The Unwinding House and Other Stories

by Jared Millet

“Better be a vacuum breach.” I pulled my thermals on, clicked the hatch release, and slid into the passage feet first.

  “Thanks,” said Karan as I pulled shoes out of my locker. “I owe you one.”

  “You got that right,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “I have to show you and you have to promise to not freak, okay?”

  “Okay, whatever. Seal check swear.”

  He led me to Clair de Lune while scenarios ran through my head. The most benign was that Karan had spilled a gallon of sauce and needed help cleaning it up. A worse possibility was that a shipment of eggs had arrived and Karan had broken one.

  We tiptoed to the kitchen’s delivery hatch. Karan pushed it open on its hinge. The hatch wasn’t sealed, which itself would have bought him a month of community service. Once inside he locked the door, crept to one of the pantries, and put his hand on the latch.

  “Remember, you promised not to freak.”

  The pantry opened. Inside, a ball of white feathers sat plain as day on the floor. It had a red comb, a yellow beak, and two beady eyes. The hen looked up and said “puk?”

  I gently closed the pantry and said “What the hell did you do?”

  “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “No you don’t. I don’t know what I’m thinking. But let’s start with why there’s a chicken in the cupboard?”

  “Okay, well, you know how things have been since we started serving eggs, right?”

  “Yeah, they’re pretty tasty.”

  “Tasty? Tasty? It’s the best thing ever. The worst egg dish we’ve come up with is a million times better than the best thing ever done with yeast bricks. And it’s something that people on Earth used to eat every day.”

  “Okay, but what’s that got to do with…”

  “And my family won’t shut up. They go on and on about how everything was so much better in the old days and we’ve all been condemned to everlasting hell. And I just can’t take it anymore. I’ve got to know what it was like.”

  “So you kidnapped a chicken so you could have your own eggs.”

  I swear his eyes sank into his skull.

  “I stole it so I could cook it.”

  That ran through my head a few times before it took.

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “No, I mean it, shut up. Are you crazy? You’d get in less trouble if you ate a human being than an animal from Species Preservation. How the hell did you get it anyway?”

  “I’ve been volunteering. They were short-handed last night, so I grabbed one and ran.”

  “You ran all the way here from the SPC with a chicken in your arms?”

  “It was in a box.” He pointed at a plastic crate.

  “Space me,” I said. “Well, we’ve got to take it back.”

  “We can’t.” Karan’s face was covered in sweat. “I have to go through with this, but… I can’t kill it by myself. I need you to hold it down.”

  “No. No. No. No way.” As much as I didn’t want to, it was time to call the cops. Karan’s mind had gone out the airlock.

  “Think about it,” he said. “If its eggs taste like heaven, what will the rest be like? Humans ate chickens for thousands of years. All those generations of breeding to produce the perfect food animal. Can you imagine? It’ll be like the ultimate drug times a million.”

  I inched toward the pantry, my palms facing out.

  “Karan, think about what you’re saying. The SPC can barely maintain a breeding population. If we thin the flock even a little...”

  “They can always lay more eggs.” His hands shook as he backed toward the knives. “But we have to know. I’ll be as humane as I can. You just hold it down while I cut off its head.”

  “No dice, buddy.” I flung the pantry wide and made a grab for the chicken.

  But damn, that hen could move.

  As soon as she saw me coming, she inflated to twice her size. Her stubby wings unfolded and her reptilian legs shot out, triggering some primitive response in my skull. My hands went up to cover my face and the hen charged with a battle cry of “Pkaw!”

  I screamed and fell on my ass as a white torpedo rocketed overhead. As far as I knew, chickens weren’t great fliers, but that was in full Earth gravity. Here on the moon, all bets were off.

  I scrambled back to my feet. The hen pranced on the chopping block. Karan eyed her with naked, animal hunger, one hand clenching a carving knife. He lunged with a prehistoric howl. The chicken hopped to the floor.

  Once again I tried to grab her. She dodged to the right. Karan barreled into me. I felt my shirt tear and the cold of his blade on my skin.

