THE PHOBIA
1.
Ginger Brooks consulted the
mirror. He had deep-set eyes, like they had been shot in by a catapult at close
range. He studied his fingertips – another day of Chicken Sexing lay before
him; his eyes and his fingertips were accompanied by Zen-like concentration
coupled with a brain surgeon’s dexterity. This arcane skill set him apart from
other men, other people. He could separate pullets from cockerels at the rate
of 8,000 a day, three, four seconds in his hands and he just knew intuitively
its sex with a 97% success rate. That was before the phobia took hold.
2.
He
couldn’t worry about that now. He had to get to the factory fast – before
Braxton. He strode out onto the landing. The house was quiet, Vincent, his
housemate was sleeping – he rarely set eyes on the guy these days. He kept
strange hours, Ginger had no idea what he did, and he always looked pale and
translucent, as if he’d been embalmed.
Disturbingly,
Ginger could have sworn he’d smelt formaldehyde emanating from his room on more
than one occasion. Tiptoeing down the stairs, not wanting to wake him, he
opened the door carefully, and gasped.
‘What
on earth...’
3.
The
front garden was full of chickens, hundreds of the damn things. Braxton. She
was up to her tricks again but how could she know? He hadn’t told anyone about
his latest terror, least of all Braxton but she had a way of picking up on your
weaknesses – your deepest fears. One by one he’d seen the others crumble before
her. The psychiatric wards were filling up fast.
The
chickens paused their pecking. Hundreds of small beady eyes turned towards him.
Ginger stood rooted to his doorstep, unable to move, his breathing rapid and
shallow.
‘Vincent,’
he screamed, ‘help me, Vincent.’
4.
"He isn't coming," the disembodied Voice of
the Chickens seemed to come from the ramshackle flock. Ginger blinked.
This could not be happening. "Step away from the door. Fetch
food."
Ginger found himself responding. "Corn
flakes?"
"It will do, but stop looking at us like
that."
The chickens began to hop into the kitchen;
slowly, menacingly. They were scrawny, discolored, featherless battery
chickens, like tiny leprous demons.
"W-what do you want?" said Ginger in
a thin papery voice.
"Let's start with the corn flakes."
In a daze he opened the pantry door.
Oh, where the hell had Vincent got to?
5.
He grabbed cornflakes, rice, lentils, anything to lay
a trail back into the garden. The
kitchen, covered in droppings and feathers, stifled what remained of his
thought process.
“Idiot!” they squawked. “Think we’re falling
for that one?”
Ignoring the food they strutted their way up
the stairs in a storm of feathers and blood, plucking flesh from weaklings
impeding progress.
The vanguard halted at Vincent’s door, heads
cocked this way and that.
Then it began.
A hammering of beaks, scratching, ripping at
splinters of wood until they heard the hiss of escaping formaldehyde.
Beyond the disintegrating door they saw him.
6.
They
surrounded the bed and began pecking the duvet, Vincent by now was wide awake
and pulling the covers tighter, his eyes bulging with terror, he shouted ginger
“help me.
“You
won’t get any” they cackled in glee.
Ginger
raced up stairs with the hosepipe, water trailing down the nice new carpet.
As
he aimed it at the bed, Vincent let out a yell. The chickens squawked in alarm
and flew to the open window losing a few feathers on the way and landed on the
chicken shed,
Ginger
paddled down the stairs nearly tripping on the hose and managed to bolt the
door
7.
With
most of the chickens safely outside Ginger reappraised his situation. It wasn’t
good. He was trapped. And what was it with Vincent and the formaldehyde?
He
squelched his way upstairs and tentatively entered Vincent’s room. It was dark,
the curtains firmly drawn. This was usual. Apart from forays to the bathroom or
kitchen Vincent spent about eighteen hours a day at his computer. He said he
ran an online business but as long as the rent was promptly paid Ginger didn’t ask
questions.
Vincent’s
array of computer monitors burst into life, a familiar face appearing on each.
Braxton’s
lips bent into half a dozen identical sly smiles.
8.
Ginger should have been at work. The conveyor belt
stopped for no one and without his skilful intervention, hundreds of chickens
tumbled off the production line; a cloud of fluff and chicken s...t.
As Braxton leaned towards the camera,
hundreds of peeping, yellow balls of rather annoyed chicks burst through the
door behind her. Her smile left her face as though wiped by a large yellow
duster. Only her eyes, black pools of hate, were visible as she was covered in
feathers from the giant, jaundiced puff-ball.
