Demons, Freaks & Other Abnormalities

by Michael Laimo

  “Dave! Git your sorry ass over here.” Stroebecker. The supervisor marched across the killing floor, a half-eaten turkey leg clutched in his hand, grease coating his chapped lips and nicotine-stained moustache. His blood-stained t-shirt, all too tight, divulged three inches of midsection that bulged over the hidden waistline of his jeans. Purple stretch marks zig-zagged their way around his enormous belly-button. Dave wondered if Stroebecker might be able to lay an egg from that cavernous opening in his gut.

  Dave stepped through the sea of blood, feathers, and dust on the floor toward his boss. Stroebecker grabbed Dave by his thinning pony tail and led him toward the dropped cages.

  “See that? That there’s a dropped cage. Got three chickens in there that ain’t gonna end up on anyone’s dinner table. Damn things are broken.”

  One of the handlers moved to grab the cage. Stroebecker released Dave’s hair and handed his turkey leg to the handler, who used two gloved fingers to clutch Stroebecker’s lunch. The blood and dust on the handler’s glove didn’t seem to faze anyone, Stroebecker included.

  Dave pinched a brow and fixed his supervisor’s blank gaze. The man, known to be a bit loose in the gears, had a crazed look about him today, not uncommon but disconcerting all the same. It was cyclical thing, this madness, a once-a-month uproar that usually kept the workers in line. Dave wasn’t sure if there was a method to the super’s madness, or if he had a loose gear upstairs spinning out of control.

  You had to be a bit mad to work in this neck of the industry anyway, and Stroebecker fit the mold flawlessly.

  Stroebecker leaned down, opened the dropped cage and pulled a chicken out by the leg. The bird flapped its wings frantically, sending up a cloud of brown dust. Urine and feces dripped down his forearm. “Well what do ya know. That there’s a good one. Ain’t nothing wrong with it far as I can see. You just got lucky Richardson.”

  As always, Stroebecker’s once-a-month routine held up production, the point he presumably aimed to prove in no way worth the time wasted. The fat man carried the flapping chicken to the first of the hangar lines and hooked it up by the legs. In this position the chicken remained oddly still, as though rumors of its fate had somehow seeped into its little brain. It clucked once and disappeared into the stunning room.

  Beyond the empty shackles, three more hanging lines remained in production, and the workers there watched the supervisor’s mad performance without pausing in the hanging of their load of chickens. Damn efficient immigrants could do the job with their eyes closed if they had to.

  Despite having been promoted to plant foreman, the raise in pay Dave had earned over the years couldn’t keep up with the cost of living, and he was unable to escape the two-room trailer he’d lived in by himself since he turned eighteen. He’d earned just enough to pay the rent and buy some canned goods at Piggly-Wiggly to go along with the “broken” chickens he’d lifted from the killing floor. Some of these chickens, along with the soon-to-be-dead egg-layers, were sent off to a separate processing plant and used exclusively to manufacture nuggets and the like. The rest were swept up and either delivered to the local landfill or buried in the fields behind the plant. Dave had always thanked the good Lord above that he never had to do that job. Killing chickens was one thing. Burying the dead was another.

  Stroebecker trudged back to the dropped cage, eyes fixed intensely on Dave. They’d never really gotten along, and Stroebecker made sure, at least once a week, to make Dave’s life a bigger hell than it already was. Perhaps he’d been threatened by Dave in some oddly twisted way. Maybe he was simply out of his mind.

  Stroebecker dug into the cage and yanked out another chicken. This one was unresponsive, limp in the supervisor’s fat hand. Dave noticed some feathers stuck in the grease on his fingers.

  “Now this one here’s a dead chicken, Richardson.” He held it up close to Dave’s face. Its eyes were bulging from its head, ruptured and bleeding. A lump of a tongue, blue and jagged, swelled from its beak. “Know why it’s dead? Cuz you haven’t been keeping tabs on your handlers. I saw with my very own eyes

  …your fat, beady, chicken-ass eyes…

  those men who are under your supervision tossing the cages from the trucks with you just standing there watching like a goddamned wart on my ass. And you and I both know that you can’t be dropping the cages cuz that’ll kill the chickens. And a dead chicken ain’t worth nothing to the man upstairs. Get my drift?”

