Doctor Vexler was sitting in the control room monitoring the Dungeons of Snerbville while drinking a cup of tea that had gone cold. She had eaten a can of peaches and a cracker for dinner and, as usual, it had been uninspiring.
It seemed she was destined to endure another night on the watch, a duty she carried like a heavy suitcase on a trip to nowhere. From far away, she heard a hose sucking goop from a pipe with a sickening slurp. She had grown used to these kinds of sounds in the miles and miles of underground tunnels and chambers, but there was one sound she hadn’t heard in quite some time.
She heard it now, a piercing blare ripping through the control room, repeating like a siren. She tapped some blue keys on a strange, glowing keyboard, and the sound stopped. A voice appeared, distant and full of static.
“Station three to control room! Station three to control room! Do you read me?”
Vexler hadn’t heard from station three in over a month, and she worried the events of nine days ago with Jenny Kim and her two nitwit friends had been discovered. Had someone seen them?
It suddenly felt like half the dry cracker was lodged in her throat, so she coughed and gulped down the last of the cold tea.
“Station three to control room!”
Vexler reached across the blue keyboard and warily held down a red button with the number three on it.
“Vexler here,” she said. “Are you on a secure line?”
“There’s no time for that! It’s me, McFadden!”
“What seems to be the problem?” Vexler asked while thinking to herself: not this bozo again.
“Open Tunnel 21 immediately!”
This was bad news. The opening for Tunnel 21 was large, the biggest of all the entry points.
“I’ll need an authorization code,” Vexler said in her calm German accent. She was nothing if not cool under pressure.
“There’s no time for codes!” McFadden screamed. “Open Tunnel 21!”
This was how they’d gotten into so much trouble to begin with, by not following any of the rules. For all she knew, McFadden only wanted to dump a truck full of garbage into Tunnel 21, an unauthorized act of award-winning stupidity.
Unfortunately for Vexler, McFadden was technically her boss. He held most of the cards. It was he and the other blockhead who would decide when she would complete her time in the Dungeons of Snerbville. She calculated the risk, tapped out a few commands, and let her finger hover over a pink key shaped like a diamond.
“Opening Tunnel 21,” Vexler said.
She pushed the pink button and heard a big and terrible sound echo through the underworld.
A door was opening to the world outside, a big door. Iron was sliding and gears were turning as Vexler switched one of the monitors to Tunnel 21. The camera pointed up into the open sky, and for a brief moment, Vexler smiled at the stars and moon overhead. She hadn’t seen them in some time.
But then something very large and unexpected fell into the hole.
“Is that . . . ?” she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing until the thing falling into the hole went right past the camera with a look of terror on its face.
A forty-foot chicken was falling into the Dungeons of Snerbville.
“This is a very bad idea,” Vexler said.
Vexler had only seconds to activate an inflatable landing area, which was only used when a live creature was tossed into a Snerb hole. If she had been paying closer attention to the monitor, she might have noticed one other important detail that was destined to change the Dungeons of Snerbville forever.
Someone was riding the forty-foot chicken.