"Every war against birds will be won by birds. " ~ Azsacra Zarathustra
Not to mention the bees and every other sort of creature lying in between. Including the wild predators that help forge the pathways of rivers, which in turn lead a myriad different animals to drink from, to survive and flourish. As trite as it might seem to many embittered among us who've become weary and cynical in this hard-pressed modern era of automation and distractions, nevertheless there indeed exists a greater chain of life whose integral parts remain interdependent with one another to evolve and maintain the conditions which allow mutual survival.
A darkening cloud now forms hovering above mankind's collective brow. Storms of electrical connections along a complicated webwork of neurons fire up like crimson sprites above a developing cloudbank. Charging the upper atmosphere with pulsating flashes of plasma power, cracking with sudden lightning bolts zigzagging with sporadic revelations to occasionally illuminate the scene below. A burgeoning cauldron slowly brewing with kinetic energy, the thunderheads of clouds amass together above the continent's eastern shore, casting a great shadow slithering over the corrugated features of the landscape, moving with inexorable precision toward a white building wrought of neoclassical design.
Zoomed in upon, the roiling cloud grows larger as it peppers the sky, revealing millions of birds in a mass murmuration which stretches and morphs into a gigantic winged form taking the shape of an enormous Great Horned Owl, of a sudden swooping down upon the executive mansion that has dared to assume the form of some Roman palace down there. Inside its oval-shaped headquarters a cabal of desperate men are grouped together to discuss the latest development in their over-arching scheme to strip away the rights of as many public demographics their advisory committee can think up.
They have isolated various American categories of people they consider to be marginalized and dispossessed. Those who could be seen as vulnerable, along with the disenfranchised; anyone in our society they deem should be excluded and stigmatized. Those they have designated as being inherently expendable, such as the elderly; people with disabilities like autism or Down syndrome; the homeless and those stricken with addictions; in fact, any members of society who aren't in lockstep with the new rising vision planned by the clever architects in cahoots with this administration.
For example, those convicted of crimes and undocumented immigrants; veterans of past wars who have used up their worthiness as far as this elite cadre of men are concerned; spent pieces of jet trash such as liberals and democrats; and for that matter, transvestites and their PRIDE allies along with grandmothers, fatties, wimps, nerds, intellectuals, radicals and people of color; Muslim Americans across the board, and all those who oppose the war, being their sacred venture against the middle-east waged in conjunction and by necessity with the higher calling of the Levantine state, to whose allegiance this inner circle of men are pledged and indebted to the mighty dollar upon which it's sworn.
In short, the politically-targeted and scapegoated are held in the crosshairs of their gunsights. They have a gut feeling between them anyhow that "overpopulation is a real problem," so these new policies will easily help cut that burgeoning dilemma down to size quite nicely, thank you very much, and make no mistake about it. These men hold their mission in the noblest of light. They have found a way to justify it all under the mantle of passages from the Holy bible.
In a clever public relations maneuver, never mind if photo ops may show the president holding a bible upside down now and then, or heaven forbid (and will look the other way) in court when after all, it turns out the bibles used there to be sworn upon are mere facsimiles, and not real testaments of scripture at all. "So you see," they rationalize, "We'll be fine. Can't be condemned for swearing on a fake book, am I right?" the head executive hushes those in his inner circle who might raise a nervous hand in objection, "Don't worry, I know you, you're good men, you're all going to heaven," so he soothes his sycophants with a wave of his hand.
It is at that moment the lights in the oval office flicker and go out, when a sudden flash of lightning can be seen along the curved southern wall, through the three tall windows, a split second before a sonic boom of thunder claps against their ears, ringing off the marble fire mantle, sending a momentary scare into the officials gathered for their convocation. The six men's heads turn toward the windows in shock, noticing the blackened shadow having fallen across them, and before any one of them can utter a word, all three windows explode inward with a shattering cascade of broken glass and howling wind. The birds of war have let themselves in.
