My alarm goes off just shy of noon. One good thing about being a freelance monster hunter is you can keep whatever hours you damn well please, and so I do. I crawl out of my old extra-long twin bed, hoping someone remembered to leave the coffee on, and grab my phone from the nightstand so I can check out the local Gig Hunter listings over breakfast.

Luckily, in the kitchen, I find half a pot of still warm-ish coffee and a note taped to the microwave: Chris—breakfast in here. I sit down at my parents’ dining room table with a mug of coffee and the biscuits and Conecuh sausages Mom left for me and open up the Gig Hunter app. I’ve spent the last couple days tweaking the notification settings, trying to find a sweet spot that would balance the fairly shitty gig-pay-to-gas-expense ratio in my favor.

When I first moved back in with my folks, I initially tried about a hundred-mile search radius, but that mostly turned up gigs in Birmingham and Atlanta, and I’m not really keen on driving my thirty-year-old GMC down either I-65 or I-85, thank you very much. But last night, I’d set the app to notify me of new gigs within about fifty miles, and today I’ve got a few hits.

I place a couple bids on the listings, and by the time I’m showered and dressed one’s already been accepted, so I head out for Hicks Chicken Farms, hoping that by the time I’m done there, one or two of the other clients will have accepted my bids as well.

I almost miss the turn off of County Road 54 that’s supposed to take me out to Hicks Chicken Farms. The listing in the app had said there’d be a sign, and I guess the sad plank of wood nailed to a stake in the ground is technically a sign, but I still have to slam on my brakes and do an illegal three-point turn across the double yellow lines.

The road—well, driveway—down to the farm is nothing but almost a quarter mile of pale gray dirt. There’s a bit of gravel scattered here and there over what must be regular muddy spots where the rain don’t drain proper, but that’s about it.

The first 500 yards or so of driveway snake through a small grove of loblolly pines, but then it opens up to several acres of gently rolling plain. On my slow, bouncy trek up to a sunshine-yellow double-wide, I pass a few small structures out in the fields.

I try to get a good look as I drive by. They look like smallish, homemade chicken coops—but they’re on trailer beds. All the coops I’ve ever seen have all sat right on the ground, and I can’t really see any of the long, white, industrial-sized chicken houses I’d seen driving around other parts of Lee and Macon counties.

Something else about these little chicken coops seems off, though. Something besides the fact that they’re on wheels.

It doesn’t hit me til I’m pulling up to the double-wide, though, and the slam of my truck door is a bit too loud against the otherwise quiet summer air.

There ain’t a single chicken in sight.