We’d learned he was useless after 2 pm and before 11 am but good for fundraisers when the university had them.
I saw myself in him… if I’d had a trust fund and no prospects.
We bounced down the gravel path from his makeshift residence to the sprawl of the farm. The cool night air began clearing our nostrils, and my head, until we reached the long chicken barn labeled Barn 21. He squinted his eyes as he killed the engine, and I knew the weight of what I’d told him at the RV was hitting him.
“What happened? Is Merryl going to be okay?” he asked.
I took the keys from his outstretched hand, stuffed them in my pocket, and mulled over how to answer. “I’m not sure it would make sense if I told you how, and I don’t know if he’s going to make it.” I paused. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
He walked to the sliding doors of the barn, reached to open them, and then stopped.
The two-way radio on the Gator sparked to life.
“Hey, LC.” Perry’s voice crackled with the poor connection. “You need to get back here. You need to see this.” The urgency in her voice was unmistakable.
“Kid, you got this?” I yelled, anxious to check on Perry and Merryl.
He didn’t move.
“What’s wrong? Are we missing something?”
“Nah,” he started to roll open the left side but halted. “It’s quiet.”
I tilted my head. What had that kid been smoking besides pot?
Gravel crunched beneath my heels as I marched forward. “I don’t have time for your doped-up ass today.”
“Stop,” he said, holding up his hand as he pressed an ear to the door, next to the sign reading Barn 21. “Are we at the right barn?”
Frustration fueling me, I grabbed the handle of the opposite door and pulled. The metal rollers squawked against the bent, rusted railings at the bottom, and the noise echoed down the length of the building. Soft red light spilled out, with intermittent patches of shadow. Toward the back, about three light fixtures away from us, was nothing but an endless darkness.
On the ground, at our feet, was a carpet of white feathers.
I walked to the panel of switches and flipped them all, hoping to kick on the fluorescents.
No such luck.
Bodie stepped in, and I held him back with an arm. The kid was correct. There was no noise, not a single cluck or flutter of wings, nor was there even a minor squawk of annoyance that we were waking them.
“Grab the flashlights above the feed bins,” I said, pointing to the wall across from us.
He fumbled for a minute, struggling with the little bit of light coming from his lighter, as I watched the dark void beyond us out of the corner of my eye. The darkness boiled and shifted.
Something moved in it, like a bubble, or a plastic bag billowing in the wind.
Or I was imagining shapes where there were none.
A bright beam of light struck my vision, and I saw stars for a moment, even as Bodie handed me the mag-lite. “I don’t see any chickens. Do you see any?”
I scoured the ground, the empty feed troughs, every inch as we shuffled ourselves nearer to the dark. Nothing. No chickens. Only feathers that clung to our shoes as we walked.
Scratch scratch scratch. The noise came, suddenly, from an indeterminable point ahead of us. It was deep, like a hoe carving into hard clay.
Bodie’s light shook in his hand. “I’m scared to look.”
I nodded. “It will be okay. A coyote more than likely tore through here. It’s going to be a mess, but it’s nothing we haven’t handled before, right?”
“Right,” he said, as he pointed his beam toward the darkness.
A creak of metal above me jerked my attention, and I looked upward. One of the fluorescent lights wobbled in the air, affixed by a single chain and a tangle of wires.
Above that, the stars… A hole in the roof.
Shrapnel dangled, ripped pieces of metal pointed inward. A thing landed, and landed hard, and then, realization struck me.
Perry.
She thought something tore through the roof above her when the meteor hit in the parking lot.
It wasn’t above her.
It was nearby, shredding through the roof of Barn 21.
“What,” Bodie said, his words barely above a whisper, “is that thing?”
In Bodie’s shaking light source, an enormous, eight-toed chicken foot dug into the ground, scratched at the dirt, with human-hand-sized talons.
Bodie jerked the light upward. We hadn’t been looking into a black, empty space.
We’d been looking at a red-dark, bubbling flesh.