  Dave nodded and took into account that all this standing around bullshitting about what he’d done wrong was cutting into Delmar’s productivity much more than a few dead chickens did.

  Stroebecker grabbed Dave by the pony tail again, the dark look in his eyes now glistening with a sheen of madness. “You gotta pay the price, douchebag.”

  And it was here as Dave was tugged along the endless lines of inverted chickens that he realized just how far out of alignment Stroebecker’s gears had shifted. The man had never gone this far, and the dark, empty look in his eyes made Dave realize how much trouble he was in.

  There was a three-foot wide area between the wall and the fourth line of chickens where the workers would stand and make certain the birds were properly shackled. Stroebecker let go of Dave and shoved him against the wall. “Watch this,” he said, wrapping a thick, meaty palm around a passing chicken’s gut. He squeezed. The chicken clucked. He squeezed harder. The chicken clucked louder. Shaking his head and clearly not getting the results he wanted, Stroebecker fisted his other hand and shoved it inside the chicken. The bird made a noise that was part frenzied cluck, part scream of agony.

  The super grinned crazily at Dave, and yanked out an egg.

  Dave felt a tremor in his stomach. His heart pounded furiously, striking at his chest wall. What was the man up to? Three nearby workers, their shift now interrupted by their supervisor, stood close by, perhaps wondering the same thing. Stroebecker took a step back and again grabbed Dave’s ponytail. This time Dave found the means to fight back, offering up a weak and wholly inefficient attempt to shove the fat man away. But Stroebecker had at least a hundred and fifty pounds on Dave, and leaned into him, pressing him against the wall. Dave wasn’t going anywhere. And neither was Stroebecker.

  Dave’s breath escaped his lungs in a painful gasp. He twisted his head from side to side, but with no avail. Stroebecker’s fat hand came over and down, right on top of Dave’s head. The egg smashed with a muffled pop. Albumen and yolk oozed down into Dave’s eyes. He shuttered his lids as Stroebecker ground the egg into his hair.

  Dave cried, “Damn it, what the hell are you doing?” He heard Stroebecker shouting something and when he opened his eyes saw three workers with their hands buried wrist-deep into the conveying chickens. The loud clucks from the chickens echoed Dave’s slamming heart.

  Stroebecker shouted, “Bombs away!”

  After a moment’s hesitation, they pummeled Dave with the eggs. One hit him squarely in the face. Stroebecker guffawed and yelled, “Ten Points!” Another one hit Dave on the chest. The next one missed, hitting the wall behind him with a solid crack.

  Stroebecker grabbed Dave’s wrist and yanked it up the center of his back. Dave screamed out and shook his head back and forth, trying to blink the bits of cracked eggshell out of his eyes.

  “More!” the fat super yelled. “He wants more! Dontchya Richardson?”

  Dave squeezed his eyes shut, tried to move but was a prisoner to Stroebecker’s weighty madness. The three workers, a sort of nutty glee shining in their eyes now, plucked eggs out of the passing chickens and hurled them at Dave. Stroebecker yelled at more workers and they immediately joined in on the frenzy. Eggs hit Dave in a seemingly never-ending succession, many in the face, some against his chest. In a few minutes he was completely sheered in raw egg and cracked shell.

  All he could do was keep his eyes and mouth closed, and wait for the madness to stop.

  Finally, the eggs stopped coming. Dave used his free hand to wipe the gooey mess from his face, and opene
d his eyes. Stroebecker was leaning in close, horrible turkey-leg breath hot against Dave’s wet cheeks.

  “I’ve got a job for you Richardson. Come with me.”

  Stroebecker released Dave’s wrist and grabbed him by the front of his wet shirt. All the dripping raw egg on him seemed not to phase the crazed supervisor. Not in the least.

  And what Stroebecker did next made Dave wonder if he would survive the ordeal.

  After the super screamed at the men to get back to work, he led Dave out into a storage room abutting the slaughterhouse. He shut the door behind him and shoved Dave against the wall, pressing his fat, sweating, stinking bulk against Dave’s heaving chest. Dave gasped for air, the weight of the man’s body too heavy to combat. Dave was smothered.

