by Chuck Austen
“Hey, hey, HEY!” Mitzi called out, understandably annoyed.
“Sorry, Mitz!” I yelled, skipping over a Ron Garney two-page spread. “I’m in a hurry. Send me the bill!”
“Corky?” she asked, clearly startled.
So much for my secret identity.
“Yep. Loved the Whitcomb you sold me last month. You always have the best stuff!”
“I got a nice Joe Jusko piece over there if you wanna walk on that,” she said, her tone getting cheerier. “Sixty-five hundred.”
“Sold!” I called back, leaping across to the Slave Labor, independent comics booth and out again into the aisle on the other side.
The crowd was thinner here as we neared the exit, and I was able to reach Wisper and the others without further difficulty. I nodded to Wendy, indicating Thug #1, and Wendy—understanding me completely—shoved him over a trashcan and into a group of fans sitting on the floor just beyond, excitedly going through their day’s haul. They were not the least bit happy about his thoughtlessly deminting their purchases and began wailing on him as if they were children beating on an inflatable party game that gave candy if you popped it.
I took the other thug and clocked him on the back of the head. But given that I haven’t exercised since the president required me to in grade school, my fist simply rebounded off the man’s head and into my own mouth. Instead of ‘defending my woman’ all I’d really accomplished was to make a very large, and very hostile professional pain-giver very, very angry.
He leaped on me in a way I’d only seen spiders do in Animal Planet specials about creatures that eat things that don’t want to be eaten, and my lack of physical prowess put itself embarrassingly on display. I flailed and screamed as we tumbled backward over fascinated onlookers, annoyed sellers, and tables full of carefully graded comic books about happy animals that don’t wear pants.
As the owner of the particular booth we were desecrating shrieked and howled, punching and kicking us both and trying to shove us into the next guy’s booth, I tried to remove my throat from the death grip Thug #2 had on it. But no amount of my thrashing, begging, or pleading would make the guy stop.
Imagine.
In desperation, the lack of vital air slowly fogging my vital brain matter, I reached into several plastic containers that had spilled around me and found some Jetsons Happy Meal toys in plastic-bags for sale at ten dollars apiece. I snagged one of the pointier, shurikenshaped ones and raised it over my head.
“Meet George Jetson!” I yelled.
And jammed the ‘determined safe-for-children’ item into the temple of my attacker. Blood spurted from somewhere inside him, and I couldn’t help but say, “Eeewww!”
The mountain of a man squealed in apparent, actual pain, and rolled off me to thrash about in a pile of autographed, Lord of the Rings action figures.
“HEY! Who’s gonna pay for this?” The booth owner demanded in high-pitched squeals. Apparently, a bleeding, fellow human being came somewhat farther down his list of ‘important things to be concerned with’, than the perceived value of the items said loser was bleeding on.
“Talk to him,” I said, pointing to the thug. And the booth owner did.
“Who’s gonna PAY for this?” he demanded of the thug, who seemed not to hear him through his shrieks of agony, coupled with the sounds of crinkling cardboard and popping plastic. He just continued rolling around, crushing things and begging for an ambulance.
Yeah, I’ll get right on that.
I raced from the booth back in the direction of the Boones and Wisper. But they were gone.
Instead I found Waboombas trapped against a wall where she struggled with her thug—like Lazarus against his antimatter self in that episode of Star Trek—both evenly matched, refusing to give an inch, throwing off flares of radiation and energy so intense they threatened to destroy our universe.
I started to leap in and help, but was still relatively physically unfit, so instead I held back and scanned urgently about for more Jetsons toys. Suddenly, a flesh-colored blur shot past me, its jet stream so intense it knocked me into a five-foot Darth Vader, who apologized to me through a James Earl Jones voice modifier.
The flesh blur was River, flying to Waboombas’ aide—I kid you not, flying—and he’d somehow lost his loincloth during takeoff. Several women ‘ooooohhhed’ appreciatively.
