Barn 8

by Deb Olin Unferth

  The only one who survived the demise was me, a lone security officer, curiously left untouched, padding down the aisles, looking up through the steel grates to the second story. The silence is so powerful, it presses against my ears.

  The second year the electricity went off. Stretches of months went by without anyone driving up, stepping out of their car. The third year only the brother came once in a while, sat in his car and stared out his windshield, drove off before dark. By then he was not surprised to see me because he didn’t. I stayed hidden and watched.

  So when those two came back, they had no idea I was there.

  But they came, a few years ago, the two auditors who went to prison. I was doing my last security walk-through of the day, getting ready to leave. I’d gotten into the habit of knocking off a bit early so I could pick up my son at preschool. My wife doesn’t get off until four.

  I was circling the silos when a car came up the road. I ducked behind a barn. Two women got out, spent a moment stretching their legs, raising their arms. At first I thought, Hummm, prospective buyers? Then I recognized them from their pictures in the news years back. The older woman had her phone out and was taking photos. She turned and caught me, I think, though I tried to dive out of the way. They walked, then stopped, the pretty one staring up at the barns, the other facing the fields. They spoke. I saw them laugh, one gestured sideways with an arm. They stayed a little longer, turning serious, somber even. The older one crossed her arms and spoke into the wind. The other turned her head toward her. Then they walked back to the car, drove away.

  Sometimes I come in early. I try not to wake my wife as I sneak out while it’s still dark and the bats are finishing their hunt. At dawn the whole valley comes alive here. A certain set of crickets begin their song at the exact moment the sun touches the horizon. Birds begin to swirl, fewer than before, but still a lot. They call to one another, circling, and fly off.

  It’s a good job. Temps don’t receive benefits, which is a downside when you have a family. My wife wants to leave this empty land, move closer to her siblings, to a place that’s bigger, louder, colder, more expensive. I want my son to have every opportunity. I tendered my resignation to Price Securities, effective this Friday. I hope for a good reference. We’ll leave this bank account open for any bonuses that may come my way for my constancy all these years.

  ANNABELLE, ROB THOUGHT, then said aloud when the barn manager and a police officer appeared in the kitchen. Rob was sitting over his bowl of cantaloupe and cold cereal (his wife rarely let him eat eggs these days, what with his father more or less dead of heart disease at sixty-four). It was a quarter to seven in the morning. The baby had woken at six.

  Even before the men spoke, the name was rising in his mind to greet their stricken faces because the only times he’d encountered faces like that were when news of his sister arrived.

  Annabelle. His earliest memories were of her carrying him on her back or under her arm like a heavy duffel, her waking him in the dark for a backyard midnight adventure of building a night fort or looking for bats.

  “You’ve been invaded,” the cop said, his heft and stance alarming in the pastel quiet.

  “They’ve taken the ladies,” the barn manager said.

  Rob lowered his spoon into his milk (almond milk, since his wife contended dairy caused diabetes) and got up from his seat. He kissed his wife and baby at the door.

  It was a short ride to the farm, a route he’d known all his life, first from the backseat with his sister, later the passenger seat beside his father, and later from his own house three blocks west of his childhood home (though he hadn’t planned for it to work out that way). He listened with half an ear to the men, but his attention was on the plume of smoke he could see even from here: evidence of Annabelle. His sister’s thumbprint on the sky. The car crossed the fields into the breaking day.

  He had the door open before the car had come to a complete stop behind the line of emergency vehicles. He maneuvered with excessive politeness, “Pardon me, please” and “Might I get by?” through the reporters and firemen and civilians, until he reached the barricade of police tape and cones that held the public away from Barn 8, still partially on fire and smoldering. A police officer who seemed to be in charge tapped him and said, “You’re going to want to see the other barns.” Rob followed him.

  At the door to Barn 4 a cop held up his hand, but the one in charge said, “That’s the son,” and they all parted. Rob was certain he heard snickering behind him.

