Big Chicken - short fiction

Big Chicken

Short fiction by Hugh Tayler - 2022 Feb - March ver 03a

I was rolling my ebike out our front gate when I saw papers scattered behind the Free Table on our boulevard. If you have a table where people put stuff to give away for free, there are always items that don't really belong or that need to be tidied. I put the bike on the kickstand and went to clean up the mess.

There were some binders and a high school math book on the table, but the scattered papers were just homework. But the homework stopped midpage, with the last date in January, the middle of the school year.

I heard a rattle and looked up at my neighbour Larry, who had just rolled up on his old bike with a trailer full of cans and bottles.  I held up the page and Larry said, "Looks like some kid bailed on Grade 10 Math halfway through the year. But you never know the real story."

I said, "No. You don't. Maybe the kid is a TikTok superstar now."

"Or maybe they died of cancer." Larry thinks of everything. He can't help it.

He said, "How's your bad ankle doing? You shouldn't be riding." He remembers everything, too. He can't help that either.

I said, "It's not that bad. And I'm booked for a physiotherapy appointment.  But I can't really pedal my regular bike, so I got this old electric bike last week. I paid $550, but the batteries are in bad shape so I can only ride 5 kilometers out and 5 kilometers back."

Larry said, "You should go see the guy camped out across from the bottle depot close to here, next to the railroad tracks, near the big trees. He could probably replace the cells in your battery. He might even have one for sale. He has a lot of stuff. I almost bought a radio controlled drone from him, but I already have two."

I said, "That sounds like a good excuse to go for a short ride. On the east side, next to the trees?"

"Next to the trees. And watch that ankle. "

*****

The ride to the bottle depot is only about 15 minutes if you go past the taxi garage and the metal recycling yards and across the viaduct over the tracks.

And Larry was right. He usually is. Across from the bottle depot there were four old RV's lined up and three tents under the trees. And a kids playhouse or a garden shed on a trailer parked behind the last RV in line.

What he hadn't warned me about were the chickens. Not the white kind that you see in chicken trucks going to the processing plant, but big rusty colored ones, maybe a dozen of them. They were doing chicken things in the dirt, but a couple of them looked at me. Hard to tell if they were suspicious or hungry. Chickens sometimes attack.

A tall middle aged guy in camouflage pants and a red sweatshirt with a cartoon frog on the front ducked as he came out of the garden shed. He had a broom and dustpan and a bucket with bits of straw and chicken poop and a few feathers. Two chickens followed him.

"Can I help you?" he asked, not friendly, but not outright hostile.

"My neighbour said you might have one of these." I patted the battery pack.

"I sold it last week. But I have a different one on the shelf here."

And he walked over to the back of the RV and flipped up a tarp. There was a whole bookshelf full of used electronic stuff and appliances. All clean, all neatly labelled, all priced for sale. There was a 48 volt battery pack with a sticker that said "80%. 40 kilometer range. $250."  Not cheap, but good value. Too bad my bike was only 24 volts.

On the shelves there were some clock radios, a stereo with a CD player, a breadmaker, three rice cookers, and two blenders which I didn't need. But there were three oscilloscopes, two Alienware gaming laptops, and a couple of small single board computers. And what might be the magnetron out of a microwave with a cord and a handle attached.

"Is that a good idea, taking parts out of a microwave? I remember a news article about a guy who injured himself trying to make a death ray to kill chafer beetles on his lawn."

He said, "I don't want to argue about death rays.  Do you want to buy something?  Or maybe you could leave the bike with us and we'll see if it is a controller issue."

"We? So you are not the technician?"

"No. I was an investment counsellor. Before. Now I am trying to help my friend. She helped me and I owe her. We need money."

I thought, "You sure do, living here in a homeless camp." but I didn't say it. His smallish RV was in good shape and his area was tidy. Almost like some retired middle class guy and his girlfriend, except for the chickens and oscilloscopes.

I said, "I don't have the schematics and the company that built this bike is out of business. I'd pay two hundred to get this bike sorted out. And another two hundred and fifty for a battery upgrade. Why don't I talk to your friend, the technician?"

He looked at me for a moment and said, "I don't think she wants to talk to you." And he pointed to a camera in the back window of the RV and waved to it, wiggling his fingers.

And then he looked surprised when an LED next to the camera blinked three green pulses. "Huh. She wants to take a closer look at you. Bring your bike over to the door so it doesn't get stolen." And he flipped the tarp back down, and motioned me over to the curb side door of the RV where there were a couple of stairs. I looped my lock through the front wheel of my bike and back to the frame so no one could take off with my bike.