A hundred beady eyes opened. As I pointed my light at them, the shapes of chickens shifted inside, melting into it, this moving blob.
White feathers, some large, others tiny, protruded in tufts. Beaks jutted out, some of them open and panting, and crowned above it all, a solid five feet above my six-foot frame, was a colossal, engorged head of a mutant with a mammoth blood-red and six monstrous, searching eyes. Globs of tissue, feather, flesh dripped off of its comb, its sides, its neck.
The thing was consuming, and it was growing before our eyes.
I balked at the sight, frozen by my fear.
And then, he moved. Bodie. The flashlight fell at his feet, and he turned to run.
“No,” I yelled, reaching out to stop him.
The chicken-glob cocked its head, and with a swoop, latched its beak around Bodie’s neck. The kid squirmed and screamed, and with a quick toss, the monster threw him in the air as a crow toys with a worm. His body went limp as the thing’s mouth opened wide, and down its throat Bodie slid. In the translucent, still-forming sinews, I could see the kid’s shape floating motionless among the bodies of the chickens the beast had already consumed.
My body shook. I couldn’t run. Bodie well-proved that.
And then, it clucked.
The building trembled with the tenor. I had seconds to act, or I, too, would be floating, would be absorbed into the monstrosity. The light fixture above me swayed, and when it did, the mess of wires sparked.
I had a chance. It was a chicken, wasn’t it? Its goals simple, its instincts unadulterated?
The light hung lower than the ceiling, give or take a foot above the creature’s head. And if I could lure it…
“Yippee-kai-yay, motherclucker,” I said, as I tossed the flashlight up, as high as I could throw it. It struck the hanging fixture, causing it to flicker. The tangle of wires sparked to life.
The multitude of eyes that were looking down at me suddenly turned their gaze upward, and with a sudden strike, it pecked.
Sparks of electricity engulfed the creature’s head. Seizing my opportunity, I ran as fast as my numbed legs could carry me. The thing shrieked behind me, and the live current roared as the conduits along the wall exploded, tendrils of tiny lightning discharged out of them. I reached the entrance as the barn was bathed in darkness.
Rolling the door shut behind me, I listened. And waited.
Was it alive? I wasn’t sure. The sickening smell of cooked rotten chicken flooded my nostrils, but I didn’t hear its screams, nor did I hear its scratches. All was quiet.
I found a piece of thin rebar at the corner of the door, nestled part-way in cracked dirt. It came up with a single pull, and with my adrenaline-fueled strength, I bent it through the double handles of the door, praying it would secure that thing if it was still breathing.
I had to get a weapon. A gun. No, the only guns we had on the property were .22 long rifles that Merryl used to scare off predators and rid us of the odd venomous snake. The caliber of that rifle would be as much use as a kick in a shin on that massive thing.
Fire. That’s what I needed—to kill the clucker with fire.
I hobbled to the Gator, feeling the pull of my hamstrings. The two-way radio crackled but no voice could be heard.
Perry. She’d needed my help, and I’d forgotten.
I prayed as I fumbl
ed in my pocket for the keys, prayed as I turned them in the ignition.
I floored the pedal and sped off for the facility’s main hub.
I hesitated at the back door. My hand trembled as it gripped the push-bar, and I peeked through the gridded windows.
The lights flickered inside, and I could see the entrances to both labs, including Lab A where Merryl awaited hopefully-soon-to-arrive professional medical attention, and Perry’s personal quarters. Nothing out of order could be seen, and the few areas out of view were the interiors of those rooms, the break room, the storage rooms, and the entry foyer.
My heart calmed as I opened the door. “Perry?”
Quiet greeted me, and my thoughts raced back to Barn 21. There’s always a stillness, a calm before the storm, and I swallowed down the sense of unease that crept up my throat. I told myself all was well in here. Merryl was resting, the chickens in there with him were probably resting as well.
I gripped the doorframe as I gazed into Perry’s office. “Perry, you in here?”
