The Tension had broken. Shrouded in the shadows of the Allegheny Mountains, Koppel had held its breath, but now it began to stir. The ghost town had escaped destruction by the narrowest of margins. A flock some millions strong had poured into the Valley from the north. It washed over the ruins of the old world like a biblical flood, leaving carnage in its wake. Only the town's sturdy brick buildings, survivors from the mega flocks, saved Koppel from total destruction. There were new cracks in foundations, knew rents in the abandoned cars that the flock had pushed around, and what little greenery that had penetrated the asphalt the ravenous horde had torn from the ground. Left in its wake was a vista that was akin to a snowfall. The bare soil had mixed with ash white chicken shit. It hardened into a cracked, grotesque mimicry of the concrete that had built the old world. The carcasses of thousands of dead chickens lay scattered along that snowy landscape. The corpses had marked the flock's path like a morbid slime trail left by a leviathan slug. They were castoffs. Detritus from an emergent entity. While this flock paled in comparison to the mega flocks that destroyed the old world, it was nevertheless a reminder that the world was being held hostage by a fowl curse. The pungent scent of their decay wafted through the fog, awakening Koppel's residents.
The rats were the first to venture out from the safety of the shadows. They were the stalwarts of Koppel. They were the latest branches in an unbroken lineage from the days when they shared their domiciles with humans. They were no longer dependent on humanities scraps but instead thrived in the new world. Houses and buildings had become their castles, the town their kingdom. They spilled out onto the streets, chittering about, weaving between abandoned cars and debris as they followed the smell of the dead chickens. Their excited squeaks served as an eerie coda to the previous day’s carnage. They weren’t unaware of the danger the flock posed to them, but they were apathetic. In this perversion of an ecosystem that the world had settled into, flocks were nothing more than an opportunity for the rats. Opportunities were plentiful in the Allegheny Wilds.
The wolves on the other hand still clung to the shadows. A pack of them had denned at the start of winter in the garage pit of an old mechanic’s shop. Like the rats, they were aware of the opportunity before them. The scent teased at their noses. It was bravest among them who dared to stick their heads out into the open air before retreating back into the darkness. The stench was tantalizing. Their starved frames shuddered at the promise of food, but an overabundance of caution kept them to the shadows. Scrawny masses huddled together in the recesses of long-abandoned buildings, they had fallen far in this new world. No longer apex predators, the flocks had reduced them to little more than scavengers. Yet there was still a quiet nobility to them, to all scavengers. They were the ones who did not turn their noses up at dirty work. They would be the ones who cleansed the land. When the rats had their fill, there would be plenty of morsels left. Plenty of stragglers to pick off. Once they were certain the flock was gone, they would feast.
Left behind were the stragglers. While the Allegheny Wilds had plenty of chickens wandering around under normal circumstances, the stragglers that wandered around were not endemic to the area. These were the wretched few that could not keep up with the flock. Sickly and pathetic creatures they meander through the streets, picking at the ground, waiting for their deaths. Whether it be from starvation, their various festering wounds and ailments, or a vindictive wind stressing their meager hearts, all of them would die.
One straggler stood out from the rest. A rooster, lean of muscle with coppery plumage, strutted through the streets. It did not know how it arrived at Koppel. Nor did it care. The nuances of the world were lost on this creature. Its desires were basic, almost robotic. Consume. Reproduce. Survive. After falling away from the flock, hunger was all that drove it.
Down the street, it spotted a young cockerel pulling at a weed that was growing out of a divide in the concrete curb. The cockerel was dying. A long, bloody gash ran across its stomach. Its blood seeped onto the pavement, as it pulled weakly at the weed.
The rooster locked in its focus. It lunged at the cockerel with a gurgling screech. Its wings flapped in a violent maelstrom, sending feathers flying into the air as it sunk its talons into the cockerel's neck. The cockerel screamed and thrashed, trying to break free from the belligerent rooster, but it was too weak. The rooster tightened its grip, pushing deeper and deeper into the meat of the cockerel’s neck until it could feel blood pooling at its scaly feet.
