And here's the right order to read those in...
Killer Robot Hospital
Mona Lisa Fart
Doing It With An Android
The Fulcrum Unification
Johnny's War
FU2: Mommy, may I diddle danger?
Bride of Ka-Ka Pants.
An Evening With Mr. Ka-Ka Pants
FU3: Prong's Revenge
Oh, you can skip these, but then you totally won't know what's going on in Torrent Too!
Read More......
Saturday, January 10, 2009
FU3: Prong's Revenge.
Heh. Wow.
That's great.
The End.
The words scrolled on the screen of Jake Prong's PDA.
Angus Mcungus switched it off, and grimaced in thought.
"But how did he write the bloody thing if he was dying?", he asked his soldier, who was standing next to his desk at calm attention and holding the gore drenched scimitar that had supposedly done the deed.
He paused as if to answer Angus, and then instead quickly raised the scimitar high overhead, and simply grumbled "hol' real still", and brought it down full force on Angus's scalp, splitting his head down to the neck like a ripe muskmelon.
The scimitar wielding Scotsman then proceeded to peel his face away like a mask to reveal a bony countenance (soaked with blood from the Scotsman's stolen face) with an intense pale blue, almost white eyed stare.
It was Jake Prong.
"As if your damned monkeys could get a drop on me, you stupid Scot bastid", Jake chuckled grimly.
Then, he proceeded to strip off the kilt, and put on his pants, wich he had hidden as a balled up wad between his legs under the kilt.
That being done, he switched on his PDA, and activated the custom program that set off the detonators for the C4 he had the foresight to place in key spots in the dimension generator at work.
Not out of any heroic instinct mind you, just for something to do.
Meanwhile, at the instant of detonation, the wormhole above the ruins of Johnny's donut shop snapped shut right in front of the dragon's face.
Needless to say, it was disappointed.
Meanwhile, Jake read the headlines on the PDA Google news about the fight between the android maid and the purple robot, the burning donut shops, the vanishing of the bigshot drunkard CEO Steve Torrent, and the dragon now over the city.
Jake put two and three and five together, and whispered loudly to himself "I bet there's some money in this!".
Two minutes later, Jake Prong's car hurtled down the interstate.
The special ordered custum built blue Knight Rider whooshing thing oscillated at full speed, and in rhythm to "space age love song", by A Flock Of Seagulls which was blaring on the CD player.
It was underway.
Flames roared up into the heavens.
The city was engulfed in a roiling biblical inferno.
There were only a handful of survivors.
Sadly, time was short for most of them.
The last of the fire crews fought valiantly until the dragon plucked the fire truck from the ground like a child's toy, and dropped it from 100 feet, crushing many of the firefighters.
Those that survived were quickly rinsed away by a belch of flame hot enough to weld with.
This was the scene that Jake came apon when he made his way into the outskirts of the city.
The dragon saw him immediately.
Jake wrenched the the car off to the left to barely avoid a fireball.
This sent him careening helplessly into a postal box, and a couple newspaper machines; he accelerated to have the momentum to plow through them and grit his teeth with determination as the crashing pinballed him around inside the cabin.
He regained control, and got back on the main road, just in time for the dragon to spitefully hurl a human being at him.
He slammed on his brakes, and tried to screech to a halt before he hit the person, but it was too late, he had only managed to slow down to 44 miles an hour when he felt the thump, and heard an ugly crackling of bones.
The car finally stopped as the body rolled a few yards away from the momentum of the strike.
Jake got a heavy lump in his gut.
He hurled the door open, and his feet hit the ground running.
He came up on the destroyed ball of human, and the lump got heavier.
He could make out from the proportions that it was a man.
He was wearing a flannel shirt, jeans, and workboots.
And worse, a rattling blood choked cough revealed that he was still alive.
Jake rolled him over to see his face.
Bad mistake.
Doing so jostled around the compounded bits that remained of his ribs, and made him scream like a baby.
Jake gulped, and tried to think of something to say, but in those precious instants, the man softly wailed out a girl's name, gurgled up thick opaque blood, and passed away like a blown out candle.
If he had been counting, or had even been listening to himself, Jake would have noticed that from the time the man was thrown at him, until this present moment, he had uttered the word "shit", in machine gun succession approximately 240 times.
If he had known to listen for it, he might have heard over the din of the flames the soft plaintive sobbing of an android from the mini-mall parking lot.
In that next startling second, Jake instinctively leapt out of the way as the roof and windshield of his car exploded inward from another human body being hurled in his direction like a baseball by the dragon.
This one was in what Jake interpreted to be a Jack Sparrow outfit.
Then, when we walked up closer, and saw it was Steve Torrent!
Jake poked at him to wake him "Mr. Torrent? Mr. torrent?".
Steve's eyes fluttered open, and the left one rolled around a bit until they snapped back to normal.
His memory visually struggled a bit until he finally furrowed his brow in surprised recognition.
"Ah! Jake..Prung is it?".
Jake breathed a faint chuckle and said "Close enough. How are you? Can you move?".
Steve mentally scanned the pains or lack of them throughout his body, and then said "um no, I don't feel anything from the waist down, plus I'm quite sure I'm all busted water balloons inside. The pain is quite incredible. I'm at a loss to describe it. I haven't got long I'm afraid", Steve explained in a detached, almost apologetic tone.
Jake frowned with sad resolve and asked "is there anything I can do sir?".
Steve thought for a second "you got any booze? That might take the teeniest edge off the molten hot razors in my guts and spine..or at least make me not care so much".
Jake rustled around in his glove compartment, and found several little liquor bottles he had swiped from hotels for the past few months, and emptied all their contents into an empty orange Crush bottle in the back seat.
"Here you go Mr. Torrent", Jake said reassuringly.
But, it was already too late, in that short amount of time, Steve had already passed out from the pain, and was well on his way towards dying.
Jake assumed he was dead already; and he was, for all intents and purposes.
Especially when in the next second, a blue fireball hit the car roof first, smelting it down to the doors, and cremating Steve instantly.
Jake started to run for it across the parking lot, and missed being hit by a third and final body that hit where he had been standing 2 seconds previously.
Once he made it to the safety of an alleyway, he was able to look back, and see that the body was a donut shop employee who whammed head first into the macadam, busting his skull like a pumpkin, killing him instantly.
Jake would have given almost anything to be fighting the mayor's creepy son over a matter of vanishing hookers and runaways.
A job like that would be sweet compared to this apocalyptic Bosch painting.
Just then, a seemingly frivolous thought floated across his consciousness.
"I wonder if Chez Labelle is burning up in all this".
And then, some mental puzzle pieces began to click together in his memory.
He quickly pulled out his PDA, and reread his journal entry about Chez Labelle and Lenny.
And then it hit him!
A possible way out of this whole damned mess!
Jake checked to see if the coast was clear, and then started running in the direction of Chez Labelle.
Ugh, it made him sick to even think the name.
He heard a whoosh overhead, and then an ominous rumbling gurgle, and his stomach sank.
He turned around, and there was the dragon.
It stood there on it's hind legs, it's forelegs/arms crossed, and what looked like a human sneer on it's lips.
Jake looked around, and knew there was nowhere he could run fast enough to get away.
He'd either not escape the first fireball, or barely escape, only to be cut down by the second one.
And that's if it belched out fireballs, and didn't opt instead for a continuous stream.
Jake's heart, stomach, and balls sank into his feet.
The dragon's chest began to swell, and it's mouth opened.
Jake's mind raced for an alternate plan other than the one he was about to use, and came up empty.
He was just going to have to bite the bullet and do it.
His brow and jaw set with determination as he went into deep, deep, deep concentration, and entered the the mental trance the volcano guru had tought him.
He imagined a hypercube, and began to will it to fold up.
Right on cue, the migraine started.
Then, he raced through the hyperpyramid, the hyperrhombus, and the hyperdodecahedron in turn, and the nosebleed started.
Once his mind became acclimated to being pushed up into the upper dimensions, it became a simple matter to mentally break his own body down into hyperpolygons, and begin to nudge his physical form into the new hyperdimensions his mind was aligned to.
He opened his eyes, and immediately regretted it.
His retinas were finger banged by a swirling kaleidoscope of ultra-violet and x-ray colors as arranged by Picasso smoking Pollock as a big human joint.
Jake closed his eyes, stifled his gorge with incredible force of will, and began to slowly and carefully sidle 2 inches to the right.
The dragon's head struck like a snake, and vomited forth a 7 second long fire hydrant gushing of flame.
It missed Jake by a mile.
The dragon blinked with confusion to see Jake standing totally unscathed in the middle of the huge scorch mark on the macadam.
In the midst of this confusion, Jake pulled all his remaining strength into a ball, and threw it as a hyperpunch.
Passing along the 4th dimension, his arm easily cleared the yards between him and the dragon, and his fist overcame the laws of perspective and grew in proportion to the dragon's eyeline.
Thus, an outside observer would have seen Jake's arm stretch across the parking lot at near bullet speed, and his fist inflate to the size of a Volkswagen and punch the dragon across the street sending him crashing through the bank.
Fortunately, there were no outside observers to see this, otherwise the observation would have determined the outcome, and thus prevented it by pressing too much normal reality in on Jake.
As it was, Jake had to fight the urge to pass out once he fell out of his hypertrance.
The inside of his head felt like a group of alcohol soaked porcupines were having an orgy, and he was drenched in sweat, and splattered with nosebleed.
He'd felt better.
He also had a slight pang of shame that he didn't finish his training with the volcano guru.
As much as he wanted to go to the drug store and steal some prescriptions and pour them down his throat like movie candy, he reminded himself that he had to get to Chez Labelles.
He had to consciously command his limbs to move for the whole remaining quarter mile there.
After awhile, Jake started to feel his second wind coming, and began to pick up his pace for the last six car lengths of distance across the parking lot to Chez Labelle's.
But just then, the last thing he needed to see and hear happened.
A rambunctious hooting crowd of drunken Frankenstiens, Draculas, Martians, and Gargoyles came leaping, skipping, and flailing out of the Macy's to his right obstructing his path.
He could tell by the very vibe of them, that they were about to give him some shit.
Jake let out a deep exasperated sigh, and pulled out his PDA and it's set of earphones, plugged the earphones onto the PDA, popped them into his ears, switched the PDA to MP3 mode, called up his playlist of fight songs, put the volume to maximum, and let Sammy Hagar's "winner takes it all", breath strength into his tortured brain and body.
Torbrigriago crawled from beneath the crumbled bricks and masonry, shook himself off, unfurled his wings, and exploded up into the sky with a flamed punctuated shriek of rage.
With his last ounce of strength, Jake exhaustedly bashed the last Gargoyle's head against the sidewalk, spilling it's brains, and then collapsed.
Torbrigriago caught sight of Jake amongst a splayed heap of corpses of Frankenstiens, Draculas, Martians, and Gargoyles.
He angled for the descent, and swooped in for the kill.
Jake's eyes fluttered open to see the dragon hurtling towards him.
He had nothing but a couple sparks of life left in him.
In one lame last pathetic effort, he imagined the hypercube, and just barely mentally folded it up about half way.
His eye fluttered open again, and then popped all the way open in shock.
The dragon just hung there, frozen in time.
Torbrigriago cleared the distance in seconds.
100 yards, 50 yards, 20 yards, and then at 10 yards away, Jake Prong vanished.
Torbrigriago's eyes bulged in shock, and he lost the split second he needed to pull up, thus crashing full speed into Macy's, tearing it open like a wet cardboard box.
After 5 minutes that felt like an hour, Torbrigriago managed to angrily wrestle free from the seemingly neverending avalanche of crumbling building materials, and back to the parking lot, only to see Jake Prong standing there calm and collected, with a superior smirk on his face, and holding a bottle of (obviously stolen) prescription pills in one hand, and a martian raygun in the other.
Torbrigriago huffed out a single methane laced laugh, and rumbled out in english "well played".
Jake deepened his smirk, bobbled his head, and said simply "I know".
Then, he fired.
Torbrigriago burnt away into a statue of charcoal like a cigarette being dragged on by a bellows.
"Well, there's that part done", grumbled Jake, who then proceeded to drink back another 5 Oxycontin, and then disappear.
Seconds later, he reappeared at the charred remains of the dimension reactor.
He emptied the last of the Oxy into his mouth, chewed it up, and gulped it down.
Then, he went into a very deep hypertrance, and saw all the time-slices of the dimension reactor at once, and honed in on the one that represented the moment of it's activation.
He then nudged his raygun wielding arm into the same timeframe, and fired.
Steve Torrent received a call saying that the dimensional device had mysteriously exploded, and that it would take several years to figure out what had happened.
Steve sighed.
"Oh well, screw it, scrap the project. I'll liquidate some assets to pay everyone's salary until they find a new job. The whole thing was a dumb idea anyway, there's got to be easier ways to be a pirate", he half grumbled half chuckled.
Then he hung up, and stared at the pirate hat sitting on his coffee table, and choked back some tears.
He gloomily decided to go out for a long drive.
Inevitably, he found himself in a donut shop.
Behind the counter were two scraggly looking gentlemen.
He looked at their nametags. The younger trainee was Phil, the older more haggared looking gentleman was called John.
Steve wasn't in the mood for anything fancy "you got any just plain?".
John frowned "just ran out, but if you want to wait, I can start up a batch".
"No thanks, I've..got to get to work", Steve mumbled, and with that, he left.
Steve drove along aimlessly for about an hour.
He was now in the country outskirts, well away from the awfulness of the city.
Just then, he saw something odd in the distance.
He slowed down to a rolling stop, and pulled up real close to make sure his eyes weren't deceiving him.
A girl was standing at attention on someone's lawn, calm as could be, and with a cardboard sign with "for sale", scrawled on it in black magic parker hanging around her neck by a length of clothesline. A small black suitcase hung from her left hand.
She was dressed in a maid outfit.
Not a "saucy", french maid outfit, a bit more conservative.
Her skin was as pale as a piece of computer hardware, and her hair was jet black, and came to a cheek length bob.
She reminded him of a young Kim Catrall.
His curiosity was piqued.
"So, why are you for sale?", he asked.
Sometime later, Lenny Sours pulled into a randomly chosen truckstop greasy spoon to use their bathroom while trying seemingly in vain to hold the rumbling gurgleing crap inside his lower intestine.
After just making it in time, and letting loose with a long satisfying water splashing 3 flusher of a crap, Lenny came out of the bathroom, and saw this interesting couple, and struck up a very interesting conversation with them.
Jake had been sitting at the center table of Chez Lebelle waiting for Lenny for over 45 minutes before he finally walked in.
And he had brought company with him!