The security monitors displayed still images from the facility. Perry’s desk, the kind where you would see a place for everything and everything in its place was covered in scattered papers, Sharpie scribbles, and post-it notes.
It looked not like Perry but like panic.
A post-it stuck to the bottom of one of the security monitors read “7:08”. As I pulled it from the screen, Merryl’s lab flashed before me. The room was vacant. The kennels Perry had placed underneath Merryl’s legs were ripped to shreds. The place was covered in splatter and feathers… and eggs.
A hundred of them, at least, lay strewn about, on top of tables, counters, the floor.
I glanced back down to the note in my hands. Perry had taken the time, perhaps in the midst of chaos, to note this. Dread flooded over me as I selected Lab A—Camera beneath the monitor and reached for the DVR knob to rewind.
A blur of motion popped up, soundless and jerky from the 5-second stills that formed the video, and then paused. Merryl lay on the table, and Perry stood watch over him, her crossed arms only unraveling to take a sip of coffee she had sitting next to her on the counter.
Merryl moved his mouth, a cough, perhaps or a plea, maybe, and Perry jolted to his side. His eyes were open, and his head lolled around like a heavyweight boxer who’d come to after an opponent had landed a perfect uppercut.
Perry helped him sit, and I breathed a sigh of relief. His mouth opened again, and Perry went back to her cup, dumping its contents into the nearby sink and turning on the faucet.
Merryl gagged, and Perry raced to him again, proffering her cup of water.
The screen jerked, the motion froze, and then Perry’s cup was on the floor, shattered in pieces. She held her hand beneath his mouth, and, in it, was an egg.
She stepped back, her gaze seeking out the camera. Merryl clutched his stomach. Eggs lay in his lap. Some rolled on the ground. As Perry stepped out of the room, the camera caught it—an egg, protruding half-way out of Merryl’s mouth.
He was vomiting them up.
I pressed hard on all the cameras, clicking through them until I reached the hall, and then Perry’s office. She had the radio in hand by this point, and I could only assume this was when she had called me for help.
And I never showed.
Where was she now? Where was Merryl? Both were now possibly beyond my help, though, and there was the matter of the eggs sprawled in Lab A—and that monstrous thing in Barn 21.
I had to get a tool or makeshift weapon to fight with, and the only thing I knew could help me was on the opposite side of this building, in the maintenance closet.
I took a few breaths, catching a faint scent of feathers and blood and fried chicken, and I stepped into the hall.
The fluorescent lights flickered again, making me wish I hadn’t been a bureaucratic butt and approved Perry’s request for LEDs. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been nearing a seizure.
The hallway was empty, and pristine, save for the filthy tracks I’d made. Slow, deliberate breaths followed cautious steps until I reached the room. I peered in through the small, rectangular window above the doorknob. There was no sign of Perry or Merryl, just mess and eggs.
Behind me, a door slammed shut, in the direction of Perry’s office. I ran toward it, calling out, “Perry? You okay?”
I jerked at the knob and squinted to see into her office. She stood by the security monitors, one hand gripping the intercom microphone, and the other carrying… an object I couldn’t make out in the minimal light.
The intercom squealed and echoed around me. “LC. I need you to follow my instructions very carefully and go immediately to Lab B. You have five seconds. I can’t keep him distracted for long. Run.”
Lab B was across from her office. I turned and ran in, slamming the door behind me.
The motion lights kicked on, and before me, on a table next to Perry’s expensive microscope, was a petri dish and a needle. A timer clicked on the countertop to my left, and the blue flame of a Bunsen burner licked the bottom of a metal pan.
The intercom buzzed. “Step away from the door. I’m coming in.”
No sooner had I moved out of the way, Perry barged in, a cone-shaped nozzle in one hand, and the other hand wrapped around the device’s control knob. I followed the familiarly-shaped cone to the tubing to the backpack she wore.
It was the Kerosene Flame Canister—a flamethrower she invented to help us perform prescribed burning, and on the odd occasion of major, widespread illness, an effective way to bonfire a pile of carcasses. She went with kerosene to spite my gasoline-budget cutting.