  “Karan, damnit, watch!”

  “Sorry,” he said, and let the knife go. It clattered to the floor and the chicken sprinted to the corner. Karan and I ran, stumbling over each other in the process. We wrestled on the floor as the hen bounded over us, one taloned foot launching off my shoulder and the other off Karan’s face.

  I spun and grabbed the bird with both hands. I must have squeezed too hard. She screeched and unloaded a blast of birdshit all down the front of my shirt. I screamed and let go. Karan snatched at her, but I tangled his legs in mine.

  I rolled to my feet. Karan did the same. The chicken had reached the closed hatch. Karan and I darted around the cutting table. I got a hand on the hatch release, but Karan grabbed my shoulder to pull me away. I backhanded his face. He fell and I swung the hatch open, letting the chicken escape.

  “What are you doing?” Karan shouted.

  I tore off my ruined shirt. “The cops can chase her from here.”

  “No!” Spittle dripped from his chin. “I swear, I’ll tell them you stole it. You’re the one with chicken shit all over.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Watch me.”

  Karan ran after the hen like a demon. I had to follow. To hell with whatever he threatened me with, I had to make sure that bird didn’t die, for both his sake and my own.

  Ahead, the chicken weaved left and right, always well out of Karan’s grasp. I did my best to keep up while watching for any advantage. The hen ran past a junction, faked to the left, then doubled to the right, straight under Karan’s legs. He did an ungraceful cartwheel while trying to catch her: his hands darted down, but his momentum carried his legs and torso forward.

  As someone raised on Luna he should have known better than to try a move like that. As someone who grew up on a freighter, I had low-gravity chase tactics down. When I saw which way the chicken turned, I bounced off the opposite wall and propelled myself horizontally in the same direction. The force of my kick would carry me far before the need to touch ground again.

  The chicken saw me coming in her rearview. She flapped her wings like a big, white bumblebee, millions of years of instinct overcoming the shortfalls of evolution. I launched off the floor, the walls, the ceiling, anything to keep up with her. When a vent grate appeared overhead, I laced my fingers through it mid-flight and ripped. The grate popped out and now I had part of a cage.

  My idea was to pen the bird into a corner and wait for the cops to arrive. The problem was that there weren’t any corners to use. The bend between the wall and the floor wouldn’t work; the hen would be able to squirm out either side. What I needed was a bend in the hallway where the grate could cover every exit but the top. If I could trap her in a corner on the floor, I could hold her in with one hand while pressing the grate with the other.

  The bird seemed to read my mind. She reversed toward me and I tried to hit her, hoping to daze and not kill. I shouldn’t have worried. Catching chickens was apparently a skill that took as much training as kung fu. She wove around me and headed back the way we’d come.

  Karan lay in wait, his mind lost to his inner caveman. He lunged. The chicken flew upward and vanished into the duct I’d opened.

  Damn.

  I leapt after her. Getting into air ducts wasn’t hard, but most people weren’t dumb enough to try. I wriggled insid
e, but the hen had the upper claw. She had plenty of room, whereas I had none. She glanced at me and said “puk,” then waddled off as calm as you please.

  Karan grabbed my heel. I kicked him away then squirmed after the bird.

  The tunnel was dark. The only illumination came from vents spaced every ten meters. The hen followed a bend to the right. I pulled myself around and saw light, not from below but above. We were under Copernicus Dome, the city’s grand enclosure with a field of actual grass. The chicken reached the end of the duct, looked up at the simulated daylight, and said “puk.” I scrambled behind, murmuring soft encouragements in the hope that she’d let me get near.

  “Easy girl. Easy. I’m the nice one. You can trust me. I’m just taking you home.”

  I grabbed. She squirmed in my hands, but somehow I kept my hold on her. She pecked but didn’t hit anything important.

  “Good girl. Good girl. You’re such a good girl.”

  Now for getting out. I scrunched and cooed sweet nothings to the chicken while pressing my shoulders under the grate. With all the force I could, but steady so as not to spook the hen, I pushed upward.