The moment the cockerel expired the rooster forgot about it. It was not food, at least not yet. Not unless things became desperate. But for now, the rooster was strong. It took in the sight of its prize with no joy, no mirth, no sense of accomplishment. Only hunger. It clamped the weed in its beak, determined to rip it from the ground and consume it, but it found that it could gain no purchase on the plant. It tried again, but still could not get a grip. Again, and again, but the weed remained planted.
The previous night the rooster had been caught in the tumult of the flock. It had stumbled and was pressed into the asphalt by its kin. The combined pressure of thousands upon thousands of chickens snapped its beak off at the base, leaving a bloody rim of viscera framing a lolling tongue.
The broken-beaked rooster would eventually die, but it did not care. It did not know or care that its beak was gone. It would continue trying to pull at the weed until it either died from exhaustion or until the wolves found it.
Koppel was not particularly special. It was a cookie-cutter suburb, an extension of the Steel City's urban sprawl. One of the many centers of humanity swallowed by the mega flocks as they ran amok across the continent. Its residents were unaware of the town's history. No memory of the great steel foundries that had built their homes. No reverence for the town's famous Halloween parade for which decorations still hung in the storefronts on Main Street. Nor was there any recognition of the resting places of the town's unlucky residents which lay scattered throughout the town. Across the world, the pattern repeated itself with little variation, but there was one thing that set Koppel apart. An interloper…
A shrill rattling echoed from the hills. Distracted from his prize, the broken-beaked chicken quirked his head in the direction of the noise. The rats, on the other hand, scattered, and the wolves yearned for the relative peace that came with the flock. At least the flock kept her from wreaking havoc.
The rattling grew into a roar. A loud cry broke through the tranquility.
“Oh fuck, fuck, fuck!”
A woman, ragged and thin, came barreling down Hill Road in a rusty shopping cart filled with canned goods. She wore and ratty jacket and cargo pants that looked much too big for her. In her hand, she held a short iron golf club, which she tried to use as an improvised brake.
It was ineffective.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck!" She screamed as she hurtled towards the wreck-littered scrap heap that Main Street had become. A turned-over bus lay in her path. She shifted her weight to try to steer the car out of the way but to no avail. Her shopping cart was too heavy for her meager weight to have any effect on it. With a deep breath, the woman leapt from the cart. She rolled along the asphalt, the cracked road stinging and tearing at her until she settled on her back.
The cart slammed into the roof of the bus with a loud crash. The cans in the cart went flying into the air, showering down on Main Street. The broken-beaked rooster took to the hair, flying as far as his inadequate wings would take him to escape the aluminum hail storm. The cans bounced off of the ground, some of them exploding in a spray of fruit juice while the rest rolled to a leisurely stop.
Then there was quiet.
The broken-beaked rooster peered out from beneath the concrete bench it used for cover, watching the woman with raised hackles. The woman lay still, her open eyes staring at the sky. Her mouth broke into a grin. “That was,” she said aloud. “That was fucking cool.”
Her name was Kaysi. Koppel was hers.
Could’ve been worse, Kaysi thought while wearing a wide grin. As her adrenaline began to fade she could feel the cold spring air stinging at a scrape on her cheek. She enjoyed the frigid nibbling at her wound. After two days of taking refuge in a cramped park bathroom with nothing to occupy her mind except for the sounds of countless chickens squawking and clawing at the too-thin walls of her shelter, any feeling was a good feeling. However, each moment her adrenaline continued to fade, revealing more aches and pains. She began to question that sentiment. Not my worst idea at all. Gotta be up there with that still I tried to build in November, but what am I supposed to do if I find a shit load of wild potatoes? Not make vodka out of them?
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Oh shit! My pants! She sat up, running her hands over her most prized possession with the frenetic energy of an amateur medic trying to find a pulse. Pockets? Good. Waste? Good. Knees? She sucked in a sharp breath when frayed threads tickled at her fingers. Her cargo pants were a custom job, gifted to her by what was the finest tailor in the Wilds. That tailor was a 45-year-old burnout named Scrinch who lived in a stack of truck tires. That mattered little to Kaysi. As a scrapper, it was her job to find value in the places nobody else cared to check. Scrinch took a men's size L pair of cargo pants and made them fit a women’s size S while still keeping them cool as hell. A boon to her profession, she was adamant about protecting them. Every scrape, tear, and frayed thread was repaired by her own haphazard hands because Scrinch, like so many others, was now gone.