Fortunately for Waboombas, unlike me River had exercised endlessly, pretty much since in utero, and when he slammed into the guy, the guy really felt it. River punched him once in the side of the head, and he went over into Waboombas, who punched him once in the other side of the head. The cumulative effect was to make the man’s head visibly thinner, and far less conscious. He dropped to the carpet with a thud that couldn’t be heard over the noise in the convention center, much of it created by the crowd of folks who had gathered to watch.
Then something startling happened. Startling to me, at least.
River and Waboombas looked deeply into one another’s eyes, as if seeing something neither had dared believe could happen in their lifetimes. Overcome, they passionately fell into each other’s arms and kissed so deeply I thought they might end up in crawling into one another’s internal organs.
“Um… ” I said, not really sure I wanted to interrupt but feeling it was necessary before they began having sex on the floor. “I think we should…I need to go find…what about…?”
With strained effort, I finally pulled River away from Waboombas. It was a lot like pulling hot, soft gum out of gooey, melted caramel.
“WISPER!” I reminded them.
River stiffened up—and not in a good way—not for Waboombas at least—and awoke to concern for his sister.
“That way!” he said, pointing, and the three of us hurried off the convention center floor and into the front lobby. Through the glass windows, moving much faster in the thinner crowd outside the building, and more motivated since realizing we had escaped, the Boones were forcing Wisper into a waiting limousine. She looked scared but strong as she glanced back my way, and I was stuck with how beautiful she was, how much I loved her, how amazingly sexy she was in my old shirt, and I kicked myself for ever giving someone so fabulous any reason to doubt me.
It would never happen again.
Washburne forced her into the back of the vehicle before she could call out, and by the time we reached the convention center’s glass entry door, the limo was already moving off and away from us.
Waboombas, River, and myself burst through the openings at the front of the building and raced toward the escaping vehicle, but we were too late. Security had held a way open through the crowd of people and cars in order to get the limo moving quickly and help ease traffic in the congested drop-off area. They were on the street and heading toward the freeway before we could even get off the sidewalk.
We stopped running and caught our breath for a moment.
Panting heavily we looked at one another, desperately trying to figure out what to do next. A commotion erupted behind us, and we turned to see Sophie and Morgan sprinting our way at full-throttle with a good ten, or more, security guards right on their tails. Sophie was holding a pair of dark slacks, and Morgan carried a walkie-talkie and a gun. Both were missing large portions of their body paint, and as Morgan gave commands to the walkie-talkie, Sophie randomly threw keys, wallet, and other items from inside the pockets of the slacks into the crowd.
A pantsless security guard veered off with one of his comradesin-arms and tried to scoop up the discarded items, which some people were grabbing off the ground out of curiosity, politeness, or just plain greed.
Clearly, we needed to get going.
I scanned the area and saw one of those trucks designed to haul an advertising trailer. It had an immense promotional piece for the new Batman movie hooked to its hitch, advertising Batman 16, Rise of the Ventriloquist Dummy! Starring Matthew Perry, with Keanu Reeves as Robin!
Seeing that the driver was chatting up some girl dressed ra
ther fetchingly as Princess Amidala, I took the opportunity, ran past him, snatching the keys he twirled absently, and leaped behind the wheel, locking the door immediately behind me. He, of course, was somewhat put out by the whole thing, as you can imagine, and began screaming and pounding on the driver’s side window. I apologized and thanked him, then turned the engine over and squealed off in an uncontrolled arc in the direction of Wendy, River and the others.
I slowed down only a little to pick them up. Morgan and Sophie were already leaping into the open bed of the truck, as Wendy and River dove into the seat beside me. Once they were situated enough not to fall out on acceleration, I left a stinking trail of rubber on the asphalt all the way down the drive toward a security guard who—I have no doubt—wasn’t paid nearly enough to become a bug on my windshield. He valiantly attempted to wave me off, apparently believing deep in that pretty place we all have somewhere in our souls that I would stop before harming him in any way.
