We shared a brief nod, before he turned his attention to Mr G.
‘You have the Naoggrath?’
Mr G nodded. ‘That’s right.’
There was something pissy about the way he said it. It surprised me; I’d never heard him talk that way before. I mean, not to anyone else, anyway. But then, they had shunned him from the community, so I supposed that was about right.
‘Bring it to me.’
Frankie went to step forward, but Mr G put out a hand.
‘First I want your word. Your promise that you’ll take good care of—’ he cast a quick glance at the little bundle of fur poking out of Frankie’s jacket, ‘—of Gizmo.’
A short pause.
A’doy nodded.
‘Well. All right.’
Frankie carried Gizmo over to Nut-sack Face, shoulders hunched against the wind, me following closely behind.
Reluctantly, he handed him over.
‘So long, little guy,’ he said, his voice husky. ‘Be seeing you.’
He sniffled and wiped his nose.
I turned back to A’doy. ‘So. Guess you were right about that whole “chosen one” thing, after all.’
This was something I had thought about a lot during the drive over here. I mean, not to blow my own horn or anything, but I was basically like a superhero now. Like Superman, only less closest-homosexual and paraplegic. Batman, perhaps. I wondered if I should wear a cape from now on, if they were hard to make, and what exactly the charge for dry-cleaning on something like that was. It’s important to always have clean clothes when you’re famous.
A’doy and Nut-sack Face shared a glance.
A’doy cleared his throat. ‘Actually, we, uh, may have exaggerated a little on that part...’
I stared at him. ‘What do you mean, “exaggerated”?’
‘I mean we made it up. All of it. We needed somebody to go stop Boot and her gang from opening a doorway into the Neverwas, so...’
I blinked. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
‘So, wait—I’m not the chosen one?’
And after I’d already decided on an outfit, too. Sonofabitch.
‘Yeah. That’s our bad.’ He sighed and turned back to Nut-sack Face. ‘Shall we?’
And so off they went, waddling back down the road-that-wasn’t-really-a-road—a gangbang of mutants and monsters and aliens—snow billowing down all around them in a fashion that would have been pretty fucking epic, had I not just found out I’d been essentially used as a pawn by a talking, sociopathic bunny rabbit.
Touché, you little furry asshole. Touché.
I turned back to Frankie. ‘Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.’
SIXTEEN
It was morning by the time we finally made it back to the apartment.
My body feeling like several stacked grand pianos, we fell through the door, the two of us immediately making a slow, shuffling beeline for the couch.
We slumped into it with a mutual sigh, then simply sat there a while, staring at the blank television set, both wanting to turn it on but not having the energy, me wondering if I willed it hard enough it might simply turn itself on or whatever. I thought that would have been pretty neat.
‘So,’ said Frankie.
I nodded. ‘So.’
‘Saved the world again. Starting to become kind of a regular thing now, huh?’
‘No, it isn’t,’ I said.
He chuckled to himself. ‘Yeah—but seriously, you should consider going legit. You know, like on the books? You never know; you might even get paid next time.’
“Next time.” You sonofabitch.
I looked over at the window. It had stopped snowing by this point, the sky now, for the most part, clear—which I thought was about right, given my track record with luck so far.
I turned back to Frankie. ‘Listen, I need you to promise me something.’
A concerned look from Frankie. ‘Sure, Dan. We’re best friends. Just name it.’
‘I need you to promise me you will not mention a word of this to Abby.’
‘Eat a dick.’
‘Frankie—’
‘No way, Dan! I can’t lie to Abby—are you nuts? Have you any idea what she’d do to me if she ever found out? She’d castrate me, Dan—and I don’t mean like she’d “have a stern talking with me”, or whatever. I mean she’d literally kick my dick into fucking scrambled egg.’
‘That’s... probably an exaggeration.’
He shook his head. ‘Forget it, Dan. I’m not going to—’
He was interrupted from his raving by the sudden sound of a door slamming.