I patted my wallet pocket and my phone pocket as he opened the door. The air inside was warm and smelled like marijuana leaf and like chickens.  I climbed the steps, careful of my ankle. It was bright inside, so I blinked as I looked around the kitchen/dining area.

There on a stool at the kitchen table was a big red chicken nearly as tall as me, with a soldering iron in one clawed yellow hand. She turned and smiled wide, a big mouth full of sharp teeth.

I was outside, digging frantically in my pocket for my keys, shaking. I don't remember leaving the RV. That's what can happen when you hit maximum fear.

The tall guy came down the stairs. "She says relax. Breath deep. And don't do anything stupid."

The shakes were almost gone. I said, "You didn't tell me you had a velociraptor making death rays in your RV."

He said, "You can see she is not a velociraptor. A raptor would have turned me into steaks and hamburger the first minute when we met. She is a dinosaur, but not from our own possibility spaces. Do you want your bike fixed or not?"

I really wanted my bike fixed. It wasn't just the battery, the pedal assist wasn't working right either.

Besides, the rest of the dinosaurs were 65 million years away. When would I get another chance to talk to a baby T-Rex covered in chicken feathers? I said, "Let's try this again. I'm Hughie. Like Huey, Dewey and Louie, the ducks."

He turned on a professional smile, and held out his hand to shake. No claws, just regular human fingernails. "Bryan. Like Bryan Adams, but not famous. And not that rich at the moment."

Bryan walked back into the RV, and motioned for me to follow. I took a deep breath and walked back into the brightly lit RV.

*****

She actually looked nothing like a chicken. She didn't have a beak and she had a long tail tucked to one side. Her skin was soft yellow on her hands and face and feet, with lots of texture, like expensive leather. She had arms, not wings. Her feathers were all small, more for insulation than flight. And they weren't one solid color: she was striped dark rusty red on a lighter orange-red background, like a tabby cat. Or a tiger. And she had a Hello Kitty coffee cup in one yellow hand, a hand with claws that looked serious, but her claws were not so big that they interfered with her grip on the handle.

Bryan said, "We like hemp tea, but we have mint if you prefer. Susie likes hers with lemon and honey."  He poured himself a cupful, a red cup with a cartoon frog.

"Thanks, but I'll pass." I was staring at "Susie". She was staring back with huge yellow eyes, pupils small and round in the bright kitchen. She winked one eye and slowly opened that big mouth to show me her teeth. And now that I had calmed down, her teeth reminded me of a dog or a raccoon or a monkey, some kind of non-human omnivore. But she seemed like a cat or a bird of prey, so where were her hunting teeth?

As if she read my mind, she pointed to her teeth, ran a finger around the whole set, then pointed to the big fixed blade knife in a sheath at her leather belt. It was a popular brand, something from a big box store. She tapped her knife and raised one eyelid.

I took out my keys, and unfolded the little blade on my keychain knife and displayed it. And I opened my mouth and showed her my teeth.

There was a flurry of double handwaving to Bryan, then she tapped one side of her head, stuck her tongue out and tapped it once. Bryan said, "She says your knife is a baby knife. She says maybe you are stupid. Or funny."

I looked directly at Susie and asked, "Can you understand English? Can you say our words?"

She looked at Bryan. Then she made a series of various bird noises, but not musical. Like a crow or chicken but deeper, like a raven.

"Her people have over a hundred different hunting and social calls, but they sign where we would speak. She can understand many spoken words, but you should sign or gesture or face signal if you want to be clear. Or try writing, but keep it clean and logical.  She is way smarter than you are and she hates the clutter and deception of English. Right now she is learning our math." Bryan waved a copy of Thomas' Calculus 12th Edition.

Susie made a sign like someone rocking a baby. I said, slowly and clearly, "Baby math?"

She nodded, then picked up something from one of the tidy stacks of papers on the table. It was a schematic, a big one, but the labels were some symbolic script. There were also some human arabic numerals, maybe values of resistors or capacitors. She pointed to a shiny new custom printed circuit board she was working on.

I said "Radio?" She shook her head. "Time machine?" She stuck out her tongue and touched it. Stupid in her sign system. Someone who has to taste everything, like an animal.

Bryan said, "We haven't got all day for you to play anthropologist. I want to go and see if there is any discount sushi when they put it out in an hour. Let me show you."

And he reached into Susie's piles of papers and picked up an big coilbound sketchbook. Susie looked at the book, put her fingers together like she was holding a pencil and then pointed at her chest. She was the artist.

