Barbarian King
Page 8
it, both feared being dashed to smithereens foremost in their thoughts.
Then, gradually a tingling sensation overcame them both, followed by some slight nausea...followed by a total loss of consciousness.
Another World
The Washington Post-Chronicle-Tribune-Times - The Secret Service has discovered that IllaryHay Clinton is missing. Her steed, a symbol of her political party, a donkey, was discovered near-dead romping around the nature preserve minus the Democrat candidate. Her spouse and former President, IllyBay, cannot be found, either. Political consultant and close friend, Jimmy ArvilleCay, explains the reason IllyBay is incognito is because, “He be search’n fo’ he miss’n bride. Be no mistag'n it, he luv her ‘n feared of her mis...mis...mis'potusne (misfortune).”
A sudden clap of thunder and the twirling mayhem came to an abrupt, crashing halt!
Crash!
In a blur BamaOay was awakened and felt a sudden, stabbing headache, as if he had been clobbered over the head with a baseball bat. It took the briefest of moments for him to catch his wits, however, a bizarre thing considering the catastrophe that surrounded him. He sat up slowly and was soon squinting around blurry-eyed and trying to make out his whereabouts. The last thing he remembered was seeing the front door of the redneck’s cabin crashing open, a tree trunk and then the lights went out. The President felt a little weird, but for some strange reason, weird in a newfangled, marvelous sort of way.
The President could make out that he was no longer spinning around, nor that his setting was any longer dark as night for the sunshine was bright and streaming in from overhead, flooding his surroundings with light and blinding him from making out anything clearly. It took him sometime to clear his head and with that accomplished he spent the next half-hour trying to get to his feet only to finally give up.
BamaOay gave a slight cry of amazement as his vision began to clear, his eyes growing bigger and more massively as he took in the surroundings of all the wonderful, ineffable sights. The redneck’s cabin had been set down jarringly in the midst of a strange land of unfamiliar noises, bizarre smells and odd sights. First, the overpowering redolence of his pollen-ladened surroundings assailed his olfactories causing him to sneeze thunderously, thunderously like never before. Next, a chaotic cacophony of utter racket assaulted his ears, the noisy buzzing of flying insects resonated throughout his forest surroundings. Then there came the head-banging chirping sound from winged creatures the likes he had never seen before. The head pounding sound of nut cracking hairy squirrels the size of beavers in the trees was the last straw.
He roared thunderously, thunderously like never before, “Shut up!”
Most of the sounds went away, but not all. The squirrel-things continued with their nut cracking.
“Shut the hell up I say!”
Everything went suddenly quiet!
“That better, now me have time to think.”
The barbecue, all that beach sand, the fan palms and prickly undergrowth under stubby, stunted trees...all that was gone replaced by a world looking more like the Pacific Northwest! The faint, raging torrent of a mountain stream now came beckoning to his ears calling him to come and slake his thirst.
The President found he could not get to this feet in the normal way, so he crawled to all fours. After a time he managed to get to one knee, only to gain his feet when he had grabbed onto a tree for support. He took several shaky steps before falling, then tumbling he rolled down hill toward the sound of the rushing water. Some minutes later, he came rolling upon the sparkling, mountain stream. He was again dazed and unclearly thinking, as he rolled his way over to a calm portion of the stream. Slowly, ever so slowly he got to all fours and then wasted little time in plunging his head into the icy cold waters, gulping mouthfuls and looking like a sort of goldfish underwater.
Pulling his head from beneath the surface for just an instant he plunged it in again...and again...and again. BamaOay never remembered being so thirsty. He paused for a few moments to catch his wind. The surface of the pool was given time to become mirror-like. The President gasped again for another breath and was just about to go under again when he caught sight of something in the reflection. He jumped back, then screamed.
Ai-eeee!
He looked quickly around ready to cry out again, but stopped short of attempting to get up and run away.
“What that?”
Breathing heavily with fright he stooped forward cautiously to take another look.
Gasp!
There it was again, the shadowy reflection he had glimpsed moments before returning his ogling. The huge outline of an ape-like creature returned BamaOay’s gaze; the thing had both an overall brutal and primitive quality of appearance.