We both pounced to our feet, expecting more bad-guys—these ones perhaps with even bigger, grosser nipples—
It wasn’t bad-guys.
‘What the hell is going on here?!’ said Abby, appearing suddenly into the room like an apparition, her little suitcase-thing dragging lifelessly behind her like the stiff, unmoving corpse of a vanquished enemy—which, to be honest, wouldn’t have surprised me at all.
I stiffened. ‘Oh, Abby! Hey!’
‘Don’t hey me—why’s the apartment trashed? And why are you both so dirty?’
‘Well—’
‘And is that blood?’ she said, pointing at my pants, which I noticed now for the first time were practically coated in the stuff.
I looked to where she was gesturing. ‘What—this? Ha-ha. No, that’s just...’
Oil? Tar? Paint? Quick—tell her it’s paint, Dan!
‘...ketchup.’
Balls.
‘Ketchup?’
‘Uh-huh.’ I elbowed Frankie. ‘Isn’t that right?’
Abby swung her gaze around to look at him.
Frankie looked frantically back and forth between us, face pale and pleading, looking like a kid having just been asked by his soon-to-be-divorced parents which one of them he likes better.
He lasted exactly three seconds.
With a child-like cry, he collapsed to his knees on the carpet, hands clasped firmly over his balls, face drenched in an instant.
‘It was all Dan’s idea!’ he cried, before curling up into the foetal position on the carpet, face in his hands and weeping hysterically, now a broken shell of a man.
I glared down at him.
Judas.
‘Well?’ said Abby.
So I told her about everything that had happened. About Lake Fairburn and the Men in Black. About Gizmo and Boot—and, yes, even A’doy, the mischievous, talking bunny rabbit, who I was pretty sure now was actually a real, bona fide evil genius.
When I was finished, Abby stared at me. ‘You punched a bear to death?’
Okay, so I may have exaggerated a little on the details—whatever.
I shrugged. ‘More or less...’
‘That’s the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard.’
I nodded. ‘Imagine how the bear feels.’ I frowned. ‘But—wait. What are you doing back? I thought your dad was, well—you know.’
There was a moment’s weighty pause.
Oh, no.
Abby didn’t cry often—a byproduct of being a lethal killing machine, I supposed—but when she did, it was almost always a whole thing. It had long ago been established that, despite her kick-ass demeanour, Abby was in a lot of ways like an onion. She had layers. And at least one of these layers, if picked at hard enough, would result in tears.
She fell into my arms—a trembling mass of blonde hair—sobbing into the collar of my jacket, me feeling like an asshole, and not sure why.
Exactly how long we stayed like that, I’m not sure. Long enough for me to get soaked, put it that way.
The morning rolled onward.
INTERLUDE—PART4
‘But—wait,’ said Lake, leaning across the table towards me. His eyes were wild and staring, his brow creased furiously. He looked like a man battling a math puzzle he knew he’d never solve, but who continued to battle it anyway, because it simply wasn’t in his nature to give u
p. So that was probably very noble. ‘What happened then?’
I blinked. ‘Then?’
‘What happened to all the—’ he swallowed, ‘—“monsters”? The ones that came out of the doorway? Where did they all go?’
‘I don’t know.’
I mean, what was I, the fucking monster police?
‘You don’t know? A small army of Hell-demons floods through onto our plane of existence—and you just let them go?!’
He was getting pretty loud now, his voice a little below a shriek.
Throughout the course of our conversation he’d grown more and more invested, urging me on whenever I slowed down or tried to take a break or whatever. In the beginning I’d assumed it had been some sort of therapy tactic; some throw-him-in-the-deep-end manoeuvre I was unfamiliar with, because I wasn’t a psychiatrist.
Now I wasn’t so sure.
‘Well, I—’
He pounced to his feet, thrusting an accusatory finger across the table. ‘Have you any idea how irresponsible that was?!’
I stared. I mean, sure, I guessed he had a point.
