The De-Excommunicator produced a single large print-out picture of a man of middling height with dark hair and very heavy eyebrows. The words ‘haunt him’ were scrawled across the picture.
“I do remember that,” Nathan said excitedly.
“If only you had complied with our instructions you could have saved us a lot of bother, Mr. Haynes. This is the man I wanted you to haunt.”
“Who is he?” asked Nathan.
“Dave,” spat Delroy with hatred.
“Dave,” Brian repeated. “You mean, of the Cult of Dave?”
“Yes. He’s been a nuisance to Particularly Cynical Atheism for far too long - converting the hopeful to his church with promises of a life of eternal bliss in his living room. It’s all been very tedious and annoying, and he’s been seizing more and more of the market share for religion in the city. However, Director Fulcher disclosed to me that Dave is scared of ghosts, and if a ghost were to haunt him he would probably lose his nerve and flee the city in terror, leaving us Particularly Cynical Atheists free to take over.”
The Galilean Relativist smiled.
“Why didn’t you just shoot him?” Nathan asked.
“Oh, yes, what a marvelous idea,” Delroy said, rolling his eyes. “Murdering religious leaders always ends their religions. That’s why no one prays to Jesus anymore.”
“Is it?”
“No. I was being sarcastic. Anyway, as I was saying, I formed a pact with Director Fulcher wherein I would repeatedly murder you in this life, and then you would come back as a ghost. Then I could use you to haunt Dave. However, it has since become apparent to me that Fulcher has no intention of holding up his end of the bargain. He’s been trying to bind you to the bureaucratic offices without letting me use you to haunt Dave first. He double-crossed me. So now I’m going to double-cross him.”
Now Delroy took out a large, deadly-looking pistol and leveled it at Nathan. Nathan smiled at it. He had another good feeling about this. Maybe something good was about to happen.
“Double-cross Fulcher how, exactly?” Brian asked, eyeing Delroy’s pistol. “Killing Nathan will just play into Fulcher’s hands. Nathan will be sent back to receiving, and Fulcher will get another opportunity to try to force him to stay in the afterlife.”
“Not quite,” Delroy said. “You forgot that when you came into the building, the security guards - who are, of course, my people - confiscated your Bureaucratic Transit Device. After you die again, Nathan, I will use it to create a door to force you directly into Dave’s house, where you will have no choice but to haunt Dave and drive him from the city.”
“What if I don’t use your door?” Nathan asked.
“Then you will be condemned to the bureaucratic afterlife forever,” Delroy said. “My way, at least you get to hang around in the living world, even if it is with a cult.”
“It won’t work if we take the device from you,” Brian barked.
Delroy smiled. “I have secured the device in the most heavily guarded building in the city - the q-tip factory. The place is a fortress. You’ll never be able to break in there in a thousand years! Now, I think it’s time for you to die again, Mr. Haynes.”
Nathan stared cheerily at Delroy. Maybe the good thing he was sensing was about to happen. Delroy cocked the pistol menacingly.
“Run, you idiot,” Brian said, and grabbed Nathan by the hand. The two men fled the room. Behind them, Delroy fired his pistol and a bullet pinged off the metal frame of the courthouse door. As they dashed into the lobby, the security guards and the bailiff - who were, of course, also Particularly Cynical Atheists, drew their weapons and started to fire. Fortunately for Nathan, Brian pulled his head down as they ran and, is also so often the case with evil people, their pursuers couldn’t really aim straight. While this did not increase Nathan or Brian’s confidence in the security of Dead Donkey’s courthouses, it did benefit them in the short term. The two men dashed outside into the parking lot.
“They’re so much faster than we are,” Brian said, glancing over his shoulder as the burly security guards gained on them. He ducked around the corner and made a series of clever, evasive motions that took them into a local alleyway behind the courthouse. Outside, the Particularly Cynical Atheists were waving their weapons and searching all the adjacent alleyways.
“Damn,” Brian said. “We’ll have to leave this alley before they find us, but there’s no way we can outrun them.”
