CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories by J. Posthumus (read after txt) 📕

and long sleeves for stealthy work. Mason carried a duffel bag with surveillance equipment he often used for covert reporting: night-vision cameras, motion triggers, directional microphones, and more. Vivian thought of herself as reasonably tech-savvy, but the gadgets were Mason’s expertise and she was grateful for his help with them. A laptop would collect and save all the data in high resolution, and display a lower-quality feed from the cameras on-screen to help them spot trouble while still saving processing power.

“I’m telling you, we’re going to find a bunch of teenagers with too much time on their hands,” Mason whispered.

“You still think it’s kids after seeing the miniature tracks?” Vivian asked.

“Farm kids make crop circles all the time; all you need is a board and some rope, and you can duck-walk through a field to make whatever design you want,” Mason said. “My brothers and I made loads of them growing up. These kids just have overshoes with little footprint shapes on the bottom or something.”

“What are those for?” Vivian asked, pointing at a pair of thick construction gloves in the bag.

“Just in case these jokers let something out and we need to help wrangle it,” Mason said. “Ever been bitten by a horse? I’m betting a llama bite isn’t any fun either.”

Claire met them at the same wooden signpost where they’d entered the zoo earlier that day, to unlock the rolling gate that was put up at night to deter after-hours visitors. Mason set up his equipment to capture any movement in the animal pens, and the three of them split up.

Vivian took position at the south end of the zoo, Mason in the middle and Claire at the north end. Vivian watched the llamas sleeping in the pen across from her, ears alert for any sounds in the dark around her. Before long, her walkie-talkie crackled.

“Miss Bacall, this is Claire, do you copy?”

“Vivian here, I copy,” she whispered back.

“All clear by the reindeer pen so far,” Claire said. “I just wanted to say how cool it is to be helping you with a story. Over.”

Vivian chuckled and shook her head before pressing the talk button again. “Thank you Claire, you’ve been great,” she said. “Um, over.”

“Do you think this one is going up on your blog, or do you have a magazine in mind to send it to?” Claire asked. “I bought a year’s subscription to What’s Happening when I found out they were running a piece from you about the Leslieville Hum. Over.”

“I really haven’t decided yet, it partly depends on what we find out tonight,” Vivian said.

“Ladies, as much as I love talking shop, the perpetrators will probably overhear us if they come back tonight,” Mason’s voice cut in. “Maybe we can continue this conversation later. Over.”

“Right, sorry. Over,” Claire said. “I just got excited—oh, not over. Un-over. I got excited to be—hang on, I hear something.”

Vivian waited for an update, but the radio remained silent.

“Claire? Claire, come in,” she said.

There was no response.

“Viv, I’m going to go check on her. Over,” Mason said. About a minute later, he spoke again. “She’s not at her position, but I see signs of a struggle. Her walkie is here, and… feathers?”

Mason was interrupted by a strange noise. In the speaker of Vivian’s radio, it sounded almost like clucking and high-pitched laughter.

“Mason?” she said. “Mason, come in. Do you copy?”

The radio remained silent.

Vivian suddenly felt very alone. Her instinct for self-preservation screamed at her to leave the zoo, but she couldn’t abandon Mason or Claire to whatever had found them in the dark. She crept through the trees to Mason’s original position and found his laptop tucked under a blanket to hide the glare of the screen.

The motion-activated video feeds were grainy and the slow refresh speed gave a strobe-light view of the animal pens. There was no time to check the high-quality footage on the hard drive. White blurry shapes flashed across the screen; they moved low to the ground, coming in from both ends of the zoo and converging on the bison pen. As the frames updated, one of the feeds showed Claire being dragged across the ground behind a group of the white shapes, moving toward the zoo operations building.

Vivian knew Mason could handle himself; he’d survived reporting from dangerous situations before and come out the other side, sometimes with a black eye or broken arm, but always alive. She crept out into the gloom of the zoo towards where the mysterious blurs had taken Claire.

She found the door ajar and the building dark. On the floor, a smear of mud—at least, Vivian hoped it was mud—showed where the mysterious things had dragged Claire. Vivian bent down to inspect it and found several white feathers adhered to it. The marks led her to a four-way intersection under a flickering emergency light, the first illumination she’d found inside the building.

Vivian stopped.

The sound of claws tap-tap-tapping against the tiled floor came from around the corner, where the mud trail faded away into darkness. Light gleamed off of three pairs of animal eyes emerging from the shadows. The tapping grew closer, and revealed a trio of chickens.

Vivian might have laughed if not for the passengers. Sitting astride each chicken was a humanoid creature maybe six inches tall, with squat pear-shaped bodies and long thin limbs. Their round heads were covered in closely-cropped fur, except for bald patches on the front where broad-featured faces leered at her. The tiny men, one with ginger fur and the other two with brown, wore what looked like rags and plaid fabric stitched together along with helmets made from bottle caps. The helmets perched above protruding ears on the sides of their heads, and each carried a spear fashioned from nails on the ends of pencils or pens.

“Another Lurg!” the ginger one cried in a squeaky Scottish accent. “Charge!”

All three riders surged forward on their chickens with spears at the ready. Vivian’s only option was to abandon the pursuit and run. She