Page 42 of The Black Rider
He hadn’t asked me to go anywhere with him this entire time. If he was asking now, then he probably needed it. Maybe he wanted me to protect him from the chickens. Perhaps one of the previous Antichrists did something horrible with chickens, and I just didn’t know. Either way, I had his back against the chickens of the world.
“Leif, are you good here?”
“Yeah, I will be working on how to synthesize both serums, but I think we should all celebrate when you get back. Dinner and a movie again?”
“It’s a date,” I said, taking Aeron’s arm. “So, tell me about your thing with chickens.”
Chapter 29
C
an I say how much I enjoyed giving the Horseman of Death a hard time? It was payback for some stunts he pulled on the way to Mexico, and I wasdyingto know what went down between him and one or several chickens.
“I’mnotscared of chickens. I just don’t like them.”
“But why? They are kind of cute.”
“They are vicious monsters who would eat us all alive if they could. Be thankful the Rage Mutation didn’t affect animals because if chickens caught it, we’d all be dead.”
“You went through my thongs, so you owe me a chicken story.”
Aeron actually blushed. “I don’t want you to know. It involved another woman.”
“I’m not judging. I thought you all had girlfriends before me or had been married before. Leif explained things to me. I know you took human lovers before, but I wouldn’t have gotten upset if you had been married before either.”
“You aren’t going to drop this, are you?”
“Call it professional curiosity.”
Aeron sighed as we strolled through San Quintin, holding hands to make our way to the other lab.
“Fine. It was a long time ago. This is probably how all those stories started that you don’t want to fuck with the farmer’s daughter. It was a long time ago. It may have been the Black Plague that time. I met her in the market, buying things for Leif. She was hitting on me pretty hard. I invited her back to our flat, but she told me it turned her on to have sex in barns and to meet her at her farm.
“It was going great. I was naked, and she was naked, screaming my name. Well, her screams woke her father. He comes barging in the barn with a pitchfork and a chicken. I jumped up, and I’m not about to kill a man for getting offended I had sex with his daughter.
“I tried to talk him down, but hethrew the chicken at my junk.He was pissed, the chicken was pissed, and my poor testicles got mauled. I grabbed my trousers and hauled ass out of there before he could grab more chickens. You don’t have balls, so you don’t know how much it hurts when they get hit, but getting attacked there by a chicken is way worse than taking a boot to the nuts. I swear, every chicken I’ve met since then stares at my junk like they want to peck my balls apart.”
“Aren’t chickens really stupid?”
“That’s just what they want you to think.”
“I’ll protect your balls from the evil chickens, Aeron. I’m quite fond of them.”
Aeron perked right up and forgot all about chickens attacking his testicles.
“We can celebrate what Leif did in the lab with more than just dinner and movies.”
I just winked at him.
“I was planning on it. How many labs are in San Quintin, anyway?”
“Leif has his private lab, and then there’s a big medical facility Leif funded that develops new vaccines and groundbreaking research. Not all diseases are the Antichrist, so Leif isn’t called to come up with a cure. He set up a bigger lab to help humans when he can’t. He’s got the best scientists from all over the world there. They’ve come up with new antibiotics and vaccines for all kinds of new diseases that cropped up. They were the ones that developed the vaccine for that virus that nearly shut the world down, and all the conspiracy theory nuts came out to play.”
“No, shit?”
“Yeah. They are pretty self-sustaining. They’ve got an entire farm attached. They have been working on finding a cure for the Rage Mutation too, but they’ve also been sharing excess from their farm with the people. I’m hoping that means we don’t have to go find chickens.”
“The fact that everyone kept all this up and running with everything going on is pretty amazing. It doesn’t look like bombs hit San Quintin at all.”