There was a niggling presence at the back of her mind. An often ignored sense of self-preservation that was begging her to to make sure her forgotten cheek wasn’t ripped open. Oh yeah! That’s right, she thought as she prodded at the scrape. She made a deliberate effort to not look at the blood on her fingers. Just some road burn.
Getting to her feet, she made a quick survey of herself. She noted a few additional scrapes on her hands and wrists and some soreness in her right shoulder, but nothing that concerned her. She was checking the torn wrists of her far more replaceable sweater when she got the impression that she was being watched.
In the quiet of the morning, she heard nothing except for soft warbling and the scraping of taloned feet along the asphalt.
It’s just one, she thought as she reached down to pick up her short iron. With metered movements, she turned around. The broken-beaked rooster stared at her, a hint of a quizzical glean in his otherwise beady, dead eyes.
"Fuck off dude," Kaysi grumbled. She made no sudden movements. It was an ugly, gurgling mess with his tongue dangling from its broken beak. Hearing its rasping breath through the gaping hole in its head, she knew it was only a matter of time before it starved to death. At the moment, though, the broken-beaked rooster was still spry and strong. I can’t look like a threat. Broke Beak's got a broke beak, but it still got claws. I can take it, but it's better to avoid a fight. Last time I had to treat a chicken scratch 5-Finger Felipe became 5-Finger and 1-Ear Felipe, which is a goddamn mouthful.
Never turning her back to Broke Beak, she made her way to her shopping cart. Her steps were deliberate. With great care, she avoided disturbing the debris on Main Street in any way, lest the noise spook Broke Beak. The only sound she made was the cracking of her steps on the dried chicken shit that caked the ground. With the flock coming through, all of Main Street was covered in the scatological frost. Yet Broke Beak's gaze never broke. Like many of the portraits Kaysi found in the wealthier old-world dwellings in the valley, its eyes followed her while its body remained motionless. This asshole doesn’t quit.
"Seriously dude," she said to the chicken. "I'm in a good mood, and you're just being a bummer. Can you please just leave?"
The chicken did not acquiesce to her request, as it was a chicken. Even if it could understand her, its primal brain was not much concerned with the particulars of human temperament. Either she was a threat, or she was not, and Kaysi could see that tiny bird brain working behind those dead eyes trying to figure out which one she was.
"Alright," she muttered. "I'll make it easy for you asshole!" She raised her short iron to the sky. The golf club was a cheap, chipped, bent piece of steel but it would be suitable for its new purpose.
Screaming, lunged for Broke Beak. Her short iron clang off the pavement, digging a rut into the caked-on chicken shit. It was a feint on her part, a shot across the bow. It was enough to send Broke Beak flailing down Main Street in a trail of feathers.
Kaysi mumbled as she watched him go. "Stupid broke beaked mother fucking. Trying to tell me what to do. Acting like he knows shit about shit. I just wanna pick up my shit and gorge myself on canned fruits. But no! He's gotta make a big show of it. Asshole."
As Kaysi stood over the mangled wreckage of her shopping cart, she felt a pang of sympathy. Its front end had buckled and crumpled in on itself. It almost looked as if it were a part of the bus it ran into. But after inspecting the wheels (and the “blast radius” of her cans), she decided that the shopping cart wasn’t a lost cause.
“Come on buddy,” she said to the shopping cart. “I’ll get you fixed right up.”
She lifted the shopping car and put it back on its unsteady, but still working wheels, and dragged it to a clear spot.
