At 9:00 AM, the residents of the village of Lysyi Kachan, neighbors to Old Kerzaky, witnessed an incredible sight. An unidentified object was screaming toward them from the sky at breakneck speed. It resembled a comet, trailing a fiery plume accompanied by thick billows of smoke. With a deafening roar, the hunk of junk slammed into Baba Zina’s garden, burying itself halfway deep into a bed of radishes.
?Despite the shock and destruction, the entire village gathered in Baba Zina’s garden within fifteen minutes. "Make way, make way!" shouted the collective farm chairman, Ivan Ivanovich Kuvalda, pushing through the crowd with his athletic tights pulled up over his round belly almost to his chest. He approached the smoking base of the apparatus, eyed it sternly, and proclaimed: "What is this thing, and where did it come from?"
?"It fell from the sky, Ivan Ivanovich! From the sky!" the people shouted all at once.
?At that very moment, from the twisted, smoking machine stuck in the radishes, Vasyl Butylkin himself began to slowly crawl out! It was a truly horrific sight for the villagers. Several men stumbled and involuntarily backed away, while others froze in a stupor at the sight of the charred and smoking "astronaut."
?Vasyl Butylkin, ignoring the general terror, let out a wild roar as he tore at the remnants of his spacesuit—made of a smoldering cotton quilt and faux leather. His slow-cooker helmet, however, had been so crushed onto his head that he couldn’t pull it off, making it look like a terrifying, elongated grimace. He tried to call for help, but his mouth, stuffed to the brim with radishes and dirt, could only disgorge unintelligible sounds and a wild, guttural growling.
?Chairman Ivan Ivanovich Kuvalda froze for a second, struck by the gruesome picture, and then, regaining his composure, loudly announced: "Comrades, Mars attacks!" Turning on his heel, he bolted, and his 150 kilograms of live weight were no obstacle. His heels flickered down the dusty road like a twenty-fifth frame.
?The stunned crowd rushed after the chairman in a single impulse. But then, 75-year-old Baba Zina, who had frozen for a moment, suddenly snapped to. Clutching a hearth-fork, she vaulted over a five-foot fence like a Shaolin monk almost instantly, overtook the lead runners, and immediately became the undisputed favorite in this sudden race.
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?Meanwhile, "Astronaut" Vasyl, desperate for understanding and help, reached out his hands toward the fugitives with a distorted cry and ran after them. His high rubber hunting boots turned his run into agony: they squelched loudly, hampering him and preventing the "astronaut" from running properly. Moreover, as he ran, the smoldering quilt on him began to flare up, and Vasyl tore at it with a wild roar, flinging burning chunks of faux leather in all directions. A severed vacuum cleaner hose, still whirring on battery power, dragged loudly behind him like a tail, kicking up massive clouds of dust from the road.
?From the side, this truly eerie spectacle looked as if an unknown, mangled monster was chasing the villagers, purposefully hunting for a victim among them.
?Straight into this chaos rode the district police officer, Gennadiy Reshotkin, on his ancient, rattling motorcycle. Reshotkin braked hard, sending the motorcycle plowing through the dust, and stopping before the frantic crowd, calmly inquired what was going on. The chairman, gasping for breath and leaning on his knees, hastily but with tragic pathos explained the "operational situation" to the officer.
?The seasoned officer, who had seen everything in his time—from stolen geese to the local council office being set on fire—initially listened to the chairman's hysterical report with iron disbelief. However, judging the general terror of the people, he reacted quickly and, transforming into a front-line commander, barked: "Assume circular defense!"
?He was about to reach for his service weapon but suddenly felt a chill of horror: the holster was empty. His wife had confiscated it due to the officer's well-known passion for overindulging in his home-brewed mash made from potato skins.
?Rallying together, the crowd began building barricades with inhuman speed: they ripped fences from nearby houses and instantly overturned a horse-drawn cart standing nearby. Armed with dried cow patties, which liberally littered the village road, the local avengers took their positions and, holding their breath, awaited the alien invader. Commander Reshotkin himself quickly unscrewed the only spare wheel from the motorcycle’s sidecar and heroically lurked around the corner of a house in the perfect pose of a discus thrower.