The detailed pencil sketch on the first page was some kind of grassy landscape with some ginkgo trees and a few grazing reptiles. There was also some kind of allosaur stalking the grazers and three short-feathered dinosaurs like Susie hiding in some tall ferns with stone-tipped spears and knives. Bryan explained. "Her species, The People, as she calls them, were climbers for a long time. That's where they got gripping hands instead of paws with claws. But they never lost their upright gait, so when the climate got drier and fruits and nuts were hard to find,  it was easy for them to come back down from the trees for more protein."

The sketch on the next page showed a group of People around the carcass of a big armoured grazer that was pretty chewed up or heavily butchered. Five of them had big knives skinning and butchering. Three of them had spears, keeping some big-clawed scavenger at a distance.

Bryan turned the page and showed me  a camp with simple huts and twenty or so baby People being fed strips of meat or something by a Person who was not full size. "They hatched big families, but life was really dangerous. The species was under relentless selection pressures for cooperation and intelligence."

The next page showed a few People wearing elaborate harnesses with pouches and sheathed knives, bigger huts with decorative carvings at the doors, and a bulky Person with a fire and a pair of tongs and a hammer and a funny-looking anvil. The page after that showed half a dozen People with a two Person crossbow and an big predator dinosaur laid out with a ridiculously big arrow in its chest.

The last page Bryan showed me featured a Person with something like a rocket launcher aimed at a big armoured grazer. Another four dino People equipped with a fancy assortment of knives and cutting tools lounged around some kind of flatbed truck with a roofed but doorless cab. A second truck with a doorless cab had a big box with multiple doors and maybe a heat exchanger on the roof. A refrigerator?

Susie was watching my face and there was no way to hide my surprise. I said slowly, "Where are the in-between pictures? Agriculture, temples, cities, statues of kings and queens?"

"I have shown her stuff from Babylon, from classical Greece and Rome, from the Middle Ages. She never draws anything like that. Straight from hunter-gatherer through Iron Age hunters to industrialized hunters. I think they had cities, factories, and a transportation network but she knows our history and she has seen our news and she won't share any of her civilization or technology."

Susie looked out the door at my electric bike and lifted her nose so I could see her upper teeth. I said, "Fine. I can afford two hundred to sort out the pedal assist problem plus the parts cost for a newer battery. But I need to know a couple of things."

Bryan looked at me. And at Susie. She nodded slowly.

Bryan sat down in the dining nook and gestured for me to sit on the tiny couch across from him, close to Susie's stool. I stayed standing, near the door.

Bryan sipped his tea and said "We met a dozen kilometers west of here, out in Pacific Spirit Park next to the University of British Columbia. I was sleeping in my Volvo wagon back then. There is a service area near TRIUMF - the Tri-University Meson Facility. Maintenance has some big equipment stored there so I just parked behind it and let people know I was there. The campus detachment kept an eye on me but never delivered a warning."

I said, "You were a cop too, once. Weren't you? And something happened."

Bryan ignored me and went on with his story. "One evening about 22:30 I heard a series of thumps that woke me up. And then a small rock hit the side of the wagon. I got my big flashlight out and there was an uneven line of debris in a perfect curve through the parking lot. It was only 10 or 20 centimeters high in most places but almost a meter high at one spot, an arc through the parking lot of rocks and paving stones and mud and vegetation and a couple of fish flopping around. And a big funny-looking turtle that looked confused. I went for a walk. The whole circle must have been about half a kilometer across, just guessing from what I could see by the parking lot lights. The centre of my imaginary circle would be to one side of TRIUMF, in the Computational Physics building. I walked over to take a look. They usually run all night, but now it was all dark except for some emergency lights. A couple of women were outside the main door on their cell phones and I could see a two more people in the lobby with stuff on a trolley."

I said, "Wow".

Bryan said, "Yes, wow. But there was more. I walked back along the line of debris through the parking lot to a new hole smashed in the fence. So I ducked through the fence and walked into the woods. Between the trees there was part of some kind of small truck, just the cab and the front wheels. The rest of the truck was completely missing. The cab had no doors, just loops to clip a safety strap across. I shone my flashlight inside but there was no body. And no steering wheel, just two steering levers. A bench seat with no back on it. I felt the driver's side. Still a little warm.  The passenger side was cold."

"I walked back to the Volvo and there were two young officers there, just kids."

"One of them said to me, "How are you doing sir?  There has been a seismic event and you can't stay here. We can give you a ride if you are having side effects from your medication." "

Bryan said, "I could hear sirens in the distance. I told her that I was fine, that I had no alcohol or firearms in the vehicle and that I had cash for a place for the night. So I slept the rest of the night over by the golf course."

 "But the weather was getting too cold for the Volvo and there is no washroom at some of the places I like to stay. I spent a week finding and buying this little motor home out in the Valley. Small motor homes in good shape are hard to find because people put more miles on them."

