“Chopper chopper!” Sparky shouted, giggling nervously.
“We can't be caught!” Jack said again. “This isn't fair!” He thought of his mother and sister crawling out of London through the dangerous darkness, his father somewhere to the north, and Lucy-Anne wandering the street alone as she searched the ruin of one of the world's largest cities for her lost brother. And such a weight of responsibility pressed down on him that for a moment he could not move, crushed there on that burnt car's bonnet and staring into the skeletal eyes of someone sorely missed.
“Come on,” Sparky said, tapping his leg.
“Jack!” Jenna shouted.
Another helicopter appeared above the end of the street, lowering itself slowly between house rows, rotors so close that they whipped dust from the buildings’ facades.
“There!” Jenna shouted, pointing at an open door across the street. “We can go through and try to find—”
“Look!” Sparky shouted. He pointed, but there was no need. The darkening of the sky was obvious.
The helicopter pilot was concentrating so hard on not crashing into the houses that he can't have noticed the flock of rooks gathering above him. There were hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, swirling and waving in complex patterns that were as beautiful as they were disturbing.
“Over there!” Jenna said. Along the street, halfway between where they stood and where the pilot was readying to land, someone emerged from a house. Rooks roosted on his shoulders and head, and though it could not be heard, Jack saw that he was whistling.
The helicopter was ten feet above the ground when the rooks dived into its spinning rotors.
“Down!” Sparky shouted. He pulled Jenna down beside him, Jack fell beside the burnt out cars…but they all had to watch.
Thousands of birds exploded in puffs of black and sprays of blood. The houses beside the aircraft were coated in clumps of wet feather and meat, and the combined calls of dying birds was louder that the protesting engine. Some dived into the main rotors, other curved down and flew into the rear rotor blade, their suicides instant and without hesitation.
The helicopter's front windshield was quickly obscured by a mess of diced rooks, and it tipped down and to the left.
Sparky shouted something else, but the noise was too great, the chaos too confusing to hear. The aircraft tilted and hit the ground hard, and the still-spinning rotors smashed across the front of a house. Shards of shattered brick zinged along the street like shrapnel from an explosion, ricocheting from the ruined cars, smashing windows, and whistling overhead. Jack felt something hit his leg, and the impact point quickly turned wet and numb.
The motor squealed, crunched, and then exploded with a pained grinding of metal. A section of brickwork fell from the front of the house directly into the blades, and one of them snapped away, spinning skyward and disappearing over the terraced rooftops. An avalanche of roof slates slid down onto crashed helicopter.
The remaining rotors stopped spinning, broken and dipped, and the aircraft settled at a slant against the house's wall.
Jack could not move. He looked from the ruin of the helicopter, to the boy with rooks on his shoulder, then back to the aircraft. There was movement there, though it could have been the shuffle of dying birds twitching wings or tail feathers. More slates slipped from the roof. An upstairs window fell forward and smashed across a broken rotor blade. The house was still shifting, and the rest of it could come down at any moment.
There were still hundreds of rooks circling above, and the mysterious boy watched them.
A side door on the helicopter creaked open. Two soldiers fell out, stumbling away from the wreck and quickly bringing their weapons to bear.