Nathan hadn’t really been paying attention and hadn’t necessarily followed everything that had happened either, but an idea struck him. He started rooting through Brian’s pockets.
“What are you doing?” Brian demanded.
“Getting help,” answered Nathan with his usual good nature.
Nathan drew a cell phone and a white business card out of Brian’s jacket, then flipped open the cell phone and started to dial the number on the card.
“Hello?” Nathan said into the cell phone. “Is this Colton Barrett? This is Nathan Haynes. I need a professional at running away.”
“I’m already on my way,” Colton said back through the phone. “Your friend, Travis, called me a few minutes ago and said you were about to be chased. I thought you looked like the kind of man who’d need a professional’s help from time to time. I’m glad I slipped you my business card. I’m almost at the courthouse now.”
“Great,” Nathan said. “I’m being chased by murderous atheists.”
“Why? Are you Jesus?”
“No.”
“Oh. Then are you Cthulu?”
“No.”
“Then are you Dave?”
“No. They’re chasing me because of Dave. I’ll explain later. How much do I owe you?”
“I’ll send you a bill,” Colton said, and hung up.
Moments later, Colton’s car screeched to a halt in front of Delroy and the other atheists who were searching for Nathan and Brian. Instantly, their attention snapped to Colton, and they began to chase him and shoot at him and Colton, not wasting even a moment, started to run for his life. He very quickly put distance between himself and his pursuers, who were running out of breath.
Brian stared at Colton bug-eyed.
“There,” Nathan said, “is a true professional at work.” He watched Colton run away happily.
When the atheists and Colton had finally slipped to a safe distance away, Brian and Nathan emerged from their hiding places and slunk out of the alleyway. It turned out that they’d been hiding in a dumpster, so they were a little filthy. When they made it out of the alley, Brian was not entirely pleased to find Travis Habsworth standing just outside and looking absolutely immaculate.
“Why didn’t they shoot you?” Brian asked irritably.
“I convinced them-”
“-you did not exist,” Brian finished, even more irritable than when he’d asked. “Why couldn’t you convince them that we don’t exist?”
“To be perfectly frank, because I don’t like you,” Habsworth replied.
“Mutual, I assure you,” Brian shot back.
“They have the Bureaucratic Transit Device locked up in the q-tip factory and will use it to force me to haunt someone named Dave the next time I die, and I don’t really want to haunt Dave,” Nathan said. “Also, they’re trying to kill me.”
Travis rubbed his hands together.
“That does sound like a problem. Under the circumstances, I would like to suggest that we flee the city.”
“You always suggest that,” Brian snapped.
“Quiet, bureaucrat,” Travis snapped back. “Now, land transport is impossible because of the traffic jam and air transport is impossible because, as our repeated crashes have demonstrated, airplanes do not exist-”
“Airplanes do exist,” Brian objected. He was in a very argumentative mood. “It just so happens that the particular airplane we keep crashing on is not very good at flying-”
“Because airplanes do not exist,” Travis said, more loudly than before, “the only way to
get out of the city is to use the transit device. To do that, we will have to break into the q-tip factory and recover it.”
“That won’t be easy,” Nathan said, although he was still determined to maintain a peppy, positive attitude. “The q-tip factory is the most heavily guarded building in all of Dead Donkey.”
“If the q-tip factory is the most heavily guarded building in all of Dead Donkey, I hate to see the least heavily guarded,” Brian muttered.
“That’s the mayor’s office,” Nathan replied.
“Ah, of course, I might have known,” Brian said. “But the point is that to escape the city you need the transit device, and to get the transit device you must get past these guards.”
“Yes,” Nathan agreed.
“We’d need some kind of distraction,” Travis said.
Nathan scratched his head.
“Hm...” he said.
Just then, the cell phone he had taken off Brian rang.
“Hello?” Nathan asked. “No, I don’t want to buy-”
There was a pause, then the shine of a sudden epiphany appeared in Nathan’s eyes.
“Why yes,” he said happily. “I just happen to be in the market for a dog riding an elephant. A dog riding an elephant would do very nicely. Can you have them delivered to the q-tip factory right away?”