“Shit!” he exclaimed, then with further shock did he realize the reflection had uttered his own curse!
“Is me?”
The vague features the President was witnessing were nearly unrecognizable, he would certainly notice after a lifetime of admiring oneself in any passing mirror, and why was he talking like most of his voters?
A kind of dark terror grew within him at the ghastly sight in the reflecting pool, a fear heightened by the incredible darkness of his now Mephistophelean-like features, but with the same huge ears of his, same short cropped hairdo...and something resembling a bald spot on top of his now lowbrow gourd. Eyes, large, deep set, and unblinking stared back at him with just the kind of stupefied look one would expect to come across with the base rungs of the evolutionary ladder.
The President was a giant with an enormous sweep of breast and the shoulders of a bull. He glanced down at himself; his sleeves were tight fitting and revealed forearms with gargantuan, corded muscles. Unlike before, he now looked more like Lou Ferrigno dressed up as ‘the Hulk,’ not the below-average golfer with a twenty-stroke handicap. On the contrary, his countenance now carried the marked appearance of a barbarian, not in name alone, but the real deal; just as his reptilian-like eyes and his thick, broad nose added to the appearance of this wild beast. Above all else, any outside observer would have been struck by his peepers, orbs that both radiated the lack of and beckoned for something resembling intelligence...a coherent thought...anything save for the void that existed from the other side of those blank, beady eyes of his.
As the President stared at his reflection for what seemed an eternity, strangely, imperturbably he was slowly beginning to have a soft spot for what he was making out in that natural mirror; he was no longer looking like the ordinary pantywaist he had once been. A wimp like those pictured in Russia when some secreted photos of him straining with a pair of ten-pound dumbbells was downloaded out onto the internet. Now he was almost a giant in stature from what he could see with bulging muscles that stood out in thick corded ridges.
He looked admiringly at his brawny meathooks, which were now brutish, bushy, sinewy, beefy and unmanicured. His arms, too, were now muscled, burly, furry and the size of a woman’s thigh. He looked next down at his white Polo shirt; it was no longer loose fitting, but stretched to the breaking point and barely able to contain his newfangled, bulging muscularity rippling with his each movement.
He lifted his shirt...shouted, “Yes!” at the sight of a six pack of corded muscles where none had existed before, but what’s this?
“What duh hell?” he exclaimed with reverberating voice.
Something was wrong, not everything had changed for the better.
“Why legs not better?”
For some unfathomable reason the Gods had shorted him on his miraculous transformation into a savage, primordial, beefcake, but leaving him largely unchanged...from his navel down!
“Me cheated!” he shouted, his disconcertment echoing around the forest causing things that flew to flight, critters that walked to flee, things that burrowed to burrow.
The eyes of the man-creature were hard, almost afire with the scintillating shallowness of a newfangled barbarian and they now reflected just one single tho
ught, a dull glimmer like that of a five-watt bulb. There had been some slight happiness in those beady eyes of his before, but now there was anything but jocularity resonating, instead only the questioning look of...‘Why?’
His eyes, deep set and staring from under a now prominent, now pronounced brow were both cold and deep; gazing down onto those still skinny legs of his, one of which was hairy as could be, the other with just a little stubble. One would have been left with the impression that the Gods had some humor in their actions.
“Why?”
Overall the President now resembled something akin to a cartoon character...one of those top-heavy, gorilla-like ‘Johnny Bravo’ types, one of those brain-dulled hunks you always saw working out at Gold’s Gym, or occasionally at a bar who used pickup lines like, "You pretty, I pretty, why don't we go home, have a drink and play postoffice?"
BamaOay now spent countless vacuous moments pondering the lower half of his, otherwise perfect beefcake bod. He now spent a countless amount of time contemplating various ideas, one thought slowly replacing another, attempting to come up with a way he could bring those toothpicks into line with the rest of his savage form.
“Me know, me do squats! Yea, dat work!” A few moments passed, then a grimacing grin came to his hardened features unseen by anything in his empty, forest surroundings.
“Me know, me run