I held up my hands. ‘Doctor, if you’ll just calm down, I—’
‘They could be anywhere...’ he said, his eyes scanning the corners, head whipping left and right in almost comical fashion. ‘Right now—right at this very moment!’
He had his fingers in his hair now, running them back and forth across his scalp in a fashion that in no small way reminded me of a crazy person—an observation that, despite the sudden nose-dive my therapy session had apparently just taken, I still took time to find more than a little ironic.
‘I—I have to get out of here!’
He began shedding clothes.
He whipped off his tie and shirt, before letting both drop to the ground with a muted ruffle.
Then came his pants.
I threw my hands in front of my face. ‘Dude!’
‘Quick—run, Daniel!’
He barrel-rolled over his desk, dick and balls flapping all over the damn place, then sprinted to the door, his smooth, hairless ass the last thing I saw before he vanished down the hall, a pale, shrieking blur.
Somewhere not too far away I heard the sound of a door opening, then closing.
I waited until I could no longer hear the sound of his panicked screaming.
Then, with a long sigh, I slowly pushed myself up from my chair and went home.
EPILOGUE
‘So how did your first therapy session go?’ said Frankie.
It was the morning after my meeting with Dr Lake. We were sitting on the couch, watching an old Little House on the Prairie rerun. A half-circle of refrigerated pizza sat on the coffee table before us, so old it probably still remembered what Jesus looked like.
‘I think I gave my therapist a nervous breakdown,’ I said.
‘Ha. Figures.’ He took another bite of his pizza, pulled it out and looked at it strangely a moment, before shrugging and popping it back into his mouth. ‘How’s Abby doing?’
I sighed.
Abby.
Turns out her father had indeed passed away, just as presumed. There had been tears. Cursing. Lots of random and spontaneous threats of dick-punches—not that I thought she really meant this last, or anything. But hey, everybody has a process.
It had taken several weeks before she was able to forgive me for not “including” her in the whole “Gizmo” thing—or what I had since come to think of as Mine and Frankie’s Week of Extreme Retardation. But she was coming around.
‘She’s okay. I mean, we still have a long way to go. But she’ll get there.’
‘Well. That’s good.’
I nodded. It was.
I turned and looked out the window at the snow.
I had thought a lot about all that had happened during the few weeks following the whole thing in Merlot, what it might mean for Future Dan, and his anus.
So turns out I wasn’t the fabled “chosen one” as A’doy and his asshole friends had so deviously misled me to believe—something I was still feeling pretty raw over, if I’m honest. I mean, sure, it meant less danger—which was good—but I’d always thought it would have been cool to know what owning a utility belt felt like. Now I guessed I’d never know.
As for the Phonies, I still wasn’t sure what the hell those fuckers really were, if they were aliens or multi-dimensional beings or what. Although A’doy had indeed informed us of their origins back in the church-museum, considering that “other” big thing he’d lied about, it would have been foolish of me to take him at his word. That, and he was kind of a dick. So there was that to consider, too.
I turned my attention back to Frankie. ‘Hey, do you want to—?’
Before I could finish, from the space just above the coffee table in front of me, a brilliant light began to form.
There was a crackle of electricity, a flash of condensed lightning, before, with a sound like a man farting loudly into a steel drum, from the air less than three feet away from our faces, a shape began to form.
Frankie and I shared a glance.
What the dick?
We turned our attention back to the sphere of light—what looked more like a wormhole, now that I looked at it—turning just in time to witness a head poke itself through.
It was the head of a man—or rather, what one might look like if run through an industrial-sized clothes-press; all long and elongated, with a big, pointed chin, whiskers poking off it either side like a cat.
‘Dan Pratt!’ it said, an unmistakable urgency in its voice. ‘My name is U’tahlalala, and I have travelled much distance to see you. Our planet is under attack. We need your help. Only you, the Kingslayer, can rid us of—’
I turned to Frankie. ‘Care to do the honours?’
‘With pleasure.’