Chapter 26
The q-tip factory was the most heavily fortified building in Dead Donkey. Rings of concentric circles of police spiraled outwards from the warehouse in thick, swirling patterns, and the heavily armed and armored guards marched to and fro across the scorched, flattened forbidden zone that separated the warehouse from the rest of the city. Anyone who wanted to potentially break into the q-tip warehouse and steal the white, cotton bounty within would surely have been warded off by the sight of these guards, who were carrying rifles of such a size that it was clear theft wasn’t at all a good idea. Standing directly in front of the front entrance, the guards were so laden down with armor and weapons that they couldn’t walk at all for fear of tripping over their own feet, or else shifting their center of balance and falling over. The foot-thick reinforced concrete plate spliced with bulletproof ceramics that they wore over their chests served as body armor, but made it hard to move around. On top of that, each man protecting the entrance carried a half-dozen rifles, three slung over each arm, a pair of shotguns over the back, a taser, a cudgel, five cans of mace, five actual maces, sixteen throwing knives, a Japanese samurai sword, a tear-gas cannon, a t-shirt cannon, a baseball bat, a cricket bat, a golf club, a soccer ball, a pistol, a pistola, a piston, a hand cannon, a regular cannon, an artillery piece, a radar gun (that fired genuine radar), a bow and arrow, an arrow and bow, a spike strip, a rocket launcher, an anti-tank rifle, a combat drone, a grappling hook, a boxer’s glove, two steel-toed boots (worn on the chest), leg irons, handcuffs, fingercuffs, an iron maiden, a flamethrower, a whip, a crop, a cat o’ nine tails, an angry cat with nine tails, a jack in the box, a suicide pill, a homicide pill, a landmine, a smart bomb, a dumb bomb, a gravity bomb, an electricity bomb, a nuclear bomb, and a hair clip. Of course, the hair clip was only for emergencies.
Normally speaking, these men stood rigidly still and at attention, ready to shoot anyone who even dreamed of getting past them and into the q-tip factory. They couldn’t move from this position for the aforementioned reasons. Today was different. Today, the huge line of guards that secured the q-tip factory were on the balls of their feet, straining, dropping some of the heavier packs of weapons that they carried to try to see the spectacle before them.
“What the hell is that?” one of them asked the others.
“I think it’s... a dog riding an elephant,” a second man answered, mesmerized.
All of the q-tip factory’s guards stopped to stare in disbelief at the elephant, which was trotting around the zone at high speed with a dog, tongue lolling, riding happily on its back. The elephant occasionally trumpeted and the dog barked.
The captain of the unit trudged forward, frowning at the elephant, and stamped out his cigarette against the side of the wall.
“I don’t like it,” he said. “That’s not just a dog riding an elephant.” He paused and then a smile crossed his face. “That’s the best damn dog riding an elephant I’ve ever seen!”
A cheer went up from the ranks of the men.
The elephant did several more laps, with the dog sitting up on its back and balancing a ball on its nose. The dog was not trained to do this; it was just having fun. Entertained and amused by the spectacle, the many guards strained and pushed forward to see the dog and the elephant, and subsequently failed when they overbalanced from all the weight they were carrying, tipped over, and fell onto the ground. From that point on they could only see the ground, but still, the ground was amusing too in its own way.
After a few minutes, all the guards around the q-tip factory were face-down in the dirt, and the elephant continued to trot around the yard with reckless abandon. From his hiding place behind a nearby concrete pillar, Nathan smiled at it. The dog seemed to be having fun. He was less sure about the elephant.
“They delivered that dog and elephant very quickly,” Nathan said cheerily. “The system works.”
Brian straightened his neat, bureaucratic collar.
“Of course the system works,” he insisted. He said this almost reflexively. No matter what system it was, it worked. That was his opinion as a bureaucrat.
Travis stood.
“Let’s go,” he said.
They all walked across the ground, ignoring the dog riding the elephant. Even Nathan managed to ignore them. He wasn’t that impressed. He’d seen a dog landing a plane, after all.