"Sorry for the wait, traffic is a nightmare out there", Lenny said with an awkward grin.
"Funny, the roads were clear when I got here", Jake replied.
"Yeah, that is funny", he shrugged off in a way that Jake wasn't sure how to take.
Then Lenny introduced his new friends "this is Steve Torrent, and this is his lady friend Celine".
Jake gave them nods of acknowledgment while repeating their names in turn.
Just then, the waiter arrived.
He began to rattle off the specials, but 5 seconds in, Jake punched his lights out, and sent him spiraling over the table next to them.
Jake grinned innocently and asked "what?".
Soon, the food arrived, and this new guy Steve started prattling on about all these great adventures he supposedly had, while his girlfriend just sat there expressionless.
Just as Jake was about to ask her an inane question to politely pull her into the discussion, an orange flash of lighting lit the sky, and a huge black spaceship slid from behind the clouds.
Then, Lord Fulcrum appeared in a swirl of teleportation sparkles wielding a plasma rifle which he immediately turned on Steve, and fired, sending him hurtling back into the wall.
"Hands off my woman, Torrent!!", he barked in an almost drill sergeant tone.
Then, in the next second, Fulcrum fell dead from a well thrown fork to the eye, and into the brain.
Jake leaned over, and swiped himself a new fork from the next table which currently wasn't being used.
"Dammit, me and my friends are trying to have dinner over here", he muttered in casual irritation.
Steve got back into his seat, and dusted himself off.
"Good thing I wore my plasma proof girdle", he exclaimed without the least little hint of shame.
Celine just stared at Steve blankly.
Jake ate some bread.
Lenny shit himself.
Steve laughed.
Jake kept eating his bread.
Celine just kept staring.
THE END
Read More......
That's great.
The End.
The words scrolled on the screen of Jake Prong's PDA.
Angus Mcungus switched it off, and grimaced in thought.
"But how did he write the bloody thing if he was dying?", he asked his soldier, who was standing next to his desk at calm attention and holding the gore drenched scimitar that had supposedly done the deed.
He paused as if to answer Angus, and then instead quickly raised the scimitar high overhead, and simply grumbled "hol' real still", and brought it down full force on Angus's scalp, splitting his head down to the neck like a ripe muskmelon.
The scimitar wielding Scotsman then proceeded to peel his face away like a mask to reveal a bony countenance (soaked with blood from the Scotsman's stolen face) with an intense pale blue, almost white eyed stare.
It was Jake Prong.
"As if your damned monkeys could get a drop on me, you stupid Scot bastid", Jake chuckled grimly.
Then, he proceeded to strip off the kilt, and put on his pants, wich he had hidden as a balled up wad between his legs under the kilt.
That being done, he switched on his PDA, and activated the custom program that set off the detonators for the C4 he had the foresight to place in key spots in the dimension generator at work.
Not out of any heroic instinct mind you, just for something to do.
Meanwhile, at the instant of detonation, the wormhole above the ruins of Johnny's donut shop snapped shut right in front of the dragon's face.
Needless to say, it was disappointed.
Meanwhile, Jake read the headlines on the PDA Google news about the fight between the android maid and the purple robot, the burning donut shops, the vanishing of the bigshot drunkard CEO Steve Torrent, and the dragon now over the city.
Jake put two and three and five together, and whispered loudly to himself "I bet there's some money in this!".
Two minutes later, Jake Prong's car hurtled down the interstate.
The special ordered custum built blue Knight Rider whooshing thing oscillated at full speed, and in rhythm to "space age love song", by A Flock Of Seagulls which was blaring on the CD player.
It was underway.
Flames roared up into the heavens.
The city was engulfed in a roiling biblical inferno.
There were only a handful of survivors.
Sadly, time was short for most of them.
The last of the fire crews fought valiantly until the dragon plucked the fire truck from the ground like a child's toy, and dropped it from 100 feet, crushing many of the firefighters.
Those that survived were quickly rinsed away by a belch of flame hot enough to weld with.
This was the scene that Jake came apon when he made his way into the outskirts of the city.
The dragon saw him immediately.
Jake wrenched the the car off to the left to barely avoid a fireball.
This sent him careening helplessly into a postal box, and a couple newspaper machines; he accelerated to have the momentum to plow through them and grit his teeth with determination as the crashing pinballed him around inside the cabin.
He regained control, and got back on the main road, just in time for the dragon to spitefully hurl a human being at him.
He slammed on his brakes, and tried to screech to a halt before he hit the person, but it was too late, he had only managed to slow down to 44 miles an hour when he felt the thump, and heard an ugly crackling of bones.
The car finally stopped as the body rolled a few yards away from the momentum of the strike.
Jake got a heavy lump in his gut.
He hurled the door open, and his feet hit the ground running.
He came up on the destroyed ball of human, and the lump got heavier.
He could make out from the proportions that it was a man.
He was wearing a flannel shirt, jeans, and workboots.
And worse, a rattling blood choked cough revealed that he was still alive.
Jake rolled him over to see his face.
Bad mistake.
Doing so jostled around the compounded bits that remained of his ribs, and made him scream like a baby.
Jake gulped, and tried to think of something to say, but in those precious instants, the man softly wailed out a girl's name, gurgled up thick opaque blood, and passed away like a blown out candle.
If he had been counting, or had even been listening to himself, Jake would have noticed that from the time the man was thrown at him, until this present moment, he had uttered the word "shit", in machine gun succession approximately 240 times.
If he had known to listen for it, he might have heard over the din of the flames the soft plaintive sobbing of an android from the mini-mall parking lot.
In that next startling second, Jake instinctively leapt out of the way as the roof and windshield of his car exploded inward from another human body being hurled in his direction like a baseball by the dragon.
This one was in what Jake interpreted to be a Jack Sparrow outfit.
Then, when we walked up closer, and saw it was Steve Torrent!
Jake poked at him to wake him "Mr. Torrent? Mr. torrent?".
Steve's eyes fluttered open, and the left one rolled around a bit until they snapped back to normal.
His memory visually struggled a bit until he finally furrowed his brow in surprised recognition.
"Ah! Jake..Prung is it?".
Jake breathed a faint chuckle and said "Close enough. How are you? Can you move?".
Steve mentally scanned the pains or lack of them throughout his body, and then said "um no, I don't feel anything from the waist down, plus I'm quite sure I'm all busted water balloons inside. The pain is quite incredible. I'm at a loss to describe it. I haven't got long I'm afraid", Steve explained in a detached, almost apologetic tone.
Jake frowned with sad resolve and asked "is there anything I can do sir?".
Steve thought for a second "you got any booze? That might take the teeniest edge off the molten hot razors in my guts and spine..or at least make me not care so much".
Jake rustled around in his glove compartment, and found several little liquor bottles he had swiped from hotels for the past few months, and emptied all their contents into an empty orange Crush bottle in the back seat.
"Here you go Mr. Torrent", Jake said reassuringly.
But, it was already too late, in that short amount of time, Steve had already passed out from the pain, and was well on his way towards dying.
Jake assumed he was dead already; and he was, for all intents and purposes.
Especially when in the next second, a blue fireball hit the car roof first, smelting it down to the doors, and cremating Steve instantly.
Jake started to run for it across the parking lot, and missed being hit by a third and final body that hit where he had been standing 2 seconds previously.
Once he made it to the safety of an alleyway, he was able to look back, and see that the body was a donut shop employee who whammed head first into the macadam, busting his skull like a pumpkin, killing him instantly.
Jake would have given almost anything to be fighting the mayor's creepy son over a matter of vanishing hookers and runaways.
A job like that would be sweet compared to this apocalyptic Bosch painting.
Just then, a seemingly frivolous thought floated across his consciousness.
"I wonder if Chez Labelle is burning up in all this".
And then, some mental puzzle pieces began to click together in his memory.
He quickly pulled out his PDA, and reread his journal entry about Chez Labelle and Lenny.
And then it hit him!
A possible way out of this whole damned mess!
Jake checked to see if the coast was clear, and then started running in the direction of Chez Labelle.
Ugh, it made him sick to even think the name.
He heard a whoosh overhead, and then an ominous rumbling gurgle, and his stomach sank.
He turned around, and there was the dragon.
It stood there on it's hind legs, it's forelegs/arms crossed, and what looked like a human sneer on it's lips.
Jake looked around, and knew there was nowhere he could run fast enough to get away.
He'd either not escape the first fireball, or barely escape, only to be cut down by the second one.
And that's if it belched out fireballs, and didn't opt instead for a continuous stream.
Jake's heart, stomach, and balls sank into his feet.
The dragon's chest began to swell, and it's mouth opened.
Jake's mind raced for an alternate plan other than the one he was about to use, and came up empty.
He was just going to have to bite the bullet and do it.
His brow and jaw set with determination as he went into deep, deep, deep concentration, and entered the the mental trance the volcano guru had tought him.
He imagined a hypercube, and began to will it to fold up.
Right on cue, the migraine started.
Then, he raced through the hyperpyramid, the hyperrhombus, and the hyperdodecahedron in turn, and the nosebleed started.
Once his mind became acclimated to being pushed up into the upper dimensions, it became a simple matter to mentally break his own body down into hyperpolygons, and begin to nudge his physical form into the new hyperdimensions his mind was aligned to.
He opened his eyes, and immediately regretted it.
His retinas were finger banged by a swirling kaleidoscope of ultra-violet and x-ray colors as arranged by Picasso smoking Pollock as a big human joint.
Jake closed his eyes, stifled his gorge with incredible force of will, and began to slowly and carefully sidle 2 inches to the right.
The dragon's head struck like a snake, and vomited forth a 7 second long fire hydrant gushing of flame.
It missed Jake by a mile.
The dragon blinked with confusion to see Jake standing totally unscathed in the middle of the huge scorch mark on the macadam.
In the midst of this confusion, Jake pulled all his remaining strength into a ball, and threw it as a hyperpunch.
Passing along the 4th dimension, his arm easily cleared the yards between him and the dragon, and his fist overcame the laws of perspective and grew in proportion to the dragon's eyeline.
Thus, an outside observer would have seen Jake's arm stretch across the parking lot at near bullet speed, and his fist inflate to the size of a Volkswagen and punch the dragon across the street sending him crashing through the bank.
Fortunately, there were no outside observers to see this, otherwise the observation would have determined the outcome, and thus prevented it by pressing too much normal reality in on Jake.
As it was, Jake had to fight the urge to pass out once he fell out of his hypertrance.
The inside of his head felt like a group of alcohol soaked porcupines were having an orgy, and he was drenched in sweat, and splattered with nosebleed.
He'd felt better.
He also had a slight pang of shame that he didn't finish his training with the volcano guru.
As much as he wanted to go to the drug store and steal some prescriptions and pour them down his throat like movie candy, he reminded himself that he had to get to Chez Labelles.
He had to consciously command his limbs to move for the whole remaining quarter mile there.
After awhile, Jake started to feel his second wind coming, and began to pick up his pace for the last six car lengths of distance across the parking lot to Chez Labelle's.
But just then, the last thing he needed to see and hear happened.
A rambunctious hooting crowd of drunken Frankenstiens, Draculas, Martians, and Gargoyles came leaping, skipping, and flailing out of the Macy's to his right obstructing his path.
He could tell by the very vibe of them, that they were about to give him some shit.
Jake let out a deep exasperated sigh, and pulled out his PDA and it's set of earphones, plugged the earphones onto the PDA, popped them into his ears, switched the PDA to MP3 mode, called up his playlist of fight songs, put the volume to maximum, and let Sammy Hagar's "winner takes it all", breath strength into his tortured brain and body.
Torbrigriago crawled from beneath the crumbled bricks and masonry, shook himself off, unfurled his wings, and exploded up into the sky with a flamed punctuated shriek of rage.
With his last ounce of strength, Jake exhaustedly bashed the last Gargoyle's head against the sidewalk, spilling it's brains, and then collapsed.
Torbrigriago caught sight of Jake amongst a splayed heap of corpses of Frankenstiens, Draculas, Martians, and Gargoyles.
He angled for the descent, and swooped in for the kill.
Jake's eyes fluttered open to see the dragon hurtling towards him.
He had nothing but a couple sparks of life left in him.
In one lame last pathetic effort, he imagined the hypercube, and just barely mentally folded it up about half way.
His eye fluttered open again, and then popped all the way open in shock.
The dragon just hung there, frozen in time.
Torbrigriago cleared the distance in seconds.
100 yards, 50 yards, 20 yards, and then at 10 yards away, Jake Prong vanished.
Torbrigriago's eyes bulged in shock, and he lost the split second he needed to pull up, thus crashing full speed into Macy's, tearing it open like a wet cardboard box.
After 5 minutes that felt like an hour, Torbrigriago managed to angrily wrestle free from the seemingly neverending avalanche of crumbling building materials, and back to the parking lot, only to see Jake Prong standing there calm and collected, with a superior smirk on his face, and holding a bottle of (obviously stolen) prescription pills in one hand, and a martian raygun in the other.
Torbrigriago huffed out a single methane laced laugh, and rumbled out in english "well played".
Jake deepened his smirk, bobbled his head, and said simply "I know".
Then, he fired.
Torbrigriago burnt away into a statue of charcoal like a cigarette being dragged on by a bellows.
"Well, there's that part done", grumbled Jake, who then proceeded to drink back another 5 Oxycontin, and then disappear.
Seconds later, he reappeared at the charred remains of the dimension reactor.
He emptied the last of the Oxy into his mouth, chewed it up, and gulped it down.
Then, he went into a very deep hypertrance, and saw all the time-slices of the dimension reactor at once, and honed in on the one that represented the moment of it's activation.
He then nudged his raygun wielding arm into the same timeframe, and fired.
Steve Torrent received a call saying that the dimensional device had mysteriously exploded, and that it would take several years to figure out what had happened.
Steve sighed.
"Oh well, screw it, scrap the project. I'll liquidate some assets to pay everyone's salary until they find a new job. The whole thing was a dumb idea anyway, there's got to be easier ways to be a pirate", he half grumbled half chuckled.
Then he hung up, and stared at the pirate hat sitting on his coffee table, and choked back some tears.
He gloomily decided to go out for a long drive.
Inevitably, he found himself in a donut shop.
Behind the counter were two scraggly looking gentlemen.
He looked at their nametags. The younger trainee was Phil, the older more haggared looking gentleman was called John.
Steve wasn't in the mood for anything fancy "you got any just plain?".
John frowned "just ran out, but if you want to wait, I can start up a batch".
"No thanks, I've..got to get to work", Steve mumbled, and with that, he left.
Steve drove along aimlessly for about an hour.
