Who: Aspen and Avram (also open to official walmart greeter Madison) Where: Outside Aspen's door, then the theatre When: 4am
Avram was sleeping hard when the noise started—hard enough that when the noise woke him, he was up and out of bed before his brain was even awake. In the murky, dreamlike seconds before the noise actually knocked out his hearing, he was aware of being halfway across the room with his hand on the doorknob and the twisted sheets and comforter dragged off the bed in his wake. At first it sounded like the shofar, that raucous trumpet-like blare that drilled through the skull, but somehow even louder. Even when he couldn't hear it he could feel it, and it was so bizarre that he went to the window to see if there was any hint outside of just what the fuck was going on.
In retrospect, the window was a bad idea.
It was impossible to see anything outside—no lights from town, the sky overcast, and after the tooth-jarring screech the only thing he saw were small dark objects that he first assumed were bats. Nothing else of that size should be active at this time of—thwack.
Thwackthwackthwackthwack.
"Ohhh shit," Avram muttered, backing off from the window as the birds started hitting the window en masse. The magpies, breaking their own necks against the glass, a seemingly limitless number of them. "Okay, okay," he murmured to himself to lower his blood pressure, barely able to hear it above the ringing in his ears. "This is upsetting but it's fine, they're just birds, they're outside, it's still safe in—"
ThwackthwackthwackCRASH.
The glass cracked, starring and spiderwebbing out from the point of impact. One of the magpies must have hit a weak point in the glass dead-on with its beak. Or else the birds had adamantium-plated skeletons like fucking Wolverine, because that was as plausible as anything else.
"Fuck, fuck, okay, this is not good..." The bathroom was an option, since there was only one window in there and it was behind the shower door. He would have hunkered down in there, but so far the Zenith Overlords seemed to be very anti-hunkering, so that was probably the wrong choice. He grabbed a t-shirt and his sweater, ready to head downstairs and see what was going on, when he heard an unfamiliar voice crying out from down the hall.
Sure enough, the assholes had moved somebody new into the house and let them wake up to this. Christ.
He knocked on the door. "Hey, um, sorry—can you hear me okay in there?"