What a dumbass. He obviously knew nothing about adrenaline, love, or their cumulative effects on the human brain. Consequently he was forced to dive for cover at the last minute, landed on a nearby hot dog cart and rolled down the street toward an oncoming trolley train filled with handicapped children.
Wow. Who could have thought that could go so wrong? Heroism has its price, I suppose.
I floored the truck out into oncoming traffic, where cars swerved, skidded, and dodged in all directions, knocking the hot dog cart into some bushes before the train could hit it. But now the guard was stuck on the hood of the car that had dislodged him, which was— unfortunately for all concerned—now driving right alongside me at just about the same rate of speed.
The guard looked frantically around for a few seconds in mounting terror, then collected himself once he realized he might not actually die. After a moment or two of brief calm, he looked in my direction and saw that I was the one who had started all this. That got his adrenaline going, and his love for violence apparently because both fogged his better judgment as he smiled a tiger’s smile and crawled over the hood of the old Pontiac he was lying across toward me—as if that was going to do either of us the least little bit of good.
I edged the truck away from him, but we were now going up the onramp onto the freeway, so there was a barrier rail on the passenger side that would only allow me so much getting away space. Worse, for reasons I won’t pretend to understand, the elderly woman driver of the Pontiac—who was screaming like the lead singer of Linkin Park falling down a mineshaft—angled her car closer to mine, as if hoping the guard on her hood might leap off onto mine, and thereby rid her of her problem. Her husband was apparently on my side, or rather the side that believed she should stop the car right now and put an end to all this foolishness. Unfortunately, his yelling appeared not to be getting through any better than mine.
“Pull over!” he told his wife. “PULL OVER!” Then he grabbed the wheel and jerked it in the opposite direction. “If you’re not going to do it, let me!”
His rash decision abruptly dislodged the guard and tossed the poor man my way, where he grabbed my side-view mirror—I say ‘my’ as if I owned it, but you get general the idea—and held on for dear life, his feet still perched atop the other vehicle as we both careened back and forth in the narrow, two-lane onramp. As the frightened guard hung there, he looked at me with pleading eyes, begging me not to let him die.
Feeling as if I might somehow be responsible for his desperate situation, I took pity on the poor man, rolled down the window, and reached out a saving arm.
Which he viciously grabbed and started pulling in some illconceived attempt to yank me from the cab! I mean, really, twice in as many days? When is removing the driver of a fast moving automobile ever a good idea, people?
And so, clearly not having thought it through, the guard hung between vehicles as we entered the freeway simultaneously, forcing other fast-moving trucks and cars out of their lanes to do so.
“There they are!” River shouted.
I turned my head—now mostly outside the window—into the oncoming rush of the wind, and saw absolutely nothing as my eye sockets ballooned out like parachutes and filled with tears from overstimulated ducts.
“AAAH!” I screamed. “I CAN’T SEE!”
River took the wheel and Waboombas reached a foot over to accelerate. I felt her painted, bare toes press down on mine and suddenly the car lurched forward. Though I couldn’t see his face, I imagined that the security guard still dangling from my arm, mere feet above the racing pavement below, was, just about then, expressing a little concern.
“AAAAAAAAAAH!” he said.
“I said, ‘I can’t see’,” I told Wendy, “not ‘go faster’!”
“We have to catch them!” Wendy informed me. “You’re going too slow!”
She pushed harder on my foot, as if that would make the pedal go somehow beyond the floor. The increase in speed caused the guard’s fingernails to dig deep into the tender flesh of my arm as gravity, speed, and tension forced him slowly down, down, down, toward certain death on the ragged asphalt passing beneath him at just over eighty-miles an hour. I heard him praying to some god or other in a language I couldn’t understand. Possibly English, but it could have been Greek for all I knew.
“This is why I don’t let you drive!” I heard the old man scream to his wife, and I wondered how many other, unfortunate people had found their way onto the hood of her careening automobile.