I stepped toward her, and her fingers tightened around the flamethrower’s trigger guard. “I need you to follow instructions and quickly,” she said. “Step over to the table, poke your finger with that needle like you’re checking your blood sugar, squeeze out some blood, put it on the petri, and then step into the corner opposite me. Any sudden moves, and I’m turning you into ash quicker than Lot’s wife turned into salt. Understood?”
I held my hands out, trying to show I wasn’t a threat. “Okay. But I have to tell you, there’s a thing in Barn 21. It ate Bodie.”
She nodded. “I saw.”
Of course she did. She had run toward her office once Merryl started vomiting eggs.
I picked up the needle. “Any alcohol wipes?”
She tilted her head, and then, without taking her eyes off me, released the doorknob and used her free hand to rummage in the nearest drawer. She tossed two white packets to me. I missed catching them, and they landed on the table. They were labeled, “Moist Towelettes, Courtesy of King Chicken Ranch. Fried chicken so good, you’ll lick your fingers to the bone!”
“Close enough,” I muttered, as I tore one open and wiped down my index finger. As I picked up the needle in my free hand, an overwhelming scent of grease flooded into my nostrils. I sniffed the air. “Do you smell that?”
She nodded again. “Vegetable oil. I didn’t have peanut. Hurry it up.”
The needle bit in, and I clenched my teeth as I squeezed five drops of blood onto the petri dish.
“Excellent,” Perry said. “Go to the corner.”
I complied, and as soon as I was in position, she dropped the flamethrower’s nozzle to her side and moved like lightning, grabbing the handle of the metal pan of grease from the Bunsen burner, carrying it over to the table, and setting it next to the petri dish. Opening a drawer at her waist, she pulled out a spoon and dipped it into the hot liquid.
“Hey,” I said. “What is going on? What are you doing?”
The liquid sizzled as she poured it onto my pitiable sample of blood. “I’m testing for infection.”
She stirred it around, and then dribbled a couple of drops onto a set of slides next to her microscope. She prepped it in a flash, and glanced back and forth from the eyepiece to me. After a minute, she sighed and her formerly stiff body drooped. “You’re clear.”
I stepped forward. “I coul
d’ve told you that.”
She slid the K.F.C.’s straps off her shoulders and eased it to the ground.
“Merryl?”
She shook her head. “He’s alive, but… it’s not him. He’s turning into something else. I have him barricaded in the break room but not for long.”
I pointed to the table. “What was all this about?”
“Trial and error,” she said. “I figured it out while trying to test Merryl’s blood. On sight, the cells look normal, but then, when I introduce a hot liquid, they react.”
I neared her. “React?”
She pushed her glasses back onto the bridge of her nose, smudging the frame with grease and grime. “Blood isn’t alive, L.C. It doesn’t… run away… from a heat source.”
I leaned against the table. “What are we going to do?”
By the vacant, distant look in her eye, a thought had crossed her mind. “More importantly, what are we going to tell people when they get here? How can we explain this? How can we keep a sample of this alive for study?”
She paused for a second, and then began rummaging through her cabinets. She took out bottles, shook one and then another, and then turned around, her actions hidden from me by her back.
I nodded toward the door. “What about Merryl… or the thing that was him?”
She turned to face me, clutching a bottle in one hand. Her brow was furrowed. Worry streaked across it. “I don’t think he’ll be viable. If he gets loose, I’ll have to destroy him. I think he’s too far gone. I need your help. Please.”
“Sure,” I said, leaning closer to her, hoping she wasn’t asking me to go back into Barn 21. “What do you want me to do?”
She sighed as she stepped into me. I’d never been this close to her, but I’d always wanted to be. She looked up to me, her lips parted. I leaned down, questioning if I should move in for a kiss, or if it would be ill timed. “When this is over, I’m going to ask a favor of you.” She placed one hand on my cheek, warm, comforting, and I leaned against it. “I need you… to forgive me.”
CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories Page 23