"You did good though," she told the cart as she tried to bend the metal bars back into place. "You ever heard of the Carnage Melons? Of course, you haven't. You're a shopping cart. You don't get out much. Probably hadn't left that supermarket in what? Fifty years? seventy? Eighty? Ninety? A hundred? I don't fuckin' know. What do I look like, a calendar? Point is the Carnage Melons were this gang of bandits that used to hang around University Town. For their initiation, they used to race down Cardiac Hill in trash cans with wheels on them. See there was a tractor trailer at the bottom that they tipped over. The idea was whoever could get closest to the wall without bailing out would be let into the gang. I don't know if it was their passion for caravan robbing or the glue they'd sniff before going down, but a lot of brave initiates smashed their faces into that trailer. Like, most of them. Half of them died. They weren't a very pretty gang. I wouldn't be able to join, as you could tell. But you, if you were a person and not a shopping cart, Melon Supreme might've even given you his toothy crown. Hang on…"
She tipped the cart over so that its mangled front end pointed towards the ground. Mustering all of her strength, and using every ounce of her lean weight, she stomped the cart. The sound of her boot striking the metal cage seemed to ring throughout the Valley. She winced with each impact. It has to be done. I know it's an inanimate piece of metal but it didn't ask to go flying down a mountain…Plus I ain't carrying all these stupid cans back to the hideout myself.
With the shopping cart “fixed”, that left the arduous task of collecting all of her cans. This is gonna suck.
As she picked them up and deposited them in the cart, she began to feel like a kid again, like she was back in the Stronghold. No matter what fun mischief she was getting up to her father insisted that every night she sweep up the metal filings in his shop. He thought it was a good character-building exercise, and indeed he was right as it helped to make Kaysi allergic to the mundane. She was not lazy. In fact, when given a job as a scrapper, she would go to great lengths to get it done. She would crawl through whatever ruin, spend hours surveying a potential pick, and would brave whatever monster (avian or otherwise) lurked around the wilds. A mantra uttered often by an old acquaintance of hers echoed in her mind. Rule number two: Boredom is a survivalist's worst enemy. Never had she felt that more keenly than in the last few months.
Koppel was her sanctuary. She still felt that way about it. It was nicer before the booze ran out, she thought as she looked at a can of sausages with disgust. I ain’t burnt out…at least not anymore, but facts are facts. Not shy about ingesting recreational substances, Kaysi was not so enthralled by drugs and alcohol that she sought them out. She was an opportunist, and the opportunities in Koppel ran out in the last few months of autumn. So Kaysi was forced to find alternative ways to satiate her boredom. All around Koppel were the monuments to that boredom. Failed experiments of entertainment. On Poplar Street there was not a single intact window, the result of a slingshot she had found. When the slingshot broke, she resorted to throwing rocks. There were destroyed cars scattered throughout the town. Kaysi had gone through great effort to repair them just so she could then wreck them, with the wrecks increasing in complexity as time went on. She capped off with her trying to build an improvised catapult using a telephone pole, an SUV, and the exact wrong amount of rope. That SUV was now the only thing holding up the roof of the old pharmacy. Then there was, of course, her attempt at making a still. I still think I did a good job on that still. Where I went wrong was eyeballing the pressure. Not my fault, I couldn’t find a pressure gauge. Her aspirations for the summer were to find and fix a bulldozer so that she could level all of Poplar Street, once and for all.
It used to be scrapping, she thought to herself in a moment of retrospection as she found herself staring at a can of peaches. I was at my best in the ruins, finding cool old shit for people. Now there’s no one left to scrap for.
“Ugh…You sound like a wrinkly old man. ‘Back in my day, I could run 15 miles without tripping over my balls.’ Sheesh.” She groaned, pulling out her utility knife. “You sound like dad.” Her dad would not be happy about her using a knife to open a can of peaches. She could hear his chiding words echoing in her mind. Don’t use the wrong tool for the job. He’s gone too, she mused. The blade finished its circuit through the thin metal, allowing her to pry the lid off. The smell of peach preserves wafted into her, helping her slowly crumbling mood. Would you look at that? I got my peaches without slicing my hand open.
She sat on a nearby bench, one of the few surfaces not covered in chicken shit. It did not matter that half the cans still lay scattered around Main Street. The winter had been rough for her. The past two days had been hell. She was going to eat her peaches.
She would have enjoyed them if it were not for the sound of taloned feet scratching at shit-coated pavement. The sound of laboring gurgling breathing of Broke Beak broke the peace of the valley.
Rolling her eyes, she looked up from her peaches. “Fucking Jeez dude…” She trailed off. Broke Beak stood in front of her, his hackles raised and a predatory look in his eyes. He was not alone…