Attack of the Giant Chickens - Ryan Matthew Harker (top 100 novels of all time .TXT) 📗

The wickedly sharp beak snapped and I remember thinking if any had still been alive a velociraptor couldn’t have been a fiercer adversary. It moved with extraordinary speed but blinking away the blood in my eyes I made a mad dash for the car anyway. It was a move of desperation and one I was sure I wouldn’t live to regret. But I did live and I didn’t regret it because just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, just when I thought it was over she arrived- the woman of my dreams.
Apparently she just blazed into town on her shiny, black and chrome motorcycle. I don’t really know for sure as I was a little busy running for my life but the facts support it. And speaking of facts, it’s a fact I didn’t hear the bike as she rode up. In fact I didn’t even hear the shotgun blast when she emptied it into the squawking, flapping, giant chicken that was chasing me across the parking lot. It’s crazy what fear will do to a person, pure, focus induced tunnel vision that forces you to concentrate on one thing and one thing only, achieving your goal of remaining completely unscathed, which in this case happened to involve getting to a car, any car, so I could jump through a window.
Anyway I reached the automobile I had chosen, a little red sports car. It was close to the ground and offered the chicken a limited chance of success to get in after me. The bike screeched up without a squeak and the shotgun blasted without so much as a sound as I hurled myself full force, head first through the sports car’s narrow driver side window and landed in a shower of glass, curled up in a ball on the passenger seat. I don’t know how long I stayed that way but my hearing must have come back because it suddenly dawned on me that I heard someone laughing, sweet laughter too. It took me completely by surprise because the last thing I remember hearing was that horrible squawking, like nails on a blackboard but worse. I sat up slowly and looked around.
From my view out the shattered driver’s window her bike sat prettily perched on its kickstand and she sat sideways on its black seat with her long white legs stretched prettily out in front of her. I thought it was sort of odd that she was riding a motorcycle in a flower print sun dress but I certainly wasn’t complaining. The shotgun leaned beside her against the bike and her chest heaved behind her crossed arms as each chuckle escaped her full, cherry red lips; she had green eyes. The visor of her helmet was up. I couldn’t make out the color of her hair from beneath it but it could have been any color, hell she could have been bald and it wouldn’t have mattered because she- was- hot!
So I decided, unless this gorgeous angel of death was enticing me out to the slaughter with beautiful peals of gentle laughter, it should be safe to exit the vehicle. I climbed out of the car’s annihilated window and caught my first glimpse of the blood spattered bird lying on the asphalt. Explains the shotgun, I thought right before I cursed myself for not just opening the door. I picked myself up from beside the car and leaned against the damaged automobile, looked down at the bird, then back at her. “Hungry?” I asked casually. “I think I saw a fried chicken joint down the block.” Suffice to say I got a little concerned when she laughed herself over backwards off the bike.
You can never be too concerned about that type of girl though, she was ok except for some cuts and bruises; and by that type of girl I do mean crazy. And although I’ve never been the kind of guy to ride on the back of a motorcycle, she offered. I’ve also not been the type of guy to refuse a ride from a crazy woman; in my experience they tend to want to run you over for some reason… especially if they’re drunk. So we rode off into the sunset so to speak, well… the sunrise I suppose if you want to be exact, and we left that town in the dust with the hope that we were leaving the worst behind us. Ha, little did we know!
Yes I did say giant chicken. Yes, and blood spattered bird. Where are you from anyway? You know, actually, do you think it would be ok if I just started from the beginning? It might be easier to understand.
The beginning, yes the beginning, I think I’m going to call our present predicament Operation Broken Omelet. So let’s get cooking!
It was a cool day in August, raining. The rain was cold. There had been a cooling trend in Pacific Northwest weather systems for the last seven years. It started off one year with an especially rough winter (we got about six feet of snow where I lived) and was followed by an especially early but hot summer (80° in March is always a treat). The following winter was mild and wet. The next year was wet with a mild winter. On and on this went with less sunshine every year and every year getting colder with the Sun’s absence. So here we were in August, it was hardly 60° outside, two o’clock in the afternoon and raining, as I may have mentioned.