  The hatched popped open and I emerged on the grassy commons. I was naked to the waist, standing in a hole, with a chicken in my hands whose patience was running out, and there was a crowd of people in front of me. None of them looked my way.

  I was going to have to be sneaky.

  That very morning, Council President Milbrook had scheduled a press conference about rent increases on habitation modules near the University. The media was present, as was a silent mob of student protesters whom the new rates would force to relocate. No one was in a pleasant mood, but all eyes were on the President as she took the stage, including mine.

  That’s why I didn’t see Karan until he threw his shirt over my head. I dropped the chicken and tried to rip the suffocating fabric away. Karan did it for me, then proceeded to chase the chicken, flailing his shirt like some kind of makeshift net. He and the hen ran straight for the media. I sprinted behind them.

  The chicken made a ninety degree turn to the right just behind the first cameraman. Karan slid straight into him. I angled wide around the protestors, hoping to cut the chicken off before she got very far. A young woman with a sign turned towards the commotion and locked eyes with me like a pilot at an oncoming asteroid.

  Karan took her out from the side. The chicken kept going between the legs of the mob. I kept running toward the right, hoping the bird would hold to her heading and I’d catch her when she reappeared.

  Instead, she emerged in full flight and landed on the President’s podium. I ran at full tilt for the stage, but Karan got there first. He’d commandeered the protester’s sign and apparently intended to club the bird. He ended up whacking the President instead, and they both went down in a tangle. I bounded over them, in front of a dozen cameras, arms outstretched to the chicken.

  I grabbed her with both hands and she announced her capture to the world with a “PKAW!” We plowed toward the ground head first. I tucked my shoulder, rolled, and sprung upright with my captive held to my breast. I didn’t pause for interviews. I ran for the SPC.

  No one tried to stop me, though many watched me speed by. I elbowed my way into Species Preservation’s main office and slammed into the reception desk, barely holding onto my prize.

  “Where do you keep the chickens?”

  The clerk pointed to a door. I thanked him and shoved my way further inside. Windows opened onto habitat rooms: cats, lizards, dogs, fish. Several staff members tried to stop to me, but I steered around them. Everything was a blur; by then I was as out of my mind as Karan.

  I reached the chicken room and banged on the door with my foot. A woman looked through the window. I held up the chicken and she opened the hatch.

  I let my captive loose and leaned on the door, sucking in lungfuls of air. Her eyes went wide.

  “Don’t leave it open!”

  Too late. Twenty other chickens swarmed out into the hall. Once more, the chase was on.

  ~

  Karan and I landed in confinement, though in the end my story was believed. Karan had suffered a total mental breakdown. It wasn’t uncommon, and the psych staff knew how to handle it. People had been going crazy for decades since Earth bit the dust. Even for those who never knew it, something in the mind just snapped now and then without the blue skies of home.

  I was fired from Clair de Lune, though I wasn’t kicked out of school. After graduation I got a job on a passenger ship, slicing yeast bricks into interesting shapes and drowning them in Karan’s spice recipes. I don’t think he’d mind me using his creations. Even after he gets out of psych, he’ll never be let near a restaurant again.

  Despite the chicken fiasco, Clair de Lune’s experiment with eggs was a success. Little reminders of our long-lost home, freighters now transport them to the reaches of space. In fact, I have a stash for my ship’s next run: scrambled or fried for breakfast each morning, and a few deviled eggs for me.

  Tag

  A wall of thunder slammed through the lecture hall.

  “Vhat…”

  The aftershock knocked Professor Weiss off his feet. He rolled to his knees and pulled himself up to his podium. His students stared back with eyes like ash on water. Seconds later, Weiss’s assistant burst through the classroom door.

  “Professor, it’s the Khendaar. They’re here!”

  Weiss closed a textbook and steadied himself.

  “Vhere are they, Brad?”

  “One came down in Mali. The other took out Topeka.”

  Weiss excused his students, most of whom were already packing or openly weeping, and made for the exit. Once outside, he dropped all decorum and ran for his lab. His T.A. reached it first. Brad had the build of an athlete, and Weiss often wondered why the young man was wasting his time in science.

