I’m sure you’ve seen on the news already - there are hundreds of places around the world that thousands of people are being evacuated from while millions watch on TV from the comfort of their homes. It’s a sad state of affairs, isn’t it? It feels like the world’s drowning in blood. I’m sure you’ve noticed it, even if you’re lucky enough to be one of the millions watching footage of those hundreds of places instead of one of the thousands of people fleeing them - like I was.
Thing is, it doesn’t really matter to me if you’ve realized how violent the world has become. Your acknowledgment or awareness is insignificant in the grand scheme of things - how we all feel about the world and whether or not it’s gone batshit sideways is insignificant. Something else came to the same conclusion about our world, something that’s been drawn to our global descent into madness like a moth to a flame - and I can’t sit still and pretend it doesn’t exist anymore.
Some context - I was an aid worker in one of the many fans currently caked in shit. I wasn’t there because of the shit hitting it though, you understand. I’d been there a few years already thanks to the local Mosquitoes being a death sentence the local Government had left unchecked for many malaria-rich decades.
I’m not going to tell you which specific shit-hit fan I escaped, but that’s because we’re all adults here - the Pentagon is going to have crawlers across the entire web looking for traces of this, so I need to be discreet. I want at least one person to see this before it’s taken down and I’m black-bagged. If I spill too many specifics I’ll be swatted before I’ve even finished a first draft, let alone copied it into my browser to post.
It’s been a few weeks since I got out, but I still break out in cold sweats whenever I dwell on it. I spent a good few years watching children waste into nothing because of a disease they got from a bug bite you understand, and landmine injuries weren’t unheard of even in “peacetime”, so it’s not like I’m easily shaken. Those last few days though… that mad existential sprint across the country to the one secure airport. The explosions, the constant thud-thud-thud on the air of gunshots nowhere near distant enough, the screams of innocent people caught in the crossfire - it will all be burned into my memory forever.
I once buried a seven-year-old left on the doorstep of our Treatment Clinic who weighed less than the stack of paperwork I’d carried to the shredder the same morning. In the few short days between the war starting and finally getting on that plane, I saw horrors of man to which the mental scarring of a dead child’s blank sunken eyes can’t hold a candle. I am telling you now nothing, nothing, I saw in that country has shaken me as much as the reason I’m actually writing this.
I’ve seen an elderly woman place a foot wrong on a dirt path and become an instant red mist. I’ve seen children so hungry they chew the flesh off their own arm. I’ve been driven down a high street in a minibus full of piss-soaked and terrified diplomats all trying their hardest not to look at the bodies hanging from the lampposts outside.
None of it, none of it, has fucked me up as much as those Crows.
The evacuation itself was chaotic. No, chaotic isn’t the word. It was a fucking mess. Hell on earth in the most literal, non-idiom sense. People were running for their lives in all directions, trying to escape groups of men with ideals and AK-47’s only to run into a hail of bullets from another group of men with opposing values but identical hardware. Overnight I went from treating the endless ebb of the globe’s forgotten to being indistinguishable from them.
Shit hit my fan too fast for my own government to swoop in and save me, you see? Guidance that came through to our little international treatment center was clear - Arnie wasn’t coming to help us get to the chopper… or plane, in this case. The UN would be holding the country’s one airport open for evacuations as long as possible, but it was up to us to make our way there. In time, too - too much dawdling in this apocalyptic microcosm and we were on our own. I joined the throngs of refugees not as an outsider but a fully signed-up participant, clutching my belongings tightly and praying that I would make it out alive.
To paraphrase, it was some scary, scary shit. That’s not what I’m here to tell you about though. No - what’s got me so damn tapped that I haven’t slept a single night since touching down on home soil came a few days later, after I’d managed to tag along with a group of gruff and - importantly - armed private security personnel escorting a Chinese oil tycoon. Thanks to our shared destination and my medical knowledge being incredibly useful at exactly the moment we met owing to that combination of ideals and AK-47’s I mentioned, said tycoon was happy for me to tag along under their protection.
I didn’t react to the bodies from the lamp posts when we were in the minibus, the ones that made all the diplomats who didn’t already need one require a change of underwear. We’d hijacked our transport on the final leg of the expedition, and by that point, I’d already been numbed to anything that wasn’t the Crows.
They’d come to me about half a day before the Chinese capitalist’s bodyguards cut seven lives short for a working automobile. As we trudged through the rubble, I saw things that I can never unsee. Bodies littered the streets, sometimes whole families, sometimes just a lone figure. The stench of death hung heavy in the air, and I had to fight the urge to retch despite being no stranger to it. My new guarantor, the surprisingly un-Communist woman from Beijing, didn’t win her personal struggles with nausea, and neither did the handful of diplomats I convinced her to allow to tag along as I had. As I reminded her, there was no telling how long the journey would be, and that dressing on her leg couldn’t change itself.
We were making our way through a shelled-out building, hoping to find a way out, when a second barrage of munitions ripped through the carcass of the once-proud structure. Our ragtag bunch of geopolitical trespassers were scattered in all directions, some fatally. All around was the thud-thud-thud and hot whistling in the air which let us know we’d taken a catastrophically wrong turn. It was then, stumbling through the smoke and the dust and the wet stench of hot red violence, that it happened.
