The sun rose over the desert like a heatstroke hallucination, peeling the air off the sand. Inside The Cosmic Bean, the kids were hanging posters, string lights, and questionable decorations (a disco ball made of foil, a Garfield plush duct-taped to the windshield, and a crooked sign that said "ALIENS WELCOME. HUMANS? EH.")
Daisy rolled out a shag rug that may have once been a bear.
Hannah was braiding Bug’s hair with glow-in-the-dark beads.
Twig was eating a glue stick.
Peppa was organizing her screwdriver collection like it was a museum.
And Mason?
Mason was in the bathroom.
Which, to be clear, was not a real bathroom. It was Soup Can Sally’s abandoned outhouse behind the van, held together by termites and depression. But when you gotta go, you gotta go.
Except, in Mason’s case, something else had already gone in there.
The chicken stared at him.
It had three eyes.
One in the middle of its forehead.
Its beak foamed red.
Its feathers were all wrong—patchy and shiny, like it had crawled out of a microwave.
And its cluck sounded like someone gargling motor oil.
Mason froze, pants down.
"...Peppa," he whispered.
The chicken lunged.
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“PEPPA!”
Back at the van, Peppa was duct-taping a tin can to the dashboard labeled “Top Secret Alien Bits.” She glanced up.
“Mason’s screaming,” said Alex, stirring powdered Tang with a wrench.
“He’s always screaming,” Peppa replied.
Another scream. Louder. Followed by a THUMP.
Then silence.
"...Should we check?" Bug asked.
They all stared at each other for a second.
Then they ran.
They found Mason standing over the dead chicken, holding a broken broom handle like a spear, sweat dripping down his face.
It was very dead.
Also very... mutated.
“Okay,” he panted, “first of all, not my fault. Second of all, that thing tried to peck my eyeball out. Third of all, I think it was radioactive.”
They all stared at the body.
Bug poked it with a stick. “Why’s its blood green?”
“That’s not normal chicken behavior,” said Alex, shielding Twig’s eyes.
“I told y’all,” Peppa muttered, crouching next to it. “They’re getting weirder.”
“You mean—”
“Yep. This ain’t just aliens. Something’s spreading.”
Twig, ever helpful, pulled out a Capri Sun and said, “Can we eat it?”
“No, Twig,” they all said in unison.
By the end of the day, the van was looking... kind of awesome. Kind of like a gift shop exploded.
They had:
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A dreamcatcher over the windshield.
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A lava lamp that only worked when Bug touched it.
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A row of walkie-talkies labeled with everyone's names (and one for Stinkwurst).
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Daisy’s mini VHS library under the floorboards (you had to draw a card to get one as usual).
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And a hand-painted mural on the side that said “COSMIC BEAN SQUAD: EARTH’S LAST HOPE PROBABLY.”
They’d also added Mason’s broken broom-spear to their weapons stash.
"Do I get a badge or something?" he asked.
"You get PTSD," said Peppa, tossing him a juice box.
That night, they burned the chicken.
Bug stayed quiet the whole time.
Peppa caught her staring at the ashes.
“You okay?” she asked.
Bug nodded slowly.
"...I think they’re testing us."
Peppa didn’t ask who they was.
Because deep down, she already knew.