On an outing to an amusement island, lawyer Ted Marshall comes across a children’s play farm. In one of the farm’s barns he is accosted by a large chicken whose strident cackling drums words and sentences into his mind. It is a pounding headache of angry, scathing arguments that scares and spooks him, but he puts down to work stress. Later, on a trip to the city’s multicultural market with his girlfriend, he again encounters a chicken whose cackling forms whole statements in his head. Frightened and befuddled, he purchases the hen, only to be told by the bird that he has been chosen to act as an interpreter of its threatening clucking for an ultimatum that the chicken must deliver to the UN.
A White House meeting with the new president, followed by a surreal televised address to the nation, causes domestic fear and puts the United Nations on edge. Ted and his girl become entangled with pompous diplomats, bumbling secret agents and nattering cable TV personalities.Throughout the world, billions of chickens are refusing to breed, eat or lay eggs, spreading international panic among food processors, the stock market and governments. In China, it had been determined that chicken would be the country’s prime source of protein and modern factory farms are being constructed across the land. Suspecting that this world poultry crisis is an Western plot designed to thwart this food policy, and believing that Trent Marshall knows the truth, Chinese agents attempt to kidnap him, triggering unintended consequences with the Russians: consequences that the Russians will blame on America.
The Gallus Ultimatum is a fast-paced, funny and terrifying fantasy novel about the world of factory farming and its impact on international politics and global food security. As the poultry crisis spreads and worsens, unexpected events will keep you wondering to the very end. And you will be very glad that your not a chicken.