Vincent stood behind Ginger, who gagged at
the pungent vapours from the other man's breath.
"Touché, Ms Braxton," Vincent
sneered.
9.
“That’s what you think Dog
Breath. Your little plan did not
entirely work. Be afraid, be very afraid. Even as we speak, I have my best
people working on it. You will find in a very short while that your preventive
measures will have been for nothing. I shall soon have the formulae with which
you have coated yourself. One of the main ingredients is of course
formaldehyde, the rest is easy. Yes, it is only a matter of time before you
find your degenerate person coated in fluffy little yellow feathers. Au
revoir.”
The screen went dead. Vincent
shuddered.
10.
"What did she mean?" asked Ginger.
"How should I now?" said Vincent,
unconvincingly.
"She was talking to you, about some
formula? And those chickens! She sent them for you, not me," Ginger
realised.
"Ok, I admit, it does look a bit
suspicious, but think back to when I moved in." Ginger remembered it well.
He'd been desperate for cash.
He'd advertised for someone to rent-share.
"I was a 'plant'. Working for Braxton, sent here to study you, to steal
your secret, to come up with 'the formula', but I discovered much more.
Something which could change the whole world!"
11.
Before he could say ‘and what’s that, exactly?’ he was
bound, gagged and thrown into the back of a pick-up. Ginger summoned Zen and
his powers of concentration and, with his chicken-manipulating knowledge he
monitored every bump and pothole of his journey. He had no choice: every knock
was recorded on his bony frame.
“That was a deep depression,” he
prided himself on accuracy – second nature given the nature of his employment.
“Aha! We’re off the main road –
ouch!”
Rough hands dragged him onto soft
ground.
“A forest?” he sniffed. “So why can
I hear a turbine engine?”
12.
The thrum and whine of the
motor was familiar, Ginger had lived with it for years at the chicken factory,
filling his head in the day, ringing in his ears at night. Strong hands grabbed
his arms hauling him up off the ground. Two goons in boiler suits half dragged,
half ran him through the trees. Carved out in the clearing ahead a long wooden
building shimmered in the afternoon heat. The double doors opened and he was
bundled inside, his feet hardly touching the ground down a long corridor. Zen couldn’t
help him now.
The tangled party veered into
a cell like room with only a wooden table and an office chair that faced the
wall. Ginger struggled to break free.
The chair swivelled around.
‘Braxton.’ He bit his lip,
trying to stay calm.
Braxton stared through the
hum of the turbine. ‘Ah…Brooks.’ She placed a brown folder on the table and
nodded to the goons. ‘I thought it was about time we had a talk.’
Ginger felt the grip on his
arms ease. ‘What the hell’s going on?’
Braxton opened the folder, methodically
turning the pages. She didn’t look up. ‘I’m going to be as open as I can with
you Mr Brooks.’
13.
“Mr Brooks, or may I call you Peregrine?”
“Only if I may call you Evangelica.” Ginger
wasn’t going to allow himself to be sweet-talked.
“Very well, Mr Brooks.” She tapped the papers.
“Your file leads me to believe you are an honest man.”
She raised her eyes to his and in a low,
conspiratorial voice said, “However, your tenant is not.”
14.
Ginger was held by her gaze; a rabbit in headlights.
About to drown in the strength of her charismatic soul-search, he shook his
head and broke the spell. He remembered the rumour about the people she’d put
into the psychiatric ward and realised it was not merely a rumour.
As he stared back at Braxton,
for the first time he saw how similar she was to Vincent, that same mannerism
of rubbing his temples, the dainty nose, the large mouth… that’s it thought
Ginger, he’s her son, he has to be. The generator coughed and spluttered and
entering the room came three identical Vincents. Braxton smirked and threw the
straight-jacket to the floor in front of Ginger. “Vincent 27” she said, “do the
honours for our guest. Then call Blacksharp Towers and tell them to expect a
new patient.”
15.
Ginger awoke from a dreamless
sleep, minutes could have passed or hours or days, he had no sense of time
having passed. He found himself in bed in what appeared to be a hospital ward.
A long room with a dozen beds at regular intervals down each side. Daylight
streamed in from high, barred windows; somewhere a strip light buzzed.
Gradually he began to recall
the events that had brought him here. Nothing made sense anymore. He was just a
chicken sexer going about his job. A chicken is just a chicken, why all the
cloak and dagger stuff?
