It

wings filled the smokestack; stinking air streamed past Mike in a hurricane, flapping his clothes, making him cough and gag and retreat as dust and moss flew.
Light appeared again, gray and weak at first, then brightening and shifting as the bird retreated from the stack’s muzzle. Mike burst into tears, fell to his knees again, and began grubbing madly for more pieces of tile. Without any conscious thought, he ran forward with both hands full of tiling (in this light he could see the pieces were splotched with blue – g r a y moss and lichen, like the surface of slate gravestones), until he was nearly at the mouth of the stack. He intended to keep the bird from coming back in if he could.
It bent down, cocking its head the way a trained bird on a perch will sometimes cock its head, and Mike saw where his last shot had struck home. The bird’s right eye was nearly gone. Instead of that glittering bubble of fresh tar, there was a crater filled with blood. Whitish-gray goo dripped from the corner of the socket and trickled along the side of the bird’s beak. Tiny parasites wriggled and squirmed in this pussy discharge.
It saw him and lunged forward. Mike began to throw chunks of tile at it. They struck its head and beak. It withdrew for a moment and then lunged again, beak opening, revealing that pink lining again, revealing something else that caused Mike to freeze for a moment, his own mouth dropping open. The bird’s tongue was silver, its surface as crazy-cracked as the surface of a volcanic land which has first baked and then slagged off.
And on this tongue, like weird tumbleweeds that had taken temporary root there, were a number of orange puffs.
Mike threw the last of his tiles directly into that gaping maw and the bird withdrew again, screaming its frustration, rage, and pain. For a moment Mike could see its reptilian talons . . . Then its wings ruffled the air and it was gone.
A moment later he lifted his face — a face that was gray-brown under the dirt, dust, and bits of moss that the bird’s wind-machine wings had blown at him — toward the clicking sound of its talons on the tile. The only clean places on Mike’s face were the tracks that had been washed clean by his tears.
The bird walked back and forth overhead: Tak-tak-tak –tak.
Mike retreated a bit, gathered up more chunks of tile, and heaped them as close to the mouth of the stack as he dared. If the thing came back, he wanted to be able to fire at it from point –blank range. The light outside was still bright — now that it was May, it wouldn’t get dark for a long time yet — but suppose the bird just decided to wait?
Mike swallowed, the dry sides of his throat rubbing together for a moment.
Overhead: Tak-tak –tak.
He had a fine pile of ammunition now. In the dim light, here beyond the place where the angle of the sun made a shadow-spiral inside the pipe, it looked like a pile of broken crockery swept together by a housewife. Mike rubbed the palms of his dirty hands along the sides of his jeans and waited to see what would happen next.
A space of time passed before something did — whether five minutes or twenty-five, he could not tell. He was only aware of the bird walking back and forth overhead like an insomniac pacing the floor at three in the morning.
Then its wings fluttered again. It landed in front of the smokestack’s opening. Mike, on his knees just behind his pile of tiling, began to peg missiles at it before it could even bend its head down. One of them slammed into a plated yellow leg and drew a trickle of blood so dark it seemed almost as black as the bird’s eyes. Mike screamed in triumph, the sound thin and almost lost under the bird’s own enraged squawk.
‘Get out of here!’ Mike cried. ‘I’m going to keep hitting you until you get out of here, I swear to God I will!’
The bird flew up to the top of the smokestack and resumed its pacing.
Mike waited.
Finally its wings ruffled again as it took off. Mike waited, expecting the yellow feet, so like hen’s feet, to appear again. They didn’t. He waited longer, convinced it had to be some kind of a trick, realizing at last that that wasn’t why he was waiting at all. He was waiting because he was scared to go out, scared to leave the safety of this bolthole.
Never mind! Never mind stuff like that! I’m not a rabbit!
He took as many chunks of tile as he could handle comfortably, then put some more inside his shirt. He stepped out of the smokestack, trying to look everywhere at once and wishing madly for eyes in the back of his head. He saw only