  Annabelle had always outwitted him, and he’d adored her. What kid doesn’t look up to his big sister, especially if she’s lawless and beautiful? He counted the day Jonathan Jarman Jr. arrived on the farm as the day he lost her. Before then, her pranks had been for Robbie’s benefit, either as target or coconspirator. Once Jonathan showed up, she cut Rob out. Within twenty-four hours he was permanently uninvited. Everything that came afterward seemed an extension of that, she leaving by degrees while he watched from afar. It seemed everyone who loved Annabelle stood back and watched her betray and leave them. It was her most unique feature—after, of course, the obvious. And sure, he’d gotten over it, dismissed her in the same tone they all did, with the same scoff.

  Then how to explain this? He paused just inside Barn 4. The fans were off, the belts still. He heard nothing. On the drive over they’d said the birds were gone—but what does that even mean, “gone”? He walked past the entryway into the hen area. Not one coo or cluck. Silence. All of them? He turned into an aisle, saw the rows of empty cages (how the hell, Annie?). He strode past several. Nothing. He stopped and rocked on his heels, let out a whistle. He actually felt delight.

  “They’re all like this,” the barn manager was beside him saying. “Well, except for Barn 8.”

  “I see,” said Rob.

  “We’re finding the trucks,” the officer in charge said. “We’re rounding them up. It’s a hell of a thing. We’re still looking for the security guard.” Rob could tell the officer was too polite to say Annabelle’s name but everyone knew the family history. At last the officer tipped his head in confidence. “Do you know where your sister might be?”

  A residual protectiveness kicked in. “What makes you think it’s her?” he demanded. He could tell by their faces that his face was arranged wrong. “I have no idea where she is,” he said. He stepped back into the sunlight, the posse scurrying after him. He walked toward the cars. He stopped in the middle of the pavement. “Wait, where are you taking the hens?”

  But it wasn’t until a couple of hours later, while he was shouting into his phone, all the maturity and rage of his twenty-eight years returned, that it occurred to him: he knew where she was. He lowered the phone.

  A: Of course I went to check Barn 8. Who has security guards these days? The alarm systems are more sophisticated and cheaper. Our alarm system was off. It was my father. He’d always had Ricardo. If Ricardo had been there, he never would have seen me. Ricardo sat for hours and played solitaire with an old deck of cards. If he had seen me, he would have sounded the alarm. He knew what I was about. But he wouldn’t have seen me because he’d never be out walking around like a zombie. Besides, Ricardo was on vacation. I knew that. My father would have just let it go for the three weeks. We had an alarm, I’m telling you. But my brother, Robbie, was running things and he’d gotten a temp guard.

  I’d just come out of Barn 7—empty—when I felt myself light up under his beam. I ran but he was determined. He stayed out there for an hour, swinging that flashlight around. I worried the other workers might start showing up. They come early on Thursdays. I couldn’t believe they’d empty one barn and not the other since both were scheduled for the same time. I had seen the depop crew on Tuesday. They take at least three weeks between depop and pop. This was a formality on my part. That damn temp. What a mess.

  Look, are we almost done? I’ve utterly lost track of the time. Can I go?

  Q: We have just a few more questions.

&nb
sp; TWENTY YEARS BEFORE ALL THIS, Farmer Robert Green Sr. drove down a small road, Robbie and Annabelle in the backseat. He went past the barbed wire and end-of-the-world signs, the familiar path unrolling like an ace bandage. The old boat of a car tugged up a hill and stopped in front of a large barn. His daughter ran across the grass, Robbie following. Farmer Green got out and stood there, hunched. He sighed.

  Farmer Green was prone to fits of melancholy. Anything could trigger it—a holiday, a rainy morning, autumn’s late dawn. He’d fall to missing his father, the original chicken farmer of the family. He’d steer the kids into the backseat, tell his wife he was taking them to “a game,” and drive here, to the farm of his childhood, though his wife would be furious if she found out.