He was now in the country outskirts, well away from the awfulness of the city.
Just then, he saw something odd in the distance.
He slowed down to a rolling stop, and pulled up real close to make sure his eyes weren't deceiving him.
A girl was standing at attention on someone's lawn, calm as could be, and with a cardboard sign with "for sale", scrawled on it in black magic parker hanging around her neck by a length of clothesline. A small black suitcase hung from her left hand.
She was dressed in a maid outfit.
Not a "saucy", french maid outfit, a bit more conservative.
Her skin was as pale as a piece of computer hardware, and her hair was jet black, and came to a cheek length bob.
She reminded him of a young Kim Catrall.
His curiosity was piqued.
"So, why are you for sale?", he asked.
Sometime later, Lenny Sours pulled into a randomly chosen truckstop greasy spoon to use their bathroom while trying seemingly in vain to hold the rumbling gurgleing crap inside his lower intestine.
After just making it in time, and letting loose with a long satisfying water splashing 3 flusher of a crap, Lenny came out of the bathroom, and saw this interesting couple, and struck up a very interesting conversation with them.
Jake had been sitting at the center table of Chez Lebelle waiting for Lenny for over 45 minutes before he finally walked in.
And he had brought company with him!
"Sorry for the wait, traffic is a nightmare out there", Lenny said with an awkward grin.
"Funny, the roads were clear when I got here", Jake replied.
"Yeah, that is funny", he shrugged off in a way that Jake wasn't sure how to take.
Then Lenny introduced his new friends "this is Steve Torrent, and this is his lady friend Celine".
Jake gave them nods of acknowledgment while repeating their names in turn.
Just then, the waiter arrived.
He began to rattle off the specials, but 5 seconds in, Jake punched his lights out, and sent him spiraling over the table next to them.
Jake grinned innocently and asked "what?".
Soon, the food arrived, and this new guy Steve started prattling on about all these great adventures he supposedly had, while his girlfriend just sat there expressionless.
Just as Jake was about to ask her an inane question to politely pull her into the discussion, an orange flash of lighting lit the sky, and a huge black spaceship slid from behind the clouds.
Then, Lord Fulcrum appeared in a swirl of teleportation sparkles wielding a plasma rifle which he immediately turned on Steve, and fired, sending him hurtling back into the wall.
"Hands off my woman, Torrent!!", he barked in an almost drill sergeant tone.
Then, in the next second, Fulcrum fell dead from a well thrown fork to the eye, and into the brain.
Jake leaned over, and swiped himself a new fork from the next table which currently wasn't being used.
"Dammit, me and my friends are trying to have dinner over here", he muttered in casual irritation.
Steve got back into his seat, and dusted himself off.
"Good thing I wore my plasma proof girdle", he exclaimed without the least little hint of shame.
Celine just stared at Steve blankly.
Jake ate some bread.
Lenny shit himself.
Steve laughed.
Jake kept eating his bread.
Celine just kept staring.
THE END
Read More......
An Evening With Mr. Ka-Ka Pants.
I had been sitting at the center table of Chez Lebelle waiting for Lenny for over 45 minutes before he finally walked in.
"Sorry for the wait, traffic is a nightmare out there", he said with an awkward grin.
"Funny, the roads were clear when I got here", I replied.
"Yeah, that is funny", he shrugged off in a way that I wasn't sure how to take.
Three seconds later, the smell hit my nostrils.
"Christ, what is that SMELL!?", I said, barely containing it as a whisper.
"Oh, that's me", said Lenny with a Cheshire cat grin "I've shit my pants".
Before I could respond, the waiter arrived.
He began to rattle off the specials, but 5 seconds in, the smell hit him.
His pale pointy Frenchman waiter face contorted in disgust, and then rage, then he hissed as if trying to crack a his voice like a sonic whip "you've sheet your pahnts!!".
Some people overheard and looked at us.
Needless to say, I was mortified.
Lenny kept right on grinning, almost defiantly.
3 hours later, we were back at Lenny's house.
Lenny's wife Maggie had him leaned against the bathroom sink, and was wearing dishwashing gloves as she cleaned him off with baby wipes, tears of humiliated rage trickling down her face.
A constant flow of obscenities was pouring out of her directed at both Lenny and I.
Lenny grinned and winked at me via the bathroom mirror.
Every few moments, she'd stop to simply scream in frustration.
Her face was red and swollen from the crying, making the effect all the more upsetting to me.
I was frozen in place by the awkwardness of the situation.
What do you DO when this happens?
Finally, I just decided to zone out, and flash back to how the rest of our dinner had gone.
And so the flashback began.
Yes, it was just 20 minutes after the waiter had arrived, and I was picking myself up from the pavement, and massaging my bruises from having been bodily hurled out of the place.
Why they had hurled me out first, I'll never know.
And why they had seemingly went out of their way to make sure when they hurled Lenny, that he landed on me, I can only guess at as well.
Needless to say, he got a wet stinky spot on my shirt from his ass, forcing me to throw it away in the nearest receptacle.
Goddamned Lenny.
Him and his pants shitting.
This wasn't the first time either.
And so the flashback within a flashback began.
Lenny and I were being chased out of the ninja rink by all the ninjas.
The Japanese apparently are more of a fastidious people than even I ever gave them credit for.
Ninjas even more so.
Because clearly, they weren't going to take Lenny's favorite little running joke for one instant.
I wished I could have understood some of that outraged chop-sockey talk they were hurling behind us along with the shuriken.
Might have made this flashback a little more interesting.
Plus I'd know how to swear in jap.
Ah well.
Anyhoo, ultimately Lenny wasn't the only one with soiled tighty-whiteys after that adventure.
But, Lenny's Lenny, hard as you try, you can't stay mad at the guy.
Ah, now where was I?
Ah, yes, the ninjas.
The ninjas? That happened two years ago.
What was my point in bringing that up?
Oh, right, that Lenny had gotten us in trouble with his pants crapping before.
Now, to get back to how he got us kicked out of the restaurant 3 hours previously.
Now THAT'S a story for the ages.
Lenny had proudly admitted to crapping his pants, the waiter had arrived, and Lenny was shrugging off his barrage of psychological daggers.
I broke it up by ordering my meal.
Scallops in Alfredo sauce over noodles.
Lenny ordered Venutian wafer cubes with dipping gel.
So, that out of the way, I finally found the opportunity to ask him why he had shit himself.
"Funniest thing", he said "had Venution last night, and the leftovers for breakfast, and the stuff seems to burrow right through me. Can't even hold it in. It just pours out of my ass before I can make it to a toilet".
I rolled my eyes and replied "gosh, that's the most interesting thing I've heard all day! What an invigorating life you must lead", I said, saturating my comments with goofy sarcasm to the overflow point.
"Well, you did ask", he chuckled.
"That I did", I sighed.
3 minutes later, in a desperate attempt to make conversation I quiped "y'know, I think I'm starting to get used to the smell".
"What smell?", Lenny said innocently.
We chuckled, and then things became awkward again.
So, the discussion floated around to rehashing the old days, as they usually do.
Mostly, we remembered the time where Lenny got the ninjas chasing after us.
You get chased around by ninjas, you talk about it forever.
I mean, come on, NINJAS.
Right around then, the meal came, and that's when things really became interesting.
The waiter brought our food with a clothespin on his nose.
Which I thought was a bit much.
I mean, yeah, Lenny stunk, but not THAT much.
The poo wasn't even fresh anymore.
Well up to that point.
See, Lenny immediately started tearing into his Venutian wafers, and within 10 minutes, I heard an ugly noise, and then a fresh dose of stench.
Why hadn't I payed attention to his order?
Why didn't I connect the dots with his story?
Why, god, why?
Just when I was about to say something, I heard the dreaded shriek of an infuriated jap!
It was the ninjas! They had found us at last!
There was the red one, and the green one, and the blue one, they all were there!
Even the pink one!
Rumor has it their colors indicate what sex acts they're into.
Y'now, like those bracelets the elementary school kids are into.
Which makes me think, what's red mean, he's into periods?
Agh, ugly thought, shrug it off.
Anyhoo, I bolted up from my seat, and did the first thing I could think of wich was to throw my plate of Alfredo scallops at them like a pie in a Stooges flick.
Coincidentally, the plate clanged the red one right in the head, and sent him reeling.
Christ, now I can't remember him without picturing him eating period.
I hate my fucking brain sometimes.
I then turned my head to shout at Lenny to get the hell out of there, but as I did, I heard the electrical buzz of a martian raygun warming up over my shoulder.
That's when things got really hairy.
Now, let me stop to explain a little something here.
When that raygun was pulled, I didn't fear for a moment, in fact, things suddenly made sense to me for the first time that day.
It's only in moments like that that things do make sense to me.
The world of sublimated desires, polite lies of omission, dressing up in yuppie suits, shaking hands with people you don't care to know, pretending to laugh at the boss's jokes, all that garbage doesn't make sense to me.
Never could tune my brainwaves into it.
But life or death struggle I understand.
That's a situation I can control on it's own terms with no false bullshit.
That's a situation that all the phony smiles and lies in the world can't muddle away with bureaucratic fudging.
That's a situation where you truly make things happen.
Where you're truly in control of your destiny.
The only time I feel truly alive.
And yes, at the risk of bragging, it's my one true talent.
Defending myself with lethal force that is.
Yes society may frown apon my possessing this skill, but why should I be ashamed?
In the times of the Roman empire, or of Ghengis Khan, I would have been a great soldier or assassin.
Why should it bother me that I don't conform to the pseudo-safe little world of unarmed little squishy pudgy Dilbert creatures?
That's the society they created, I have no use for it, as much as I have no place in it.
Wich might explain why my only human relationship is a semi-retarded maniac with bowel control problems.
But on that point, I digress.
Just ask yourself, what did the people with a natural aptitude for computer programming do before the computers were invented?
Now extend this forward, and ask yourself, what are the people with natural aptitudes for operating and fixing teleporters, or piloting starships doing now?
Probably being very unhappy.
Just like all those computer geeks born in the wild west.
And likewise, what are all the people with natural aptitudes for dumping boiling oil on invaders, or operating catapults doing today in this horrible dishonest obfuscative yuppie land?
Being as bored and unfullfilled with their existence as a computer geek filling laudanum prescriptions to V.D. ridden cowboys.
As bored and unfullfilled as a virtuoso of murder in a dead end cubicle monkey job.
Oh, and I am a virtuoso.
Mozart didn't have to bother with practicing scales and shit, he just sat down and played.
I don't have to practice at a range, or muck about with learning fencing, I just pick up a weapon and kill.
I take to it like a fish to water.
Or like the asshole drivers run right to the little red sedans at the car dealers.
And like those little red car driving pricks, I'm not ashamed a bit.
I refuse to be.
In a world that not only fails to punish, but actually rewards indolence and fatal incompetence, I quite simply refuse to be ashamed that I'm a natural killer.
I just thought I should explain all this, so that what I'm about to do in the next bit doesn't come as a shock.
Mmmkay?
Mmmkay.
Okay, so someone pulls a martian raygun on me.
Immediately, I grab my fork, instinctively calculate where my attacker's gun hand is, and from there extrapolate where his head is, then I throw my fork over my shoulder, right into his eyeball popping it like a zit, and making the yolk come all out.
This gives me the precious milliseconds I need to turn around, and grab his arm, and aim it at the ninjas just as he fires the gun on shocked pain reflex.
As the whole herd of multi-colored ninjas went up like ash snakes, the all too familiar smell of roasting japs filled the air.
Or was that Lenny's pants?
Hard telling.
Anyhow, it was just then when I finally noticed who the gun wielder was.
It was the waiter!
I should have known, there's almost always a frog at the bottom of these things.
If it's anything I hate more than roasted japs, it's sneaky frogs in the food service business.
Just when I was about to pull the fork out of his eye socket to start furiously stabbing him all over, I got hit in the back in the head with a blunt heavy object and blacked out.
Next thing I know, I'm landing on the pavement of the parking lot, and having Lenny thrown at me.
Safe to say we're both banned from Chez Labelle.
Stupid restraunt with a stupid name, I think I'll burn it down tomorrow.
Anyhoo, to top off the evening, Lenny's car had been stolen, so I had to drive his nasty ass home in my car.
Naturally, I made him sit on some newspapers.
And then we got stuck in a traffic jam for 2 and a half hours.
But, that story isn't was interesting as ninjas, raygun wielding waiters, and a guy who persists in eating food from Venus even though it doesn't agree with him, so I'll skip ahead back to the part where Lenny's wife is cleaning his ass and yelling at me.
So, there's Maggie sitting in the kitchen sobbing and drinking shots of scotch, and I have to stifle my human impulse to comfort her, cuz that's a slippery slope to adultery, and I just don't do that.
In the meantime, Lenny has gone into the den and is playing with his Tonka trucks or whatever the hell it is he does in there.
So, I try to at least awkwardly excuse myself, but my throat has dried shut, and I can't even croak, so I just run for the door, and get the hell out of there.
The traffic jam had broken up, so I made good time back home.
Back home to my nothing, and my nobody.
So, I try to will myself to sleep, hoping tomorow will be less disagreeable, but just as my eyelids start to droop, the phone rings and scares the shit out me.
I hate my phone's ring.
Damned thing always sounds so urgent, and then you find out every time it's a fuckin' telemarketer.
It's Maggie, and she's sobbing even harder than when I left her, and in between hysterics, I barely make out in bits and pieces something about Lenny being kidnapped by Scotsmen.
Then, my blood runs cold, and I remember the time after Lenny pissed off the ninjas, that he pissed off some Scotsmen.
Which is odd, considering what naturally filthy people they are.
One would think that pants pooping would be part of their usual routine from the smell of them.
And as I recall, I had frankly told them so.
Which didn't seem to help the situation.
I just don't understand people.
Their reactions have never made logical sense to me.
Anyhoo, I assure Maggie that I'll deal with the problem, and that Lenny would be safe at home before the night was through, even though I wasn't sure how to make good on that promise, and then to avoid the awkwardness of further human conversation, I immediately hang up.
Friggin Scotsmen.
It's always something.
And so that basically brings you all up to the present.
Now, I'm laying here slowly bleeding to death, and paralyzed from the waist down, impaled by a scimitar.
Damned Scotsmen.
I suppose you'd probably like me to describe the final fight with them, and whether or not Lenny made it.
....no, sorry, I'd like to, but there's not much time left for me.
Vision blurring, all tingly and light headed, y'know, the whole dying thing.
Use your imagination, you know how these grimly heroic suicide missions play out.
Matrix flips, bullet dodges, airborne karate kicks, y'know, all the trimmings.
