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

haze. “There’s been an incident, and you’re taking the ten-thirty feeding in Barn 21.”

He waved his hands at the air as though he could clear his transgressions, and then, no doubt thinking better of it, grabbed his coat and slid past me out the door. “I’m supposed to be off-duty.”

I followed him in turn, making sure to slam the door behind me. “I’m supposed to be incredibly drunk. Yet here we are.”

“Where’s Merryl?”

“Injured,” I said, pointing to the idling side-by-side I’d driven out to his on-site RV.

He slid into the driver’s seat of the Gator, and I let him. I needed a moment to think and not do, and by the looks of him, we’d be taking a slower ride than normal anyway.

The kid lived high among the clouds of his god, Bob Marley, flunked most of his classes, but every year his dad donated to our flagship university. Bodie had started with an internship at our university, complete with paid-for studies abroad. The wanna-be Botanist fell down that ladder, hitting every rung until we were left with him, and nonetheless, in the summer—our most in-need-of-actual-help season.

We’d learned he was useless after 2 pm and before 11 am but good for fundraisers when the university had them.

I saw myself in him… if I’d had a trust fund and no prospects.

We bounced down the gravel path from his makeshift residence to the sprawl of the farm. The cool night air began clearing our nostrils, and my head, until we reached the long chicken barn labeled Barn 21. He squinted his eyes as he killed the engine, and I knew the weight of what I’d told him at the RV was hitting him.

“What happened? Is Merryl going to be okay?” he asked.

I took the keys from his outstretched hand, stuffed them in my pocket, and mulled over how to answer. “I’m not sure it would make sense if I told you how, and I don’t know if he’s going to make it.” I paused. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

He walked to the sliding doors of the barn, reached to open them, and then stopped.

The two-way radio on the Gator sparked to life.

“Hey, LC.” Perry’s voice crackled with the poor connection. “You need to get back here. You need to see this.” The urgency in her voice was unmistakable.

“Kid, you got this?” I yelled, anxious to check on Perry and Merryl.

He didn’t move.

“What’s wrong? Are we missing something?”

“Nah,” he started to roll open the left side but halted. “It’s quiet.”

I tilted my head. What had that kid been smoking besides pot?

Gravel crunched beneath my heels as I marched forward. “I don’t have time for your doped-up ass today.”

“Stop,” he said, holding up his hand as he pressed an ear to the door, next to the sign reading Barn 21. “Are we at the right barn?”

Frustration fueling me, I grabbed the handle of the opposite door and pulled. The metal rollers squawked against the bent, rusted railings at the bottom, and the noise echoed down the length of the building. Soft red light spilled out, with intermittent patches of shadow. Toward the back, about three light fixtures away from us, was nothing but an endless darkness.

On the ground, at our feet, was a carpet of white feathers.

I walked to the panel of switches and flipped them all, hoping to kick on the fluorescents.

No such luck.

Bodie stepped in, and I held him back with an arm. The kid was correct. There was no noise, not a single cluck or flutter of wings, nor was there even a minor squawk of annoyance that we were waking them.

“Grab the flashlights above the feed bins,” I said, pointing to the wall across from us.

He fumbled for a minute, struggling with the little bit of light coming from his lighter, as I watched the dark void beyond us out of the corner of my eye. The darkness boiled and shifted.

Something moved in it, like a bubble, or a plastic bag billowing in the wind.

Or I was imagining shapes where there were none.

A bright beam of light struck my vision, and I saw stars for a moment, even as Bodie handed me the mag-lite. “I don’t see any chickens. Do you see any?”

I scoured the ground, the empty feed troughs, every inch as we shuffled ourselves nearer to the dark. Nothing. No chickens. Only feathers that clung to our shoes as we walked.

Scratch scratch scratch. The noise came, suddenly, from an indeterminable point ahead of us. It was deep, like a hoe carving into hard clay.

Bodie’s light shook in his hand. “I’m scared to look.”

I nodded. “It will be okay. A coyote more than likely tore through here. It’s going to be a mess, but it’s nothing we haven’t handled before, right?”

“Right,” he said, as he pointed his beam toward the darkness.

A creak of metal above me jerked my attention, and I looked upward. One of the fluorescent lights wobbled in the air, affixed by a single chain and a tangle of wires.

Above that, the stars… A hole in the roof.

Shrapnel dangled, ripped pieces of metal pointed inward. A thing landed, and landed hard, and then, realization struck me.

Perry.

She thought something tore through the roof above her when the meteor hit in the parking lot.

It wasn’t above her.

It was nearby, shredding through the roof of Barn 21.

“What,” Bodie said, his words barely above a whisper, “is that thing?”

In Bodie’s shaking light source, an enormous, eight-toed chicken foot dug into the ground, scratched at the dirt, with human-hand-sized talons.

Bodie jerked the light upward. We hadn’t been looking into a black, empty space.

We’d been looking at a red-dark, bubbling flesh.

A hundred beady eyes opened. As I pointed my light at them, the shapes of chickens shifted inside, melting into it, this moving blob.

White feathers, some large, others tiny, protruded in tufts. Beaks jutted out, some of them open and panting, and crowned above it all, a solid five feet above my six-foot frame, was a colossal, engorged head of a