I caught a glimpse of something moving in the shadows. At first, I thought it was just my imagination - a hallucinatory by-product of the brain-liquifying explosions attempting to turn the street into a landscape of gnarled glass. However, as I looked closer, I realized that it was something entirely too real. Unfortunately, my need for discretion with specific details stems from conversations I’ve had with very official men and women in the time since, conversations that came with photographs and footage and reports of previous encounters and a whole bunch of fucking non-disclosure agreements I will not be fucking adhering to you utter pricks.
Sorry. Yeah. Sure you can figure it outcolor, but as much as I wish I’d been hallucinating, I have it on pretty solid authority that I wasn’t.
I’d been stumbling around in the choking fumes of war for about half a minute when my senses returned enough to me to notice it through the thick haze. It was hunched over in a building carcass across the street a stomach-churningly short distance from me. A creature - if you could even call it that. Words like aberration, abomination, or obscenity feel more appropriate. A being that instantly conjures up concepts like “crime against nature” the moment it’s viewed. A thing whose mere existence is offensive to the laws of reality.
This thing was unlike any beast, real or imagined, that I had ever seen before. It was tall, lanky, easily gracing 9ft, clad in skin the sickly grey color of phlegm coughed up by a 40-a-day smoker. The way the gunfire flashes lashing through the fog danced on the things flesh exposed that it was slimy to the touch - a realization which unnerved me almost as much as the city pigeon-thin plumage of sparse, wiry feathers. A beanpole of a guy with leaking skin and feathers wouldn’t be enough to fuck me up this much though - weird as it was.
Nah. What’s fucked me up is its fucking heads. Both of them.
Yeah, you read that right. Both of them. This walking genetic hate crime exposed by the mortar had two heads - and neither were human. Where a cranium that didn’t drive me instantly to the verge of madness should have been was instead a pair of crow heads sitting atop a thick, vertebrae-ridged neck. They were grotesquely large in proportion to its body, with dark beady eyes that gleamed even in the dim flashing almost-lightlessness of the fog of war. The worst part was the beaks - each a charred ebony claw exploding from an avian face, each impossibly sharp and pointed and dripping with the visceral spoils of human war.
Straight away I knew I’d interrupted it in the middle of a deep and intensely personal ritual. It was… feeding. I’m sure you can already guess on what, or, perhaps more humanely and respectfully, whom. I promise you that, as foregone a conclusion as said thing spotted in said place having said diet feels, nothing prepares you for witnessing it first hand. Especially when the specifics of which parts of our anatomy it’s partial to.
The building across the street had been filled with the bodies of civilians unfortunate enough to be caught in a prior wave of shelling. Even through the smoke, I could see the reddish almost-blackness where empty dead gazes should have been. Even though it was osavoringnly a minute or two max, it felt like I watched in horror as the creature ate the eyes from the corpses for hours. It was a slow and deliberate process, the crow heads craning down towards the face of each mangled, burned, and half-bloated body - one gore-crusted beak delicately peeling back the eyelids so the other could suck their prizes from the skulls like oysters. It was almost as if it was savouring the taste, relishing in the grotesque feast.
Worst part is, even with the dull thud-thud-thud of armed conflict filling up what wasn’t drowned out by tinnitus, I swear I could still hear it. The sound of the creature eating was nauseating, a wet squelching that cracked and spat through the air each time its beaks tore into soft optical flesh. I felt bile rise in my throat, and I had to turn away, unable to watch any longer. I retched violently, the disgust overwhelming me.
That’s when I realized whether or not I could really hear it was irrelevant, because it could definitely hear me.
All four beady shark-like eyes locked onto mine, and for an eternity-long moment, the disfigured cannibalistic carrion and I stared at each other. I could see the hunger in its eyes, its twin beaks lightly clicking in anticipation of feeling the warm eyes I gazed back with sliding down its throat. I didn’t have to be close to it to know its desire to consume me just as it had consumed the corpses around it was all-powerful. A pure, unquenchable hunger that radiated from the crow-headed abomination like a grotesque heat.
Thankfully, it never got the chance to have a taste. Before it could react to my presence with something more fatal than a soul-piercing stare, one of the Beijing bodyguards grabbed me roughly by the arm, pulling me behind a nearby building. I stumbled and fell to the ground, my heart racing as I heard the creature’s claws scraping against the rubble in the street behind us. I yelled something unintelligible at the bodyguard, but he didn’t acknowledge. Thankfully I needn’t have bothered, because before I knew it he’d wordlessly dragged me through another fifteen feet of lethal fog to where his boss - and her most recent injury - waited, and we weren’t followed.
I only caught a short look at the Crows, but the image will be seared into my mind forever. I don’t know what that thing was, or where it came from, but I can’t help but wonder - how many other monstrosities are lurking in the shadows, waiting to pounce on innocent victims in the chaos of war?
By the time we actually reached the airport, I’d found my senses and was recounting what I’d seen at length to anyone who would listen. Turns out you get some pretty powerful people evacuated from warzones, people whose memories get jogged by phrases like “fucking giant two-head crow person”. I was already in handcuffs by the time the plane landed.
I’ve been sworn to secrecy about what I saw, and I’d intended to stand by that, but I can’t keep quiet any longer. People need to fucking know what’s out there, what’s lurking in the heat and fire of war like our greatest tragedies are a God damn buffet. I’m going public about what I saw. It’s time for the truth to be known about the full cost of war, and what it can bring, no matter how bleak or terrifying it may be. Keep an eye out.