The Great Big Kentucky Fried Human Siege

“Where do you want to go for your birthday?” asked Mr Rooster Cluck. “Or, more to the point, what would you like to eat?”

“How about some roast human?” Master Cluck, whose given name was Cock, answered. “It’s been a long time since we had any.”

Mrs Hen Cluck, his lady mother, made a face. “Roast human?” she asked. “Couldn’t you think of something more...decent? Like sweet roasted wheat or something?”

“It’s my birthday,” her son said mutinously. “I want roast human!”

“Oh, all right,” Rooster Cluck said. He squeezed his wife’s wing sympathetically. “We can always go out again on the weekend and have that wheat,” he told her.

“It’s just that I worry about him,” she answered. “Roast human! It’s so common. I worry about the kind of friends he goes around with. They’re ruining his mind.”

“What’s wrong with his friends?” asked her husband, but absently, not listening to her answer. He bent his head in the mirror and thought about exactly how he ought to adjust his crest. Just a little over to the left, he decided, and the wattles to hang naturally. After all, it wasn’t as though they were going to some posh place. Roast human didn’t merit too much dressing up, and for that he was secretly grateful.

They drove over to the Kentucky Fried Human outlet on CockADoodle Avenue. Mr Cluck drove, as usual, somewhat flashily. He hadn’t, he would tell his wife when she tried a bit of back-seat driving, scrimped and saved to buy a car just to slink along as though he was ashamed to be seen in it. He pulled up in the parking lot in a spray of chickenfeed.

“Three servings of Premium Grilled Human, extra crunchy,” he allowed Master Cock Cluck to tell the waitress. It was his birthday, after all. The waitress glanced at Rooster to confirm the order, which he did with a nod. She went back to the kitchen hatch.

“This place needs a bit of doing up,” Rooster Cluck observed.

“Yes,” his wife sniffed. “It’s...downmarket, that’s what it is.”

“Careful, dear,” Rooster told her. “You know that isn’t the right thing to...”

Just at that moment there was a loud explosion and part of the front wall fell in. Three big chickens wearing green crest-covers and masks ran in through the dust and smoke, firing at the ceiling with assault rifles. “Don’t move and nobody loses a feather!” they crowed over the sounds of screaming and the automatic fire. “Freeze, or you’ll wish you’d never been hatched!”

“What the hell?” Rooster Cluck began, but he never finished, because he found himself with the barrel of an assault rifle at the tip of his beak. He looked up the length of the weapon at the glaring yellow eyes of a furious green-masked chicken.

“I thought I told you not to move,” the green-masked chicken said.

“You said I wasn’t to move,” Rooster explained. “I didn’t. You never told me not to speak.”

“What are you, a lawyer?” the chicken clucked in disgust. “I might have known,” he said, as Rooster nodded. “That’s all we needed.”

“Who are you chickens anyway?” Rooster asked. “Is this a robbery? Is that what it is?”

“Silence!” one of the other chickens yelled, and fired a burst into the ceiling to emphasise his point. He sprang up on the countertop. “We’re taking this place over,” he yelled, “in the name of Chickens for the Ethical Treatment of Humans.”

“Yes,” the two other chickens cackled. “It’s the beginning of the war for the soul of the chicken race!”

“You chickens,” the green-masked chicken on the countertop said, “make me sick.” He paused a moment. “Make us sick,” he amended. “The way you scrunch, crunch and gobble down human meat, with never a thought about the conditions under which those humans are raised.”

“And slaughtered,” the chicken with his gun at Rooster’s beak reminded.

“And slaughtered. Have you visited the human farms recently? Well?”

There was a brief pause. It grew to be a long pause.

“You told us not to speak,” Rooster said when the pause seemed all set to become interminable.

“You told them not to speak,” his masked chicken passed on.

“Anyway,” said the countertop chicken, “it doesn’t matter. We have videos. And we have Cluckella Cluck, the actress, on our side.”

“Cluckella Cluck?” Rooster rose from his seat. “But...”

“I’m not going to warn you again!” his masked chicken screamed.

