Even before the events in the supermarket, Jim Ironheart should have known trouble was ing. During the night he dreamed of being pursued across a field by a flock of large blackbirds that shrieked around him in a turbulent flapping of wings and tore at him with hooked beaks as precisely honed as surgical scalpels. When he woke and was unable to breathe, he shuffled onto the balcony in his pajam
