Chapter 5
Fred Grimsley sat up in bed, and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. It was 5:00 am, and he had to feed the chickens and milk the cows. He yawned and stretched. He looked at his beautiful wife still asleep, and wanted to crawl back in bed with her. He thought about the hungry animals and got dressed instead.
Fred made his way through the dark house toward the back door. He didn't turn on any lights because he didn't want to ruin his night vision. Fred did not use a flashlight because he knew where everything was in the dark. He grabbed his machete on the way out the back door—“that damn fool rooster had better not attack me again,” he said to himself. He didn't intend to kill it, just smack it with the flat side of the blade, to knock some sense into him. From time to time, Fred would also run across a snake, and he would definitely use the sharp side of the machete if he saw one of those. In his opinion, the only good snake was a dead snake. As he stepped outside, he heard a twig snap in the woods to his right. He couldn't see anything, but it sounded like something big, maybe a bear, he thought. He continued on across the yard to the chicken coop, gripping his machete tighter and straining his ears and eyes for another sound or movement. Fred entered the chicken coop, and started to collect eggs. Almost immediately, he noticed that one of his hens was missing. He didn't see feathers all over the ground, and didn't see any sign that something had dug under the fence surrounding the coop. “Stupid kids,” he muttered. In the past year or two, Fred had caught three of the kids in the area trying to steal his hens. He had chased them off every time, but they had always made enough noise that he could tell when they were around. This time, there had been no noise, no clucking, no nothing. Instantly he thought about the twig he had heard snap when he had come out the back door. This time, he thought, I’m going to scare these kids so badly they will crap their pants and never come back.
Fred opened the door to the chicken coop and came charging out screaming like a madman with his machete held high over his head. Fred took three steps, and ran headlong into a man who had been walking toward the coop. the man screamed like a girl, and the two of them went sprawling onto the ground in a tangled heap. Suddenly a horrible smell hit Fred’s nostrils, and he knew that this move had had its desired effect, but who the hell was this guy? This didn't seem like a kid. He was bigger than any of the kids in the area.
Fred struggled with the guy on the ground, and had to fight desperately to maintain his grip on the machete in his hand. Fred wondered how long he could keep this up, but knew that if he gave up, he was a dead man.