Supernatural Chicken Nuggets

The Encased Angel (Pt. 1)

Micah flicked the red kill switch and let the machine die, and he felt his hears adjust to the absence of its rumble. He stepped down from the excavator and looked towards his fellow crewmates who were gathered around a freshly dug hole that Micah was responsible for. It was just one of many that dotted the empty trail that they had carved into the woods. Micah wiped his forehead and his hand came back drenched. The day was hot and the sun's rays lacked mercy on the group of men who had already cleared several kilometers of land for fresh roads to be paved.

"What does this mean?" He heard someone quietly say.

"The fuck do you think it means? We are digging up a fucking graveyard, that's what." A harsher voice said in response.

Micah pushed his way to the edge of the hole to see what had stopped the progress of clearing the path. Two men were already in the hole with shovels clearing dirt away from what looked like the tip of a huge coffin protruding from the meniscus of the hole. The earth around the object was dark and deathly.

Ellis, the youngest man on the road crew, was bravely clearing dirt from the face of the grim thing, "it says," he read aloud: "Here resides One who did not keep to their proper domain."

They all shared curious glances filled with worry.

A tall, burly man stepped forward, "you little shit, that's written in German. How do you know what it says?"

"It's Spanish," said a Hispanic man sitting at the edge of the hole, which was as wide as Micah was tall and half as deep.

The coffin was humongous, and dirt caked chains were wound tight around it. The links looked as if they had been melded into the metal surface of the ancient coffin.

Micah twisted his head to see the exposed face of the casket. As his eyes made contact with it, the light seemed to shift in impossible ways, blinging him only for a moment. Before Micah could fully comprehend it, English letters morphed into readable words on the muddy surface. Like Ellis had recited, a mysterious message was etched perfectly into the metal.

The German man, who's name was Mikhael, and a few members of their party of twelve argued over the language that it was written in. Despite the fact that it was clearly written in plain English. Micah had a shadow of doubt, but when he double checked he saw the same message. Although, the letters seemed shifted a little. It was just his imagination.

"Maybe we should just leave it alone," Micah said to Ellis as his shovel worked at the dirt around the coffin.

"You saw the maps," he responded with full confidence in what he was doing. "There are no towns near here for another 50 kilometers. Why would there be a coffin buried in the middle of nowhere? And look at how big it is! I bet it's chock full of gold or some shit."

Mikhael smiled, "yeah, rich fucks used to be buried with their money and treasure back in the day, right?"

Micah didn't like where this was going, but judging by the looks of over half of the men there he knew what the consensus was coming to.

Ellis was the first to present the idea, "let's open it."

Micah noticed an automatic split in the group. Some faces mirrored his own: reluctance and worry, while many more shared Ellis' expression: the one a man gets when choosing greed over common sense.

Ellis was smarter than he looked because he must have noticed it too and he immediately took advantage of the numbers, "all for opening it?" He raised his hand calling for a vote.

An older gentleman towards the back of the circle interrupted him, "hold on now, they have laws against this type of stuff for a reason."

Mikhael shrugged, "so? What's the promise of riches compared to the threat of the law?"