In one paralyzing split moment, time seems to slow down to a near stop. Five of the senior advisors caught in super slow motion react in self-defense, their arms moving upward, while their beleaguered helmsman in the long red tie slowly begins to turn his back in a lowering crouch. They that build all the guns. They that build the death planes. They that build the big bombs. They that hide behind walls. They that hide behind desks. We just want you to know we can see through your masks.
You that never done nothin'. But build to destroy. You play with our world like it's your little toy. You put a gun in our hand and you hide from our eyes. You turn and run farther when the fast bullets fly. Like Judas of old you lie and deceive. A world war can be won you want us to believe. But we see through your eyes and we see through your brains like we see through the water running down all our drains.
You fasten the triggers for the others to fire. Then you sit back and watch while the death count gets higher. You hide in your mansion as young people's blood flows out of their bodies and is buried in the mud. You've thrown the worst fear that can ever be hurled. Fear to bring children into the world. For threatening our babies unborn and unnamed, you ain't worth the blood that runs in your veins.
How much do we know? To talk out of turn. You might say that we're young, you might say we're unlearned. But there's one thing we know though we're younger than you. Even Jesus would never forgive what you do. So can we ask you one question, is your money that good? Will it buy you forgiveness, do you think that it could? I think you will find when your death takes its toll all the money you made will never buy back your soul.
And we hope that you die and your death will come soon. We'll follow your casket in the pale afternoon. And we'll watch while you're lowered down to your deathbed, and we'll stand over your grave till we're sure that you're dead.
What occurs next happens very fast. There will be no record of it due to the extreme caution taken by the kingpin himself to limit his circle of trust for their ears alone. No cameras were set up, nor any microphone. Their Samsung Galaxies and Sony Xperias were locked into a Faraday box. "This meeting is strictly for our ears, it's going to be just between us. We're going to sit down and discuss just who gets to ride on the bus," with a smug nod and a wink their self-appointed boss says. It caused eyebrows to rise and some turns of the head.
The memory of those words evaporated just as the stormcloud of birds exploded into the room. A frenzy of wings whipped the air into a turbulence of feathers. Talons reached out and extended from the birds' feet thrust forward. The parliament of owls poured into the room like liquid ink into a still pond, rapidly filling it with nightmarish intensity. The faces of all six statesmen were flensed off their skull mounts in the course of an instant. Blood sluiced into the flock to be soaked into wings. All the owls were screaming and barking in a furious cacophony of sound, screeching their symphony of vengeance while gulping their prized gobbets of flesh down their gullets, as six bodies fell to the beige office Reagan-era rug, itself soaking up the spreading pool of blood.
Nature's parliament of raptorial beaks surgically targeted the twelve human ocular globes of sight, plucking them with a deft precision that could only be seen to be believed, and there was no one there with an eyeball left to see, verily. The sudden and unexpected facial avulsions and degloving of the masks worn by these gentlemen wasn't quite enough to shed them of their mortal coils, nor was the traumatic enucleation of their visionary orbs, alas. But that was quite alright with the raptors, their work was done, and as swiftly as they had arrived, they twisted around and shot out of that room, in an outpouring of wings, thrumming through the three shattered windows like a phantasmagorical inkblot of derangement being exorcised from the sanctum, leaving some feathers drifting down to stick to the carpet.
Nature works in mysterious ways. All six of these cabinet members managed to survive, albeit blinded for life, defaced and deformed and quite traumatized. It turns out they spent many weeks in the ICU hospitalized. The upshot was that while the rest of their cabinet and their cohorts in arms scurried and tried as best as they could to suppress what had happened, word got out nevertheless from some of the hospital staff who coaxed it out of them in their delirium, and who apparently held a grudge over the fate of a peer at HCMC in Minneapolis. There were plenty of witnesses to the murmuration that descended upon the White House, uploading their reels of the startling incident on Instagram and TikTok. As for the executive branch of hand-picked freaks and rejects, all the plastic surgery their dirty money could buy wasn't enough to cover up the scarred facial reconstructions nor keep the truth from the collective view of the public eye.
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