What I may not have mentioned was that at the time if I had said I was extremely fed up with the rain it would have been like saying that bowl cut haired rock beat band from Liverpool wasn’t one of the greatest musical sensations of the last century. And I don’t mean to whine here but it had been raining for nearly two years solid and it felt like six. I had seen rain every way you could possibly imagine. Have you seen that movie, about the guy who goes to ‘Nam and he describes all the different types of rain he experienced? No? Well whatever, I’ve seen more kinds of rain than him, let’s leave it at that. But it didn’t really matter what kind of rain we were having anymore because no matter what it was always the worst kind… cold. The only thing that’s worse than being wet is being wet and cold.
Well I suppose you’re right, being attacked by giant chickens is worse than being wet and cold.
Anyway it was August, it was raining, and it was cold. This caused people to stay indoors more. This and the fact that along with the rain the economy had been getting worse as well, which caused an abundance of people who really had nothing better to do to stay indoors also. And in this digital driven, technological society we lived in it was inevitable for people to find themselves on the internet.
Ah, the internet. It was a wonderful and dangerous device, wasn’t it? You could find the answers to all of mankind’s questions and then some. An amazing network of information; that internet really did let you surf right along. Making smooth transitions from one piece of data to another, to another, to another, the beauty of which being that you could never get outta the net in any less than an hour and you invariably forgot what had prompted your search in the first place once you’d gotten a few pages deep. And with all the sexual predators and scam artists you couldn’t trust anyone. No one on the internet was who they said they were! Why this one time I joined one of those internet dating sites. I met this beautiful woman. 5’ 9’, blonde hair, really big… well you get the drift, and when we finally got together for a real live date she turned out to be 300 lbs of pure baby-back ribs. I don’t think I had ever run that fast before the chickens. But hey, like I said, wonderful technology, right?
So it was raining and everyone was inside because of it.
Now the rain and the lack of sun caused numerous problems. There were floods and power outages. Crops failed and livestock were dead or dying. Fruit, produce, dairy, beef and pork costs skyrocketed as these things had to be imported from other parts of the States and the world. This was even harder on local farmers. They couldn’t raise the crops to sustain their families let alone their livestock and with the rising food cost, for most it became impossible to buy hay and grain for their animals too. But chickens on the other hand were thriving and while cows and pigs became less common, you started seeing more and more chickens.
At one point a massive community forum was created on the internet to discuss this situation. It was created by Fooster Farmers as a promo piece for their distribution department but it quickly become something so much more and the massive chicken grower had no choice but to release the site as public domain. I’m a member, was a member, and I’d just jumped on real quick to track the market price comparisons of chicken to other meats. Really I wasn’t a huge poultry fan to begin with, definitely preferred a good ol’ fashioned hamburger with cheese and bacon (oh man my mouth is watering just thinkin’ about it), I was more interested in knowing when beef was gonna make a comeback.
So I had just turned off my laptop (after exactly eighty-two minutes online) and pushed myself away from my desk when I heard the whine of foreign objects burning their way through the atmosphere. I turned just in time to catch out the window the smoke streams dissipating in the distance. Curious. Feeling a bit like the sky might be falling I turned on the TV to see if there was anything being reported on the news, and there wasn’t. Over the next few days I made phone calls to some people I knew but no one seemed to know anything. There was still nothing on the news and I hadn’t seen anything posted about it on the internet so with no luck in turning up any info on the whatevers it were that fell out of the sky I did the most practical thing I could think of, I forgot about it.
Man I wish I had had the foresight to further investigate that one!
You see those smoke streams turned out to be the arrival of one of the most exciting memes to hit humanity’s consciousness since the advent of Velcro- there is life outside this blue and green bubble that we call home and it just said hello! Nine contact points in North America (three of which were in our beloved Pacific Northwest), six contact points in South America, ten in Africa, four in Australia, and a baker’s dozen spread throughout Europe. No one knows where they