Cluck Cluck cluck

You wake up one morning to find your front lawn covered in clucking chickens...and they are all staring at you menacingly. Write a short story or poem about what happens next!

824 words


My eyes opened to dead silence, still air, and darkness. Something was wrong. I laid in bed trying to figure out what. I'm hot. The fan is off. No power. I laid in bed and stared into nothing, waiting for the power to come back on.

Then a cluck from outside. My stomach got tense. Cold bullets of sweat erupted along my limbs and back. I sprang out of bed and ran down the hallway. My legs shook. I felt like I was going to vomit. "Out! Get out NOW!" I screamed. I beat on bedroom doors so hard I thought I'd crash right through them. Nobody replied.

I backed up a good five feet from one of my roommate's doors and took a deep breath. I charged the door with my shoulder and burst it open. His room was empty. Outside the clucking got louder.

I forced my way into another room. Empty. My head went numb and I braced myself on the wall. Those pieces of crap left. They knew and they left me.

The clucking echoed off other buildings now. There were so many. I couldn't even pick out the sound of individual birds flapping. It was all one big sound; one big flapping, clucking, angry sound. My throat constricted. I wished and prayed it would just keep getting tighter until I choked to death. I sat beside the bed with my head between my knees and cried.

When I was about thirteen it started. The executions were planned back then, at least as far as the executee was concerned. Death row inmates could choose to be mauled to death by wild animals with the provision that their families would receive a portion of the money made from broadcasting their death. With a national unemployment rate of fifty percent and most families barely able to buy food and gas, who could blame record numbers for tuning in and watching a grisly, high definition death.

Ten years later it was a franchise. They had animals made on spec in a laboratory. Canaries, sloths, beavers, whatever. Give a scientist enough time and he'll make up a batch of ducklings mean enough to kill anything.

Five years after that and the only crime someone had to be guilty of was not being powerful enough for their death to matter. Chickens seemed to be the preferred method of execution.

I'd seen it enough times to know what happens if I waited too long. The broadcasters would fire in riot gas and I'd come out choking and crying. I'd die undignified, as if dignified meant stoically getting torn apart by chickens.

Snot streams glided across my lips as I remembered laughing at those poor schmucks on TV getting pecked to death by those mean bastard chickens. I laughed to the verge of peeing. Now I imagined my roommates laughing at me. Mocking the way I died. I clenched my teeth and wanted to scream a scream that the entire universe would hear. They'd hear too and they'd be afraid. I imagined that scream at the same time I imagined myself yelping and pissing and shitting myself from fright and injury as ten thousand mutant chickens tore my skin to shreds.

An airhorn blasted above the ruckus outside. Three minutes until gas time.

I ran to the bathroom splashed water on my face. It was too dark to see my reflection, but I knew I looked like I'd been crying. I punched myself in the jaw to set myself serious and then threw my right fist into the mirror. It shattered. Blood dripped out of my knuckles. A glass shard was embedded between my first two fingers. Pain flickered up to my elbow.

I left the shard in place. I thought it would make it easier if I was worried about my hand instead. When I got to the front door I forgot I had ever punched a mirror. My chest throbbed and I panted uncontrollably. My eyes got big and I felt as if I was about to topple head over feet.

Stadium lights hit as soon as I stepped outside. White light enveloped everything and punched the nerves in the back of my eyes.

Then I saw them. The chickens were emaciated. Dirt caked on their feathers, their bodies were as tough as old leather boots. Their claws were huge and gnarled and dug into the dirt as they awaited the signal to attack. Their eyes were the color of dried blood. Chewed up tongues dangled from their pointed beaks. They eyed me. They hated me. They hated me because their DNA told them too. They'll kill me because a radio signal will tell them to.

Another airhorn bleated. One of the larger chickens stretched itself tall, flapped its wings, and let out a shriek that stilled me. All at once there was flapping and dirty feathers and deafening shrieks. Poking, scratching and then darkness.