Now that you know what's going on, you need to learn how it all started.
A few years back, I was walking home from school with my friend, Charlie Madrigal. Of course that’s not his real name, if I told you, my fate would be sealed. We were entering a neighborhood a few blocks outside of mine and we decided to take a shortcut. The two of us headed for an old, abandoned tunnel that went under the lake. It never got very far in the construction, but it was dry anyway. The had just finished the hole when they stopped and that’s all I know about it, because it was from my grandparents’ time.
Despite the darkness, we ducked under the plastic tarps theat covered the entrence. Charlie and I had done it about a million times, and we had no reason to be afraid. We pulled out our flashlights that we always kept in our backpacks so we could walk home through here and clicked them on.
After ten minutes of walking, Charlie noticed a hole about three feet in diameter in the ground and the wall. We aimed the beams in, made sure there were no rodents, and crawled in. It was a tunnel inside a tunnel. Pretty cool, we thought. As we got deeper and deeper, we noticed some clinking, just the pipes cooling off. At the bottom—we had been crawling downward—we came to another floor. It was more of hallway than a tunnel, the walls were straight up and down, not curved like the passage we were in earlier. We turned left, and started walking. a while later, we saw a light from the around next corner. I backed into the shadows whileCharlie peered around. He screamed! He ran back the way we came and I followed, knowing that there was trouble close behind.
We ran hard. We came across a bunch of boxes piled on top of each other and dove behind them. Not even daring to breathe, we waited. Seconds later, footsteps—lots of them. Most ran past, but some, three, stayed. They were knocking over boxes. CRASH! Splinters went flying. They weren’t boxes, they were empty crates. That means that they could see through them. Charlie panicked. He slid farther in and kicked his flashlight which slid across the floor. One of those huge guys heard it. He turned around, lifted up the stack of crates Charlie was under, and threw them on top of me. Most broke but I was now stuck. I could see them, but I now couldn’t move if I wanted to. They dragged Charlie up onto his feet, and called for the others. Before they could answer, Charlie was being dragged off farther into the darkness. A minute later, I heard the others that had passed earlier walking and laughing at some joke one of them had made. I was still too scared to even try to stand up, so I waited.
When I finally calmed down, and my heart rate slowed, I very quietly tried to push the crate off of me. It was no use whatsoever--way too heavy. Once again, my pulse sky rocketed. If you’ve ever been in a sleeping bag with your head at the foot end and somebody comes up and grabs you from behind, then you know what it felt like. I’m not usually very claustrophobic, but trapped in the dark with gargantuan weight lifters that could squeeze you to death with one hand can make you feel pretty scared. Once again, there was nothing to do but wait. If I made too much noise, then they would hear me and do whatever they were doing to Charlie.
After an hour or so, I realized that I could slide out if I was really slow at it. If I went the wrong way and/or too fast, I might tip over one of the boxes beside me. I was moving about 1 inch a minute, and my stomach was starting to hurt because of the rocky floor, but another half an hour, I was out of there and back on my feet. I quietly walked over to where the men had brought Charlie, and peered around the corner. There wasn’t anybody there, so I followed the path. I know it was a pretty dumb thing to do, following their trail, but I had to find my friend.
When I came to a more lit area, slowed down even more. I was getting deeper into the secret. I heard talking from the guys back there. I couldn’t understand one word of it, but I tried to listen anyway. I finally worked up enough courage to look, and so I did.
It looked like a zoo. There were rooms dug into three of the walls, each with a large plexiglass window. Once my eyes adjusted to the light, I could see chickens in all of them except one. Charlie was in the third compartment from the left. He was asleep, and knowing him, I bet he was drugged—he would normally be yelling and pounding on the glass. This way, he wouldn’t be such a disturbance. I looked around some more, and saw a person in a lab coat giving one of the chickens a shot of some bubbly red liquid. Nothing happened for a second. Then, the chicken screamed so loud I had to cover my ears. Everybody in there did too. This was probably the first time anything like this had occurred because I had heard nothing before this and all of those people would have most likely been wearing ear protection by now. The man clutching the chicken dropped it and the chicken ran around like mad. It not only acted like it, but it also looked like it was furious. It’s eyes were red now, like the liquid that had been injected into it, and it ran up to somebody, clawed them, and ran up to another person. The people that it touched would thrash wildly, then fall over for a minute. At that point, they’d be back on their feet dazed either trying to catch it, or hiding from it. The chicken was now opening the enclosures and letting the chickens out. This was wierd. How did it know that pulling the lever down would open it.
What the chicken did next was even more bizarre. It climbed up a ladder and kicked a huge pot of the red stuff onto the chickens. They pecked at it, and a few seconds later, there was a thunderous screaming from all of those hundreds of chickens.
The shrieks had woken Charlie up. He still looked tired, but he was awake. His cell was open, and he stayed in the back corner and tried to hide himself in the hay. It didn’t work. Now that all of the guards were out running down the different hallways, he was the only human in there besides me. Every single chicken in that vast room gathered around him like a pack of hungry wolves.
At the shriek of one—probably the first chicken—they sprung on top of him. They were pecking and pecking at him. Charlie screamed. I ran out, Grabbed one of the guns that a guard left behind. All I could do was shoot. I sprayed bullets at the chickens. Several of them fell, but they turned on me now. I was out of bullets so I grabbed another. Many more died, but it wasn't enough. They were dodging the bullets like they knew were I'd shoot. I could see that Charlie was already dead, so I turned and dashed out of there, hoping that the path I chose would lead outside.
I was so scared that I couldn’t even scream. I just ran. Suddenly, I tripped. Rocks were ground into my face, but I was back on my feet in no time. I could hear the chickens running toward me. They were catching up. I had to find a way out of there. Abruptly, a hole, just like the one Charlie and I had crawled through to get into this place, appeared. I ducked into it and scrambled up.
I got to the top. It was different then the first one, instead of it being in the middle of an abandoned tunnel, it was in the park. I stood up and looked at the hole for just one second before I filled it with the surrounding rocks. It was a hollow tree facing away from all the normal everyday action. I could easily see how one could pass right over it.
Without warning, the rocks jarred. The chickens were ramming themselves against the stones. I piled more on and took off. As soon as I got home, I locked myself in my room and checked every little niche for those smart pieces of poultry, and luckily, I found nothing.
When Charlie was found, people all over town thought that there was a psychopathic scientist murderer on the loose—that explained the lab, but they were never sure about those feathers. I couldn’t say anything because they’d think I was mad and then believe that I did it myself. School was out for two months because nobody would ever leave their houses, and we just ordered food by telephone, or over the Internet. When people felt a little safer, they let us go to school, and most of the teachers showed up for class. But I never walked home again, and I rarely even rode the bus. Now, we’ve even moved across the country. I didn’t tell my parents of course, but I did suggest that we get out of there because it scared me to be around a place with a killer. So, we moved across the country. I can’t tell you where, but we did move. And now, we have a small chance. They might not succeed, especially since Bush won the election--Al is a robot sent in by them. But don’t get a false sense of security, they’re still very powerful. And very deadly.