“You’re going to give me your word not to release any more animals from this zoo,” Mason said. “Especially none bigger than you already have. Then you’re going to let us all leave, and I’ll release your chief before we go.”
“Absolutely not!” Chief Dundoogle said from Mason’s grip. “The Herdening must continue, it is our way!”
“What’s so important about this Herdening?” Vivian asked. “Is it for sport?”
“Sport? Leave to it to a great daft Lurg to think the Herdening is a game!” said the chief, rolling his little eyes. “This is aboot our boys becoming men! They must prove that they can ride their fowl skillfully enough to bring down a great beastie before they can become a full warrior of the clan. That’s what the Herdening is for.”
“Is that all?” Vivian said. “What a silly reason to cause all this trouble. Now promise you’ll stop, like Mason told you.”
“Hang on, Viv. This is a horse of a different colour. This is important,” Mason said, and lifted the chief to look him in the eye. “When my brothers and I were younger, our dad took each of us on a father-son deer hunting trip when he thought we were ready. It wasn’t just about whether we could bring down and clean a deer; he wanted to make sure we were ready for responsibilities and big decisions. He wanted to make sure we were ready to be grown men.”
“The Herdening is the same!” Whispit shouted.
“Those trips helped to mold each of us into who we grew up to be,” Mason continued. “I’d hate to have lost out on that because of circumstances beyond my control.”
“Aye, then ye ken it well,” Chief Dundoogle said. “The Herdening must continue.”
“But you can’t keep putting the zoo animals and everyone else at risk,” Claire insisted.
Mason thought for a second. “What if I told you, you didn’t need any of these animals for the Herdening?” he asked the chief. “What if I told you there was another animal that lives all over this park, in fact all over the city, far more ferocious and a more worthy hunt than anything in these pens?”
“Well o’ course I’d want to see this beastie!” the chief said. “But what could possibly be as fierce as ye say?”
“This will never work,” Vivian whispered to Mason as they approached the massive Grenadier Pond which took up almost the entire western edge of the park. They and Claire led the Sproutlings to the water’s edge as the sun rose behind them.
“Those over there? Those are the great ferocious things ye havered of?” Chief Dundoogle asked from the back of his chicken.
“They are indeed. Don’t believe me? Go bother one,” Mason said with a grin.
The chief whistled, and a scout approached went ahead to investigate a pair of large brown birds with black serpentine necks. As the scout approached, one of the geese honked and hissed at him with outstretched wings. The scout ignored the warning, and the goose charged.
“Chief Dundoogle, may I present the illustrious Canada goose,” Mason said, still smiling.
The goose swung a wing at the scout and knocked him from his chicken onto the cement path. Still honking, it ducked its head to deliver a pair of swift bites before it picked up the scout in its beak and threw him screaming into the pond. The wounded Sproutling grabbed a floating piece of tree bark and kicked for shore.
“By the heather, it’s as ye said and more!” the chief said. “And these beasts are plentiful?”
“Almost too much,” Vivian said.
“Tis a worthy foe for the Herdening indeed!” the chief declared. “Ye have a bargain, Lurg. My clan will darken the zoo’s doorstep no more.”
“Well, you don’t have to stay away entirely,” Claire said. “We always love guests. Just do like the other guests do and don’t touch the animals. Or, you know, release them. I’ll leave out some snacks for you guys at night, if you like.”
Vivian and Mason took their leave as Claire and Chief Dundoogle made their arrangements, and Vivian socked Mason on the arm.
“That was mighty brave of you, taking on a whole clan of warriors by yourself,” she chuckled.
“All in a day’s work,” Mason replied.
“Mind if I offer one piece of advice, though?” Vivian asked.
“What’s that, Viv?” Mason said.
“Next time, pick a fight with someone your own size.”
The End
About the Author
J. Trevor Robinson is an author and new dad from Toronto, and the closest he's ever come to a live chicken is the far side of a fence. The High Park capybara escape is very real, though the involvement of non-human factors is hotly debated to this day. Vivian and Mason return in Exclusive Scoop from Secret Stairs: A Tribute to Urban Legend. Links to all of Trevor's books and stories, including his upcoming alt-history horror novel The Mummy of Monte Cristo coming out October 20, 2020, can be found at themummyofmontecristo.com.
The Great Chicken Escape
Cedar Sanderson
The Great Chicken Escape
Cedar Sanderson
“The chickens escaped.”
Gertrude Saar’s voice cut through his focus. She loomed over where he was lying on his back peering up into the innards of the door.
Basdev “Bas” Anand didn’t look away from the panel he was inspecting. Whoever had designed this system had obviously never expected anyone to have to work on it again. Space station work was like that, he’d learned already. Over-engineered by guys who never had to fix anything.
“We can’t close the doors,” she said again after he didn’t immediately reply.
Bas snapped at her. “No shit, Gert. No one can close any doors.” He immediately felt contrite. “Sorry. It’s just… do you have any idea how many doors there are on a station this size? And how many engineering techs are aboard right now?” He rolled his head to the side so he could see the husbandry tech. She seemed flustered. Her normally neat hair flew up and out like a dandelion’s puff. Her jumpsuit was streaked with what he hoped was good clean dirt, but it probably wasn’t.
Bas had been given a list with strict priority of doors to repair first. However, as lead tech for this section, he figured some wiggle room was necessary.
“Do you need me to come there, next?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Thought you should know. Since they got into the park.”
Bas closed his eyes. He wasn’t a religious man, but he muttered something that might have been a prayer, then opened his eyes again. “Does Beetroot… er, Mr. Chamberlain know yet?”
She grinned, lightening her tired face and making her look closer to her real age. “That is a good name for him. He does get dangerously red when alarmed. No, I don’t think so.”
“Angry,” Bas corrected, wiggling back under the door again. He had it levered up enough to just reach. “He gets red when angry. I’ll put your chicken door on the list.”
“Thank you.” Gert stumped away in her heavy work boots.
Bas recalled his correction of her word choice not long after that. He had succeeded in repairing the door he’d been working on when Gertrude had interrupted him. One of the section doors, the heavy blast plates were a big safety issue if they could not be closed and locked.
He had assigned his team each one of those to start. Now, filthy from rolling on the floor and sweaty from wrestling components into place, he was lugging his bag toward the next door on the list, one of the shelter doors that could turn the park into a safe place in case of air loss deep into the station. He came around a corner and nearly collided with Gaven Chamberlain, the head of parks.
“You!” Chamberlain was an alarming shade of near-brick red. He thrust a finger toward Bas’s chest. “You must fix the doors.”
“Er. I am working on it?” Bas hefted the heavy bag he was holding and tried to sidestep the man. Chamberlain was not his boss, but he was a boss, and accustomed to holding sway in his fiefdom.
Chamberlain sidestepped and blocked the corridor again. “There is livestock in the park. In
. The. Park.” He repeated the words through gritted teeth.
“I have orders…” A flicker of movement behind Chamberlain caught Bas’s eye, and he faltered as he identified what was walking toward them.
“Pay attention! My doors must come first… What are you looking at?”
What Bas was looking at was a confident chicken, reddish-blonde in color, striding up the middle of the corridor. Gert had said specifically chickens. “Ah, sir, what sort of livestock?”
Chamberlain spun around. “Chicken!”
The chicken slowed her strut, and looked up at them with a beady eye. She didn’t stop, though.
Chamberlain waved his arms. “Shoo! Shoo!”
“Sir, I don’t think it’s—” Bas stopped talking. The big man had charged the fowl.
Bas was torn between laughing, which might make the parks manager pop a blood vessel, and getting to the next door with all haste. He opted for the door.
Chamberlain, in full flight after the fluttering, running bird, didn’t even notice Bas slip away down a side corridor. Bas knew the entire station inside and out. It was how he had met Gertrude. He’d gotten a work order to build a chicken coop, only one that went vertical for space saving, and he’d shown up in the husbandry corridor wanting to talk to a subject matter expert before he started designing the thing. Having an on-call SME was always a good plan.
Gertrude loved her chickens. This had to be very upsetting to her. Bas was confident the chicken Chamberlain had been menacing would be fine. The chicken had to be able to outmaneuver the big guy, if nothing else. Bas was a little sorry he hadn’t been able to linger long enough to see the outcome. However, there were bigger fish to fry. He nodded awkwardly to a man sitting at his dining table as he passed yet another open door. He didn’t stop. Personal spaces were way down on the list for repair, as inconvenient as that was for the general population.
Bas reached his destination and set his bag down then himself. He blessed the gods he was still young and limber enough to wriggle into the confined spaces. He’d come aboard the station seven years before, and the station had been in full operation for over a decade. He sometimes wished he had been around while it was being built, though. Then he would know whose names to curse when he was wedged inside something for repair. Like now.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement. He turned his head to look, carefully not moving his hands, and came face to face with a chicken.
It was standing by his elbow and ducked down to look under the jacked-up door at him. This one was black and white with a puffy topknot of feathers atop its head. Bas had to admit the feathers, each one outlined neatly with black, were pretty. But that bright, interested gaze made him nervous in his current vulnerable, immobile position.
“Hey, buddy, how about you back up a little?” Bas cleared his throat. His voice had gotten a touch wobbly at the end as the chicken stretched its neck out, turning its head from side to side to look at him. “Ok, that’s close enough,” he said.
If he let go of the unit he supported, he could chase off the chicken. Chickens were big cowards; he’d learned while measuring the space for the coop. But they were also inveterately curious. Plus, they would peck at anything, including each other.
Gert had told him they routinely indulged in cannibalism and showed him the little isolation coop where they put chickens who had been plucked bald and bleeding by the rest of the flock. But, if he dropped the unit on his face, it was going to be worse than a peck.
A pair of hands appeared in his limited range of vision, moving slowly. The chicken, distracted by Bas, was captured with an indignant squawk, and removed from his field of view. Now he could see familiar boots.
“Are you ok in there?” Gert asked.
“Yes. He hadn’t quite worked up to taking a taste of me.” Bas got back to work. His hands moving quickly, he stripped out the blown fuse and slotted in the new one. “Thanks for grabbing him. I felt like he was going for my eyes.”
The boots shifted a little. “She. And would you like a sandwich?”
“Gert. Do I look like I can have a sandwich?” Bas grunted a little as he tightened the bolts holding the unit inside the door.
“When you can.” She walked off again, and Bas felt bad he’d snapped at her.
He closed the access hatch and wiggled out from under the door, but she was already gone. He closed the door then opened it again. Few things felt as good as getting the job done. Now, to find Gert and apologize.
She had not gone far. Someone had cobbled together a wire cage, and the husbandry techs were putting chickens in it. Gert saw him coming and waved a chicken at him. Its head stayed as steady as though it had a gyro inside it, which Bas found disconcerting.
He shied away from the cage. “I wanted to say sorry…” He didn’t get to finish what he was saying. Another of the husbandry techs—Lindsey, he thought her name was—popped up at his elbow.
“Here, we have sandwiches!” She held up a box and pulled off the lid. Inside were neatly wrapped squares.
“Um. Thanks.” He took one, and his stomach growled on cue.
Lindsey giggled at the sound effect. Gertrude, who was no longer holding a chicken, came over and asked, “How much longer on the doors?”
Bas swallowed. “Well, I’ve got two done, and it’s lunchtime. It’s going to be a while.”
“What happened?” Lindsey asked. She put the box of sandwiches back in Bas’s range, and he snagged a second gratefully.
“Thanks. Well, there was a power surge.” He shrugged. “No idea why. That’s Sam’s department, way above my pay grade. It was over the rating of a component used in all the station doors.”
Gert’s eyes got big. “Even the exterior doors?”
He nodded, adding extra motion for emphasis. “They fail shut. The interior ones fail open. It’s a safety feature. Outside stays on the outside. And, man, am I glad I’m not on that duty.”
They looked at each other. “There are a lot of doors.” Lindsey said thoughtfully.
Gert grimaced. “I guess the chickens will have to wait. We can get some of them in the coop.”
A week later, Bas was reminded of that conversation. They still had not gotten all of the doors working. His little crew was working on doors during every scheduled hour and some off the clock. They had come to the point of looking for a work order of higher priority than the doors, and fighting over it, just to have a break from lying under doors changing blown fuses. Bas was lying under this door, listening to a contented hen clucking somewhere nearby.
He wasn’t quite sure where it was. People had started to hang up curtains over their non-functional doors, for privacy, as much as that helped. The curtains worked as a social barrier for humans. Chickens knew nothing of social norms and probably wouldn’t care if they had. Bas had learned to watch for shit-landmines before he got down on the decking by a door now. And to keep a close eye out while walking through the corridors.
Chickens didn’t just leave unpleasantly liquid surprises in their wakes. The whole station had begun playing a game of hunt the egg, who’s got an egg? From what Bas had seen, the chickens did not approve of this. Humans, on the other hand, seemed to find it hilarious. Eggs were scarce in the cafeteria; which Bas was ok with. He thought of the chickens every time he saw an egg now.
He had gotten the routine with the door repair down to a smooth sequence. Jack it up, wriggle under, locate the unit… For a design that used all the same parts that failed in the same way, and the same time, you would think that the control unit would be in the same place on every door. You would be mistaken.
“What did you say?” Gert’s voice made him startle.
He hadn’t heard her walk up. And…
“Talking to myself. Bad habit.” Bas projected enough, he hoped, to be understood.
“Thanks for getting the habitat door closing.”
“That wasn’t me.” Bas slid the unit back into place and started tightening. “One of the o
thers on my crew. But there are still loose chickens.”
“About that…”
He pushed himself out from under the door and looked up at her. Her coveralls were clean, and hair tidy, so it couldn’t be too bad. “I can’t help with the chickens.”
She shook her head. “No, that’s up to Husbandry, I know. It’s the core.” She blurted, her lips quivering.
Bas got up from the floor and dusted himself off. “Why does that fill me with doubt and fear? We fixed the doors into the central core.”
“There are chickens in there.” She fidgeted. “I don’t know how.”
“How did you find out about chickens in the core?” Bas put his tools back in the bag, checked the time, and then, hefting the bag, headed for the access.
Gert trotted alongside him.
Bas contemplated her out of the corner of his eye. He had seen her so often recently from a prone position he’d almost forgotten how much shorter she was. She also hadn’t answered his question.
“Gert?” he prompted.
She glanced sideways at him as he led the way through the park. The big green belt of their home, he thought of it. If the core weren’t there, you’d be able to look up overhead and see nothing but a sweeping stretch of green. The core, with its painted clouds on pale blue, and occasional incongruous struts like spindly white legs, was both up, and in, perceptually.
Bas wanted to rub his face, but a glance at his hands told him this was a bad idea. “I can guess. It’s off-limits, but kids love to play in the zero-grav.”
She shook her head. “No, I mean, I don’t know, but that’s not what happened.” She was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “They didn’t take the chickens up there.”
“Not even to see if they could fly in zero gee?” Bas asked, pointing at the closest leg. Inside it was an access ladder. They headed for it, veering off the beaten footpath onto a faint trail marked with a sign warning it was for authorized personnel only.
CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories Page 17
