Cold Fire

bear Henry Ironheart's wretched look of guilt and fragile hope, Holly glanced up at the birds again—and saw them coming. More than thirty of them now, dark knives slicing down through the somber sky, still high up but coming straight toward the courtyard.
    “Jim, no!”
    Henry looked up.
    Jim lifted his face, too, but not to see what was coming. He knew what was coming. He raised his face as if to offer his eyes to their sharp beaks and frenzied claws.
    Holly leaped to her feet, making herself a more prominent target than he was. “Jim, face it, remember it, for Christ's sake!”
    She could hear the shrieks of the swift-descending birds.
    “Even if The Enemy did it,” she said, pulling Jim's upturned face to her breast, shielding him, “you can get past that somehow, you can go on.”
    Henry Ironheart cried out in shock, and the birds burst over Holly, flapping and squirming against her, swooping away, then more of them fluttering and scraping, trying to get past her and at Jim's face, at his eyes.
    They didn't tear at her with either their beaks or talons, but she did not know how long they would spare her. They were The Enemy, after all, manifesting itself in a whole new way, and The Enemy hated her as much as it hated Jim.
    The birds swirled out of the courtyard, back into the sky, gone like so many leaves in a violent updraft.
    Henry Ironheart was frightened but unhurt. “Move away,” she told him.
    “No,” he said. He reached helplessly for Jim, who would not reach for him.
    When Holly dared look up, she knew that the birds were not finished. They had only soared to the fringe of the bearded gray clouds, where another score of them had collected. Fifty or sixty now, churning and dark, hungry and quick.
    She was aware of people at the windows and sliding glass doors that opened onto the courtyard. Two nurses came through the same slider that she had used when wheeling Henry out to meet Jim.
    “Stay back!” she shouted at them, not sure how much danger they might be in.
    Jim's rage, while directed at himself and perhaps at God for the very fact of death's existence, might nevertheless spill over and spend itself on the innocent. Her shouted warning must have frightened the nurses, for they retreated and stood in the doorway.
    She raised her eyes again. The larger flock was coming.
    “Jim,” she said urgently, holding his face in both hands, peering into his beautiful blue eyes, icy now with a cold fire of self-hatred, “only one more step, only one more thing to remember.” Though their eyes were only a few inches apart, she did not believe that he saw her; he seemed to be looking through her as he had earlier in Tivoli Gardens when the burrowing creature had been racing at them.
    The descending flock squealed demonically.
    “Jim, damn you, what happened to Lena might not be worth suicide!”
    The rustle-roar of wings filled the day. She pulled Jim's face against her body, and as before he did not struggle when she shielded him, which gave her hope. She bent her head and closed her eyes as tightly as she could.
    They came: silken feathers; smooth cold beaks ticking, prying, searching; claws scrabbling gently, then not so gently, but still not drawing blood; swarming around her almost as if they were hungry rats, swirling, darting, fluttering, squirming along her back and legs, between her thighs, up along her torso, trying to get between his face and her bosom, where they could tear and gouge; batting against her head; and always the shrieking, as shrill as the cries of madwomen in a psychopathic fury, screaming in her ears, wordless demands for blood, blood, blood, and then she felt a sharp pain in her arm as one of the flock ripped open her sleeve and pinched skin with it.
    “No!”
    They rose and departed again. Holly did not realize they were gone, because her own beating heart and fluttering breath continued to sound like thunderous wings to her. Then she raised her head, opened her eyes, and saw they were spiraling back into the leaden sky to join a storm cloud of other birds, a mass of dark bodies and wings, perhaps two hundred of them high overhead.
    She glanced at Henry Ironheart. The birds had drawn blood from one of his hands. Having huddled back into his chair during the attack, he now leaned forward again, reached out with one hand, and called Jim's name pleadingly.
    Holly looked down into Jim's eyes as he sat on the bench in front of her, and still he was not there. He was in the