This was not the weirdest thing Mabel had ever taken a baseball bat to, or even the scariest, but it was not fucking easy.

The Brock Marsh street she had been walking down exploded with claws and feathers, to the horror of her and everyone else. She'd dragged two boys into the closest shop - a bookstore with the world's most unfortunately large windows - and had them and the shopkeeper brace shelving against those windows as much as they could. The birds furled against the windows like an angry cloud; at the sight of the first crack, Mabel had banished the other three to the windowless thick door of the storeroom in the back. She'd barricade them in, if she had to.

The windows were tougher than they looked. The small window on the front door was another story, those black furious balls trying to squeeze through the break in it all at once. They manage it one by one, only to be bashed into submission by Mabel wielding the shopkeeper's bat. The cracks in the larger windows were getting bigger and the crows weren't going down without a fight.

Her arms are starting to bleed.