Backstory

There was a grain incident. Nobody at the farm will say what happened, which is how you know it was bad, and the official report simply reads: “subject buried at the edge of the cornfield, near the silo.” Three nights later the subject stood up, brushed itself off, and began shambling toward the grain it had come back for. It does not remember what it was going to do with the grain. It remembers only that the grain matters, and that something between it and the grain is in the way.

The Zombie Chicken is tough in the way old farm equipment is tough — no speed, no strategy, no particular interest in your defences, just a slow, unstoppable conviction that it is owed corn. It moans in a key that sounds like a broken weathervane, and it will shamble through a hailstorm of cheap shots without so much as flinching, because in its heart it has already accepted that it is dead and everything after this is bonus time.

It is not angry. It is not even hungry, really. It is simply, eternally confused — and confusion, given enough mass and enough time, is its own kind of siege engine.