When they reached the door to the q-tip factory, Travis reached down and plucked up the key from the captain, who was currently face-down crushing his cigarette into the road, and unlocked the large door to the q-tip warehouse. This represented a major breach of security, and the first time anyone in Dead Donkey had ever managed to force entry to the q-tip warehouse, where they might have been able to secure almost unlimited numbers of q-tips and menace the eardrums of everyone in the city. A review by the city council of how this security breach came to pass would conclude that it had been because the guards were insufficiently armed, and the guards were later issued large steel mallets to whack people with and main battle tanks to drop on intruders.
Throwing the door open, Travis strutted into the factory. He brimmed with the confidence of a man who has just broken into the most heavily guarded q-tip depository in the world. Nathan followed him, humming, and Brian followed both of them. Inside, there were stacks of boxes of q-tips organized into pallets, themselves organized into stacks of pallets, which were themselves organized into truckloads. There must have been millions, if not billions, of q-tips inside this one factory - practically the entire global supply of q-tips. A man could get his ears pretty clean with all those q-tips.
There didn’t appear to be any workers in the facility or manufacturing going on whatsoever. The factory had stopped producing long ago and was now serving as a glorified warehouse.
“Where’s the Bureaucratic Transit Device?” Brian hissed.
Nathan opened a box of q-tips.
“It’s not in here,” he said cheerily, then opened another box. “Not in here either,” he reported. “Or in here. Or in here.”
“We get the picture,” Brian said irritably. He’d had a very bad day.
“I do not think Delroy would have hidden such an object inside a box of q-tips,” Travis said calmly. “What’s underneath this tarp?” He pulled aside a large, bluish tarp to reveal a huge sculpture of twisted metal. It didn’t look like anything particular. It was just a curved mass, like a giant had taken a length of humungous wire and twisted and coiled it around an odd centerpiece. Nathan stared at it in awe.
“It’s the Symbol,” he said.
“Excuse me?” Travis asked politely.
“The Symbol,” Nathan repeated. “Let us all
bask in its symbolicalness. Its deep meaning and efficaciousness.”
There was a pause.
“What does it mean?” asked Brian.
“Something very important,” Nathan said. “Everyone says so.”
“I do not believe in symbolism,” Travis said calmly, and draped the tarp back over the Symbol.
Nathan stared at where it had been cheerily for a moment, then went back to looking through q-tip boxes.
Travis, meanwhile, was puzzling over the factory as a whole.
“If I were a Particularly Cynical Atheist, where would I hide a Bureaucratic Transit Device?” he asked aloud. “Particularly Cynical Atheists believe that life is a short, meaningless, and miserable march to a lonely death.”
“They do?” Brian asked. “That is pretty cynical.”
“Hence the name,” Travis agreed.
“Have they ever met Nathan?”
“My deaths aren’t all lonely,” Nathan said, maintaining his usual positive attitude. “Sometimes I die with a badger. Once I died with Brian.”
“Please don’t remind me,” Brian muttered.
“So they would hide the device where no one would ever think to look, or at least where a Particularly Cynical Atheist would think no one would think to look,” Travis said, above the squabbling. “A short, meaningless, miserable march to a lonely death... man’s march through life is meaningless...”
“They’d hide the device somewhere sad and meaningless,” Brian said. “Like in a box of q-tips, where Nathan is looking.”
“No, no,” Travis said. “They would have done the opposite. Particularly Cynical Atheists don’t seek meaning. From their perspective, the last place anyone would look is somewhere meaningful!”
He whipped around, back to the Symbol, and with one jerk dragged the tarp off of the top of the Symbol again. Travis stared shrewdly up at the mass of twisted metal and iron, his eyes darting and seeking out the meaning that the thing contained. Then, slowly, his hand ran along the inside of one of the contorted i-beams that was used to form the center of the sculpture. With a shout of triumph, his hand came back holding the Bureaucratic Transit Device.
You Are a Ghost. (Sign Here Please) Page 21
