Eerie, Indiana fanfiction: Good to Eat

[froodle]

Written for Day 31 of the 31_days October challenge. The prompt was "good to eat"



Marshall unclipped the greasy plastic strap beneath his chin and removed the heavy novelty hat from his head with a sigh of relief. His hair was plastered to his scalp with a combination of sweat, airborne particles of cooking oil, and the blood of something neither wholly human, nor yet completely poultry. Also some barbeque sauce, a puddle of which he had slipped and fallen in during the battle.

Unhooking the clip-on tie and the temporary plastic nametag identifying him as a trainee on his trial shift, he threw the entire assortment into a trash can overflowing with dirty napkins, crumpled promotional flyers and half-gnawed chicken bones. He rummaged in his backpack, glanced furtively about him, then shed the red and white polyester shirt and pulled on his Giants sweatshirt in a series of quick, practiced movements. The Chickeniest Chicken Palace uniform joined the hat, tie and nametag in the garbage.

He produced a small hand-held voice recorder from his bag and pressed down the red record button.

“Item: Chicken-Man Hybrid eating out of the trash behind Chickeniest Chicken Palace.” He paused, considering how to categorise the events of the last few hours. “Code Nightmare Fuel, sub-type, Body Horror. Cross-reference under anthropophagy, unwitting slash unwilling. Supplementary entry: places never to eat in Eerie. File it between the nachos at the Eerieplex and the hand-finished chocolates at Grandma’s Kitchen.”

He began walking, slinging his backpack over one shoulder while still holding the black box up to his mouth, hoping that by giving voice to what had happened, he could make some sense of it.



~



It had started with a two-line article buried deep in the pages of the Eerie Examiner:

“Police responded to complaints of squatters seen on the fire escape of an abandoned apartment building in the down-town area. Addressing rumours that the figures were described as “inhuman” or “monstrous” by callers, Officer Derek of the Eerie PD told reporters that residents were “confused” and that no evidence had been found to suggest these prowlers were anything more than local teenagers seeking cheap thrills in a run-down structure over the Halloween period.”

A few discreet and cunning enquiries in the right direction (which mostly consisted of calling the Eerie PD switchboard complaining about “them thar monsters again” and waiting for Officer Derek’s exasperated declaration that they had checked the Stanwyck thoroughly and there was absolutely no trace of a hellish man-beast having made it’s lair there, before looking up the address in an old directory and heading out on their bikes) had brought them to the building in question. A boarded-up window whose plywood slats were soft with rot barely offered even token resistance, and then they were in.

There’s been an oily sheen on everything, which Marshall had initially put down to long neglect and the multitude of fast food joints that lined the surrounding streets. He’d been at least partly right, although none of the burger vans, kebab shops or pizzerias had had a hand in contributing to the state of the place.

Then Dash had casually mentioned a horrible man-chicken hybrid who frequented the fetid alleys behind the Chicken Palace, and through a series of events that were in no way Marshall’s fault, had decided he’d done enough investigating for one night and vanished off to wherever he was crashing at the moment. He’d been right about the chicken man, but that didn’t make up for the fact that Mars had had to do the rest of the investigation solo, as it required going undercover at Chicken Palace and there was no way Simon could pass for thirteen. Consequently, Dash was at least part-way to blame for everything that happened afterwards.

The hiring manager at Chickeniest Chicken had barely glanced at the application form Marshall had filled out; such was the lure of an afternoon of free labour from a minor with, presumably, no knowledge of employee rights or health and safety in the workplace. He had been fitted with a red and white checked shirt, a clip-on tie emblazoned with a cartoon chicken enthusiastically devouring a bucket of his fellow fowl, and a hat of extruded foam sculpted into a takeout box full of deep-fried drumsticks. The nametag completed the disguise – Mars couldn’t bring himself to think of it as a uniform – announcing to the world that here was one Maximillian “Max” Haveasock, fresh-faced apprentice to the world of fried chicken parts. The pseudonym wasn’t his finest moment of on-the-spot thinking, but he’d seen Mister Lodgepoole pushing his portable misappropriation device (i.e., a wheelie bin) past the window and it had momentarily distracted him.

The next seven hours had passed in a haze of cooking oil, thick grey batter spooned from an industrial size tub, and suspiciously uniform chunks of wet, pink chicken meat. There’d been no sign of the Chicken Man, just an endless stream of screeching children and impatient adults who clearly placed far too much of their self-worth on their ability to rapidly secure deep-fried chicken parts and be rude to the servers as they did it. Max Haveasock was a mild-mannered and soft-spoken young man, but Marshall Teller was mentally cataloguing those houses that would not get a protective cantrip muttered over their lawn during the next street party, prosperity ritual, or gnome infestation.