“But Cluckella Cluck is my sister,” Rooster shouted. “You contact her and see what she says about what you’re doing here.”

“You idiot, Rooster,” the third armed chicken yelled, pulling off her green mask. “I’m right here, and if you open your beak one more time...”

“Aunt Cluckella?” Cock Cluck burst out laughing. “Weren’t you eating human right along with us the last time you visited us?”

“Is this true?” the chicken on the countertop enquired in a terrible voice, glaring at Cluckella. “Have you contaminated yourself with the taint of human flesh?”

“It was a long time ago,” said Cluckella, her crest going pale. “You see...”

There was a sound of sirens from outside, and the engines of many cars. “Come out with your wings up!” someone crowed through a megaphone. “This is the Cockapolice!”

“I suppose you’ve had human too?” the chicken on the countertop asked Rooster’s masked chicken, ignoring both the megaphone and Cluckella.

“Well, just once,” the chicken confessed. “Or it may have been twice...”

“I give up.” The chicken on the countertop pulled off his mask and flung it down. “I’m surrounded by hypocrites and incompetents!” He jumped off the counter and dropped his gun. It fired and put a neat hole through the Kentucky Fried Human logo of the smiling Cockerel on the wall. “I’ve had enough of this,” the chicken said. “I’m going over to the non-violent path.” His voice became dreamy. “I can just see the new, peaceful CETH,” he said. “Chapters in every nation of the world. Thousands of members. We’ll picket places like this and send people on guilt trips. We’ll dress up as humans and lie around on street corners. We’ll rope in vegetarian celebrities. We’ll claim vegetarian chickens have better sex and lay stronger eggs. We’ll get funding from the vegetarian food companies.” He turned a dreamer’s eyes to the other two. “Let’s surrender and get it over with, then.”

“Wait!” Cock Cluck shouted. “You can’t do this!”

“Why not?” All three chickens looked at him. Every chicken in the place looked at him, even those who had sheltered under the tables at the first explosion and were yet to emerge. “Why can’t we?”

“What about us?” Cock Cluck said. “You have to at least wait until the TV cameras turn up and make this an international spectacle. That way all of us at least can make a fortune selling our stories to the networks. How I survived the terrorist siege, and so on.”

“Watch whom you’re calling a terrorist.”

“Sorry,” said Cock contritely. “But my point’s still valid. You ought to wait till they bring in hostage negotiators and a SWAT team.”

“The lad’s speaking the truth,” Rooster’s chicken said. “No publicity is really bad publicity.”

“Besides,” Cluckella said, “it’s going to inform the whole world about our agenda.” The ex-countertop chicken glared at her. “I’m just saying,” she mumbled.

“Ohhh...” a hen across the room groaned. “I’m laying, I’m laying. The contractions are beginning.”

“Is there a doctor in the coop?” her male companion shouted. “My girlfriend’s in trouble!”

“I seriously doubt that,” Hen Cluck muttered. “She’s about to lay her golden egg, that’s what it looks like to me.”

“Excuse me, dear.” Rooster Cluck rose from his place and went over to the groaning hen. “Ma’am,” he said. “I’m a contract lawyer, and I strongly suggest you let me handle your negotiations with the networks. After all, you must realise that laying an egg under such circumstances means that you’re a valuable media property now.” He fished around in his pocket. “Here’s my card.”

“Look here,” the former countertop chicken said, jerking his beak at Cock. “You go out there and tell them that we’ll be sending out a female hostage who’s been taken ill.”

“No!” Rooster Cluck yelled. “Ask them to send a doctor in. My client’s not going anywhere without a signed contract for her first-hand story!”

“Do as he said,” the ex-countertop chicken said, shrugging. He thought. “And tell them we’ll be coming out with our wings up...but only when we get signed contracts from the TV networks. Do you understand?”

“I do.” And Cock Cluck emerged from the shattered door of the Kentucky Fried Human outlet into the lenses of a hundred TV cameras. Even the hardened network bosses agreed he looked good.

