Mutiful

Flamingos

Joey:

When the Morrisons turned into pink flamingos I got interested.

It had been wolves with the occasional lion. Wolves you take down with silver bullets. Lions need gold. A standard gold slug is garbage and will squash out on any bone. But a good fourteen karat slug aimed right will leave a Were-lion gasping its guts out. It takes them about a minute or two to go down. So you want to avoid heroic hip shots unless you've got a trauma unit handy. Or you might end up holding your guts in with one hand while you fish around for your spent ammo.

Yep, that's something you never see in those hero shows. They spray hundreds of rounds to blitz the baddies, and no cleanup. But for me and all the squints, we have to go in and bring back every squashed bullet. I get why. You've got to figure a single bullet is a bit more than an ounce. Even with 14 karat gold putting a couple of slugs into a Were-lion is thousands down the drain. Not that it really matters, now that everyone has gone barter with the collapse of the banks. But I don't get more slugs unless I turn in my used ones.

I'm a squint. A sharpshooter. I learned out in OKAS back in Iraq, just across the border from any action. I spent most of my time repairing sand-filled tanks. The rest of my time I split between the range and trying to get with the one nice-looking female mechanic on base. She only liked upper brass so I got in a lot of target practice.

Standard policy with the Weres was to stake them out with three sharpshooters. One guy takes the shot. The other two cover him while he goes down and grubs around for his used bullets. Early on we all wore special decontamination gloves for grubbing around. But then one of the squints tore his hand open on a busted rib. After he spent three weeks in solitary, we figured whatever the Weres had wasn't catching. After that we treated the Weres the same as you would a deer or a wolf. Don't cut yourself, but don't worry about a little blood.

It wasn't cushy duty, but it wasn't bad. We got a lot of travel, and we saw a lot of action. When the first Weres showed up, there was only one squint squad. We were all top secret, very black ops. But over time more and more Weres showed up. They set up squint squads for every major metropolitan area. My own squint squad is supposed to cover the southern section of Cleveland, but we pretty much got every call from ten miles around. The other Cleveland home base thought they could handle things themselves, but they came to us begging bullets twice before their perimeter was overrun.

The trouble is, we're not making a dent in the Were issue. There are more every day. That's why the banking system went down. Too many Were-lions in the upper banks. Who knew that only a handful of people had access to the passwords that made the whole system run? Not to mention the run of Weres on Wall Street. That was a bad day in the stock exchange. People turning Were all over the place as a screaming panic set in.

The whole thing pretty much just smacked of end times. Lots of people turning into wolves and lions, nothing particularly interesting. Horrible, dangerous, but hardly interesting to anyone who's ever watched any horror movie. Until the flamingos.

It was on a routine scout that I saw the Morrisons go flamingo on us. I was playing clean-up watch, and Jonesy had just downed two wolves. He was rooting around in their chests for his silver bullets when the Morrisons came across the park.

Most of the time civilians took off when they heard shots these days. Most people rode around in cars with grill work over all the windows. That was the one business that was thriving, chop shops. You saw cars with spiked fenders, cars with side-mounted machine guns. As if you could shoot anything with a side-mounted machine gun besides the trees along the side of the road.

But the Morrisons were picnicking. All Brady Bunch with a checkered picnic basket and the two skipping children. I guess they figured the park had just been emptied of wolves and it was a great time to have a family outing.

Jonesy disagreed. From where I was lying up on the roof of an empty office building, he more than disagreed. I could even hear how much he disagreed from way up there, and he wasn't using language appropriate for children. Mr. Morrison told him so, and I saw, yes, I swear I saw Jonesy level his rifle on an unarmed civilian.

What happened next sort of bent my brain. One minute Mr. Morrison is backing away, and the next minute Mrs. Morrison is all up in Jonesy's face, her neck pistoning back and forth like she's trying to take a bite out of him. And he's got his rifle between them, straight in Mrs. Morrison's gut. Then Mr. Morrison lets out a squawk that I can hear from the roof. Suddenly he isn't Mr. Morrison anymore. He's all thrashing around on the ground, rolling over and over, and Mrs. Morrison is still in Jonesy's face. Jonesy is all red in the face and screaming right back, so he doesn't notice Mr. Morrison's transformation.

With a heave, Mr. Morrison throws off his clothes. He's a giant flamingo, all pink feathers and squawk. Jonesy shoves Mrs. Morrison out of the way and levels his rifle on Mr. Morrison. As the flamingo charges, Jonesy looks up at me and pulls down frantically. He wants me to take the bird out. Both my buddy Frankie and me open up on the flamingo. We're using silver, heavy bullets meant to drop a wolf or at least throw him back. And Mr. Morrison the flamingo goes down in a shower of feathers. I can hear Mrs. Morrison and the kids screaming. A second later they're all rolling on the ground and Jonesy's pumping his fist like he's trying to pull a truck horn. He wants us to take all of them out.

But Jonesy's got bigger problems. Even with a half dozen silver bullets in him, Mr. Morrison the flamingo is back on his feet. We open up again. But this time he just hunches down and we run through our loads on him. We've only got ten each, minus what we lost in the wolves. Silver doesn't grow on trees and we're sharpshooters, so we hit Mr. Morrison in a vital spot every time. At the end he ruffles his feathers and stands up.

Right about now Jonesy figures out he'd better run for it. So he does. He books it out of the park and Mr. Morrison just looks after him, then Morrison goes over to the picnic basket and knocks it over. The whole basket is full of raw shrimp. Weirdest thing I ever saw. The Morrisons must have been already changing slowly and our team just set them off.

So, how do you kill a Were-flamingo? That's the real question. So far, they've been happy in the park, but they aren't going to stay there for long once the shrimp run out.

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