And oh yeah, Lenny got away.
From the whiff of him, I could tell all the excitement had made him shit himself.
Man, that sly bugger, he's really got life all figured out.
We could all learn a thing or two from him.
Maybe it's the massive blood loss making me say that, but I hope not.
I hear that when you die, you shit yourself.
Heh, wouldn't that be fitting?
Ooooh, bright light.
Heh. Wow.
That's great.
The End.
Read More......
"Sorry for the wait, traffic is a nightmare out there", he said with an awkward grin.
"Funny, the roads were clear when I got here", I replied.
"Yeah, that is funny", he shrugged off in a way that I wasn't sure how to take.
Three seconds later, the smell hit my nostrils.
"Christ, what is that SMELL!?", I said, barely containing it as a whisper.
"Oh, that's me", said Lenny with a Cheshire cat grin "I've shit my pants".
Before I could respond, the waiter arrived.
He began to rattle off the specials, but 5 seconds in, the smell hit him.
His pale pointy Frenchman waiter face contorted in disgust, and then rage, then he hissed as if trying to crack a his voice like a sonic whip "you've sheet your pahnts!!".
Some people overheard and looked at us.
Needless to say, I was mortified.
Lenny kept right on grinning, almost defiantly.
3 hours later, we were back at Lenny's house.
Lenny's wife Maggie had him leaned against the bathroom sink, and was wearing dishwashing gloves as she cleaned him off with baby wipes, tears of humiliated rage trickling down her face.
A constant flow of obscenities was pouring out of her directed at both Lenny and I.
Lenny grinned and winked at me via the bathroom mirror.
Every few moments, she'd stop to simply scream in frustration.
Her face was red and swollen from the crying, making the effect all the more upsetting to me.
I was frozen in place by the awkwardness of the situation.
What do you DO when this happens?
Finally, I just decided to zone out, and flash back to how the rest of our dinner had gone.
And so the flashback began.
Yes, it was just 20 minutes after the waiter had arrived, and I was picking myself up from the pavement, and massaging my bruises from having been bodily hurled out of the place.
Why they had hurled me out first, I'll never know.
And why they had seemingly went out of their way to make sure when they hurled Lenny, that he landed on me, I can only guess at as well.
Needless to say, he got a wet stinky spot on my shirt from his ass, forcing me to throw it away in the nearest receptacle.
Goddamned Lenny.
Him and his pants shitting.
This wasn't the first time either.
And so the flashback within a flashback began.
Lenny and I were being chased out of the ninja rink by all the ninjas.
The Japanese apparently are more of a fastidious people than even I ever gave them credit for.
Ninjas even more so.
Because clearly, they weren't going to take Lenny's favorite little running joke for one instant.
I wished I could have understood some of that outraged chop-sockey talk they were hurling behind us along with the shuriken.
Might have made this flashback a little more interesting.
Plus I'd know how to swear in jap.
Ah well.
Anyhoo, ultimately Lenny wasn't the only one with soiled tighty-whiteys after that adventure.
But, Lenny's Lenny, hard as you try, you can't stay mad at the guy.
Ah, now where was I?
Ah, yes, the ninjas.
The ninjas? That happened two years ago.
What was my point in bringing that up?
Oh, right, that Lenny had gotten us in trouble with his pants crapping before.
Now, to get back to how he got us kicked out of the restaurant 3 hours previously.
Now THAT'S a story for the ages.
Lenny had proudly admitted to crapping his pants, the waiter had arrived, and Lenny was shrugging off his barrage of psychological daggers.
I broke it up by ordering my meal.
Scallops in Alfredo sauce over noodles.
Lenny ordered Venutian wafer cubes with dipping gel.
So, that out of the way, I finally found the opportunity to ask him why he had shit himself.
"Funniest thing", he said "had Venution last night, and the leftovers for breakfast, and the stuff seems to burrow right through me. Can't even hold it in. It just pours out of my ass before I can make it to a toilet".
I rolled my eyes and replied "gosh, that's the most interesting thing I've heard all day! What an invigorating life you must lead", I said, saturating my comments with goofy sarcasm to the overflow point.
"Well, you did ask", he chuckled.
"That I did", I sighed.
3 minutes later, in a desperate attempt to make conversation I quiped "y'know, I think I'm starting to get used to the smell".
"What smell?", Lenny said innocently.
We chuckled, and then things became awkward again.
So, the discussion floated around to rehashing the old days, as they usually do.
Mostly, we remembered the time where Lenny got the ninjas chasing after us.
You get chased around by ninjas, you talk about it forever.
I mean, come on, NINJAS.
Right around then, the meal came, and that's when things really became interesting.
The waiter brought our food with a clothespin on his nose.
Which I thought was a bit much.
I mean, yeah, Lenny stunk, but not THAT much.
The poo wasn't even fresh anymore.
Well up to that point.
See, Lenny immediately started tearing into his Venutian wafers, and within 10 minutes, I heard an ugly noise, and then a fresh dose of stench.
Why hadn't I payed attention to his order?
Why didn't I connect the dots with his story?
Why, god, why?
Just when I was about to say something, I heard the dreaded shriek of an infuriated jap!
It was the ninjas! They had found us at last!
There was the red one, and the green one, and the blue one, they all were there!
Even the pink one!
Rumor has it their colors indicate what sex acts they're into.
Y'now, like those bracelets the elementary school kids are into.
Which makes me think, what's red mean, he's into periods?
Agh, ugly thought, shrug it off.
Anyhoo, I bolted up from my seat, and did the first thing I could think of wich was to throw my plate of Alfredo scallops at them like a pie in a Stooges flick.
Coincidentally, the plate clanged the red one right in the head, and sent him reeling.
Christ, now I can't remember him without picturing him eating period.
I hate my fucking brain sometimes.
I then turned my head to shout at Lenny to get the hell out of there, but as I did, I heard the electrical buzz of a martian raygun warming up over my shoulder.
That's when things got really hairy.
Now, let me stop to explain a little something here.
When that raygun was pulled, I didn't fear for a moment, in fact, things suddenly made sense to me for the first time that day.
It's only in moments like that that things do make sense to me.
The world of sublimated desires, polite lies of omission, dressing up in yuppie suits, shaking hands with people you don't care to know, pretending to laugh at the boss's jokes, all that garbage doesn't make sense to me.
Never could tune my brainwaves into it.
But life or death struggle I understand.
That's a situation I can control on it's own terms with no false bullshit.
That's a situation that all the phony smiles and lies in the world can't muddle away with bureaucratic fudging.
That's a situation where you truly make things happen.
Where you're truly in control of your destiny.
The only time I feel truly alive.
And yes, at the risk of bragging, it's my one true talent.
Defending myself with lethal force that is.
Yes society may frown apon my possessing this skill, but why should I be ashamed?
In the times of the Roman empire, or of Ghengis Khan, I would have been a great soldier or assassin.
Why should it bother me that I don't conform to the pseudo-safe little world of unarmed little squishy pudgy Dilbert creatures?
That's the society they created, I have no use for it, as much as I have no place in it.
Wich might explain why my only human relationship is a semi-retarded maniac with bowel control problems.
But on that point, I digress.
Just ask yourself, what did the people with a natural aptitude for computer programming do before the computers were invented?
Now extend this forward, and ask yourself, what are the people with natural aptitudes for operating and fixing teleporters, or piloting starships doing now?
Probably being very unhappy.
Just like all those computer geeks born in the wild west.
And likewise, what are all the people with natural aptitudes for dumping boiling oil on invaders, or operating catapults doing today in this horrible dishonest obfuscative yuppie land?
Being as bored and unfullfilled with their existence as a computer geek filling laudanum prescriptions to V.D. ridden cowboys.
As bored and unfullfilled as a virtuoso of murder in a dead end cubicle monkey job.
Oh, and I am a virtuoso.
Mozart didn't have to bother with practicing scales and shit, he just sat down and played.
I don't have to practice at a range, or muck about with learning fencing, I just pick up a weapon and kill.
I take to it like a fish to water.
Or like the asshole drivers run right to the little red sedans at the car dealers.
And like those little red car driving pricks, I'm not ashamed a bit.
I refuse to be.
In a world that not only fails to punish, but actually rewards indolence and fatal incompetence, I quite simply refuse to be ashamed that I'm a natural killer.
I just thought I should explain all this, so that what I'm about to do in the next bit doesn't come as a shock.
Mmmkay?
Mmmkay.
Okay, so someone pulls a martian raygun on me.
Immediately, I grab my fork, instinctively calculate where my attacker's gun hand is, and from there extrapolate where his head is, then I throw my fork over my shoulder, right into his eyeball popping it like a zit, and making the yolk come all out.
This gives me the precious milliseconds I need to turn around, and grab his arm, and aim it at the ninjas just as he fires the gun on shocked pain reflex.
As the whole herd of multi-colored ninjas went up like ash snakes, the all too familiar smell of roasting japs filled the air.
Or was that Lenny's pants?
Hard telling.
Anyhow, it was just then when I finally noticed who the gun wielder was.
It was the waiter!
I should have known, there's almost always a frog at the bottom of these things.
If it's anything I hate more than roasted japs, it's sneaky frogs in the food service business.
Just when I was about to pull the fork out of his eye socket to start furiously stabbing him all over, I got hit in the back in the head with a blunt heavy object and blacked out.
Next thing I know, I'm landing on the pavement of the parking lot, and having Lenny thrown at me.
Safe to say we're both banned from Chez Labelle.
Stupid restraunt with a stupid name, I think I'll burn it down tomorrow.
Anyhoo, to top off the evening, Lenny's car had been stolen, so I had to drive his nasty ass home in my car.
Naturally, I made him sit on some newspapers.
And then we got stuck in a traffic jam for 2 and a half hours.
But, that story isn't was interesting as ninjas, raygun wielding waiters, and a guy who persists in eating food from Venus even though it doesn't agree with him, so I'll skip ahead back to the part where Lenny's wife is cleaning his ass and yelling at me.
So, there's Maggie sitting in the kitchen sobbing and drinking shots of scotch, and I have to stifle my human impulse to comfort her, cuz that's a slippery slope to adultery, and I just don't do that.
In the meantime, Lenny has gone into the den and is playing with his Tonka trucks or whatever the hell it is he does in there.
So, I try to at least awkwardly excuse myself, but my throat has dried shut, and I can't even croak, so I just run for the door, and get the hell out of there.
The traffic jam had broken up, so I made good time back home.
Back home to my nothing, and my nobody.
So, I try to will myself to sleep, hoping tomorow will be less disagreeable, but just as my eyelids start to droop, the phone rings and scares the shit out me.
I hate my phone's ring.
Damned thing always sounds so urgent, and then you find out every time it's a fuckin' telemarketer.
It's Maggie, and she's sobbing even harder than when I left her, and in between hysterics, I barely make out in bits and pieces something about Lenny being kidnapped by Scotsmen.
Then, my blood runs cold, and I remember the time after Lenny pissed off the ninjas, that he pissed off some Scotsmen.
Which is odd, considering what naturally filthy people they are.
One would think that pants pooping would be part of their usual routine from the smell of them.
And as I recall, I had frankly told them so.
Which didn't seem to help the situation.
I just don't understand people.
Their reactions have never made logical sense to me.
Anyhoo, I assure Maggie that I'll deal with the problem, and that Lenny would be safe at home before the night was through, even though I wasn't sure how to make good on that promise, and then to avoid the awkwardness of further human conversation, I immediately hang up.
Friggin Scotsmen.
It's always something.
And so that basically brings you all up to the present.
Now, I'm laying here slowly bleeding to death, and paralyzed from the waist down, impaled by a scimitar.
Damned Scotsmen.
I suppose you'd probably like me to describe the final fight with them, and whether or not Lenny made it.
....no, sorry, I'd like to, but there's not much time left for me.
Vision blurring, all tingly and light headed, y'know, the whole dying thing.
Use your imagination, you know how these grimly heroic suicide missions play out.
Matrix flips, bullet dodges, airborne karate kicks, y'know, all the trimmings.
And oh yeah, Lenny got away.
From the whiff of him, I could tell all the excitement had made him shit himself.
Man, that sly bugger, he's really got life all figured out.
We could all learn a thing or two from him.
Maybe it's the massive blood loss making me say that, but I hope not.
I hear that when you die, you shit yourself.
Heh, wouldn't that be fitting?
Ooooh, bright light.
Heh. Wow.
That's great.
The End.
Read More......
Bride of Ka-Ka Pants.
Sweet Jesus, don't I hate weddings.
Especially Catholic ones.
Awful, just fucking awful.
Worst thing you can ever subject yourself to.
Long stretches of boring, followed by some sappy shmaltz, and then it's time for the electric slide.
Lenny's wedding was no different.
Well, except that he decided to liven things up in his own interminable style.
You guessed it, at the very end of the ceremony, Lenny shamelessly, deliberately, and noisily shit his pants.
Needless to say, his lovely bride, Maggie, was not pleased.
Oh well, tough nuts for her, she picked him.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves here, that's how the story ends.
This is how it all began....
It was 2 years ago, and Lenny and I were driving towards the graveyard with a trunk full of fireworks to throw at the new crop of zombies.
The blue Knight Rider swooshing light on the front of the car was going full speed, Lenny was sitting on newspaper, the windows were cracked wide open to let out the smell, and some Wang-Chung was blaring on the stereo
Sure, life had fallen into a routine, but it was pleasant enough.
It's cliche, but we didn't know how good we had it, or how free we were.
Ah, youth.
So anyway, we stop at Labonzas, the convenience store down the hill from the cemetary to get some beer and snacks.
Convenience stores are holy shrines for me.
Freaky candies you thought they stopped making, like the Willy Wonka Scrunch bar, locally made fudge and shrink wrapped pickled sausages lovingly labeled with logos made in MSPaint, and best of all the comics rack.
I deliberately factor in 20 minutes pissing away time on zombie night for perusing the comics rack.
The comics rack at Labonzas is simply magical.
The Needful Things of comics, except without the Faustian deals.
See, they don't just carry the new stuff, but they unload the old comics from their dead kid's vast collection, and sell it all for peanuts.
Yellowed copies of Dial "H' for Hero, House Of Mystery, Tales From The Crypt, 50's MAD, Weird War, y'know, the good shit.
They pile up as much as will fit on that spindly little rack, and I buy it up as fast as they can unload it.
I know what you're thinking, why be fascinated with old horror comics when I blow up zombies in real life?
Well, the sad fact is that real zombies aren't as good as in comics.
They're just...well, sad.
People's grandparents and shit...and they're all messed up and don't move so good..you get the idea. Pretty grim. Not scary at all.
