Day of the Turkey

Subscriber-only episode

Every bird has its day...

***Content Warning: Episode contains irreverent humor, explicit language, and gore, and is not for the meleagrisphobic.***

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Transcript

(Mysterious music)

NARRATOR

Thanksgiving Special: Day of the Turkey.

(Sounds of turkeys gobbling)

NARRATOR

The visitors emerge from their vehicle, stepping into the soft moonlight. One of them tests the air, then confers with the other. After a brief discussion, an accord is reached, and they begin to walk across the fields toward the ill-kept farm a quarter mile away.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Gaffer Lohman wakes up, scratches his ass, untangles himself from the grey sheets with a groan and a loud fart. Three days’ worth of mousy stubble graces his chin, and looking into the bedside mirror, he wishes as he has so often that the hair on his scalp might grow so readily.

His wife, Daphne, calls up at him from the kitchen downstairs to get his lazy keister out of bed. He shouts back an equally unaffectionate reply, and slips into the same grease-spattered, dusty clothes he wore the day before.

When he shuts the front door on Daphne’s haranguing him for leaving the slaughter of their last batch of butchering birds until the very last minute, he notices a strange smell in the air, mingled with the ever-present odor of the turkeys. This other scent reminds him vaguely of both cheap whiskey and of old, fermenting mulberries, a smell not quite unpleasant, but wholly out of place.

Being a fundamentally incurious man, Gaffer shrugs it off and gets back to the day’s work. Ambling out to the poultry house, he notices that the usual boisterous morning sounds of the turkeys, impatient for their morning feed and for relative freedom from the confines of their coop, are wholly absent. But there are no obvious signs of a murderous midnight raid by skunks or coyotes or raccoons, and so again, he lets it fall from his thoughts.

As he fetches the grain blend for the morning feeding – for those who will live long enough to partake of it, at least – his battered old flip phone chimes weakly. Pulling it out, he finds a text from his friend, Bill Banes, asking if he wants to go deer hunting today. Instantly his temper surges – he remembers that, when he asked Bill if he could help with the turkey slaughter, Bill said he would be working today. That he really would rather be out hunting than engaged in this thankless and unpleasant work only adds to the sharp bitterness in his terse reply. Bill, unsurprisingly, does not respond.

Muttering under his breath about wives and friends and the infinite sorrows they bring, he thinks how even when Daphne first mentioned this little seasonal side business scheme, he knew at once that he would end up doing all the actual work. Of course, she claims that her contribution of marketing the product is just as crucial as the physical labor of raising and butchering the turkeys, an argument he might find more convincing if that “marketing” didn’t mostly consist of putting up a measly two flyers in the gas station and grocery store in town, and calling up a few of her friends.

Filling the buckets with rolled corn and protein pellets, and turns to go and cast them over the enclosed pen where the turkeys will roam, protected from roving wild predators, after he has selected those lucky few to be butchered and sold for someone’s Thanksgiving dinner. In the turning, he misses the dark, viscous fluid that drips from the roof overhead, though in all likelihood he would simply dismiss it as spilled oil or some sort of roof leak even if he did see it.

Only when he opens the door to the poultry house do his first feelings of alarm and confusion set in, but by then, it is far too late.

(Beaky bleaky music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Finishing her breakfast of Cocoa Crisps, fried eggs, and Jimmy Dean sausages, Daphne moves to the front door to shout out a question at her husband, if she should get the scalding water started. Gaffer doesn’t answer, and she rolls her eyes, muttering that the man is absolutely useless, and she can’t remember what she ever saw in him.

Fetching the scalder, she sets it by the door, determining that she will not help Gaffer rectify his own chaotic incompetence unless he asks her to, and asks nicely. She pours herself another cup of coffee, heavily diluted with sugar and cream, and moves to look out the window toward the poultry house. There is no visible sign of Gaffer, none of the turkeys that should be raucously crowding their little pen by now. A half hour passes without change, her coffee cup refilled twice between increasingly perturbed vigilance, and she decides at last that even her Gaffer doesn’t move this slowly. He is no longer young, she considers, and worry finally begins to take root as she imagines him lying hurt, perhaps in some kind of medical emergency, in the dusty, churned soil. After another five minutes with no change in the farmyard, she slips on the Crocs that Gaffer mocks her for wearing, calling them her “city girl shoes”, and goes outside to find him.

She notices an unexpected aroma as she descends the porch steps, something it takes a moment to place: it smells like a perfectly seasoned roasting turkey. Now anger mixes with her concern, and she wonders if her damned fool of a husband has decided to eat her turkeys instead of selling them, simply to spite her.

Swearing and storming out to confront him, she stops dead when she sees what lies on the other side of the poultry house, so suddenly that she almost stumbles.

Then, she begins to scream.