“Get the SWAT teams,” he told the police. “And interview me, damn it!” he told the TV cameras. “I’m media gold, if only you had the sense to see it!”

And that, cockerels and hens, is the real inside story of how the Great Big Siege of the Kentucky Fried Human franchise all began, which you’ve been reading about in the papers and watching on TV, and which is now in its third day. Apparently, agents from both sides are in consultation over movie rights, and aren’t far from reaching an agreement.

A surrender is expected tomorrow, just as soon as the international news networks all get here.

The Grandmaster's Address

Members of the Most Exalted Order of Barbers and Hairdressers,

My friends,

I called this meeting – this emergency meeting – as you are well aware, to find a way to face this impossible situation facing us, this situation which, I might say without exaggeration, threatens not just our livelihoods but our very existence.

I shall briefly recapitulate what has been happening in these recent days to refresh your memories so we can think together and tackle this danger before us.

You may not know this, but I was – all unknowing – an eyewitness, as I now realise, of the beginning. That was the night when I was visiting our previous Grandmaster, who – as you know – handed the office over to me ten months ago. The old man had phoned me and asked me to visit him. He sounded nervous and asked me to get there before dusk. He would not answer when I asked him why. I thought about it and decided to go, if only because nobody had seen the old man in weeks and I thought I’d better find out how he was.

Well, with one thing and another, I was a little late, I admit; it was past seven, and completely dark, when I drew up outside his door; you all know he lived alone, in that lonely house in a tree-lined street with no neighbours within shouting distance. He opened to my knock at once and practically dragged me inside by the arm, reaching past me to shut and lock the door as soon as I was inside. It was months since I had seen him, and I noticed at once that he looked haggard and ill; he had even stopped shaving and had grown out his hair, so that he had a scruffy beard and a lank white mop of hair like a woman’s.

“Why are you so late?” he asked. “Now you’ll have to stay here overnight.”

“Overnight?” I asked, surprised. “I can’t. I have to be home by ten.”

“You can’t,” he said hurriedly. There was a wild look in his eyes. “It is out there, do you understand?”

“It?” I tried to draw away from him, alarmed by the look in his eyes.

“Yes...it. It comes closer every night. A month ago I sensed it. A week ago tonight I saw it. And last night,” he shuddered with horror and grasped my arm so tightly that I found the bruises of his fingers on my skin later, “it...reached the house. It was tapping on the windows and trying to break in!”

“What are you talking about?” With great difficulty I managed to free my arm from him and began backing away towards the door. He had begun shaking all over and I began to be rally afraid of him then. I thought he had gone completely mad. If only I had known...!

“Listen!” he hissed at me, showing his teeth, “can’t you hear it? It’s come around again. It’s sniffing around the house looking for a way in. Hark!” he cocked his head, as if he could really hear something. “There! There! You heard it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The monster,” he said. “The monster, all of black and blonde and red-gold...why do you think I’ve stopped shaving and cutting my hair?” Suddenly he turned and ran towards the back of the house. “I forgot to shut the kitchen window!” he yelled over his shoulder. “It could find a way in!”

You may be sure I took the opportunity to quit the presence of this raving madman. Before he had even reached his kitchen I had unbolted his front door and was halfway down the path to my car. And without waiting a moment, I jammed my key into the ignition and drove away. I wasn’t sure but that he would start after me with an axe.

In the last moment as I drove round the corner, I thought I saw something in my rear view mirror. I just caught a glimpse of Something – something huge and menacing and dark, like a shadow that seemed to be rushing after me. But a moment later I was round the corner and in a brightly-lit street full of people and rushing traffic and it was clear I’d imagined it. I drove home, shaking my head and deciding the Order would have to decide what to do about our former Grandmaster, who was so clearly now nothing better than a drivelling lunatic.

In the event we didn’t have to do anything about it, because nobody ever saw the old man again.

After that evening I had a few days so full of work that the entire business of the old Grandmaster slipped my mind. It was only when the police turned up one day at my door and asked me if I’d any idea about what had happened to the old man that I remembered anything at all...