But, they blow up good.
Especially with the M-80's.
Anyhoo, I'm being the definition of the savvy shopper, trying to juggle how many cans of beer I want to compromise for how many House Of Mystery, and visa versa, when I hear this chick laughing.
I don't remember the Labonzas having a daughter, nor do I remember them hiring on a new girl, so I turn and look, and yes indeed there is a girl at the counter, and she's chatting it up with Lenny and laughing at his jokes.
A girl!
Laughing!
At Lenny's jokes!
Lenny's awful anti-Semitic mongoloid jokes!
While he's got shitty pants!
"Dear DC Comics, have I got a plotline for you...", forms in my thought bubble as I put back all the comics, and get a whole case of Coors instead.
15 minutes later, I'm sitting in my folding lawn chair at the graveyard, beer in the cooler, waiting for the sun to set, and totally unenthused about tonight's zombie blasting, because Lenny has brought his woman along, and she absolutely will not shut up about her fucking time at college.
Which reminds me why I prefer whores.
Thank god for the beers.
Shame I didn't buy any comics though, the zombie crop was pretty slim.
A couple car accident kids, and an executed serial killer.
A fat slow one.
Anyhoo, long story short, zombie nights quickly ended, Lenny and I drifted apart, and I became a bitter scarred hitman for something to do.
Which brings us up to the wedding.
Punches were thrown by the father of the bride, women cried, some fat stupid uncle who saw fit to include himself in the fray fell on the cake, and I sat back and read my comics.
I remembered 'em this time.
Which Is why I mentioned 'em earlier.
Foreshadowing y'see.
Good stuff eh?
Oh, and then the ninjas showed up.
Sweet Jesus, don't I hate weddings.
Especially Catholic ones.
Awful, just fucking awful.
Worst thing you can ever subject yourself to.
Long stretches of boring, followed by some sappy shmaltz, and then it's time for the electric slide.
And then the ninjas show up.
Well, you've no doubt been to a wedding, so you know how the rest goes, no need to bore you with the details.
Anyhoo, that was months ago.
After a protracted honeymoon and settling in period, Lenny finally finagled a guy's night out.
He insisted it be at that new snooty French/Venutian place in town.
Chez Labelles.
Gah, sounds like it'll be awful.
THE END
Read More......
Especially Catholic ones.
Awful, just fucking awful.
Worst thing you can ever subject yourself to.
Long stretches of boring, followed by some sappy shmaltz, and then it's time for the electric slide.
Lenny's wedding was no different.
Well, except that he decided to liven things up in his own interminable style.
You guessed it, at the very end of the ceremony, Lenny shamelessly, deliberately, and noisily shit his pants.
Needless to say, his lovely bride, Maggie, was not pleased.
Oh well, tough nuts for her, she picked him.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves here, that's how the story ends.
This is how it all began....
It was 2 years ago, and Lenny and I were driving towards the graveyard with a trunk full of fireworks to throw at the new crop of zombies.
The blue Knight Rider swooshing light on the front of the car was going full speed, Lenny was sitting on newspaper, the windows were cracked wide open to let out the smell, and some Wang-Chung was blaring on the stereo
Sure, life had fallen into a routine, but it was pleasant enough.
It's cliche, but we didn't know how good we had it, or how free we were.
Ah, youth.
So anyway, we stop at Labonzas, the convenience store down the hill from the cemetary to get some beer and snacks.
Convenience stores are holy shrines for me.
Freaky candies you thought they stopped making, like the Willy Wonka Scrunch bar, locally made fudge and shrink wrapped pickled sausages lovingly labeled with logos made in MSPaint, and best of all the comics rack.
I deliberately factor in 20 minutes pissing away time on zombie night for perusing the comics rack.
The comics rack at Labonzas is simply magical.
The Needful Things of comics, except without the Faustian deals.
See, they don't just carry the new stuff, but they unload the old comics from their dead kid's vast collection, and sell it all for peanuts.
Yellowed copies of Dial "H' for Hero, House Of Mystery, Tales From The Crypt, 50's MAD, Weird War, y'know, the good shit.
They pile up as much as will fit on that spindly little rack, and I buy it up as fast as they can unload it.
I know what you're thinking, why be fascinated with old horror comics when I blow up zombies in real life?
Well, the sad fact is that real zombies aren't as good as in comics.
They're just...well, sad.
People's grandparents and shit...and they're all messed up and don't move so good..you get the idea. Pretty grim. Not scary at all.
But, they blow up good.
Especially with the M-80's.
Anyhoo, I'm being the definition of the savvy shopper, trying to juggle how many cans of beer I want to compromise for how many House Of Mystery, and visa versa, when I hear this chick laughing.
I don't remember the Labonzas having a daughter, nor do I remember them hiring on a new girl, so I turn and look, and yes indeed there is a girl at the counter, and she's chatting it up with Lenny and laughing at his jokes.
A girl!
Laughing!
At Lenny's jokes!
Lenny's awful anti-Semitic mongoloid jokes!
While he's got shitty pants!
"Dear DC Comics, have I got a plotline for you...", forms in my thought bubble as I put back all the comics, and get a whole case of Coors instead.
15 minutes later, I'm sitting in my folding lawn chair at the graveyard, beer in the cooler, waiting for the sun to set, and totally unenthused about tonight's zombie blasting, because Lenny has brought his woman along, and she absolutely will not shut up about her fucking time at college.
Which reminds me why I prefer whores.
Thank god for the beers.
Shame I didn't buy any comics though, the zombie crop was pretty slim.
A couple car accident kids, and an executed serial killer.
A fat slow one.
Anyhoo, long story short, zombie nights quickly ended, Lenny and I drifted apart, and I became a bitter scarred hitman for something to do.
Which brings us up to the wedding.
Punches were thrown by the father of the bride, women cried, some fat stupid uncle who saw fit to include himself in the fray fell on the cake, and I sat back and read my comics.
I remembered 'em this time.
Which Is why I mentioned 'em earlier.
Foreshadowing y'see.
Good stuff eh?
Oh, and then the ninjas showed up.
Sweet Jesus, don't I hate weddings.
Especially Catholic ones.
Awful, just fucking awful.
Worst thing you can ever subject yourself to.
Long stretches of boring, followed by some sappy shmaltz, and then it's time for the electric slide.
And then the ninjas show up.
Well, you've no doubt been to a wedding, so you know how the rest goes, no need to bore you with the details.
Anyhoo, that was months ago.
After a protracted honeymoon and settling in period, Lenny finally finagled a guy's night out.
He insisted it be at that new snooty French/Venutian place in town.
Chez Labelles.
Gah, sounds like it'll be awful.
THE END
Read More......
Friday, January 9, 2009
FU2: Mommy, may I diddle danger?
Johnny had been hanging into the back ridges of this occursed flying dragon with a death grip for what seemed like hours now.
Just at that moment he saw....
....a man in what appeared to be a Captain Hook costume falling from the sky. Keith heard a noise, and turned his head to see about a hundred yards away from the falling guy, what appeared to be....
....a red dragon like on a Chinese restaurant menu swooping towards him. Steve froze for a second, and then took to laughing again. He heard an exclamation below, and looked down to see....
...a man in a flannel shirt, jeans and workboots holding what appeared to be a mannequin head. The dragon snatched the laughing man in the pirate suit out of the air, and then turned and swooped towards the flannel shirt guy. Johnny hung on tighter to fight the surge of thrust.
Meanwhile, Lenny Sours was stuck in the traffic jam that had formed around the smashed purple robot, trying in vain to hold the rumbling gurgleing crap inside his lower intestine.
Meanwhile, Keith watched in horror as the dragon snatched the man in the pirate suit out of the air, and then turn to head straight for them.
Meanwhile, Jake Prong crunched on his ice, and decided to give Lenny 5 more minutes.
Meanwhile, Steve and Johnny watched helplessly as the dragon snatched the man holding the android head off the ground, and then swoop back up, turn back towards Johnny's burning donut shop that was a speck off in the distance, and about three hours dragon flight away.
Meanwhile, the wrecker had finally cleared the robot and decapitated android maid from the road, and started letting traffic through.
Meanwhile, the Green Mamba, having continued it's straight line descent into the sky had left the planet, and pierced the sun's corona, and without it's telefractal shields activated, it went up like a piece of flash paper.
Meanwhile, Lenny Sours pulled up to Chez Labelle.
Read More......
Just at that moment he saw....
....a man in what appeared to be a Captain Hook costume falling from the sky. Keith heard a noise, and turned his head to see about a hundred yards away from the falling guy, what appeared to be....
....a red dragon like on a Chinese restaurant menu swooping towards him. Steve froze for a second, and then took to laughing again. He heard an exclamation below, and looked down to see....
...a man in a flannel shirt, jeans and workboots holding what appeared to be a mannequin head. The dragon snatched the laughing man in the pirate suit out of the air, and then turned and swooped towards the flannel shirt guy. Johnny hung on tighter to fight the surge of thrust.
Meanwhile, Lenny Sours was stuck in the traffic jam that had formed around the smashed purple robot, trying in vain to hold the rumbling gurgleing crap inside his lower intestine.
Meanwhile, Keith watched in horror as the dragon snatched the man in the pirate suit out of the air, and then turn to head straight for them.
Meanwhile, Jake Prong crunched on his ice, and decided to give Lenny 5 more minutes.
Meanwhile, Steve and Johnny watched helplessly as the dragon snatched the man holding the android head off the ground, and then swoop back up, turn back towards Johnny's burning donut shop that was a speck off in the distance, and about three hours dragon flight away.
Meanwhile, the wrecker had finally cleared the robot and decapitated android maid from the road, and started letting traffic through.
Meanwhile, the Green Mamba, having continued it's straight line descent into the sky had left the planet, and pierced the sun's corona, and without it's telefractal shields activated, it went up like a piece of flash paper.
Meanwhile, Lenny Sours pulled up to Chez Labelle.
Read More......
Johnny's War.
Just after the current batch of customers cleared out, and just before the next batch waddled in, Johnny took time to plunk a fresh batch of plain donuts into the hot oil.
Then, with a motion of his finger and a nod, he took Phil aside in confidence, and said "look, I know you're an idealistic kid, and this is gonna sting a bit, which is all the more reason to get this over with, and shatter your illusions before you get tackled even harder by reality. Donuts are WAR, kid. You think I'm crazy now, but you'll see. Donuts are WAR".
Just then, he clammed up, as the customers were coming through the door.
Johnny stared with a fierce intensity and mumbled under his breath so the patrons couldn't hear so well "you remember what I said, kid. Now go refill the coffee machine".
Phil put himself on autopilot for the rest of his shift, his body robotically performing it's assigned thankless menial chores, his mind inexorably fixated on Johnny's words.
"Donuts are war? How the fuck are donuts war? Is he saying weird stupid shit to yank my chain, or is he just fucking crazy? Jesus, Christ, I've got to get out of this fucking town", Phil thought to himself in a repeating mobius strip.
Nothing would shake it loose either.
Injecting jelly filling into donuts wouldn't distract his mind from it, having a smoke in the parking lot didn't sooth the quake in his nerves, and yanking his crank in the men's room only made the chill in his spine ease for a few fleeting moments.
The deep hidden horror of those words set a pall over his soul.
Was there no relief?
Many were the times he considered simply asking Johnny what the fuck he was talking about, but the prospect of it all being just a lame chain yank, and thus by asking, eliciting a cruel chuckle and a "it doesn't mean anything STUPID", didn't really appeal to him.
But, Phil realized, his options were quickly running out.
Sooner or later, he was just going to have to ask.
But the longer he delayed this, the more elaborate the means of comfortably broaching the subject became.
Phil realized one thing, Johnny was a genius.
Either deliberately, or by an accidental idiot savant type of deal, he had with three strange words put his mind into an intractable emotional and social trap.
Genius.
Pure evil genius.
Phil's simultaneous hatred of, and respect for Johnny were awesome.
Finally, around closing time, Phil choked back tears of humiliation, and cleared his nervously tightening throat to ask Johnny what he fuck "donuts are war", meant.
But before he could croak it it out, a giant insect mandible smashed through the roof of the place spraying plaster shards and dust all over the place.
Phil made a mental note that the dust was getting all over the sticky donuts, and that there was no way to pick it all off, they'd simply have to be thrown out.
"What a waste. Poor donuts. They didn't ask for this", Phil mumbled gravely.
"Ain't NOTHING easy about being a donut, kid!", replied Johnny with grim resolve.
Then, the mandible made a second strike, and drove an even deeper hole into the roof.
This time, wood and masonry crumbled through.
Fixated on the ceiling, Phil became faintly and disconnectedly aware that Johnny had started screaming something at him, and had handed him a shotgun.
What happened next made his previous inner turmoil look even more ridiculous than it already was.
Two hours later, Phil and Johnny had killed the giant ant, finished dismembering it's corpse, wrapping it's limbs and body segments up in black trash bags, and stuffing them into the dumpster out back.
Johnny then leaned up against the wall of the store, wiped green insect goo off his hands onto his jeans, and lit up a cigarette.
"So, you're probably wondering what that was all about, eh kid?", Johnny asked with a trace of gruff irony in his voice.
Phil nodded his head silently, still half in shock.
"Well, over the years, I've toyed with a few theories. Best one I can come up with, is that reality has like, leaky spots in places, that allow all the Frankensteins, and Draculas, and Martians, and Gargoyles to slip into this world from the world of our collective daydreams right? And for some weird complicated reason I can't figure out, all these leaky spots have donut shops, pizza joints, and chinkfood places built on top of 'em. And see, it's up to us chosen fast food types to take care of these critters at night. Trouble is, the leaks seem to be growing, thus letting bigger things through. Like f'rinstance these giant ants. That's a new one on me".
Phil once again simply nodded.
"So, if the challenges are gonna keep getting bigger, I'm gonna need a partner to help run the place. 'Specially the night shift. So, you know the whole score now, kid. You in, or you out?".
Strangely, the answer came to Phil's lips instantly "I'm in! I've never felt so alive!".
Johnny grinned and nodded "Knew you would kid, knew you would. I can see it in people's eyes if they're the type".
Then, Johnny's expression became grave "if the Devil or whoever is sending giant ants this time, next time he might send giant spiders, or birds, or maybe even fuggin' Godzilla. We might have to call on the pizza boys, or the chinks to help someday".
"Let's hope that day is far off, sir", Phil said.
Johnny flicked his cigarette butt away, and stomped it "I hope the christ too, kid".
Then Phil asked "gee, you think all the screaming, and shooting will make the cops show up?".