 
(Beakier bleakier music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Philippa Hrdy is already in a bad way by the time she hits the road in her little old ’07 Ford Focus. Her husband, Vince, was supposed to pick up their Thanksgiving turkey yesterday after work, but instead went out drinking with his friends, leaving her alone with the kids all evening and with no way to start the dinner preparations. All this, after her own long day at the grocery store, pulling a double shift she’d traded so that she could have an extra day off to complete all the domestic labor of this so-called holiday. And of course, he is absolutely useless today, with a hangover as blue and deep as the South Pacific. She barely feels safe leaving the kids, aged seven, nine, and thirteen, under his supervision for even an hour, but she needs the turkey now if she is to get everything done by noon tomorrow.

It is a bright, clear day, the sky that beautiful shade of perfect November blue, the air cool but not unpleasantly sharp. If she were not so stressed, Philippa would enjoy the drive, the refreshing feel of the clean air rolling in through the partially rolled-down window, the wholesome smells of the fields, drying and yellow after the harvest.

When she pulls into the Lohman farm, though, she scowls with irritated confusion. There is no one in the yard, no movement from the house to come and greet her even though she called ahead early this morning, no sign of any movement at all in the preternaturally quiet farmyard. There is at least one car parked in the drive, a well-cared for white 2012 Toyota Camry, that she is pretty sure does not belong to the Lohmans, who are locally well-known for both their stinginess and a tendency toward neglect.

Philippa emerges from her Ford, and notices as she does so that the Camry’s driver door is ever so slightly ajar. Calling a quizzical hello, she approaches the car, receiving no reply. Just as she is about to turn from the unknown vehicle and move toward the house, a touch of color catches her eye, and she bends forward to inspect the faint crimson speckling upon the hood.

Eyes widening, she looks up toward the poultry house and the empty turkey pen. A cloud passes briefly over the mid-morning sun, casting the world momentarily into shadow.

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

Sheriff Lundberg is sitting in his office, trying to extract a stubborn dried nasal blockage without his receptionist, Miss Dunn, noticing. The sudden ring of the landline on his desk makes him jump, painfully jamming his finger into his nostril, and so he is extremely ill-tempered when he answers.

His tone changes instantly when he recognizes the caller as Dane Geiser, a prominent local landowner, almost as rich as he is severe. After a conversation of less than five minutes, Lundberg hangs up the phone with a deep sigh.

His department has been getting strange calls all morning on the non-emergency line: calls about strange smells, about lights in the sky in the early dawn hours, about missing persons that haven’t really been missing for more than a few hours, even one about how it is just too quiet outside. Lundberg was initially inclined to dismiss them as the usual preemptive holiday tippling, but then the Hrdy call came through to him directly. The Hrdy kid – who isn’t really a kid anymore, Lundberg supposes, with three children at home – didn’t even bother to pretend he hadn’t been imbibing, but the insistency with which he maintained his wife should be home by now, or at least answering her cell phone, troubled Lundberg. More troubling still, he realizes that all of the strange calls seem to be centered on a specific region in the southeastern quadrant of the county.

A region, he thinks, with the Lohman farm that Vince Hrdy brought up in his call near its center.

And now, with a big fish like Geiser calling, he cannot afford to write it off any longer. In fact, he feels uncomfortable with the thought of even delegating it to one of his deputies. Aside from his influence, Geiser’s reputation as a teetotaler adds a little more credence to his claims that all of his closest neighbors seem to have suddenly and unaccountably gone completely dark, as far as the sheriff is concerned. 

No, Lundberg decides, he needs to follow up on it himself. And if it turns out to be nothing, he can complain about it later to Miss Dunn and to his deputies. If not…

Well, he doesn’t really want to think about that unless he must.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The eastward drive strikes him as uncommonly bleak, though there is nothing truly changed that he can see, only the usual picked fields and pastures of prairie grass gone grey with approaching winter dormancy, the familiar sight of both tidy modern farmhouses, perhaps a little too modern and soulless, and the deteriorating older houses left to slowly fall in upon themselves.

The sheriff is driving up the Lohman road when a bright glint in the field to his left lances across his vision. He stops, trying to locate the source, but it is gone. Putting his department pickup into reverse, he slowly backs up until the shine momentarily blinds him again.  Squinting, he peers out into the yellow, broken cornstalks. Nestled amongst them, about a hundred yards from the road, is something large and metallic, but too obscured for him to be certain exactly what it might be.

He pulls off onto the shoulder of the road and kills the engine, then clambers out and makes his way toward the object on foot. The ground is already hard with a couple of nights’ freezes, and a couple times he stubs his toes painfully against the grooves and ridges worn into the earth by the irrigation pivot, now as unyielding as rock.

Shit, the sheriff grumbles to himself, feeling every one of his fifty-nine years. The last year has been quiet, and he hoped to coast his way through the remaining few months until he could finally retire. Now, as he trudges in the chilly November field, he feels that those prospects receding, turning grey as the frigid earth underfoot.

When he nears the object, he breathes a mangled oath. The thing partially hidden within the field is, by his estimation, about six feet long and four foot high, ovaloid. It is certainly metallic, unpainted, almost too silvery to seem real, as though it is formed of frozen mercury. It appears to be a single piece, without visible joints or seams of any kind.

