I trailed myself down the avenue in my usual manner – three hundred feet or so back, and on the opposite side of the street.  It was an old habit and one that had saved us from some serious damage or death on more than one occasion.  It was early evening and the street was quiet, but better safe than sorry, we reckoned.

Even as this thought crossed my minds, I saw myself suddenly confronted by a group of five individuals who had stepped out from a side alley and directly into my path, on the other side of the street.  A little Murder, but a Murder nonetheless.

Members of the Fancy Crows, a smallish gang of violent street dandies that hung out locally at a dive called The Crow Bar.  You couldn’t miss the place, there was a giant sign out front adorned with a faded painting of a crow wielding a crowbar like a weapon and a large wrought-iron sculpture on a protruding lintel above the entrance to the establishment that depicted a regal crow sitting astride a pair of crossed crowbars, with much extraneous filigree and pomp – all together a bit of garish over-kill, in our opinion.

The hoodlum Crows always looked to me like a shabby collection of 19th Century undertakers; dressed all in black and slightly dingy.  But sans the top hats, due to the over-large pompadour hairstyles each of them sported on their underdeveloped (one imagined) craniums; fixed in their majestic glory by vast amounts of aerosol spray and stabilizing compounds.

I leaned up against a brick doorway arch and waited.

No sense getting involved in this easy business, I thought to myself, I can handle this lot without my help.

Still, true to my vigilant natures, I reached beneath my otterskin duster and undid the snaps securing my Coat-Gun, allowing it to swing more freely from the sling sewn into the garment.

I thumbed the power button ‘On’ and the safety ‘Off’, appreciating for a moment just how quiet this model was compared to the older version fitted with the 20cc two-stroke engine.

The electric blunderbuss hummed reassuringly and I patted the gut-splattering weapon lightly with a mixture of love and respect and then I leaned back further into the shadows and waited for me to deal with the birdbrains who had no idea the type of shit-storm they were about to step into.  There was soon to be some very deflated pompadours hanging limply across some very sad, and most certainly bloodied, faces.

As I waited, I was rudely interrupted by the arrival of a Mechanized Application which spotted me in the doorway and zipped over to make its sales pitch.  Annoyed and distracted, I quickly cracked an ampule of Aspect Gravy and changed the bot’s perspective; it saw things differently and trundled off in confusion.

I shook my head at the retreating form and then turned my attention back to myself.

The tense stand-off between me and the other five men had not yet erupted into violence, but the moment seemed close, so I left the archway and ambled a bit nearer to myself.

And then Mama Corax stepped into view from just down the street and walked slowly towards the place of contention.

Mama Corax – oddly beautiful.  Tall and thin, with a more reserved version of the requisite pompadour and wearing a long black off-the-shoulder dress, with a train in the back that managed to mimic the effect of tail feathers.

Beautiful, but also unsettling with her surgically altered legs and feet, created through an entire battery of radical procedures which had turned them into bird appendages – crow’s feet, to be precise.

“Come, children,” she said to the Fancies in a sing-song but compelling voice, “back to the nest you naughty ones, before you get your plumage plucked.”

The five of them looked at her, then looked at us, then back to her, then down at the ground.  Three of them proceeded to hop around in small circles, affecting the same strange gait as that of their namesake birds.

Not very intimidating, we thought to ourselves as we exchanged a quick glance at distance and gave us a ‘What the fuck?’ kind of a look.

Mama scowled and stamped one of her ‘feet’.

The chastened Crows stopped hopping, clucked their tongues a couple of times each, then turned on their heels and moved off, back towards the Crow Bar, waggling their heads as they went, setting their pompadours to wiggling; a sign of avian annoyance, apparently.

She waited until her little flock had turned a corner and disappeared before she levelled her gaze first at me and then at me, and she said, “Cawwwww,” in a low, silky voice.  “I can think of better things to do with the two of you than fighting,” and her lip curled up in a devilish smile, “Oh, well, someday perhaps.”  She looked the two of us over again with an expression on her face like that of a crow sizing up a delicious lump of roadkill and then she turned and strutted down the street, the black dress trailing behind her and her bird legs.

Just before she rounded the corner the little flight had taken, she called over her shoulder, “Oh, and there had better not be any bird-shot in that monstrosity under your coat, you naughty boy.”

We smiled to ourselves and continued on our way – leading and trailing myself, as usual.