He’d been wiping down tables in the empty and shuttered restaurant, cursing Dash under his breath and bemoaning a wasted Saturday afternoon that had brought him nothing but the determination to hold on to his paper-boy job quite possibly until he left for college, when he’d heard the familiar cacophony of falling trash cans through the open kitchen door. His legs were aching from being stood up all day, but he’d vaulted the melamine counter, snatched his camera from beneath the cash register and been stood outside in the falling drizzle before his brain had time to process what he was doing.

“Bigfoot,” he whispered, engaging the flash and resting his finger lightly on the shutter button. The alley was dark, the only illumination coming from the fizzing orange sodium of the street lights up on the main road and the bright glare of the Chicken Palace’s kitchen that spilled white light over the grimy brickwork of the buildings outer wall.

Then a shadow moved over the open doorway and a few moments later, Marshall had found himself looking up into the face of a nightmare.

The Chicken Man had the narrow curving peak he shared with his feathery namesakes, and beneath it a bright red wattle shivered and bobbed with the jerky motions of his head. It was an unappealing sight, but not outside the run of regular Eerie cryptozoology. The skin mottled with feathers and the pale thinning hair topped with a bright red comb gave Mars a reflexive shudder of phantom itching across his face and neck, but he held the camera steady and snapped off a quick succession of photographs. At the first flash, the Chicken Man spun to face him, the unnatural beak hanging open in an expression of almost cartoonish surprise. That was when Marshall had seen the two rows of neat, white, human teeth inside the yellow-orange keratin, and the broad flat tongue of a person, and even before the Chicken Man lunged at him, he’d started screaming at the wrongness of it all, his legs turned abruptly to rubber as he staggered backwards, shaking his head in refutation of the thing before him.

A chicken’s knees face backwards, and the Chicken Man was stuck halfway between hominid and hen, his legs bending in both directions and causing him to bobble almost comedically as he pursued his prey down the greasy alleyway. Marshall stumbled into overflowing trash bins, sending them toppling to the smeary concrete in a spray of paper napkins and rotting chicken parts. He rolled them in front of him, trying desperately to put some obstacle between him and the thing that lurked behind the Chicken Palace. If he could make it to the mouth of the alley, to the safety of the orange circle of street lights and the staticky hum of passing cars, surely it wouldn’t follow him there?

The Chicken Man raised an arm that ended in three scaly talons and swiped at him. Marshall was saved by an unused single serving of barbeque sauce that burst beneath his sneaker and sent him sprawling to the filthy asphalt, skinning the palms of both hands as he tried to halt his fall. He continued to retreat in an awkward shambling crab-walk, a crustacean startled from its rock pool by an exploratory prod from a shrimping net wielded by an abomination of feathers and flesh. Mars had a brief mental image of a human/seagull hybrid, far deadlier but somehow less hideous than the creature before him, and he wondered which of them would win in a fight and why exactly his brain was distracting him with this now of all times.

Then the cold metal of a fallen bin was at his back and he realised that he had, in his panicked backwards flight, missed the open end of the alley and backed himself against a wall. The Chicken Man loomed over him, his still-human eyes pushed to opposite sides of his head by the terrible toothed protuberance in the middle of his face, and his fleshy claws clenched reflexively as he reached for Marshall.

And then he was gone, a startled squawk and a scattering of pin-feathers still hanging in the air where he had been a moment before. Marshall opened his eyes, saw nothing, and took his hands away from his face.

A figure in glowing white, with a short neat beard and a bolo tie over a crisply ironed shirt front, had sunk two enormous meat-hooks into the Chicken Man’s shoulders (wing joints? thought Marshall fuzzily, uncertain at what point you stopped using human nomenclature and switch to avian terminology to describe something that was half-man, half-chicken, and although he hated to give Dash any credence, really, really horrible) and using the thick chain attached to them, jerked the creature off its three-toed feet.

Now the Chicken Man lay on its back, stunned, stirring weakly amidst a drift of filth and feathers. The glowing man in white raised an axe high above its head and brought it down hard at the place where the human neck met the great feathered breast. Blood fountained into the air, painting the walls on both sides of the alley in gore. The decapitated body of the Chicken Man continued to thrash and scrabble in the dirt for several long minutes afterwards, minutes which Marshall used to vomit up everything he had eaten in the last day or so. The man in white never turned to look at him, only dragged the corpse back towards the open kitchen door of the Chicken Palace.

