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

plunged into a lightless hallway, darting around a corner, but her foot caught an unseen wire, and she fell hard.

“Got her!” said another high-pitched Scottish voice. “Quick, the bag!”

Rough cloth covered Vivian’s head.

When the bag came off, Vivian was supine on the dirt floor of a large utility shed. Ropes criss-crossed her body, held down tight to the ground on either side of her with wooden pegs with just enough slack to turn her head. She was briefly reminded of reading Gulliver’s Travels as a girl, but then noticed she wasn’t alone.

“Claire! Claire, are you okay?” she asked.

“Oh hi, Miss Bacall!” Claire said, groggy and with her glasses askew but still chipper. “I’m alright, I think I bumped my head. I’ve been seeing tiny men riding chickens around? I might have a concussion.”

“Viv? That you?” Mason said from her other side. His feet were next to Vivian’s head, but otherwise all three of them seemed to have been tied down the same way.

“It’s me. What happened?” Vivian asked.

“What happened, my great wee Lurg friends,” said a voice near her head, “is that ye’ve been captured by Clan Dundoogle!”

The ropes offered just enough give for Vivian to turn her head to face the source of the voice. It was another of the six-inch men on chickenback. This one had thick streaks of grey in the fur on his head and a bald patch on the top, and his clothes seemed to be made of finer scraps than the others. Tucked into the back of his plaid sash, a single peacock feather nearly doubled his height. If Vivian had to guess, he would be the group’s leader.

“It was leprechauns after all, and they got the jump on us,” Mason grumbled. This was followed by a swift thwack and Mason uttering profanity.

“There’s no such thing as leprechauns, ye daft turd-wit!” the leader exclaimed. “We’re Sprootlings, people o’ the heather, the proud chicken-riders of the Highlands! And the three of ye stand guilty of interfering with the Herdening!”

“Sprootlings?” Claire asked.

“Nae, not ‘Sprootlings,’ SPROOTLINGS!” the leader said with a deep frown.

“That’s what she said, ‘Sprootling,’” Vivian pointed out.

“Nae nae nae, Sprootlings! Sprootlings!”

“Oh!” Vivian said. “Sproutlings! You’re called Sproutlings?”

“Aye! That’s what I said, ye great walloper!” he said.

“Sproutling or Sprootling or whatever, we don’t know what you’re talking about. We were just trying to learn who’s been letting animals loose from the zoo,” Mason said. “Viv, you’ve gotten us into it again. Just like in Calgary.”

Vivian’s ears perked up. She and Mason had gotten into enough weird situations before to work out a simple code, and “Calgary” was the signal for one of them to keep somebody talking. She needed to provide a distraction for whatever Mason was up to.

“Chief Dundoogle,” she said, guessing at the little man’s title, “I have to admit that I’ve never heard of a Sproutling before. How did you come to be in Canada?”

“Deception and trickery!” the chief roared. He spurred his chicken into pacing back and forth. “My clan used to dwell in the Highlands near a Lurg village called Oldmeldrum, where the Lurgs bottle their firewater and tend their sheep. I was leading a raid on the distillery with aboot half the clan, but the Lurgs had set a trap for us. They stole our chickens, tied us up, and stuffed us into the firewater crates!”

“And you were sent overseas in a whisky shipment,” Vivian reasoned. “That must have been a rough journey.”

“Aye, many of us still bear the bruises of being knocked aboot by the bottles, but we survived, and found our way here!” the chief declared. “Ye cannae keep a Dundoogle doon!”

“But why release the zoo animals?” Vivian asked.

“Yeah, why the animals?” Claire repeated in a daze. “You didn’t eat any, and it looks like you kept the chickens.”

“We get food enough from hunting squirrels and raiding Lurg cupboards,” Chief Dundoogle said. “The Herdening is a matter of honour and bravery. We’ve had two successful Herdenings since coming here, and only the most recent one went awry. The great fat rabbit-things got away, and t’was a great shame on my youngest son Whispit.”

Vivian couldn’t tell if “Herdening” was another case of her misunderstanding the Chief’s accent or another Sproutling word like “lurg”. Whatever it was, it seemed to be the reason behind the animal escapes.

“You tried to Herden Bonnie and Clyde?” Claire said before Vivian could ask for more details about what the Herdening even was. “That’s so mean.”

The ginger Sproutling who had ordered the charge at Vivian stepped forward.

“I’ll do ye proud tonight, Pa!” he said. “These chickens are soft, not trained at all when we found them, but they’ll learn. And the humpbacked horned thing will be my triumph!”

“You can’t let Skippy out!” Claire cried, the notion breaking through her mental fog. “If he gets away, people could get badly hurt! Heck, you could get hurt just from trying!”

Suddenly, Mason lurched to a standing position, his pocketknife open in his hand and severed ropes falling away beneath him. Drawing up to his full height he flung his arms open and shouted at the Sproutlings around them, spooking the chickens and sending the room into chaos as the riders tried to get their inexperienced mounts under control again. Mason took advantage of the opportunity to free Vivian and Claire, and they ran from the utility shed.

“We always have such a great time in Calgary,” Mason said, taking Vivian’s arm. “Let’s grab our stuff and skedaddle.”

“You can’t go. They’re still going to try and take Skippy!” Claire said.

Mason looked at Vivian in exasperation, but he grunted and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Fine. We’ll do this the hard way. But Claire, I’m going to need to borrow your glasses,” he said, pulling his thick construction gloves out of his pocket.

“Why?” Claire asked.

Frantic clucking and vaguely Scottish noises grew louder in the utility shed as the chicken-riders and Chief Dundoogle approached.

“Just hand them over and get back,” Mason insisted. He put them on