  He walked toward the barn, stooped to pull up a few handfuls of weeds that overran the path. The worst of the contamination was closer to the village a few miles off, but here the earth and air still supposedly contained its traces: trichloroethylene, tetrachloroethylene, chloroform, and other chemicals. His wife didn’t want him bringing the kids. And she sure as hell didn’t want the kids climbing onto the barn’s roof, which, she said, was surely rotting after years of neglect and could crash in under a child’s weight at any moment.

  Well, it had held up so far.

  But Robbie Jr. knew their father wasn’t watching. He and Annabelle ran through the tallgrasses and weeds to the barn, climbed the ladder bolted to the wall. They sat on the rooftop, stringing their legs over the side. They lay back and looked at the clouds. They sat up and took in the trees of the forest beyond. Robbie liked this part.

  He did not like the next part, when Annabelle insisted they “roof race,” meaning whoever reached the edge of the roof first without falling off won. The urge to slow down as you neared the edge contrasted with the urge to speed up to win. It was a version of the game chicken (meaning the one who lost was “chicken,” implying that chickens scare more easily than most animals, though that is not the case—hens will fight fiercely to protect their young, and don’t even get us started on the pluck and courage of the rooster, famous for his skill in battle). It was the sort of game Annabelle liked, and Rob, worshipful, followed.

  ZEE WAS IN THE FINAL TRUCK beside Dill. Annabelle drove.

  Texts were coming in like heartbeats, the investigators violating the radio silence pledge, minutes into an emergency, fucking unprofessionals. They were all getting what they deserved, Zee thought, for following Annabelle into yet another scenario she’d concocted. Look where it got the lot of them. And since Annabelle and Dill didn’t want to look, Zee took it upon himself to tell them.

  He read the texts aloud, described the photos—the fire trucks, the investigators in handcuffs. He showed them to Dill, who kept shouldering Zee away and muttering about it being the investigators’ fault, as if she hadn’t orchestrated the whole thing, flat beginning to billowy end.

  Annabelle turned off the main road and kept going. They left the service area and his phone fell silent. They drove past the contamination signs. Oh lovely. Just what he wanted to do this morning. Wallow in chemical waste.

  But wait. What was that?

  A massive barn, two trucks standing stupidly on the horizon.

  So if he was understanding this correctly, and he wouldn’t put it past her, they’d brought the hens from one factory farm to another.

  They stopped alongside the trucks. Annabelle turned off the engine. He could hear the hens cooing like morning birds. A hum of insects. A wide plateau of silence underneath, the sound of no sound of machinery. Four investigators came walking out of the barn looking like they might fall over. Annabelle hopped off the truck. “What are we waiting for? We’ve got to get these hens off the trucks.”

  One of them cupped a cigarette. “What the hell do you think we’ve been doing?”

  Zee took this opportunity to stretch his long legs, step down, and ask rhetorically, “Ready for prison?” The investigators looked disappointed. They hadn’t been getting the texts, they didn’t know what was up all over town, but they could tell by the postures of the group removing themselves from the truck that the plan wasn’t cool anymore. They got it fast: it was fucked and it would get further fucked still. So, this knowledge in their hearts, together they finished the unloading. It took a couple more hours. They took down the batteries and released the birds into the barn, over forty grand in there now between the three trucks.

  “You starting an egg farm?” said Zee.

  When they were done and standing by the trucks, talking next moves, talking imminent escape, Annabelle came out and said, “You all scoot.”

  Fine with Zee. “You coming?” he said, meaning Dill, because no fucking way was Annabelle getting in—she’d already walked off. The investigators started up one of the trucks. Dill and Annabelle, they stayed. Zee looked into the rearview and saw her heading back into the barn. What a loon.

  “WE CAN GET SOME PEOPLE UP HERE to take them tomorrow,” Dill was saying, wiping his hands on his pants. He followed Annabelle to the back of the barn. “We need to get some water set up,” he said. “Do we have any supplies?” He watched her unlatch the barn doors, a set of old-fashioned affairs that you dragged through the dust, the entire building made of wood that had had decades to soften. What was she doing? “They’ll get out,” he said, while she dragged the door, sunshine breaking into the darkness and the faces of thousands of hens. They were startled by the light and backed off. He said, “It’s dusty in here, but …” She started wading through the hens to the other end of the barn.