A man shuffled down the ward
and sat on the bed next to him.
It took Ginger a moment to
realise that he was looking into his own face. Stunned, he began to check the
other patients. As far as he could make out they were all his doppelgangers.
16.
“So you think chicken sexing has scrambled my brains?”
he thought, not taking his eyes off his new bezzy-mate.
Doppelganger Ginger began to cluck,
moving his head up and down in short jerks as though pecking at corn, aiming
for Ginger’s eyes. On cue, the other clones left their beds, a disorderly row
of shuffling and clucking moved towards them.
“Poetry in motion you ain’t” thought
Ginger. “But you’d be contenders for Eurovision.”
An intercom crackled: ‘Exterminate!
Exterminate!’
“As you wish.” Ginger shouted
back. “But don’t blame me if it all goes wrong!”
Swinging his duvet like a caped
crusader he trampolined across the beds, gaining height he swung onto the strip
light and grabbed at the window bars. He should have known – cost saving
measures had plastic painted to resemble steel. Wrapping himself in the duvet
he put an elbow through a pane of sugar glass.
“Take that you scrawny excuses of
manhood.”
The egg he threw exploded on impact
reducing everything to ash within seconds. Eerie laughter filled the void.
17.
Braxton escaped the blast as
she steered her Time Warp Converter back to the time before this craziness
started – she had to stop it from happening. Vincent was in his formaldehyde
pod, Braxton’s tears fell to it’s glass lid as she stared down at her damaged
son. And where was her secret love, Ginger. She tried to get him away from all
this, but the clinic had failed her.
It all started with Ginger’s
phobia, his irrational fear of Happy Endings, I must save him and indeed the
world. This turbo – charged bird flu was her fault she thought she had found
the cure, then the lab was raided; yes that’s when it all started…
18.
… when she came up with the
idea of building a secret plant in the forest, a duplicate of the chicken
factory down to the last detail. Whatever happened in the main factory would be
just a front, the real work programme could continue without raids or inspections.
Braxton
struggled with the door to Vincent’s formaldehyde
pod, she should have run the programme differently; ignored the turbo
charged bird flu, fine tuned the doppelganger procedure. She shook her head,
pulling frantically and listening for a rush of air from the pod. But to alter
the process would have changed things. The reasoning behind the replication
process had been economically sound, half the chickens on the conveyor belt
were always male, so fifty per cent of them were always useless. And there was
Ginger’s time to sex them too. If every bird was a female, there would be no
wastage and no need for Ginger. Maximum output with minimum effort.
Braxton
tapped on the glass ‘I’m going to get you out of there Vincent.’
The
replication of female birds had been a solid success apart from their broiler
like appearance, except a batch which had gone wrong when Vincent’s mistake had
mixed some human DNA into the process. That had been the battalion of scrawny
cluckers which turned up at Ginger’s house.
Three
green lights started flashing on the pod, Braxton was half way there. There had
been no holding Vincent once he had fine tuned the accidental DNA mix. Human
doppelgangers were created to work the plant in the forest – total economic
self sufficiency and potential wealth beyond her wildest dreams. But it had
come at a price. The doppelgangers developed chicken phobias and needed
corrective psychiatric treatment and Vincent…Vincent… how hard he had tried to
correct the process, even using himself as a guinea pig.
A
hiss of air blasted into Braxton’s face and then the stench of formaldehyde hit her.
‘Mother’
Vincent looked into Braxton’s eyes. She figured no son could have made a
greater sacrifice, putting himself on the line and applying formaldehyde to his own body to see if it
arrested the psychiatric degeneration. She could stop this all now before the
future she had just lived started.
‘Mother’
said Vincent. ‘What are you doing, I’m just about to change the world.’
Braxton rested the palm of her hand on his
cheek. ‘No son…you’re not changing the world, you’re coming home with me.’
Vincent
looked stunned. ‘But I’m…’Braxton put her hand on his shoulder.
‘Home
for a shower - wash that stuff off before you do yourself some damage. No buts.’
She
thought about Ginger. His life would carry on and the phobia, it would never exist now. Braxton took hold of
Vincent’s hands and pulled him out of the pod.
‘I’m
shutting it all down tomorrow – every last bit of it.’ The stare never wavered,
but her face suddenly cracked into a smile. ‘Come on, its salad for tea.
Somehow I just don’t fancy boiled egg and bread soldiers.’
