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And wouldn’t you know it? Not five minutes later, the damned harpies showed up. The dirty beasts couldn’t even wait until I was done working before the whole damned flock of ‘em dived on me.
At least they were the dumb kind. I don’t know if you can even really call ‘em harpies, since they’re like them like a monkey is to a man. These were smaller than a baby, and screeched where a harpy would shout and scheme. They didn’t act as a pack, either, even though there were a good dozen in the sudden cloud of wings and spite. Half of them were bothering each other than they were bothering me. The crap-throwing, though? They did that like a harpy would, I can tell you. Made me grateful for the long coat, in more ways than one. Harpy crap stinks something fierce, and it sticks to dead skin just as hard as it does to living flesh.
I would have preferred to have something better than a hammer to fight them off, though I’m not sure what it could’ve been. A knife wouldn’t have done any better, and a gun wouldn’t have done a cursed thing, since they moved too fast for that. A shovel, maybe, or a net, pr anything that’d let me hit more than one of the harpies at a time. Instead I was stuck with twirling, swinging, and smacking where I could, with their caterwauling in my ears, and a thumping in my head that got louder with every scratch and scrape…
“Mister Deadman! Mister Deadman!”
Even now, I don’t know if the harpies flew off when Missus Grammy yelled out, or if she waited until they were gone. Either way, suddenly I was standing by myself in the yard, with a bloody hammer in my hand, and a bunch of harpy corpses by my feet. One of them was still moving feebly, and I looked at it for a long second before carefully kneeling to put it out of its misery.