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

shrill screech blasted out of it. It flapped its fluff-covered wings.

It launched itself toward Merryl’s open and smiling mouth. I stared in horror as its scrawny legs grew, stretching out twice their length, its body lagging behind it.

Its toes grasped Merryl’s lips, and, before he could jerk them away, tiny talons sprung from their ends and dug into his flesh. He screamed. The rest of the chick caught up and barreled itself, legs and all, into Merryl’s mouth.

Merryl clawed at his cheeks, pulled at his lips, his gasping plugged by a muffled ball of chirping fluff. Two stringy three-toed feet poked out from in between his lips.

I slid into the hole in the ground, my ass pulling hot coals from the edges in with me. Merryl turned to me, his eyes near bulging, face turning shades of blue. He clawed at his throat.

I reached for him, and wrapped one hand around the back of his neck; the other I focused on grabbing the jutting little bird legs. They slipped through my fingers and tucked, moving past Merryl’s lips and into the dark recesses of his mouth.

I stepped back, horrified, frozen in the moment. Tears, of pain, of terror, streaked down Merryl’s weathered face, and his eyes rolled into the back of his head. He rocked back and forth, swaying as though an unforeseen wind blew him.

“Catch him!” Perry yelled as she slid in beside me.

Her voice jolted me into action. I leaned toward Merryl, grabbing around his waist as he crumpled like a snowman in warm rain. His weight pulled me, making it so I couldn’t support him. Instead, I folded with him as I eased him down to the ground.

“Is he breathing?” Perry clawed at the back of my shirt, trying to find purchase to pull me away and let her through.

I obliged, never taking my eyes from Merryl.

His eyes were closed. His chest rose and fell in a soft, shallow rhythm, as though he were sleeping.

“What the hell just happened?” I whispered.

Perry pushed her dark-rimmed glasses back on the bridge of her nose. “I’m not sure, but he’s breathing, so there’s still time.”

“Time for what, Perry? Call the ambulance? Tell them a chicken egg fell from the sky, hatched, and lodged its little body in our friend’s throat?”

“Yes,” Perry said, leaning over Merryl. She reached into a back pocket and produced her cell phone, five models too old and one screen too cracked to be of much use. She held it to the sky, but all that remained in the corner were unfilled vertical bars. “We need to get him out of this hole and somewhere I can keep him stable.”

“Agreed,” I muttered as I pulled myself up and out, on my unspoken mission to grab our first aid kit and a stretcher.

The heat bit at my hands and feet, but I ignored it, instead turning my thoughts on the sleeping, invaded gentle giant in the hole next to me. Feelings washed over me, disbelief of what I’d just seen, concern for Merryl, but nested beneath them all, fear remained.

What had landed in the midst of us was a new lifeform, something that many dreamed of encountering. All I saw when I looked down at Merryl’s steady breathing was the understanding that it was not the blessing scientists made it out to be. It was a thing most dangerous… and foul.

We stretched unconscious Merryl out on the exam table in Lab A.

Using small kennels filled with the chickens, Perry had made up for the lack of distance from the edge of the metal table to Merryl’s feet by sliding the metal cages beneath his calves.

I watched him breathe, the rest of him motionless.

“We have him stable. Three hours minimum? You can’t send a helicopter? Or a trooper? Anybody?” Perry’s voice echoed off the metal walls.

The backward and forward movement of her shadow told me she was pacing, never a good sign. Perry was the stoic, scientific, let’s-slow-down-and-study-it kind, and the only giveaway to her emotional upheaval was pacing, which I’d witnessed once, during the strained birth of a genetically-modified calf.

She stormed back in, her bronze cheeks reddening with a temper I’d long suspected she’d kept covered with bottle blonde hair. “They can’t make it for five hours.”

I stood up. “I’ll drive him then. We can stretch him out in the back of the Tahoe.”

Perry held up a hand as she neared the exam table. “The only direction you’ll be able to drive is toward the border. School bus wreck has the highway and emergency services locked down.”

“Shit,” I said. “What now?”

Perry crossed her arms with a sigh, looking down at Merryl. “We wait.”

“What did you tell them?”

Perry sighed. “I told them a space chicken jumped in Merryl’s throat—of course I didn’t. I said he had an object lodged in his mouth and throat, is unconscious, but breathing.” She crossed her arms. “I’m going to stand watch over him. Maybe I can pull that thing out if it exposes itself.”

“What do I need to do to help?”

“I still need the feed at Barn 21 to happen at ten-thirty, if we are to stay on track.”

I pursed my lips. I didn’t care much for menial tasks when someone was in need, but part of our operation was experimentation, with anything from cross-breeding to testing new nutrient mixtures, and most of that depended on us operating like clockwork, especially during the skeleton-crew summers. “Can’t Bodie handle that?”

Perry looked down her nose, over the edge of her glasses. “You’ve seen Bodie today?”

I slammed my fist against the RV door, rattling the cracked fiberglass window. Inside, bass thumped louder than my knock, so I grabbed the handhold to my left and prepared to kick at it until he either answered or my foot answered for him by way of broken lock and busted handle.

It flung inward on my third attempt, sending the shaggy-headed twenty-year old flying backward. “What the hell?”

I stepped inside and found myself engulfed in a sweet-smelling