  Stroebecker leaned close in to Dave, grinning through his yellow, greasy moustache, revealing the dark gaps between his yellow teeth.

  “I love eggs, Richardson. How about you?”

  And with that, Stroebecker began licking the raw egg off of Dave’s face.

  In all of Dave’s life and everything he’d ever seen in his years here at Delmar—the slaughters, the blood, the huge buckets of chicken heads, the dumpster full of rotting male chicks discarded because only the females were good for egg-laying—nothing could compare to having the hideously obese, horrible smelling monster named Edwin Stroebecker licking raw egg off his face. He made every effort to shove the man away, but it was useless. Despite being nearly crushed, the oppressive heat in the building had sucked the strength and breath from him, virtually incapacitating him.

  The man’s tongue felt like sandpaper, each lick like a stab from a knife in his heart, first his neck, his cheeks, his nose…and then ever so slowly moving up, all over his ears, licking…licking…licking all that raw egg from every inch of his face, moaning as he did so, and damn it to all hell if Dave didn’t feel something rigid rising out through the layers of fat on Stroebecker’s body, something pressing up against his own leg as the fat super flicked his tongue out against Dave’s lips, making certain to replace all the raw egg on his face with his horrible, warm saliva.

  Dave wanted to scream, dear god how he wanted to scream, but was too scared to open his mouth should—heaven help us—the man decide to slip his tongue between Dave’s parting lips.

  So Dave screamed as best as he could with his lips sealed, and it would have been considered pretty loud if not for all the working machinery and the clucking chickens on the other side of the wall.

  Stroebecker shoved his oppressive girth against Dave. Dave grunted painfully. So did Stroebecker. Tears filled Dave’s eyes and ran down his cheeks as Stroebecker grabbed him, again, by the ponytail.

  “C’mon Richardson...”

  Winded, all Dave could do was follow the man’s lead as he was led outside into the fields behind the factory.

  The killing fields.

  This was where the pipes in the slaughterhouse floors led. In addition to those chickens that died on the way to the slaughterhouse, millions of gallons of water were used at the end of the day to flush out the remains of a half million birds: over 1500 tons of guts, chicken heads, fat globules, feathers, and blood. All hosed down the huge drain at the east end of the slaughterhouse.

  Dave had always wondered what happened to all the guts and feathers once they settled into the earth. Was it all absorbed into the ground? Did animals and bugs eat it all up?

  He was about to find out.

  Apparently all those chicken remains weren’t as biodegradable as one might think. Or if it was, it was simply too much for the earth’s stomach to hold, and it saw no choice but to regurgitate it all back up for the world to see.

  Their feet squelched in the soft muddy ground as they walked farther into the fields of weeds. The stench grew unbearable, assaulting Dave’s nose and urging his gorge to rise. Flies by the thousands began to buzz about Dave, the sticky egg on his skin an unburied treasure for them to investigate. He shook his head, tried to pull away from Stroebecker’s iron grip, but the big man grunted and plowed forward like a goddamned bulldozer, parting the waist-high weeds as he moved deeper into the killing fields.

  The farther they moved in, the softer the ground became. Dave’s feet sunk in to the ankles. The stench grew unbearable and he vomited down the front of his shirt.

  Stroebecker laughed. “Got a bit of a cleanup for you to take care of, Richardson.” The weeds thinned, and they came upon a chain-link fence.

  Dave lurched forward, the swollen fingers of his free hand clutching the fence for support. He stared ahead…and nearly dropped dead from the sight.

  Here was the landfill. The place where the pipes from the slaughterhouse led. But there seemed to be a problem. It was overflowing with biological waste. All those years of hosing down the floors, flushing out the chicken heads and the guts and the feathers, the feces and urine. It was all here, a sea of it rotting for years in the center of a huge field instead of soaking into the earth, baking beneath the summer sun, a terrible secret kept a hundred miles away from the closest community.

  Stroebecker grabbed Dave and yanked him along the length of the fence. Weakened, Dave could barely fight back, much less keep up with the fat man. His legs tangled up as Stroebecker pulled up a torn section of fencing.

  “Let’s go Richardson.” With his strong, meaty hand, Stroebecker shoved Dave through the opening. Dave clawed at the slimy ground, but to no good use.

  He began slipping down.