  “Jesus.” He saw now. “Was this your plan all along?”

  She reached the dark end of the barn, raised her arms, yelled, “Let’s move it out,” over the heads of forty thousand hens.

  THAT FIELD. Once fallow, now flower. Tallgrass, clover. A forest on the other side.

  They’d never been invited onto the land before. No one had ever asked them to come have a look at the sky, and they couldn’t see it from their cages. They’d never felt space around them, never dirt or grass under their feet. The hens paused just inside the crowded barn and gazed out, heads tilting and turning. The sky glinted—surely full of predators. But the ground might have something to eat. With their left eyes—the eye they use to see distance—they could see the trees that began on the other side of the grassy prairie. The air was moist and clear in ways unfamiliar to them. Pollen floated through it. That’s the thing: they want the air—cool, bug-filled, quiet—and they will soon love the rest, if you just give them a little time. Let them adjust.

  The haze of sunlight met the barn’s darkness in a swirl of motes.

  These voyagers, descendants of the ancient forest dwellers, hesitated. White leghorns are a jittery breed. Yes, Bwwaauk had nonchalantly strolled out of Plato’s Cave, but these hens were not in possession of the same wandering spirit, the devil-may-care insouciance of that odd hen. These hens were afraid.

  No thanks. We’ll stay inside. This is good right here.

  Suddenly, like everything else in their lives, someone made the choice for them. There was a horrible noise and then the hens at the door were shoved out by the hens behind.

  BACK AT THE POLICE STATION Janey was cuffed on the floor. She was a few hours from falling in love with Zee, who seven years later would come for her in her teenage bedroom, wait with her there for three months, and then walk out beside her, as if out of a dark barn, blinking in the sunlight. Zee, with whom she would try again. Demand more.

  But before all that, while she was still cuffed on the floor, Janey had a strange sensation, but what was it? Ninety miles away, Annabelle was lifting her arms, and Janey was somehow feeling the drag of the barn door, she felt the air rushing in, the shocking daylight, she felt the crumbling of the world made up of steel and wire and bulbs and belts and food flakes. The illusion of the barn was scattering into bits of light.

  Janey. She had had the original vision of hens leaving the barn, but it was Annabelle who’d imagined them arri
ving, dreamed it those long nights on her houseboat, concocted her scenario, but didn’t know how it would happen.

  Sitting on the station floor, Janey felt the prairie wind and sun on her face, but she would never find out what it meant. Only three humans ever knew where those forty thousand hens went, and they told no one.

  DILL HAD WATCHED MANY HOURS of raw footage of farmhands chasing hens from one end of a cage-free barn to the other in preparation for depop. It used to remind him of predator apocalypse movies—thousands scrambling, shrilling, panicking, piling—and this was no different from that, but to be amid it, to be in the investigators’ shoes, among hens going into hen meltdown, was a jolt. Some would be trampled and injured, some killed. But there was no other way to get them to leave, so he lifted his arms and shouted along with Annabelle, and the hens flowed around his feet like a wave in water. He and Annabelle followed them as they left the barn and went screaming into the field.

  They wove through the grass for the cover of the trees—the forest preserve that began at the edge of the field. He walked around the side of the barn to look for Annabelle, who’d disappeared, but he stopped when he spotted a line of police cars snaking up the hill. They were a long way off, dots in the distance, turning lights. He went back into the barn to hurry the remaining hens.

  “WE ACCELERATED UP THE HILL. I could see two more of those ludicrous trucks at the top. Not until then was I even willing to grant we were going the right way. We’d been driving in loops for an hour. Brad in the front car supposedly had the coordinates locked into his system but I had my doubts until we saw the trucks, two of them just like the others, dull in the sunshine, and who knew how many trucks there were altogether. A lot.