Johnny raised and eyebrow and chuckled "y'know, it's weird they never come, Whether it's due to the curse, or this shitty town, I don't know. Don't much care either".
Then, they stepped back inside, and started the long cleanup.
It was sunrise before the place was fairly presentable.
When Phil woke up in the afternoon, and turned on the news, what he saw gave him a start.
The donut place had burnt down.
As had a string of other donut places, and a Chinese food restaurant.
The police were theorizing arson, or terrorists, but Phil new.
It had been goblins or a dragon or.....something.
Then, another shocker, Johnny had turned up missing.
Oh, of course they used his real name, but Phil could only ever imagine him as Johnny.
Johnny on the spot.
And deep down, Phil new he couldn't be dead.
No, he had to be alive somewhere, possibly in whatever realm the dragon or whatever had come from.
But, he knew it wasn't for him to resolve.
It wasn't his war.
It was Johnny's war.
Just then, he knew exactly what "donuts are war, kid", meant.
And he wept.
THE END
Read More......
Then, with a motion of his finger and a nod, he took Phil aside in confidence, and said "look, I know you're an idealistic kid, and this is gonna sting a bit, which is all the more reason to get this over with, and shatter your illusions before you get tackled even harder by reality. Donuts are WAR, kid. You think I'm crazy now, but you'll see. Donuts are WAR".
Just then, he clammed up, as the customers were coming through the door.
Johnny stared with a fierce intensity and mumbled under his breath so the patrons couldn't hear so well "you remember what I said, kid. Now go refill the coffee machine".
Phil put himself on autopilot for the rest of his shift, his body robotically performing it's assigned thankless menial chores, his mind inexorably fixated on Johnny's words.
"Donuts are war? How the fuck are donuts war? Is he saying weird stupid shit to yank my chain, or is he just fucking crazy? Jesus, Christ, I've got to get out of this fucking town", Phil thought to himself in a repeating mobius strip.
Nothing would shake it loose either.
Injecting jelly filling into donuts wouldn't distract his mind from it, having a smoke in the parking lot didn't sooth the quake in his nerves, and yanking his crank in the men's room only made the chill in his spine ease for a few fleeting moments.
The deep hidden horror of those words set a pall over his soul.
Was there no relief?
Many were the times he considered simply asking Johnny what the fuck he was talking about, but the prospect of it all being just a lame chain yank, and thus by asking, eliciting a cruel chuckle and a "it doesn't mean anything STUPID", didn't really appeal to him.
But, Phil realized, his options were quickly running out.
Sooner or later, he was just going to have to ask.
But the longer he delayed this, the more elaborate the means of comfortably broaching the subject became.
Phil realized one thing, Johnny was a genius.
Either deliberately, or by an accidental idiot savant type of deal, he had with three strange words put his mind into an intractable emotional and social trap.
Genius.
Pure evil genius.
Phil's simultaneous hatred of, and respect for Johnny were awesome.
Finally, around closing time, Phil choked back tears of humiliation, and cleared his nervously tightening throat to ask Johnny what he fuck "donuts are war", meant.
But before he could croak it it out, a giant insect mandible smashed through the roof of the place spraying plaster shards and dust all over the place.
Phil made a mental note that the dust was getting all over the sticky donuts, and that there was no way to pick it all off, they'd simply have to be thrown out.
"What a waste. Poor donuts. They didn't ask for this", Phil mumbled gravely.
"Ain't NOTHING easy about being a donut, kid!", replied Johnny with grim resolve.
Then, the mandible made a second strike, and drove an even deeper hole into the roof.
This time, wood and masonry crumbled through.
Fixated on the ceiling, Phil became faintly and disconnectedly aware that Johnny had started screaming something at him, and had handed him a shotgun.
What happened next made his previous inner turmoil look even more ridiculous than it already was.
Two hours later, Phil and Johnny had killed the giant ant, finished dismembering it's corpse, wrapping it's limbs and body segments up in black trash bags, and stuffing them into the dumpster out back.
Johnny then leaned up against the wall of the store, wiped green insect goo off his hands onto his jeans, and lit up a cigarette.
"So, you're probably wondering what that was all about, eh kid?", Johnny asked with a trace of gruff irony in his voice.
Phil nodded his head silently, still half in shock.
"Well, over the years, I've toyed with a few theories. Best one I can come up with, is that reality has like, leaky spots in places, that allow all the Frankensteins, and Draculas, and Martians, and Gargoyles to slip into this world from the world of our collective daydreams right? And for some weird complicated reason I can't figure out, all these leaky spots have donut shops, pizza joints, and chinkfood places built on top of 'em. And see, it's up to us chosen fast food types to take care of these critters at night. Trouble is, the leaks seem to be growing, thus letting bigger things through. Like f'rinstance these giant ants. That's a new one on me".
Phil once again simply nodded.
"So, if the challenges are gonna keep getting bigger, I'm gonna need a partner to help run the place. 'Specially the night shift. So, you know the whole score now, kid. You in, or you out?".
Strangely, the answer came to Phil's lips instantly "I'm in! I've never felt so alive!".
Johnny grinned and nodded "Knew you would kid, knew you would. I can see it in people's eyes if they're the type".
Then, Johnny's expression became grave "if the Devil or whoever is sending giant ants this time, next time he might send giant spiders, or birds, or maybe even fuggin' Godzilla. We might have to call on the pizza boys, or the chinks to help someday".
"Let's hope that day is far off, sir", Phil said.
Johnny flicked his cigarette butt away, and stomped it "I hope the christ too, kid".
Then Phil asked "gee, you think all the screaming, and shooting will make the cops show up?".
Johnny raised and eyebrow and chuckled "y'know, it's weird they never come, Whether it's due to the curse, or this shitty town, I don't know. Don't much care either".
Then, they stepped back inside, and started the long cleanup.
It was sunrise before the place was fairly presentable.
When Phil woke up in the afternoon, and turned on the news, what he saw gave him a start.
The donut place had burnt down.
As had a string of other donut places, and a Chinese food restaurant.
The police were theorizing arson, or terrorists, but Phil new.
It had been goblins or a dragon or.....something.
Then, another shocker, Johnny had turned up missing.
Oh, of course they used his real name, but Phil could only ever imagine him as Johnny.
Johnny on the spot.
And deep down, Phil new he couldn't be dead.
No, he had to be alive somewhere, possibly in whatever realm the dragon or whatever had come from.
But, he knew it wasn't for him to resolve.
It wasn't his war.
It was Johnny's war.
Just then, he knew exactly what "donuts are war, kid", meant.
And he wept.
THE END
Read More......
The Fulcrum Unification.
Lord Fulcrum crawled back to his feet, dusted himself off, and reoriented himself by taking note of his surroundings.
Inexplicably, he found himself in a donut shop.
Behind the counter were two scraggly looking gentlemen.
He looked at their nametags. The younger trainee was Phil, the older more haggered looking gentleman was called John.
"Not from around here, are you, mister?", the one called John asked suspiciously.
"Er, where is HERE exactly?", inquired Fulcrum cautiously.
John pulled out a crucifix "here, grab onto this", he more than suggested.
"Sure", Fulcrum complied, not seeing the harm.
And indeed there wasn't.
Afterward, John looked at the cross, and then Fulcrum's hand, seemingly shocked. "Oh. I guess I was wrong. Nevermind. So, you want to order something?".
Fulcrum wasn't in the mood for anything fancy "you got any just plain?".
John frowned "just ran out, but if you want to wait, I can start up a batch".
"No thanks, I've..got to get to work", Fulcrum mumbled; and with that, Fulcrum left.
Part two- Girl in trouble (is a temporary thing)
Fulcrum drove along aimlessly in the car that he had boosted some hours ago.
He was now in the country outskirts, well away from the awfulness of the city.
His mind swarmed with questions.
Where was this?
What sort of dimensional gateway had pulled him here, and who/what had created it?
What did it have to do with the donut shop?
Why had traveling through it erased his super powers, and changed his face from Chris Sarandon, to a young Chevy Chase?
The peacefulness of the country, and the fresh air blowing through the window had cleared his head some, and given him back his logic, but the mysteries still refused to crack open.
Just then, he saw something odd in the distance.
He slowed down to a rolling stop, and pulled up real close to make sure his eyes weren't deceiving him.
A girl was standing at attention on someone's lawn, calm as could be, and with a cardboard sign with "for sale", scrawled on it in black magic marker hanging around her neck by a length of clothesline. A small black suitcase hung from her left hand.
She was dressed in a maid outfit.
Not a "saucy", french maid outfit, a bit more conservative.
Her skin was as pale as a piece of computer hardware, and her hair was jet black, and came to a cheek length bob.
She reminded him of a young Kim Catrall.
His curiosity was piqued.
"So, why are you for sale?", he asked.
She paused in thought, her eyes darting about as if having an invisible conversation inside herself.
"Do you like children?", she finally asked.
Just to see what would happen, he said "hate the little bastards".
More eye darting, and then "Then I beat the children of the household".
Obviously a lie, a very weird lie, but it intrigued him even more.
"So, how much?", he said with a warm smirk.
"One hundred dollars".
"Who do I pay?".
She took the longest pause of all with that one.
She turned to look at the house, then back at the car, then back at the house, and so on, for about 10 cycles.
Finally, she thrust out her hand "I'll mail it to them".
Fulcrum smirked, and pulled out his wallet, and handed her a hundred.
The hundred dollar bill from HIS dimension.
It was neon orange, and had a hologram of a martyred robot general on it.
She stared at it for a long time, sniffed it, shrugged, and stuffed it in her suitcase.
"Let's go then", she said, and let herself into the passenger's seat.
"Neat, free girl", Fulcrum thought to himself with a grin, and took off.
20 minutes later, Bruce came down the walkway to get his newspaper.
"Say, I wonder where Celine has gotten to", he said while scratching his head.
Part Three- Only solutions.
Jake Prong surveyed the grisly scene before him.
Dismembered heads, limbs, and entrails of dead hookers hung from chains, and lay splayed about on the barn floor.
The governor's creepy little weasel nephew had done this.
Jake shook his head in annoyed disgust.
No matter how many towns he had moved to, things always seemed to lead to dead hookers.
And it was always the governor's creepy nephew at the bottom of it.
Same old shit every time.
Right on schedule, the aforementioned creepy nephew dove down at Jake from the rafters.
In almost bored anticipation of this, Jake braced a pitchfork he'd found just right to catch and impale the creepy cannibal nephew through the belly, and then carry the momentum of his jump/fall into a flip onto his back.
Some few minutes later, Jake had set loose the guy's caged starving dogs, who, smelling the blood, immediately set to eating the guy's entrails eliminating all evidence of Jake's foul play.
It seemed like it took a decade for him to die.
Jake's hands hardly ever shook anymore now, unlike when he first started seeing shit like this.
After watching a few extra minutes to be sure, Jake got into his car and left.
He had to get back to the office.
These mercenary jobs were an amusing diversion, and afforded him some toys, but they didn't pay utilities or put food on the table.
Even so, Jake mentally noted, offing creepy geeky cannibals beat dealing with Scotsmen and ninjas.
Once he'd blended into the afternoon traffic, and felt secure enough, he activated his hands-free carphone rig, and called Lenny about lunch saturday.
Talking to Lenny would make things make more sense.
Lenny had life all figured out.
That sly bugger.
If only Jake knew his secret.
Part Four- Saved By Zero.
Steve Torrent did his usual routine.
He got up, walked the long flight of marble stairs to the kitchen, fixed himself some cereal, scratched his ass, and then took the long hike to the living room to watch some tube.
Comedy Central was playing "spies like us", again, so he grouchily decided to get out of the house and do something.
"Maybe I'll tour one of my businesses", he mumbled aloud to no one in particular.
His butler gave him a snooty look.
"You''re fired, butler", Steve grumbled.
"Yipee!", exclaimed the butler as he skipped towards the door.
Jake Prong had now been at the office for 6 hours.
He had done his usual routine of sorting the mail, loading it on the cart, making the delivery run, stocking the stationary/supply closet, refilling the paper trays on the Xerox machines, and was now organizing files in the records department.
One time, he asked what all the paperwork was for.
All he got was an angry blank stare for his trouble.
Ever since then, his lunch had had saliva blobs all over it.
He ate strictly from the candy machine now.
He stared at the clock for awhile, then haphazardly and randomly shoved some more files into place.
Clock, files, clock, files, papercut, swear, clock, files,....
Suddenly, a supervisor slinked around the corner.
"The CEO has come to take a tour of the place, time to gather in the cafetorium for inspection, make yourself look presentable, Prong".
Jake smoothed out his bangs, and tucked in his shirt, and headed gloomily towards the cafeteria.
He refused to call it a cafetorium.
After standing around in the cafetorium for 15 minutes trying to pass time striking up conversations with the people standing next to him, and snootily being rebuffed with eye rolls and hisses, the bigshot CEO finally strutted in.
He wasn't what Jake expected at all.
Pot bellied, bald as Kojak, bad posture, stubble faced, and shuffling around in PAJAMAS AND A ROBE in the middle of the afternoon IN PUBLIC, and with a perpetual sneer on his lips as if he was always about to say "fuck you", to the world in general.
"Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Torrent", introduced his supervisor's supervisor.
"So, this is the staff that runs the place eh?", said Torrent bored and unimpressed in between taking big gurgling sips of coffee brandy from a large Tupperware thermos as if it were a Mountain Dew Big Slam.
"So, what do I pay you guys to actually DO here anyway?".
Five different bosses gave Torrent the same type of stare they had given Jake.
"You don't even know, do ya?", Steve said with an un-phased smirk.
Jake immediately decided that he liked this guy.
Jake raised his hand "I'd be interested to know as well".
Steve got a shit eating grin on his face, and reciprocally decided that he liked this guy.
Even more so when he saw management's eyeballs pulsate as they whipped their heads in his direction.
"What's you're name son?", Steve asked calmly.
Jake swallowed "Jake. Jake Prong, sir".
Steve held that grin "I like your moxie kid, you're going places".
Then he turned to face the others, especially management "the rest of you are fired as of this very instant. Pile out. Now. You're history. BLOW!".
Everyone started leaving in an orderly manner like good little drones.
Jake was frozen in place in shock.
Steve lazily pucked a coin at one of them as they made their way toward the cafetorium door "here's an indian chick dollar, go buy yourself a cookie and a piece of soul, you mummy faced husk. Keep the change".
Jake raised his hand on drilled in Pavlovian conditioning.
"Um, may I enquire as to what that was all about?".
Steve took a slug of coffee brandy.
"Mmmm.....nah".
Another slug.
"Well, I'm closing up, you coming? Don't want to get locked in to ya?".
