Ji heard a stir of wings. Faint and aflutter, feathers innumerable shuffled in the shadows surrounding the Misfits. Whatever the Flock was, they were everywhere.

Ji recalled exploring a cave with his sisters when they were teenagers. Yu-na and A-ra had been writing a paper on Chiroptera for Advanced Biology, and so they'd needed to study the bats in their natural environment. As always, more intelligent than Ji by twice but only half as brave, they'd taken their brother with them to go first into the hole in the side of the hill. He'd wondered then, maybe fourteen, and urged by his siblings to "check it out first" if they were afraid because they were intelligent enough to consider a hundred ways this could go wrong? Ji had just thought bats were cool. Maybe ignorance was bliss after all? Then he'd been inside the cave, standing in the dark, the dry-paper sound of a thousand bats rustling leathery wings.

This noise sounded like feathers instead of stretched skin and ominousness instead of indifference. And perhaps Ji had learned a little too much about the Wider World since standing in the bat cave with his sisters and feeling more like Bruce Wayne than a stupid college kid in a slasher flick. Maybe ignorance was indeed bliss, and he was no longer innocent. He could think of a hundred ways that this could go wrong...