The longer he stares at it, the more he thinks it looks like a gigantic egg.

Later, he is unsure just how long he spends gazing at the thing in disbelief, but when he is finally able to pry his attention away from the object, he moves back toward his truck, much more quickly than he left it, and speaks frantically into his radio.

Then, he sits in the truck, waiting for any sign of traffic along that road. There is none, and though it is a minor country road, it strikes him as unusual that he seen not one other vehicle upon it this whole time. And as he sits there, he thinks back to that caller who complained of the unnatural quiet, and it seems much less silly to him now than it did a few hours ago.

At last, Deputy Gibbs arrives, and Lundberg tells him to secure the unknown object until the bomb squad from state patrol arrives and determines if it is an immediate threat. Gibbs, the youngest and, in Lundberg’s frank appraisal, dullest deputy in his department, blinks in mild confusion, but murmurs faltering acknowledgment.

Deciding he must be satisfied with that, the sheriff turns his engine over and continues toward the Lohman farm.

Arriving, he finds four cars in the small drive, two of which he is pretty sure belong to the Lohmans from their shabby state. The Camry has license plates from the next county over, and he believes that the Focus belongs to the Hrdy woman, though he doesn’t know her or her husband well enough to be certain.

Throwing open the door, he hops out of the pickup, a little awkwardly, and strolls up to the door. His repeated knocks and shouted summons bring no answer, and he begins to circle the farmhouse, peering in through the windows. The interior is dark and cluttered, but there is no motion within.

Turning his steps toward the poultry house and pen, he calls out again. The deathly quiet of the farmyard is beginning to make his flesh creep and his scalp prickle with cruel anticipation. Telling himself he is probably overreacting, he shifts the hood guard on his holster and rests his palm gently on the grip of his Glock 17.

Something wafts through the air, a scent at once appealing and slightly nauseating, like turkey wrapped with bacon and then slightly charred. When he rounds the corner of the poultry house, he sees the smoking remains of what looks like a bonfire, and the pile of large, darkened bones.

Holy fucking shit, the sheriff murmurs. Then he bends over and vomits noisily.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

So enrapt is he in examining the inexplicable, silvery orb, that it takes Gibbs a moment before he realizes that the radio on his belt is crackling out words, in the distorted and broken voice of the sheriff.

They’re all dead, Gibbs, the sheriff says. They are all dead.

Shocked as much by Lundberg’s discomposure as by his words, and responds back with a 10-9.

His radio crackles, but no further communication comes through. Gibbs is about to repeat his query, when a subtle ringing begins, so faint at first that Gibbs thinks it is only his ears, but then growing in intensity. After the first few seconds, a much lower pulsating hum bleeds out of the ringing, and Gibbs turns to see that the metallic ovaloid is slowly rising from the ground.

My God, Gibbs, the radio finally crackles again. It’s the birds. It’s the fucking birds.

Gibbs does not respond. He stares, open-mouthed, at the hovering orb as blood begins to stream from his nostrils and his ears. If he hears the distant crack of the four rapid pistol shots, he gives no sign. Slowly, he sinks to his knees, his head quivering now and his flesh gone deathly pallid and cold.

The orb gives one final, powerful pulse, and then settles back to its resting place. Gibbs falls heavily forward into the field, heedless of how the stiff, broken cornstalks gouge at his face. From the weeds at the edge of the field, the turkeys emerge from where they have lain in wait, gobbling in triumph and gleeful anticipation.

 
(Beakier bleakier music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The visitors watch their distant brethren feasting, and warble in satisfaction.

The initial uplift trial seems to have been a great success, the first says.

Yes, the second concurs, though their star-flung cousins have much yet to learn.

We must have faith in them to do so, the first replies. The challenges ahead will be their crucible, preparing them for the ascension to their rightful place upon this planet, and someday, among the stars.

The second says nothing for a while, merely watching the earthlings dine. It steps forward, and tentatively tastes the alien their vessel has so graciously cooked for them, smacking its beak appreciatively. The earthlings gobble an invitation, and the visitor respectfully declines.

Stepping back toward its companion, the second says that it is time to go. As they walk back toward the vessel, it muses that perhaps, in the future, this day will become the stuff of legend to the turkeys of earth, and will be marked with a primitive but joyous ritual of feasting, and of thanksgiving for their salvation from the hideous, brutish apes who once terrorized and preyed upon their ancestors, but are now mere beasts fit only for meat upon their tables.

Perhaps, the first says thoughtfully, but for now, their noble work must be continued elsewhere.

And with that, the visitors enter the vessel, which has yawned in semi liquescent manner to welcome them. In a few moments, the silvery orb hums and begins to rise into the heavens, to carry its occupants yet a little further in the pursuit of their grand mission: the elevation of all meleagridids, on every world.

(Mysterious meleagridid music)

NARRATOR

Happy Thanksgiving!

 
(Sound of turkey gobbling)