Flying for the Exit

The latest chapter in A Lost Pigeon Named Lew!

Howdy, everyone!

I hope your week has been going swimmingly.

Thanks for opening up this chapter!

If you’re new here or if you have a couple of chapters to catch up on, here’s a link for you to the full series:

If you haven’t already, here’s a good old subscribe button for you. It’s free!

Also, if you’re reading this and you’re a Substack writer, leave a comment! Maybe we can collaborate on something!

Now, for today’s chapter… it’s time for Lew to fly for the exit.

---

The terrible alarm sound from the jewellery store continued on behind us as we flew away.

Down below, the guard was still chasing after us. There was no stopping now. We had to keep moving.

“Where to?” asked Ruby.

“We can’t go through the vents again,” said Joan. “Not with that creature up there. How else can we get out, Lew?”

I thought it over as quickly as I could. There was one other option.

“There is another way,” I said. “It’s the same way the humans come in and out. The front door.”

“Do you know how to get us there?” asked Joan.

I was starting to have a better feel for the layout of the mall.

“I’ll give it a shot,” I said. “We need to get back to the cafeteria first.”

We carried on down the mall laneway towards the food court. Random humans were looking up as we passed them by. I wonder what they thought when they saw us and all of the jewellery we were carrying…

We made it back to the food area and we were once again met with a myriad of different paths that we could go down. We landed on a small lip of ledge high up one of the walls and I tried to think over our options. I looked down each of the mall laneways, weighing them up, trying to think a clear answer into existence.

“Guess who’s back,” said Joan suddenly, looking down at ground level.

The guard had just come scrambling into the cafeteria, along with a small team of humans dressed in white from the jewellery store.

They were looking up and searching around for us, scanning the ceiling.

“They’re persistent,” said Ruby.

“I guess this is a little bit different to stealing a French fry,” said Joan.

The main guard, whose head was still shiny with Joan's poop, now peeled away from the other jewellery store humans in white and ran into a nearby store.

While I weighed up the paths we could take, Joan took some of the jewellery off of Ruby to help her out.

I was still thinking it over. The last thing we wanted was to end up totally lost in a random part of the mall.

I saw that one of the mall laneways was busier than the others. Things began to click in my mind.

Before I could share my findings, the guard was back from the store and had something with him. It was the last thing on earth I had wanted to see. A slingshot. It was just like the one that the kid had hit me with when I was on the cruise. That slingshot had caused all of this...

I told Joan and Ruby, "We need to hurry. That thing he has, it's deadly."

As the guard rejoined the others, one of the jewellery store workers finally spotted us. Pointing up at us, they told everyone else and suddenly all eyes were on us.

“Where do we go?” Joan asked.

"That way," I said. "That's the way out."

We flew straight for the busy laneway. Looking back as we left the cafeteria, the jewellery store team were right on our tails.

We flew above the shuffling crowd of people -- more and more of them looking up at us, completely befuddled.

The laneway began to open up and then we saw the spinning front door to the mall.

We landed on top of another little billboard on ground level. The rotating doors were absolutely packed with people coming and going.

We stood for a moment and just watched the doors in the distance. It was a pigeon’s worst nightmare. We knew we had to do it, but we were afraid.

Suddenly there was the sound of an impact and the eruption of feathers. It was Ruby. She'd been hit.

Before any of us could react, Ruby was knocked off the billboard.

I looked back and saw the guard standing in the distance with an evil smug look on his face, still holding up the slingshot he had just fired.

Joan and I dived off the billboard after Ruby. We reached her and she had already hit the floor.

She was squirming on the ground as she tried to untangle herself. One of her wings was shaking. That was where she’d been hit.

“I’m ok,” she said.

“Can you fly?” Joan asked.

She moved her wing a little bit to test it; the wing was quivering and jittering.

Somehow, for some reason, Ruby smiled.

“I’m tough as nails,” she said.

We knew the security guard would be stomping over there at that very moment, closing in by the second.

We helped Ruby to her feet and there wasn’t any time for being gentle.

We waited for Ruby to take off first to make sure she was ok. There was a stutter at first and then she was in the air, flying low and tilting from side to side.

We went after her and made for the spinning doors. When I looked back, I saw the guard charging after us.

Flying low, humans were jumping out of our way when they saw us, clearing the path, acting as if we were deadly snakes instead of three little brittle birds. One of them took a kick at us but slipped over themselves and fell.

We were almost at the spinning doors. There were more and more humans all around us.

Getting closer, we had to slow down. We couldn’t just fly through the spinning doors. We would be going too fast and there was too much glass around the place. It was too dangerous. We needed to walk in on the ground.

“We can’t fly in there!” I called out to Joan and Ruby. “We need to land!”

We stopped just short of the spinning doors. For the last stint, we weaved between the human legs around us, sticking close together.

We made it in…

And the guard made it in too…

---

Thanks so much for giving today’s chapter a read.

Next installment soon!