"I don't mind camping here in East Vancouver next to the bottle depot, but it is a lot safer and quieter out at UBC if you can manage it. So I thought I would try my luck again out at the service area near TRIUMF. The lights were back on in Computational Physics and the mess - mud, paving stones, big turtle - everything was gone from the parking lot. So I parked the motor home out of sight next to the heavy equipment and walked over to Computational Physics and introduced myself to the new security woman at the front desk and told her my background and gave her my cell phone number."

"But I was still surprised when she called me an hour later and reminded me to lock my doors. She said that one of the electricians said that he had seen something funny when he parked for the night shift. Like a big chicken or an orangutan or a sasquatch or some undergraduate wearing a role-playing costume."

Bryan sipped his tea. "So I put on my old vest, got my big flashlight and took a walk. There was a whole section of fence removed and a freshly cleared path through the trees along the line where the debris and truck had been. So I walked about fifty meters into the forest. And that's when I saw the reflection from a pair of eyes further down the trail. I turned off the light and stopped and waited and listened. I heard a twig break off to my right. Then behind me to the right. I turned back toward the parking lot and waited about ten seconds and turned the light on suddenly."

"And there was the biggest chicken I had ever seen, a chicken striped like a tiger, displaying a mouthful of teeth, with a big cheap combat knife in one chicken claw hand. I had never seen anything so dangerous in my life."

"So I aimed the hot spot of the flashlight at its feet instead of the face and said, "Would you like some dinner?".  I moved into a T-stance and got that big heavy flashlight ready to swing. And it put the knife away and reached down into a dirty black shopping bag and pulled out two dead rats and offered me one."

Bryan finished his tea and said, "We've been friends ever since."

I said, "Could I get a glass of water?" and mimed drinking. Susie got a cup from the shelf before I could finish. She was effortlessly faster than any human alive. The water was a little warm and I drank it in three gulps. Adrenaline. It does that to me.

Bryan said, "You don't get to ask questions. But I can tell you that if you look up a series of talks at the Perimeter Institute you will find a visiting Israeli physicist talking about information-matter equivalency in possibility spaces. Susie found it and she has watched it four times. And we got his published work. And she talked me into getting a fuel cell generator so she could have good lighting while she repaired things to learn our technology and make us some money. Do you want your bike fixed or not? "

 Susie raised her eyelids and gave me the double open hand "Well?" gesture.

I said, "Sure. But one thing. Where did she get that wicked big knife in Pacific Rim Park? Do you both sleep in this tiny space together? Who cooks and who does the dishes?  Is she from the past or an alternate reality? What is a possibility space?"

Bryan said, "Your bike will be ready in three days because we might need a day to get parts. Two twenty-five up front, probably another two twenty-five when you pick it up ."

He stretched his legs. "I don't have to cook for her. She likes end-of-day sushi and I get to the supermarket early in the morning when meat is on discount from the previous day. She eats some vegetables and fruits raw but she needs a lot of protein. She really is nothing like a chicken, but they like her and she likes them. So she sleeps out in the chicken house. Your other questions can wait until you pick up the bike. I can give you a short ride to your place in the Volvo so you don't make that ankle worse."

I went out and unlocked my bike and rolled it over to the door of the RV. Susie leaned down the stairs and lifted my 30 kilogram bike like it was nothing.

Bryan would not answer any more questions on the drive home, except to say  "Susie works fast but give us a couple days with the bike. Come back on Thursday, about noon."

*****

My wife Joan drove me back three days later at 11:30 in the morning. When we rounded the corner, I had an awful feeling in my stomach. No Volvo. No RV. No chicken house. Joan parked her station wagon and I went over to a different RV that was now parked in Bryan's spot. I didn't have to knock. There was a woman in late middle age in a leopard skin fleece jacket, pink yoga tights, and gumboots relaxing in a folding lawnchair. My bike was next to her. I said, "Did Bryan tell you I would be around to pick up my bike?"

She said, "You mean Bob. You must be Louie. Here you go. I need two hundred in this envelope for Bob and the chickens and twenty-five cash for me. He says you'll be happy with the bike. Here, you can put the envelope in the mail yourself."

The envelope had a box number at the UBC Post Office. I looked up and my wife had picked up two red feathers from under the trees, feathers that seemed short compared to most chicken feathers.

She said, "So maybe you didn't make the whole thing up. Test your bike so I can drive home. I'll pick up some sushi on my way."

My electric bike works fine. I have lots of range now. Enough to ride fourteen kilometers out to UBC so I can see if there really is a semicircle through the woods behind TRIUMF and the Computational Physics lab.       

 *****************