  Inside the lab, on an old television with a “Don’t Panic” sticker on the screen, a newsman was holding back tears. There was no sound, the set’s speaker having blown a decade before. The scene cut to a shaky helicopter video of a giant glass crater that had once been Saharan sand.

  “Vhere is it?” Weiss asked.

  “Heading for the Atlantic. The other one’s going northeast. They’re both moving at twice the speed of sound.”

  “I meant the translator, dummkopf.” He didn’t mean to bite Brad’s head off, but it just came out that way. “Ve should at least try to talk to them, jah?”

  “Most of it’s in the storeroom, but the software is all on the server.”

  “Vell, vhy isn’t it on the laptop? Get the equipment; I’ll transfer the files.”

  ~

  Weiss’s colleagues in SETI had received their first extraterrestrial transmission a year earlier. The signal from nearby Tau Ceti carried a cornucopia of technical data. It also gave a description of the Khendaar and a warning to evacuate the planet. Once the details of the message leaked, the following societal meltdown made large-scale preparations impossible. Only a handful of institutions, such as Weiss’s university, were able to develop a fraction of the alien technology needed for survival.

  Brad wheeled a device that looked like part of a rock band’s sound system toward the lab’s loading dock while Weiss drummed his nails on his laptop and waited for the last of the software to install. The translator had yet to be tested to his satisfaction, but it would simply have to work. There was no more room for error.

  On the silent television, a prominent media personality shouted at an unseen audience. Behind the pundit’s pudgy face, a satellite photo displayed a chain of giant footprints across the Midwest, each half a mile from the next.

  A VTOL jet collected Weiss, Brad, and the translation device from the university commons and rocketed into the air as soon as they shut the hatch. Brad held a radio to his ear.

  “My God,” he said. “The African target is swimming the Atlantic. It’s moving so fast it’s plowed a furrow to the sea floor.”

  “
And the American one?”

  “Ran right through Chicago and knocked over half of downtown,” said their pilot. “Now it’s wading through the Great Lakes. It looks like the aliens will join up somewhere in Maine or Quebec.”

  “Not any more,” announced Brad in a dead voice. He set the radio down. “The western Khendaar just flattened Toronto. Now it’s heading for New York.”

  ~

  The alien crouched over the ruins of Jersey City. Its clustered heads swirled through the clouds like a mass of gargantuan snakes. Its twin tails cracked the air with repeated sonic booms. Weiss asked the pilot to land, but he declined.

  A hundred-foot wall of water approached from the east in advance of the second Khendaar. The wave rolled over Manhattan and up the Hudson, tearing bridges apart like reeds. Half of the city collapsed into pillars of smoke and rubble; the few skyscrapers that remained leaned and groaned like drunkards. The inevitable backflow down the river would wash the rest away, but for the moment there was stillness.

  Weiss demanded that their pilot put them down, and after consulting with his superiors he landed in the wasteland of debris that was Central Park. Weiss and Brad had just unloaded their equipment when the quake hit. Tremors rocked the earth with the rhythm of footfalls, and a shadow blocked the morning sun.

  To the east, a Khendaar rose on its hind legs. Sheets of Atlantic seawater slid off of its body in localized downpours. The other alien had crossed the Hudson, but was partially concealed behind the ruined skyline.

  Weiss activated his machine and spoke through a microphone. “Please! You must stop this! Ve are intelligent beings! You are destroying our cities, our homes! Vhy are you doing this? Please, vill you listen?”

  As he spoke, thunderous sounds in an alien tongue poured from the translator. Brad fell to his knees from the force of the noise. Weiss gripped the edge of his device to keep his legs from buckling.

  The alien to the east leaped into the sky and soared overhead, thunder crashing behind it like the anger of a god. The other Khendaar tried to dodge, but its opponent tackled it, flattening a huge swath of steel and concrete. Giant words spilled from its maw as they wrestled, and a translation appeared on Weiss’s monitor: