by Alex McCall
They hooked the chains on to their quad bikes and revved the engines. I watched as the Catcher was wrenched out of the hole, through the hotel door and off down the street, clattering along.
I stared after them. Part of me wanted to follow them, hug my sister and apologise for fighting with her. But I just couldn’t. I’d hated the Brotherhood for so long, it felt like a constant weight on my shoulders. No matter what I did I couldn’t seem to drop it.
I rounded on Blake, who was watching them leave, looking satisfied. “What was that for?”
“I don’t trust them. They keep trying to duck out of things.”
“We need them on our side; you can’t just go insulting them like that. What’s your problem?”
He seemed about to answer me when one of his soldiers ran up. “Blake, Blake,” she yelled.
He focused on her immediately. “What is it?” he asked.
“You’ve got to come quickly. There’s trouble at the farms. Three Catchers.”
I looked at Blake and felt my eyes widen. “That’s where Sally was going,” I told him.
He cursed and turned, sprinting off. “Get Cody to send some more backup,” he yelled over his shoulder. Then he grabbed the whistle that hung around his neck and gave it a swift, ringing peep.
His group materialised around him, as if they’d been waiting for his call. They were always nearby, the most experienced chicken hunters we had. They started running towards the farms. I sprinted after them and quickly caught up.
“What are you doing?” Blake yelled at me.
“I need to see this,” I yelled back. “First the attack this morning and now this? Right where Sally is?”
“Do you think they’re trying to get more council members?”
“Well, we won’t know until we get there,” I yelled at him, accelerating. “Come on!”
CHAPTER 7
It was a hard run to the farms, along College Street before turning on to Wellington Place. Sally had needed an area of grass or earth to farm but the centre of Aberdeen was mostly tarmac and granite. So she’d settled on the Bon Accord Terrace Gardens. They weren’t very big but they were very central. If those farms worked well, she talked about developing Duthie Park, like they had during World War Two.
When we got there everything was in chaos. Sally’s farmers were running all over the place, pursued by the three Catchers. Sally, meanwhile, was trying to attack a Catcher with a shovel, screaming with rage at the top of her voice. I stopped when I saw her, surprised. She was normally so calm. Then I saw her plants, the rows of crops that she’d been working so hard on. Several of them had been squashed flat by big chicken claw-prints. I guess seeing all her work trampled had snapped something deep inside her.
However brave it might have seemed to attack a Catcher like that, it was also dumb. No human could take on a Catcher with just a shovel. From what we’d learned via TV and radio, Catchers were even bulletproof. That’s why we preferred lasers.
But the lasers had one distinct weakness. They consumed a lot of energy, and I mean a lot. They guzzled more energy than a toddler on sugar. We needed to plug them into the mains or hotwire them into a car, which was dangerous. The Brotherhood was working on some portable ones but they would take a while to develop. So if we brought lasers to a fight, they had to be set up ahead of time, like the ambush I’d helped with yesterday.
If we didn’t have lasers then things got tricky.
“Nets,” I snapped at Blake as we started running forward.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he replied calmly.
I’d seen it before, in him and a few of his crew. When trouble started they didn’t freak out like some did. They calmly assessed the situation and then acted. I guess some people just handle danger better than others.
“Angus, Connie, you take the one on the right. Andrea, Stuart, the one on the left. The one in the middle is mine. Everyone else, get people out of here.”
I joined Blake as he ran towards his Catcher, which was beginning to stalk Sally. This wasn’t going to be easy. Jesse and I were the first to take down a Catcher ‘unarmed’ but we’d had to pull a house down on it. Since then we’d come up with an easier, though much more risky, approach.
“Do you want to be bait or shall I?” I asked Blake, running beside him. He grinned.
“You can have the fun,” he said, without even a hint of irony. ‘Fun’ was not the word I’d choose.
I pulled out my shock-stick as I ran, clanging it off the chicken’s legs. Shock-sticks always got their attention. The chickens didn’t seem to know what they were, and anyone carrying one was identified as a threat. The Catcher turned away from Sally and moved towards me. A brief strike to its neck and I dodged out of the way.
It buffeted me with its wing, throwing me backwards through the air. I landed with a thump on the hard ground. This wasn’t a new Catcher like some of the ones we’d faced recently. Both the skill with which it controlled its machine and how plain it was, just a round body on legs without ornamentation, told me this was an old and experienced pilot. I worried for a second. Maybe this tactic wouldn’t work.
I lay still, unable to get up, as the chicken approached me. I could hear screams and clanging all around. My shock-stick lay a few metres away, dropped as I landed. I rolled over onto my front and began to crawl for it, but I knew I wouldn’t reach it in time.
The shadow of the bird descended on me.
I rolled over again. I wanted to see this part. I wanted to see it trying to eat me.
“Just try it,” I snarled up at him. “I might be a bit more than you can swallow.”
It bent over slowly, looking at me with something like curiosity; like it didn’t know what to make of me. Its beak opened slowly, almost as if it was gently yawning. But what came next wouldn’t be gentle. I’d seen it enough times to know. It would flash forward, its beak sinking deep into the soil. The jaws would snap shut then I’d be sent tumbling with a load of earth and seedlings down into the bowels of its stomach.
I glanced sideways, to make sure my timing was perfect. The other two Catchers lay still. They’d already been dealt with.
My Catcher seemed to notice this at the same time I did. It stopped moving, its eyes frantically revolving in their sockets with tiny squeaking noises. But it saw the trap coming far too late.
Blake sprinted out from where he’d been hiding beneath one of the defeated Catchers, next to the suddenly calm Sally. He slid on his knees when he got to me, like a striker after scoring a spectacular goal. His hand arched up and over, the net he’d been holding there unfolding gracefully. It spread through the air and came down over the Catcher’s head.
And that was it. When I’d first tried out the nets I’d expected a few sparks, maybe a thump or something. But no. Without a fanfare the chicken’s signal was cut off and it became just another useless lump of metal.
“He shoots, he scores!” Blake crowed, getting to his feet and dancing around with his arms in the air.
I breathed out sharply before hauling myself to my feet. “You took your time,” I told him.
“You were such good bait. I was enjoying your performance.”
“Well next time enjoy it less and act quicker.”
“Alright. Though I don’t know why you were worried. That was pretty easy.”
“Yes. It was easy…” I frowned. “Blake, get your people over here right now.”
“Why?” he asked, though he was sensible enough to begin beckoning them over before I answered his question. The farmers had already left and just us and Sally remained.
“Because that was easy. Too easy. The chicken piloting this thing was good. Too good to fall for something we’ve done so many times. Look at these Catchers. They’re so basic. And look – there are dents from bullets and stuff. We shouldn’t have been able to take them down so quickly.”
“Which means…” Blake’s eyes narrowed as he got it too “…that wasn’t an attack.”
�
��It was a diversion.” I nodded, as a scream, quickly silenced, sliced through the air.
“That was Benny,” Blake said. “It came from over there.”
We moved as one in the direction of the scream, Sally still clutching her trusty shovel. When we got there we found a crumpled body beside a bush. Benny lay still, not moving.
“Is he alright?” someone asked, but Sally was already rushing forward. She bent down beside him, smoothing back his hair and checking his pulse.
“He’s breathing normally,” she told us, the confidence in her voice reassuring. “But he’s unconscious. I don’t know what could have cause—”
Sally was cut off by a second scream as something enormous, black and chicken-shaped burst from the bushes beside her. It was on to her in a second, moving oddly. Parts of it seemed to open up and flow over her, sucking her into its cavernous gut. She was dragged backwards into the bush, which rustled a few times and was still.
A second after getting over our shock we tore in after her, brushing leaves and twigs away from our faces.
“Sally!” I yelled. “Sally!”
“What happened? What was that?”
“I don’t know, Blake. But make sure it doesn’t get away with Sally.”
We hunted around for a while, calling her name, but we all knew it was no good.
Sally had been taken.
We finally made our way back to the main battleground and found the Catchers also gone. Our nets lay shredded on the ground. Beside them was a single black feather.
Ever since the beginning of the chicken apocalypse I don’t think I’d ever felt so defeated.
I looked at Blake and saw that he was feeling the same way. “What was that?” he asked.
I could only shrug. I didn’t know.
CHAPTER 8
“So you have no idea what that thing was? It’s an egg-nigma?”
I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. My walkie-talkie was sitting on my bedside table, Jesse’s voice floating through it. He’d finally got round to calling me and I’d just finished filling him in on the attacks that day.
“Nope,” I said. “I think Hazel might have an idea but she’s not told me yet – because Blake was there.”
“Shame they didn’t eat him as well.” Jesse didn’t really know Blake. He’d been banned from council meetings since he make some joke about Cody trying to ‘rule the roost’. But he knew how I felt about Blake.
“We need him,” I reminded Jesse quietly, though privately I agreed. “The longer we have him the more effective we’ll be.”
“Unless he’s the spy.”
Now there was something I didn’t want to think about. We knew it had to be someone on the council, but Blake was too useful. I hoped it wasn’t him.
“Who do you think it is?” I asked.
“Well, I…” Jesse’s voice cut off for a couple of minutes. Then it was back, though fuzzy with static. “Sorry, a chicken just flew over. Didn’t want to risk it landing or anything.”
My heart rate settled back to normal. “Where are you, anyway?”
“Just scouting out the chickens’ base.”
“What?” I sat bolt upright in bed. “Why are you talking to me while doing that?”
“Relax.” Jesse’s voice sounded almost sleepy. “I’m miles away, looking at it through binoculars. I’ll see anything coming before it gets to me, and I’ll hide. Besides, it’s best to do this at night. I’m harder to see.”
“What does it look like?”
“A huge barn – almost the size of an aircraft hangar – all big and red. They must have built it from scratch.”
I lay back down. “Well, where is it? How easy is it to get to?”
His voice went quiet, though his tone stayed the same. “Not that easy. They’ve built it right by Kemnay.”
“Your hometown? That’s lucky.”
“Not that lucky.” Jesse sounded a bit bitter. “They’re out in the country, miles from anywhere that isn’t a farm, and it looks like they’ve levelled a fair amount of the village so there’s no chance of hiding there. It’s improved the place but it’s still annoying. They’ve got a big fence round the barn that’s probably electric. Half of the site is bordered by the River Don. I mean it isn’t a big river but it’ll be tricky to cross without our weapons getting soaked. So it’ll be hard to attack and even harder to sneak anyone out.”
“Sounds a pain.”
“I don’t know,” Jesse said musingly. “With the right plan it should be doable…” He tailed off.
“Jesse,” I told him sternly, “do not try and take that place on by yourself. Just find out what you can and get back here.”
“Sure, sure.”
“I mean it.”
“Alright, alright. I’m not stupid.”
I wasn’t convinced. Great. More reason to worry.
“So, anyway. Traitors?” I diverted our conversation back to where we’d begun.
“Yeah, sorry.” There was a pause for a moment, as if he was looking at notes. “Well, it has to be someone in the council. No one else should know all the information they’re using to get to us. They’re hitting too many supply runs, finding too many hidden bases. So that’s you, Blake, Noah, Cody, Glen, Hazel, Deborah, Jeremy and Percy, I guess. It’s not Sally, we know that much. We know it’s not you. Glen isn’t at any council meetings. I really doubt it’d be Noah.”
“That still leaves us with six people. You don’t really think it would be Cody, do you?”
“You never know,” Jesse replied. “Cody could be a dove.”
I stared silently at the ceiling above me. I knew Jesse was trying to make some sort of dumb joke but I couldn’t figure out where he was going with it.
“OK,” I said, eventually giving in, “get it over with. Why would he be a dove?”
“Because he could be planning to stage a coup.”
If he was expecting laughter he was disappointed. All he got from me was stony silence. One thing I didn’t miss about Jesse were his terrible jokes.
“You know,” he continued, “it means a military takeover. And it’s pronounced the same as the sound a dove makes. Actually, it’s spelt oddly and before I knew how to pronounce it I was going to make a joke about—”
“You know, I’m really regretting getting you that dictionary. I thought your jokes would get better, not worse.”
“It’s one of the best gifts I’ve ever had,” Jesse said, then his voice turned serious: “Really, though, watch out for Cody. This might be a way for him to gain control over Aberdeen.”
“You seriously think Cody would work with the chickens to gain more power?”
“He didn’t want to fight them to begin with, remember? He said it would draw unwelcome attention and that he’d get more done staying out of their way. It’s not hard to imagine him working with them to get what he wants.”
“But he was targeted today,” I argued.
“Yeah, right before the much more successful attack on Sally. The one that actually worked.”
Jesse was right, though I didn’t like it. If Cody was the traitor, then we were in big trouble.
“So basically we can’t trust anyone that’s not you, me, Glen or Noah?”
“You can trust Hazel. She’s your sister; she wouldn’t betray you.”
I wanted to believe him. But I just kept picturing her wearing the feathery Brotherhood uniform, arguing with me about fighting the chickens. I still couldn’t trust my own sister.
I punched the wall, hard enough for Jesse to hear the thump. If he had, he didn’t comment. “So what can we do now?” I asked.
There was a crackling of static through the radio. Maybe Jesse was eating something. I could picture him sitting there, bar of chocolate in hand, staring at the far-off barn and thinking.
“What you need is some way of narrowing down the suspects. Tell each of them something secret and see who reacts. But that could take ages and you couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t pass t
he information on to other people.”
I felt something tingle at the back of my brain. “Not if we did it with a specific mission. Something the chickens would want to stop. We could tell different people different information about the mission and see which information gets passed on to the chickens – that would tell us who blabbed.”
There was a pause, then Jesse replied, excited, “Yeah, that would work. But what mission?”
I grinned into the darkness. “I know just the thing.”
CHAPTER 9
JESSE: OPERATION HENHOUSE HUSTLE
It really sucked being so far away from Rayna and not being able to chat easily. That was something I’d never really appreciated before the chicken apocalypse. Before if I wanted to talk to someone I could just message them on Facebook or text them. They could live hundreds of miles away and it wouldn’t really matter.
Now I could only call Rayna on the radio and I didn’t want to do that too often in case it was intercepted, which is why I’d asked her not to contact me. Also, she was always busy with something and I was probably annoying her. During the last few days I’d been sleeping during the day and sneaking about at night. Which meant that when I actually wanted to talk to Rayna she was usually asleep. And it was rarely a good idea to talk while sneaking around. The only reason I got away with it now was the distance between me and the chickens’ barn.
As the light from the coming dawn started brightening the horizon I put down my binoculars and stretched my shoulders. On the dew-soaked grass beside me lay my notebook, slightly damp. I picked it up and settled it in my backpack, preparing to start the hour-long hike back to the farmhouse I’d been camping in. It was a bit annoying having to walk so far every night, but sleeping in a real bed was worth it.
It hadn’t been hard to track down the chickens’ headquarters. I just followed a few Catchers as they flew overhead, making sure I stayed out of sight. I’d probably learned everything I could from scoping the place out under cover of darkness; there wasn’t much activity around the barn at night. But it helped to work out the general layout of the place. Maybe I’d go back in daylight, just once, and see what it looked like when everyone was awake, how well guarded the place seemed. Then it’d be time to head back to Aberdeen and make some plans. I already had a couple itching away at the back of my head but it all depended on finding the spy. I’d agreed to call Rayna tomorrow evening, once she’d completed her first spy-catching mission. Then we’d—