So I told them that I’d gone to his place and he had acted bizarre and erratic and I’d soon left. They seemed satisfied and didn’t bother me again; and I – well, I decided the mad old man had simply left everything and gone away. He wouldn’t be the first to do something like that.

It was just two days after that when, as you remember, the Terror began. First one, and then another, and then almost all of our members began reporting some Thing of fear that walked the night. They could sense it, they said, coming closer and closer to them every night, some Thing of infinite menace. And, strange to say, nobody but our Order’s members sensed it, not even their family members. Soon, they said they could hear it too; they shivered in fear and pulled the blankets over their heads as it stalked the night, this Thing, and howled its anguish and hatred at the stars.

Anguish? Yes, that is what I said; for it is anguished, this Thing. And it hates us; oh, how it hates us.

I too sensed it, my friends. I too, heard it, and continue to hear it. And then, at last, I saw it.

One night last week I was driving home. Like all of you, I find these days a marked disinclination to being out after dark, but those not afflicted like us of the Order do not arrange their business according to our fears and fancies. Thus it was that I was inordinately delayed at a meeting and was driving home as quickly as I could. Those of you who have visited me know that there is a long stretch – about two kilometres – that I have to drive through fairly dense woodland to get home. As soon as I entered this woodland I sensed It. Its presence was suddenly all around me, overwhelming in its intensity. I felt the hairs erect at the nape of my neck. And then, suddenly, I saw It.

It stood on the road before me, arms outstretched. It towered as high as the tall trees, and was as broad as the road was wide, and its dim red eyes glared down at me from a face of matted darkness.

I was saved only because I was driving far too fast to stop or even swerve in time. In the moment before I struck it, my headlights shone on it and showed me something of its structure. And then I had hit it and crashed right through, and as it collapsed behind me I heard its despairing shriek in the night. I can hear it still.

Be assured, friends, it is not dead. It stalks the night, every night, and reconstitutes itself during the day. It can never be destroyed, and it will never be appeased, and it will hunt us down, one by one, and whatever it did to the old Grandmaster, it will do to each and every one of us...unless.

Unless what?

In order to answer that, I must tell you now what the Terror, this Thing that haunts us, is.

I told you I caught a close glimpse of it just before the car hit it. I saw a black, shining surface, streaked with gold and magenta here and there, a surface that split apart in a million strands as my car hit it. Yes, friends and fellow members of the Exalted Order, this Monster that haunts us is composed of nothing more than...hair.

Can you imagine the amounts of hair that we have cut, the beards we have shaved? Do we – any of us – spare a thought for that hair, that beard’s natural desire to be able to live in peace? For surely hair, and beard too, have auras, and when they are cut we violate that aura. Over time, that disturbed aura, that disorganised energy, builds up and up until it reaches a critical point.

And so, is it any longer a mystery that it hates us, poor Thing? Can you still doubt its anguish?

What shall we do, then, to protect ourselves from this Thing that nightly composes itself anew from the hair and beard we cut during the day? Remember that apart from us, nobody else is affected by this energy and so they cannot see it or feel its effects. Therefore we have no chance of being believed by anyone we might approach for help. And meanwhile, the aural energy grows and grows and the Monster comes closer and closer.

It is, then, time to ask the vital question: is there anything, at all, that we can do?

Members of the Most Exalted Order of Barbers and Hairdressers, I believe that there is. It will be a lot – a tremendous lot to ask of you, but it is the only way. We must stop feeding the beast. We must stop adding to the bad energy until the mass of it that is abroad finally weakens and collapses, as it inevitably will, given time.

Yes, my friends, you understood me correctly. Until this Thing melts itself back into the energy of the Cosmos, we must stop shaving and cutting hair. We must go on a mass cease-work. There can be no exceptions, believe me. We sink or swim together.

I suggest therefore that you all stock up on beard combs and turbans. For the next few months or years, this city will resemble one controlled by the Taliban.

I, Grandmaster of the Most Exalted Order of Barbers and Hairdressers, have spoken.