Jake didn't know how to process this, so just took it a second at a time.
"I...suppose so".
As they walked around the corridors shutting off lights, Steve reassured Jake "don't worry about those slap-happy dumplings, they'll have some more papers to shuffle in someone else's building by monday".
Jake started to say the next immediate question "what about...".
Steve interrupted "oh, your job? You needn't worry, you're promoted! I created this whole company just to find someone like you. I need people like you for some very SPECIAL work".
Jake tensed, grimaced, and nervously gulped.
Steve laughed "Don't worry, it's not gay stuff! Calm down. Jeez".
Jake finally found his voice again "so, what...IS this special work?".
Steve took another big belt off his thermos "well, y'see..could you get those last switches? There, good. Y'see I've got this project. Y'ever see the movie Treasure Island?".
Jake furrowed his brow "Ages ago, I don't remember any specifics if it's trivia you're after..".
Steve stifled a belch "doesn't matter, as long as you got the gist. I'll explain on the drive over to the location. Oh, and you'll be driving by the way, I'm shit faced".
Jake grimaced again "...um,...yes sir".
Part Five- Set me free.
Jake Prong had now been doing his SPECIAL work for 3 days.
He had just done his usual routine of sorting the datawafers, loading them on the grav-cart, making the delivery run, stocking the storage media supply closet, refilling the ridulin crystal trays on the Zkorekz machines, and was now organizing circuit boards in the plug racks of the records mainframe chamber.
One time, he asked what all the circuit boards and data were for.
All he got was an angry blank stare for his trouble.
Ever since then, his lunch had had saliva blobs all over it.
He ate strictly from the flav-o-mat now.
He stared at the clock for awhile, then haphazardly and randomly shoved some more boards into place.
Clock, circuits, clock, circuits, chipcut, swear, clock, circuits,....
Part Six- Words we couldn't say.
Fulcrum sat staring at his placemat, blurring his vision, and floating through his own personal la-la land.
He and Celine had come to this randomly chosen truckstop greasy spoon because Fulcrum had needed to piss, and to fill his belly.
At least that was part of the reason.
He also needed to gather his thoughts.
He was discovering, that the longer he spent in this dimension, the more it seemed to be grabbing ahold of him in a fundamental, and disturbing way.
Vast chunks of his memory, all of it from the several millenia he had spent creating his alternate timeline were slipping away like a forgotten fever dream.
All the languages he had learned, gone.
What it felt like to screw Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Sharon Stone, gone.
String mechanics, gone.
Psychohistory, gone.
The geopolitical chess moves he had use to gradually reunite the middle east in under two centuries, gone.
How to strip and reassemble a hyperdrive with a ratchet set, gone.
All gone.
Dissolving like a fart in the wind.
And yet, memories that he had thought long gone, lost to those same millenia, were coming back to him as fresh as seconds ago.
His real name.
His 5th birthday.
His first pet.
His favorite brand of frozen pizza.
His first car.
His first hangover.
His first premature ejaculation.
The numbers of his favorite Chinese food entrees.
His high school locker combination.
On and on they all flooded back.
And so, he continued to stare into his placemat, letting all these bits and pieces hopefully tumble back together into something that could at least function as a person again.
Celine for her part just stared unblinkingly.
Finally, she spoke.
"Electron analysis reveals his establishment is swarming with fecal bacteria".
Fulcrum shook himself back into awareness "whuh?".
"Maybe your immunity is up to the task Mr. Fulcrum, but all the same, you'd be taking your health into risk by eating here".
"Keith".
"Sir?".
"Call me Keith. Fulcrum is a name I made up for myself a long time ago, when I was....sick".
"Very well....Keith".
Finally, she blinked.
Lord, that was creepy.
Just then, the sloppy Joes arrived.
"Fecal bacteria be damned", Keith thought "I'm starving".
He dug in greedily and messily, grunting with pleasure in between swallows.
Celine didn't have anything, but watched his eating with a strange level of interest.
Part Seven- Push it to the limit.
Clock, circuits, clock, circuits, chipcut, swear, clock, circuits,....
Finally, the clock told Jake Prong what he wanted to hear.
Five minutes until quitting time.
He went to the bathroom to kill that last 5 minutes reading the paper while taking a fake dump.
Meanwhile, deep under the city, the configuration of the circuit boards he had jammed into their plugs/racks/shelves transmitted their data to a device deep under the city.
A device emitting anti-reality waves.
Anti-reality waves that needed to be tuned precisely and constantly.
And properly.
Tuned with a constant data flow from the records mainframe chamber.
Wich in turn had to be properly configured by the proper arrangement of properly programmed circuit panels.
Wich meant that lazily randomly stuffing those panels into place as if they were paper files being stuffed in by a disgruntled employee at an insurance firm would be very bad.
Jake Prong however, wouldn't have cared even if someone had bothered to explain this to him.
Nor would he have batted an eye if told that his indolence had caused the anti-reality fields to focalize over donut shops, instead of over Steve Torrent's house like they were supposed to.
Nor would he have lost much sleep over the fact that the reality sinkholes were now opened to a disturbing hell dimension rather than the alternate pirate-Earth Steve Torrent wanted to visit for his birthday like they were supposed to.
And if someone had shrieked at the top of their lungs that the reality holes were expanding, letting increasingly bigger monsters through, he still would have ridden out his 5 minute fake crap break, punched out, and gone home to his apartment.
Unless someone offered him money to stop up the reality holes.
But they weren't going to.
Since no one presently knew about the problem.
Well, except for Johnny, but being a low man on society's totem pole, his grievances would go unheard until it was too late.
Keith Sprunk and Celine were back on the road again.
Once he had some protein in him, Keith's head had become a lot clearer.
After a digesting awhile at the diner, he had figured out who could figure out what was going on, and how to fix it.
Steve Torrent.
Steve Torrent would know what to do.
Steve Torrent tinkered with multi-layered time travel as a hobby, and had bamboozled him time and time again across multiple histories.
A man like that could do anything.
He'd find Steve torrent, and demand that he make everything right, or else he'd kill him.
It had taken Celine 15 seconds on a high speed public internet terminal at the nearest mall to calculate his whereabouts.
Now, they were on their way.
Torrent had to fix this.
He HAD to.
Just then, Keith's belly rumbled, and sent up a foul smelling acidy belch.
"Oooh, those sloppy Joes ain't gonna go peacefully", Keith mumbled.
Celine looked at him, her expression always unchanged "I told you".
On a spontaneous impulse, he reached over and poked the tip of her nose and made an accompanying "boop", noise.
She crossed her eyes, then stared at him in apparent confusion.
Keith merely kept grinning goofily, and let out a chuckle.
Another of her pregnant pauses, and then a monotone "What is so funny?".
Keith chuckled again "you're adorable".
During this exchange, Keith's Darth Vader-y Fulcrum uniform had melted and morphed into a flannel shirt, white undershirt, jeans, and work boots.
Not that he noticed, since the memory of having the suit vanished along with much of his experiences in project Shazam.
He wouldn't miss them.
Just then, he noticed something in the middle of the road, and slowed to a stop.
It was a robot.
A big robot.
A big purple robot.
A big purple robot with a missile launcher on it's shoulder.
A missile launcher that was coming to bear on their car.
"That ain't good", Keith ironically deadpanned.
"Not that I have ever seen, no", Celine seriously deadpanned.
Meanwhile, Steve Torrent stood astride the roof of the Green Mamba, piloting it by remote control, and wearing a pirate costume deliberately modeled after the Captain Morgan lable.
"It's finally gonna happen! I'm gonna be a goddamned pirate!", Steve exuded with boyish excitement.
Meanwhile, Jake Prong had just been seated at the center table of Chez Lebelle
Meanwhile, Keith Sprunk came out of his roll, and looked back at his exploded car.
Celine had landed and rolled off in the opposite direction, and was several yards from him, and apparently at just the right angle that he was out of her field of vision.
She looked at the car, and then at the purple robot with it's smoking empty missile launcher.
At the car, then the robot, at the car, and then the robot, for about 10 cycles.
Then, finally she let out a simple "no".
Then, her features contorted into a snarl, and again with a simple and yet more stern "NO!".
Then, she raised her voice for the first time Keith had ever heard, by letting out a wailing "NOOO!!!", that could only be described as a mix of human rage and despair.
And with that, she cleared the 10 yards between her and the robot in about 2.5 seconds and tackled it, sending it reeling, and flailing it's arms.
"...holy shit", remarked Keith as he sat transfixed on what was occurring.
Meanwhile, the Green Mamba flew ever skyward, not finding the reality vortex that was supposed to be there.
Steve was too busy proudly comparing himself to the empty Captain Morgan bottle in his left hand for alarm bells to sound in his head.
Meanwhile, Jake Prong scarfed his bread and water, and fiddled with his napkin.
Meanwhile, Keith watched in baffled amazement as Celine continued to feverishly and systematically tear exotic looking electronic doodads out of the robot's wrended chest cavity, and stomp each one in turn into little plastic crumbles.
Meanwhile, Steve's foot slipped on a droplet of Captain Morgan's and fell off the Green Mamba with a surprised yelp.
Meanwhile, Jake Prong asked the pointy faced waiter to give him a few more minutes for his friend to arrive before ordering.
Little did he know that a red ninja had just blown his straw paper at him, but missed.
Meanwhile, Keith finally found a lull in the demolition in which to safely stroll up and say something "I think he's dead, sweety". Celine froze, seemingly shocked, then looked at her hands. During the tussle, all the skin had been torn away, revealing the chrome-y alloy underneath. Keith had to have known by now what she really was. This realization caused her lip to shake, and her eyes to well up.
Just then, the purple robot sprung to life, just long enough to take a random swing that bashed off Celine's head, and send it flying like a major league homerun baseball.
Her neck rained sparks, and then her body slumped to the ground.
Keith sprinted forward, yanked out another random doodad from the robot's chest, and stomped it.
That seemed to have done the trick, because it too slumped dead to the ground.
Keith calmly headed off in the direction Celine's head had flown.
Meanwhile, the ground continued growing closer underneath Steve.
He just laughed.
Deeply and freely.
Meanwhile, the pointy faced waiter received a call on his cellphone from a gentleman with a thick Scottish accent.
Meanwhile, Keith picked up Celine's head, and cradled it gently.
She looked up at him with puppy dog eyes, and then paused as if in thought, her harddrive rattled a bit, and then she asked "do you stil find me...adorable?".
Keith grinned, 'booped', her on the nose again, and said "always, kitten".
For the first time ever, she smiled.
Meanwhile, just at that moment Steve saw.....
Meanwhile, just at that moment Keith saw overhead....
Read More......
Inexplicably, he found himself in a donut shop.
Behind the counter were two scraggly looking gentlemen.
He looked at their nametags. The younger trainee was Phil, the older more haggered looking gentleman was called John.
"Not from around here, are you, mister?", the one called John asked suspiciously.
"Er, where is HERE exactly?", inquired Fulcrum cautiously.
John pulled out a crucifix "here, grab onto this", he more than suggested.
"Sure", Fulcrum complied, not seeing the harm.
And indeed there wasn't.
Afterward, John looked at the cross, and then Fulcrum's hand, seemingly shocked. "Oh. I guess I was wrong. Nevermind. So, you want to order something?".
Fulcrum wasn't in the mood for anything fancy "you got any just plain?".
John frowned "just ran out, but if you want to wait, I can start up a batch".
"No thanks, I've..got to get to work", Fulcrum mumbled; and with that, Fulcrum left.
Part two- Girl in trouble (is a temporary thing)
Fulcrum drove along aimlessly in the car that he had boosted some hours ago.
He was now in the country outskirts, well away from the awfulness of the city.
His mind swarmed with questions.
Where was this?
What sort of dimensional gateway had pulled him here, and who/what had created it?
What did it have to do with the donut shop?
Why had traveling through it erased his super powers, and changed his face from Chris Sarandon, to a young Chevy Chase?
The peacefulness of the country, and the fresh air blowing through the window had cleared his head some, and given him back his logic, but the mysteries still refused to crack open.
Just then, he saw something odd in the distance.
He slowed down to a rolling stop, and pulled up real close to make sure his eyes weren't deceiving him.
A girl was standing at attention on someone's lawn, calm as could be, and with a cardboard sign with "for sale", scrawled on it in black magic marker hanging around her neck by a length of clothesline. A small black suitcase hung from her left hand.
She was dressed in a maid outfit.
Not a "saucy", french maid outfit, a bit more conservative.
Her skin was as pale as a piece of computer hardware, and her hair was jet black, and came to a cheek length bob.
She reminded him of a young Kim Catrall.
His curiosity was piqued.
"So, why are you for sale?", he asked.
She paused in thought, her eyes darting about as if having an invisible conversation inside herself.
"Do you like children?", she finally asked.
Just to see what would happen, he said "hate the little bastards".
More eye darting, and then "Then I beat the children of the household".
Obviously a lie, a very weird lie, but it intrigued him even more.
"So, how much?", he said with a warm smirk.
"One hundred dollars".
"Who do I pay?".
She took the longest pause of all with that one.
She turned to look at the house, then back at the car, then back at the house, and so on, for about 10 cycles.
Finally, she thrust out her hand "I'll mail it to them".
Fulcrum smirked, and pulled out his wallet, and handed her a hundred.
The hundred dollar bill from HIS dimension.
It was neon orange, and had a hologram of a martyred robot general on it.
She stared at it for a long time, sniffed it, shrugged, and stuffed it in her suitcase.
"Let's go then", she said, and let herself into the passenger's seat.
"Neat, free girl", Fulcrum thought to himself with a grin, and took off.
20 minutes later, Bruce came down the walkway to get his newspaper.
"Say, I wonder where Celine has gotten to", he said while scratching his head.
Part Three- Only solutions.
Jake Prong surveyed the grisly scene before him.
Dismembered heads, limbs, and entrails of dead hookers hung from chains, and lay splayed about on the barn floor.
The governor's creepy little weasel nephew had done this.
Jake shook his head in annoyed disgust.
No matter how many towns he had moved to, things always seemed to lead to dead hookers.
And it was always the governor's creepy nephew at the bottom of it.
Same old shit every time.
Right on schedule, the aforementioned creepy nephew dove down at Jake from the rafters.
In almost bored anticipation of this, Jake braced a pitchfork he'd found just right to catch and impale the creepy cannibal nephew through the belly, and then carry the momentum of his jump/fall into a flip onto his back.
Some few minutes later, Jake had set loose the guy's caged starving dogs, who, smelling the blood, immediately set to eating the guy's entrails eliminating all evidence of Jake's foul play.