The interesting thing about speeding down a crowded freeway while people dangle precariously from various sides of your vehicle is: no matter how fast or recklessly you may be driving, there is guaranteed to be another driver attempting to outdo you.
Case in point.
As the advertising truck sped along as I hung out the driver’s side window, as River steered, as Wendy gave it all the gas it had, as Morgan and Sophie did God only knew what in the truck’s back bed, as the security guard hung off me and the hood of the old people’s car, as the old people screamed, and complained, and drove erratically—as all that was going on in full view of anyone else on the freeway who was paying the least little bit of attention—a motorcycle, of all things, raced between our vehicles out of a desperate need to—I don’t know—cut precious seconds off his commute time perhaps.
It didn’t really work out as planned.
The most immediate effect was that, suddenly, the security guard was gone. The secondary effect was that, somewhere ahead of us, a surprised motorcyclist was wobbling and careening all over the road with a screaming man on his head, and that forced the limousine to slow its speed in order to avoid a collision.
As the long, black car backed away, the motorcycle veered off, drove up and over an embankment, and disappeared into a chickenplucking factory. This meant that—as the other car containing the older couple suddenly swerved off away from us and into a slowmoving ice-cream truck, splitting it open like a boiled cranberry and spilling its contents all over themselves and their car, they both let go of the wheel and careened hard right and into some yellow, waterfilled, safety containers—we were alone on the freeway and right up alongside the limo, pacing it.
Then the tinted passenger side window of the luxury vehicle suddenly whirred itself down, and I saw Wisper’s face, frightened and screaming.
“Corky, he’s got a gun!”
A flash erupted from near her head, she flinched, and I ducked. The front windshield of the truck shattered out, and River and Wendy shielded themselves from the bits of glass that escaped the plastic safety coating and flew in their directions. Breathing hard, and more than a little scared, I hunkered behind the driver’s door, debating my next move.
“You drive,” I told River.
“I already am,” he said.
“Oh. Right. Then stay close to them.”
He gave me a cocked look that begged me not to tell him stupid things, I nodded a kind of apology, pulled the handle and pushed outward, seeing the bottom edge of the limo under
the bottom edge of my door and the blur of pavement below that.
What now? I wondered. What would Bruce Willis do in this situation? Something manly, no doubt, so I should discard that line of thinking. How about Matthew Perry?
Or Spiderman?
I thought about options and considered that there might be something in the back bed of the truck that could be of help. In fact, hadn’t I seen Morgan with a gun earlier?
I sat up quickly to look through the rear window and saw Morgan and Sophie having sex.
Dear, GOD! There was a time and a place for everything, and this was neither!
I dropped down again to avoid any additional gunfire, and before I had time to consider what a stupid idea it was, I opened the door, shimmied out and back toward the rear of the truck. Hanging on for dear life and realizing this was way scarier than when you see it in the movies, I leaned out and reached for the gun that lie beside the furiously rutting Sophie and Morgan.
“Look out!” I heard Wendy call, and I turned just in time to see the limo moving fast toward me, apparently with the intent of crushing my legs.
Son of a…!
I jerked my feet up, which threw me completely off balance, and when the limo slammed the truck, the impact knocked me onto the roof of the Boone’s black transport, as it immediately swerved away again, two lanes over from where we’d been.
Over in the truck’s bed, I saw Morgan and Sophie’s heads pop up in surprise. Apparently the earth had moved for them, and they knew it couldn’t have been Morgan’s lovemaking.
“What the hell?” Morgan said as he watched me scramble atop the swerving limo.
“Throw me the gun!” I yelled to him.
“What gun?” he asked, clearly confused.
“You had a gun!”
Morgan’s hamster reluctantly got out of bed then fell backward into the wheel. “Oooh, right. That gun. What’d I do with that?”
He slowly reached over, apparently unwilling to get off Sophie long enough to do anything with any actual urgency, and searched through some things I couldn’t see. After a moment, he held up the dark pistol.
