Chapter 15. Ferdy Chicken Answers the Call
Fred Chickweed was out the door of the high school in twelve seconds flat. It wasn’t Fred Chickweed that entered the Petey’s Perfect Pizza Pies van, however. It was a different creature entirely. It was a whole different order of creature. The personality of Fred Chickweed was subsumed, stored for another day when pizza delivery was the first order of business. The first order of business tonight was far more important than any pizza delivery.
As Fred left the building, he tore off the top layer of his three layers of clothing. He ripped the worn oxford shirt from his body, not bothering to finger loose the buttons. Rather, the buttons tore off of their threads and sailed into the night. They fell like a short squall of rain to the sidewalk, though Fred wasn’t waiting around to hear them fall. He was still running, tugging loose the large yellow cape attached to his neckline and tucked into his baggy jeans. Soon enough, he dropped his jeans as well, tripping for only a moment as he pushed them down his legs and over his booted feet. Thus was revealed his lumpy Spandex body suit. Orange. Hunter’s orange.
This was no mere superhero, this was a rock star. Well, an aging rock star. A somewhat overweight rock star. But he had the adrenaline and the passion and the sheer knowledge—not to mention the guts—to do what had to be done. To save the day. To rescue this town from its own passive ignorance.
Thus, it wasn’t Fred Chickweed that entered the Petey’s Perfect Pizza Pie van, but Ferdy Chicken, in all his fowl glory.
Ferdy turned the key in the ignition; the pizza van roared to life. He wished desperately that he were behind the wheel of the Ferdymobile. Here he was, involved in the first actual emergency of his superhero career, and he was without his own car. It would have been so satisfying to race down the road with his custom car, the orange chicken on the hood resplendent in its simple, powerful lines that bespoke grace and crime fighting acumen and simple good taste. But, alas, it was not to be. When the time comes to stand up and be counted, one drives the vehicle that is available. The Petey’s Perfect Pizza Pie van would have to do. He cranked the gear lever into the D position, and squealed away into the night.
The average superhero, Ferdy considered, might have turned the van around to meet the creatures of the lake face to face. That, however, would be wrong. One must not go into battle unprepared. Wasn’t his motto Be Prepared? Wait, no, that was the Boy Scout motto. But not any less good advice for all of that. His motto was Just In Case. And that’s just the plan of action he intended to put forward. There would be no pell-mell rush to meet the unknown. He would do three things: first, he would drive to his secret lair. Second, he would map out the probable route that these creatures would take on his wall-sized chicken hawk’s-eye view of Lone Tree. Third, he would call that information into the mayor on red phone. Then, he would check his gear. Wait, that was four things. Okay, he would do four things. Then, he would meet the creatures of the lake head-on. Wait, that was five things. Okay! Five things. He would do five things.
The van careened down the streets of town. The mostly empty streets of town, thankfully, because while Fred Chickweed was a careful middle-aged man with a good driving record, Ferdy Chicken was enlivened with a sense of purpose that managed to ignore the rules of the road that Fred would have insisted upon. Rules such as stopping at red octagonal signs, for instance, and not driving on the sidewalk.
In record time, then, Ferdy Chicken arrived at his secret base, which on a normal day wouldn’t be considered a secret base so much as it would be thought of as Fred Chickweed’s mobile home.
He pulled into the driveway with a screech of the brakes. The van rocked on its mainframe. Ferdy pushed the gear lever back to its P position, then, leaving the van running, ran to his garage.
“Let’s see,” said Ferdy to himself. The first order of business on his list was to, um, call the mayor? No…check his gear? No…oh wait! The first order of business was to drive to his secret lair. That had already been accomplished. On to the second order of business!
He walked over to his wall-sized chicken hawk’s-eye-view of Lone Tree, carefully sidestepping the many car parts strewn across the floor. He extracted some previously prepared push-pins from a tin on the workbench, each carefully labeled “Bad Guy” with a little flag made out of red tape. Then, he pondered the map.
The newspaper had suggested that these creatures lived in the lake. That wasn’t a Known, at this point, but it was a pretty good guess. Certainly, they were in the water at the time the photographs had been taken. Just as certainly, they had been coming from the direction of the lake when Principal Klieglight had seen them outside his window. Fred stuck the red pin in the middle of the bluish span on the left side of his map. He stuck another Bad Guy flag next to the school. Why not? It wasn’t ideal, of course, because clearly these creatures were mobile in nature. They wouldn’t stay in the same place forever. Still, the map had a purpose, and it was fulfilling that purpose now. All he could do was to get as accurate a picture as he could.
Now, let’s see, Fred thought. The photograph in the paper had seemed to show six creatures, possibly seven. Was that the extent of them? Only seven creatures? Ferdy Chicken thought not. That would have been too lucky a snapshot. Surely, there were other creatures outside of the frame, or possibly still underwater. But how many more? That was the question. Twice as many? Three times? For all Ferdy knew, there might be twelve times as many. There might be a hundred or better! There might be a gross! Ferdy chicken remembered the ugliness of the creatures in the photograph, and chuckled to himself at his own small pun.
The question regarding the total number of creatures, Fred considered, was an impossible one to answer. An easier question would be, how many pins did he have in his hand? The curious reader will be intrigued to know that, through chance or fate or the mysterious mathematical equivalencies of a conscious universe, Ferdy Chicken had created an exact dozen Bad Guy pins before he had run out of red tape. These, he pushed into the photograph at various points along the beach, centering around the lawn that surrounded Lone Tree High School.
The only question left was where would the creatures go from here?
The town, from Ferdy’s chicken hawk’s-eye view, looked something like a squared-off target. The center of that target, the bull’s eye, was not a circle but another square: Mosquehenna Park. The more recently named Moon Park. It was where Lone Tree had gotten its name: in the very center of that park was a single Oak tree, the largest anyone had ever seen. It had been there when the town was founded, and it was going to be there, the locals all thought, when the last of them was gone. It was the one constant in all of their lives, that tree.
Interestingly, all manner of trees grew rather well in Lone Tree’s climate: Maples, Oaks, even the occasional Larch, but none of them made it more than a foot or two into the air before they were chopped down. The residents were firm in their conviction that there could only be a single tree in Lone Tree, and they knew which one it was going to be. Outside the city limits, and even at the edges of the lake, people allowed nature to take its course, but within the city limits there was only one tree, and the Oak that presided over Moon Park was it. It stood in the exact center of the park, a round pupil centered in a square grassy iris. From Ferdy’s perspective in his garage, the eyeball of the park stared at him. It seemed to be daring him, somehow. And Ferdy knew, intuitively, that this was where the creatures were headed. They might make a circuitous path through the various streets of town, but there was no doubt about it: this was where they would end up.
Ferdy Chicken picked up the red phone.