A few minutes later, there was the muffled, meaty sound of repeated axe blows and the hiss and bubble of the fryers coming to life. Marshall climbed shakily to his feet, divested himself of the last remnant of Maximillian Haveasock, and began to make his way slowly home.

Halfway there he met up with Dash and Simon. They were carrying wet wipes and long knives, and for a moment they both looked immensely relieved to see him. Dash’s face quickly resumed its usual expression of eye-rolling distain, but Simon had thrown himself at Mars with a shout, hugging him around the waist while he apologised over and over, babbling about Harley and a ritual to free the Dark One from its prison inside a mortal child, which had apparently ended when Harley bit a chunk out of the Witch Queen’s face, knocked over the altar, and escaped with a sacrificial goat that he was now hiding in his bedroom.

“Wow,” said Marshall, disentangling himself as gently as possible. “What did the Witch Queen say?”

“Mostly argh, argh, my face, my beautiful face, you wretched child, you will pay for your insolence,” said Simon. “Then Dash showed up with a super-soaker of holy water and after that it was mostly just screaming.”

Dash smirked and held up a heavy golden amulet that still bore the sticky and steaming traces of liquefied witch-flesh. “There’s still one or two cults in town that haven’t declared bankruptcy. Somebody’s bound to be interested in this thing, once it’s cleaned and polished.”

“Don’t strip the flesh off,” said Mars. “Those bozos who rented the Shunned House last month will pay you extra for it.”

Dash gave him a sharp look.

“Are you okay?” he said.

Marshall sighed.

“I need a shower and a clean change of clothes, and something to eat,” he said.

Dash opened his mouth. Simon knew, he just knew, that the next words out of his mouth would be chicken-related, and trod on his toe. He doubted Dash felt it through the heavy black work-boot, but the message got across.

“Pizza?” he suggested. “You get cleaned up, we’ll order it. I’m babysitting Harley tonight, so Dash can hook up the VCR while you take a shower and if you want to, we can watch those cursed videotapes the workmen unearthed when Eerie Video closed down.”

“Not Mister Zips,” said Dash. “The delivery girl always tells me how I’m going to die when she shows up.”

“It’s because you never tip,” said Mars, rubbing his eyes with the heels of both hands.

Dash scoffed. Simon rifled through his pockets until he came up with a handful of crumpled takeout menus and shoved them at Dash.

“Pick out the ones with delivery people you haven’t scammed or places with a high enough mortality rate that the last guy has probably died by now,” he said. “I know you keep track of the ones with the bad safety records.”

Dash was unabashed.

“It’s a good way to get a free meal,” he said. “You call in an order to a part of town with a big monster problem, and while the pizza guy is busy fending off tentacles or whatever, you sneak in and steal whatever’s in the back of the van.”

“This is exactly why the girl from Mister Zips hates you,” said Simon.

“Plus no tip,” added Marshall.

“Whatever,” said Dash.





Microwave-verse

Bonfire by froodle, in which Pinocchio is ruined forever

Gingerbread by froodle, in which there is a witch in the Eerie Woods

Leaves by froodle, in which plantlife finds Marshall entirely too enticing

Offspring by froodle, in which there are dragons

Based on Your Previous Purchases by froodle, in which Mars should really pay attention to Amazon's reccomendations

Housework by froodle, in which a rota cannot be agreed upon

Breakfast by froodle, in which Dash's attempts at cookery do not go well

Ghost in the Machine by froodle, in which a new laptop opens an old wound

Consequences by froodle, in which an encounter with leprechauns leaves the boys very tired indeed

The Microwave by froodle, in which Andrea Fantucci returns to Eerie after a considerable absense

The Eldritch Abomination in the Room by froodle, in which the microwave is most definitely not discussed

Basic Household Maintenance by froodle, in which manticores are inconsiderate houseguests

Torrential by froodle, in which there is a storm, and the boys eat ice-cream

Linens by froodle, in which Dash X makes a bed

Night Music by froodle, in which Simon is woken by a nocturnal visitor

In For The Night by froodle, in which Dash refuses to leave the house

Hound by froodle, in which Simon makes a friend

Errands by froodle, in which Simon has a to-do list

Waterlogged by froodle, in which Eerie experiences heavy rainfall

Wildlife by froodle, in which Simon and Marshall go to the beach

Rainbow by froodle, in which Dash fails to properly appreciate Michael Flatley

Jackolantern by froodle, in which the local pumpkin patch has a problem