It seemed like it took a decade for him to die.
Jake's hands hardly ever shook anymore now, unlike when he first started seeing shit like this.
After watching a few extra minutes to be sure, Jake got into his car and left.
He had to get back to the office.
These mercenary jobs were an amusing diversion, and afforded him some toys, but they didn't pay utilities or put food on the table.
Even so, Jake mentally noted, offing creepy geeky cannibals beat dealing with Scotsmen and ninjas.
Once he'd blended into the afternoon traffic, and felt secure enough, he activated his hands-free carphone rig, and called Lenny about lunch saturday.
Talking to Lenny would make things make more sense.
Lenny had life all figured out.
That sly bugger.
If only Jake knew his secret.
Part Four- Saved By Zero.
Steve Torrent did his usual routine.
He got up, walked the long flight of marble stairs to the kitchen, fixed himself some cereal, scratched his ass, and then took the long hike to the living room to watch some tube.
Comedy Central was playing "spies like us", again, so he grouchily decided to get out of the house and do something.
"Maybe I'll tour one of my businesses", he mumbled aloud to no one in particular.
His butler gave him a snooty look.
"You''re fired, butler", Steve grumbled.
"Yipee!", exclaimed the butler as he skipped towards the door.
Jake Prong had now been at the office for 6 hours.
He had done his usual routine of sorting the mail, loading it on the cart, making the delivery run, stocking the stationary/supply closet, refilling the paper trays on the Xerox machines, and was now organizing files in the records department.
One time, he asked what all the paperwork was for.
All he got was an angry blank stare for his trouble.
Ever since then, his lunch had had saliva blobs all over it.
He ate strictly from the candy machine now.
He stared at the clock for awhile, then haphazardly and randomly shoved some more files into place.
Clock, files, clock, files, papercut, swear, clock, files,....
Suddenly, a supervisor slinked around the corner.
"The CEO has come to take a tour of the place, time to gather in the cafetorium for inspection, make yourself look presentable, Prong".
Jake smoothed out his bangs, and tucked in his shirt, and headed gloomily towards the cafeteria.
He refused to call it a cafetorium.
After standing around in the cafetorium for 15 minutes trying to pass time striking up conversations with the people standing next to him, and snootily being rebuffed with eye rolls and hisses, the bigshot CEO finally strutted in.
He wasn't what Jake expected at all.
Pot bellied, bald as Kojak, bad posture, stubble faced, and shuffling around in PAJAMAS AND A ROBE in the middle of the afternoon IN PUBLIC, and with a perpetual sneer on his lips as if he was always about to say "fuck you", to the world in general.
"Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Torrent", introduced his supervisor's supervisor.
"So, this is the staff that runs the place eh?", said Torrent bored and unimpressed in between taking big gurgling sips of coffee brandy from a large Tupperware thermos as if it were a Mountain Dew Big Slam.
"So, what do I pay you guys to actually DO here anyway?".
Five different bosses gave Torrent the same type of stare they had given Jake.
"You don't even know, do ya?", Steve said with an un-phased smirk.
Jake immediately decided that he liked this guy.
Jake raised his hand "I'd be interested to know as well".
Steve got a shit eating grin on his face, and reciprocally decided that he liked this guy.
Even more so when he saw management's eyeballs pulsate as they whipped their heads in his direction.
"What's you're name son?", Steve asked calmly.
Jake swallowed "Jake. Jake Prong, sir".
Steve held that grin "I like your moxie kid, you're going places".
Then he turned to face the others, especially management "the rest of you are fired as of this very instant. Pile out. Now. You're history. BLOW!".
Everyone started leaving in an orderly manner like good little drones.
Jake was frozen in place in shock.
Steve lazily pucked a coin at one of them as they made their way toward the cafetorium door "here's an indian chick dollar, go buy yourself a cookie and a piece of soul, you mummy faced husk. Keep the change".
Jake raised his hand on drilled in Pavlovian conditioning.
"Um, may I enquire as to what that was all about?".
Steve took a slug of coffee brandy.
"Mmmm.....nah".
Another slug.
"Well, I'm closing up, you coming? Don't want to get locked in to ya?".
Jake didn't know how to process this, so just took it a second at a time.
"I...suppose so".
As they walked around the corridors shutting off lights, Steve reassured Jake "don't worry about those slap-happy dumplings, they'll have some more papers to shuffle in someone else's building by monday".
Jake started to say the next immediate question "what about...".
Steve interrupted "oh, your job? You needn't worry, you're promoted! I created this whole company just to find someone like you. I need people like you for some very SPECIAL work".
Jake tensed, grimaced, and nervously gulped.
Steve laughed "Don't worry, it's not gay stuff! Calm down. Jeez".
Jake finally found his voice again "so, what...IS this special work?".
Steve took another big belt off his thermos "well, y'see..could you get those last switches? There, good. Y'see I've got this project. Y'ever see the movie Treasure Island?".
Jake furrowed his brow "Ages ago, I don't remember any specifics if it's trivia you're after..".
Steve stifled a belch "doesn't matter, as long as you got the gist. I'll explain on the drive over to the location. Oh, and you'll be driving by the way, I'm shit faced".
Jake grimaced again "...um,...yes sir".
Part Five- Set me free.
Jake Prong had now been doing his SPECIAL work for 3 days.
He had just done his usual routine of sorting the datawafers, loading them on the grav-cart, making the delivery run, stocking the storage media supply closet, refilling the ridulin crystal trays on the Zkorekz machines, and was now organizing circuit boards in the plug racks of the records mainframe chamber.
One time, he asked what all the circuit boards and data were for.
All he got was an angry blank stare for his trouble.
Ever since then, his lunch had had saliva blobs all over it.
He ate strictly from the flav-o-mat now.
He stared at the clock for awhile, then haphazardly and randomly shoved some more boards into place.
Clock, circuits, clock, circuits, chipcut, swear, clock, circuits,....
Part Six- Words we couldn't say.
Fulcrum sat staring at his placemat, blurring his vision, and floating through his own personal la-la land.
He and Celine had come to this randomly chosen truckstop greasy spoon because Fulcrum had needed to piss, and to fill his belly.
At least that was part of the reason.
He also needed to gather his thoughts.
He was discovering, that the longer he spent in this dimension, the more it seemed to be grabbing ahold of him in a fundamental, and disturbing way.
Vast chunks of his memory, all of it from the several millenia he had spent creating his alternate timeline were slipping away like a forgotten fever dream.
All the languages he had learned, gone.
What it felt like to screw Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Sharon Stone, gone.
String mechanics, gone.
Psychohistory, gone.
The geopolitical chess moves he had use to gradually reunite the middle east in under two centuries, gone.
How to strip and reassemble a hyperdrive with a ratchet set, gone.
All gone.
Dissolving like a fart in the wind.
And yet, memories that he had thought long gone, lost to those same millenia, were coming back to him as fresh as seconds ago.
His real name.
His 5th birthday.
His first pet.
His favorite brand of frozen pizza.
His first car.
His first hangover.
His first premature ejaculation.
The numbers of his favorite Chinese food entrees.
His high school locker combination.
On and on they all flooded back.
And so, he continued to stare into his placemat, letting all these bits and pieces hopefully tumble back together into something that could at least function as a person again.
Celine for her part just stared unblinkingly.
Finally, she spoke.
"Electron analysis reveals his establishment is swarming with fecal bacteria".
Fulcrum shook himself back into awareness "whuh?".
"Maybe your immunity is up to the task Mr. Fulcrum, but all the same, you'd be taking your health into risk by eating here".
"Keith".
"Sir?".
"Call me Keith. Fulcrum is a name I made up for myself a long time ago, when I was....sick".
"Very well....Keith".
Finally, she blinked.
Lord, that was creepy.
Just then, the sloppy Joes arrived.
"Fecal bacteria be damned", Keith thought "I'm starving".
He dug in greedily and messily, grunting with pleasure in between swallows.
Celine didn't have anything, but watched his eating with a strange level of interest.
Part Seven- Push it to the limit.
Clock, circuits, clock, circuits, chipcut, swear, clock, circuits,....
Finally, the clock told Jake Prong what he wanted to hear.
Five minutes until quitting time.
He went to the bathroom to kill that last 5 minutes reading the paper while taking a fake dump.
Meanwhile, deep under the city, the configuration of the circuit boards he had jammed into their plugs/racks/shelves transmitted their data to a device deep under the city.
A device emitting anti-reality waves.
Anti-reality waves that needed to be tuned precisely and constantly.
And properly.
Tuned with a constant data flow from the records mainframe chamber.
Wich in turn had to be properly configured by the proper arrangement of properly programmed circuit panels.
Wich meant that lazily randomly stuffing those panels into place as if they were paper files being stuffed in by a disgruntled employee at an insurance firm would be very bad.
Jake Prong however, wouldn't have cared even if someone had bothered to explain this to him.
Nor would he have batted an eye if told that his indolence had caused the anti-reality fields to focalize over donut shops, instead of over Steve Torrent's house like they were supposed to.
Nor would he have lost much sleep over the fact that the reality sinkholes were now opened to a disturbing hell dimension rather than the alternate pirate-Earth Steve Torrent wanted to visit for his birthday like they were supposed to.
And if someone had shrieked at the top of their lungs that the reality holes were expanding, letting increasingly bigger monsters through, he still would have ridden out his 5 minute fake crap break, punched out, and gone home to his apartment.
Unless someone offered him money to stop up the reality holes.
But they weren't going to.
Since no one presently knew about the problem.
Well, except for Johnny, but being a low man on society's totem pole, his grievances would go unheard until it was too late.
Keith Sprunk and Celine were back on the road again.
Once he had some protein in him, Keith's head had become a lot clearer.
After a digesting awhile at the diner, he had figured out who could figure out what was going on, and how to fix it.
Steve Torrent.
Steve Torrent would know what to do.
Steve Torrent tinkered with multi-layered time travel as a hobby, and had bamboozled him time and time again across multiple histories.
A man like that could do anything.
He'd find Steve torrent, and demand that he make everything right, or else he'd kill him.
It had taken Celine 15 seconds on a high speed public internet terminal at the nearest mall to calculate his whereabouts.
Now, they were on their way.
Torrent had to fix this.
He HAD to.
Just then, Keith's belly rumbled, and sent up a foul smelling acidy belch.
"Oooh, those sloppy Joes ain't gonna go peacefully", Keith mumbled.
Celine looked at him, her expression always unchanged "I told you".
On a spontaneous impulse, he reached over and poked the tip of her nose and made an accompanying "boop", noise.
She crossed her eyes, then stared at him in apparent confusion.
Keith merely kept grinning goofily, and let out a chuckle.
Another of her pregnant pauses, and then a monotone "What is so funny?".
Keith chuckled again "you're adorable".
During this exchange, Keith's Darth Vader-y Fulcrum uniform had melted and morphed into a flannel shirt, white undershirt, jeans, and work boots.
Not that he noticed, since the memory of having the suit vanished along with much of his experiences in project Shazam.
He wouldn't miss them.
Just then, he noticed something in the middle of the road, and slowed to a stop.
It was a robot.
A big robot.
A big purple robot.
A big purple robot with a missile launcher on it's shoulder.
A missile launcher that was coming to bear on their car.
"That ain't good", Keith ironically deadpanned.
"Not that I have ever seen, no", Celine seriously deadpanned.
Meanwhile, Steve Torrent stood astride the roof of the Green Mamba, piloting it by remote control, and wearing a pirate costume deliberately modeled after the Captain Morgan lable.
"It's finally gonna happen! I'm gonna be a goddamned pirate!", Steve exuded with boyish excitement.
Meanwhile, Jake Prong had just been seated at the center table of Chez Lebelle
Meanwhile, Keith Sprunk came out of his roll, and looked back at his exploded car.
Celine had landed and rolled off in the opposite direction, and was several yards from him, and apparently at just the right angle that he was out of her field of vision.
She looked at the car, and then at the purple robot with it's smoking empty missile launcher.
At the car, then the robot, at the car, and then the robot, for about 10 cycles.
Then, finally she let out a simple "no".
Then, her features contorted into a snarl, and again with a simple and yet more stern "NO!".
Then, she raised her voice for the first time Keith had ever heard, by letting out a wailing "NOOO!!!", that could only be described as a mix of human rage and despair.
And with that, she cleared the 10 yards between her and the robot in about 2.5 seconds and tackled it, sending it reeling, and flailing it's arms.
"...holy shit", remarked Keith as he sat transfixed on what was occurring.
Meanwhile, the Green Mamba flew ever skyward, not finding the reality vortex that was supposed to be there.
Steve was too busy proudly comparing himself to the empty Captain Morgan bottle in his left hand for alarm bells to sound in his head.
Meanwhile, Jake Prong scarfed his bread and water, and fiddled with his napkin.
Meanwhile, Keith watched in baffled amazement as Celine continued to feverishly and systematically tear exotic looking electronic doodads out of the robot's wrended chest cavity, and stomp each one in turn into little plastic crumbles.
Meanwhile, Steve's foot slipped on a droplet of Captain Morgan's and fell off the Green Mamba with a surprised yelp.
Meanwhile, Jake Prong asked the pointy faced waiter to give him a few more minutes for his friend to arrive before ordering.
Little did he know that a red ninja had just blown his straw paper at him, but missed.
Meanwhile, Keith finally found a lull in the demolition in which to safely stroll up and say something "I think he's dead, sweety". Celine froze, seemingly shocked, then looked at her hands. During the tussle, all the skin had been torn away, revealing the chrome-y alloy underneath. Keith had to have known by now what she really was. This realization caused her lip to shake, and her eyes to well up.
Just then, the purple robot sprung to life, just long enough to take a random swing that bashed off Celine's head, and send it flying like a major league homerun baseball.
Her neck rained sparks, and then her body slumped to the ground.
Keith sprinted forward, yanked out another random doodad from the robot's chest, and stomped it.
That seemed to have done the trick, because it too slumped dead to the ground.
Keith calmly headed off in the direction Celine's head had flown.
Meanwhile, the ground continued growing closer underneath Steve.
He just laughed.
Deeply and freely.
Meanwhile, the pointy faced waiter received a call on his cellphone from a gentleman with a thick Scottish accent.
Meanwhile, Keith picked up Celine's head, and cradled it gently.
She looked up at him with puppy dog eyes, and then paused as if in thought, her harddrive rattled a bit, and then she asked "do you stil find me...adorable?".
Keith grinned, 'booped', her on the nose again, and said "always, kitten".
For the first time ever, she smiled.
Meanwhile, just at that moment Steve saw.....
Meanwhile, just at that moment Keith saw overhead....
Read More......
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