  His shirt got snagged onto the fence and tore down the back. He managed to get two fingers latched around the fencing, but Stroebecker, a hideous glee shining in his eyes, kicked Dave’s fingers, then shoved the fence forward and watched as Dave Richardson slid down into the pool of chicken viscera and waste. Dave looked up, saw the swath his body left in the thick coating on the wall of the fill before he plopped through the coagulating surface of the pool.

  He fought against it, screaming, crying, reaching his arms up but feeling himself being pulled away toward the center of the pool, as though there was an undertow in its depths…or a shark, or some other horrible monster latching onto him, embracing him like bait. He tried to swim, but the sludge was too thick. Feathers adhered to his body; skeletal chicken heads with their eyes gouged out staring up at him; beaks and claws poking at him as though they possessed lives of their own…as if somewhere deep beneath the pool of blood and guts there existed a power, a being, a sentient thing guiding the pool and its parts about Dave as though it was all an extension of its unnamable self.

  Finding himself at the center of the pool, the fencing now twenty feet away on all sides, Dave stared back at Stroebecker, his outline plump in the sun’s shadow, his girth bouncing up and down as he pointed and laughed at his nemesis, Dave Richardson, foreman for the Delmar Poultry factory. And as Dave eyed Stroebecker back with hatred, that fat chicken-ass murderer, he felt the power beneath him pulling him down…down…down, and saw the souls of a billion chickens surrounding him as the pool of viscera gurgled up over his head…

  ~ * ~

  At five o’clock, the bell rang and the workers left their posts. Stroebecker saw through the window in his office one of the immigrants making off with a live one lucky not to have met its fate with the lopper. Stroebecker had it in his mind to give the worker a piece of what he’d given that good-for-nothing Richardson, but for now let it slide. Richardson had to go, sooner than later. They guy was putting up some serious numbers, and the man upstairs was more than impressed with him at their interview last week. That meant Stroebecker’s job was on the line—Delmar was making cuts by the dozens, and Dave had probably offered to do Stroebecker’s job for less pay.

  Sooner or later, Stroebecker would be toast.

  But with Richardson now gone, Edwin Stroebecker’s job was safe. For now. Until another foreman was called into headquarters. Then he’d have to keep very close tabs on the man.

  He stayed late and caught up on the paperwork he fell behind on—damn that Richardson
!—then went out on the killing floor to make certain the evening cleaners had properly flushed the floor.

  There was an explosion out in the factory.

  The walls shook. Stroebecker lunged forward, his bulk jiggling as he made his way along the rows of shackles. He went into the boiler room, then past the dozen loppers, still bloodied from the day’s work. A group of men plunged out of the room where all the innards were sprayed, where all the waste was sent into the killing fields. They were covered in muck. Black, bloody, filthy, stinking, lumpy muck.

  “The pipe!” one of them screamed in broken English. “Boom!”

  The men, six of them, staggered past Stroebecker and didn’t turn around to see the wave of thick waste tiding out of the room. It hit Stroebecker in the legs and surged up to his swollen gut, splashing him in the face as he fell back against the wall.

  “Holy shit!” he screamed. “Somebody help me!”

  The wave surged again, spilling out of the room, splattering against the walls, then towing back only to surge forward again, bringing with it more remains from the backed-up system. Another explosion shook the room. The tiles in the walls cracked. Dust rained down. The waste splashed up into Stroebecker’s face, harder this time, seeping into his nose, his mouth, his eyes. He coughed and gagged, wiping his face furiously with trembling hands. The wave surged back, and as it did he attempted to stand, but slipped back down, shoes unable to grab a firm hold on the flooded floor.

  “Bossssss…” came a hideous voice from the waste room. Deep and gurgling. Invasive and determined in its dreadful tone.

  Stroebecker gazed up…and through the dripping mask of filth on his face beheld a thing not born of this earth, a thing that stood manlike in the threshold of the room, but in its very existence was more…chicken than human. It was covered with filthy rotting feathers, only a small portion of them at its swollen breast retaining the white hue they once held. The rest were black and brown, withered and stained with blood and sewage. Its legs were tendon thin, devoid of anything resembling human flesh, the bones now bound with a multitude of chicken claws, thousands of them united in a bid for muscular balance and strength.