Popping the pizza slice into his mouth, he promptly leaned forward and pushed the man’s head back through the hole.
‘Wait!’ said the man, googly eyes widening before, with another deafening fart-sound, both he and the hole he appeared from vanished back into the ether from whence they came.
Frankie fell back into the couch and immediately resumed munching pizza. He looked at the TV and groaned. ‘Let’s watch something else. This is boring—besides, I bet she’s not even really blind.’
I glanced at my watch. ‘Can’t. Got to go get balloons for the party.’
He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’
I began to make my way over to the door, when Frankie called after me.
‘Oh, hey, get me some Pop Rocks when you’re out? It’s, uh... for my Grammy. Yeah, she loves Pop Rocks. She’s such a slut. Seriously, it’s embarrassing.’
I groaned and reached for my jacket.
***
Evening came, and it was time for the party, so I put on some clean clothes and started pretending like I wanted to be there.
This was my usual routine for parties. I walked through the apartment, one of those little plastic cups in my hand, nodding smiles to people I passed whom I only vaguely recognised, even though I didn’t really want them to be there. I dodged arms and elbows. Winced at how loud the music was, because even when letting your hair down, it’s still important to be considerate of the neighbours.
Through some miracle or another, I eventually found myself in the living room, which I was disheartened to discover was just as lively and bustling with people as the rest of the apartment.
People in Christmas cardigans laughed as festive-themed jokes about Santa and his sack were tossed wildly back and forth across the living room like a goddamn midget in a gangbang, yucking it up like it was about the funniest thing they’d ever heard, despite probably having heard the exact same joke—or one just like it—only the Christmas before. Other people with party blowers hanging out of their mouths like cigarettes drunkenly professed their New Year’s resolutions to anyone who would hear them, despite knowing full well they had no intention whatsoever of keeping them, but who felt seemingly compell
ed to tell everyone just the same.
Amongst those on the couch sat a similarly cardigan-laden Frankie, a child’s electric piano in his lap, that he looked to be showing to some girl from Abby’s work (Leanne? Lorraine?), whom I only vaguely remembered because of that fucking lazy eye she had.
He tapped a ditty out on the keys, and she laughed—though I couldn’t hear exactly what was played. Christ, that eye, though.
It seemed everybody was having a great time but me.
Sighing, I shot a look around for Abby—
There was a crash and a yelp as the door to the apartment suddenly flew open.
I spun around on instinct, butthole tensing reflexively like in those perilous moments right before a prostate exam, turning just in time to witness a heavily armed Chuck Norris storm his way into my apartment, guns hanging from seemingly every appendage.
‘Okay, everyone! Don’t panic! I’m—!’
His eyes fell on Frankie sitting on the couch and he gasped.
‘Frankie?!’
Frankie turned to him. ‘Oh. Hi, Chuck. What’s up?’
Chuck waddled over, face a mask of concern. ‘Is everything okay? I got your message, and I thought—’
Frankie laughed. ‘Oh yeah—that. Yeah, it’s cool. Dan and I took care of it.’
Chuck let out a deep sigh. His moustache quivered. ‘God, I was so worried!’ He collapsed into Frankie’s arms, tears streaming down his face in torrents.
Frankie patted his back. ‘There, there. It’s okay. You’re okay, big guy.’
I turned my attention back to the party, finding Abby standing by the TV with Eric—whose face I noticed, unfortunately, still resembled that of a criminally abused ham.
‘Hey!’ she said as I approached. ‘Where’d you go? I’ve been looking all over for you.’ I glanced over her shoulder at Eric, who waved cheerily.
Ugh.
I turned my attention back to Abby. ‘Oh, you know. Just, uh...’
Yeah, Dan—where did you go? Tell her. Tell her how you were cowering in a ball on your bed, wondering how anyone could be in a party mood, considering what’s coming, how if they knew they’d probably all go throw themselves into traffic or a volcano or something—
Dan and Frankie and the End of Everything Page 20
