“Oh yes,” Malibu said. “Just spin her
once. I know she can do more, but I've never put her to the test, so let's keep
things simple.”
I
actually paid attention to this warning of his. My grip had grown sweaty and my
very thoughts felt dopey.Slothfully, I began to
rotate the handle while I braced for any smashup. Forged from thick iron, it
was no baby’s rattle. After the completion of one revolution, nothing had
happened.
“Try it a little faster.” Batman trained his
ignorant sidekick.
“Right,” I said, and gave it another whirl. A literal whirl. I brought the
lever to the top of its orbit and flung it down with a good amount of velocity.
A string of, “NoNoNoNo!” could faintly be heard over the cacophony of bullets.
Too late. I staggered back at the noise and cupped my hands over my ears.
The expulsion of ammo was far too rapid to discern individual shots. Though the
earliest, and not categorized as a semi-automatic, it was a machine gun after
all. Where they should have mashed themselves into chump change, the bullets bit
pockets into the wall as if it was made of dough, throwing up spherical
explosions of acute, green light. I squinted to count off the holes as they
spangled. Onetwothreefourfivesixseven, eight-nine-ten-eleven, twelve, thirteen,
fourteen and fifteen. It had spun two and a half times around, losing steam as
it neared the end.
From the ground, I looked up at Batman to see what that meant. When he said to
go faster, the one-spin instruction had been pushed right out my other ear.
Maybe I wasn't so good at retaining information.
Malibu stood there, hands on hips, disquietly marveling at the wounds. “You did
it, boy.” He turned to marvel at me. He never called me boy unless he was
ashamed of me. “Jolly Roger, you done it. D’you jussdoo what’ver ya want? Your
day equal whatyer bowla breakfass tace li’? Orzit whisheverway th’wind blows?”It was rare when he didn’t slow down to take correct
breaths between his speech, causing the words to ooze over each other. It was a
telltale sign that he was beside himself.
I tried to refute it as I crawled to my feet, but no false claim was going to
redeem me. “You could... say that.”
“Stubborn as a sun-baked cow pie,” Gut muttered.
Great, now I’m cow poop. My face did feel a little steamy.
“Huh,” he sighed as I came around
the Gatling gun to examine my gaffe. “It probably won’t matter in this case,
but do work on getting a hold of yourself. Oh son, there will come a day when
the matter of responsibility will make or break you.”
That
was starting to penetrate my thick skull. Little did I know, I might as well
have been the guy at the helm of the Titanic,
for all my narrow mind could register was the tip of the iceberg.
I
was so concerned that I happened to blurt aloud, “Um, don’t take the keys away,
Batman?”
He
looked bewildered about the allusion to Batman, but seemed to catch its
essence. “Hey, I’m your pal,” he comforted. “Take heed though,” he winked. “The
Jokers out there will lock you up and throw away the key for no reason, other than
that it tickles them to life.”
That
was a haunting prospect.
I
ventured towards the wall, warily, and inspected the craters. There was a
pattern. An… impossible pattern.
You
see, the Gatling gun was fastened to the floor. It had remained perfectly stationary.
So imagine the classic six-bullet chamber, scale it to fit the Heschita, and
keep in mind that she doesn't jiggle a hair while she fires.
The
resulting pockmarks buried into the wall did not match up with what I had observed.
What I expected to see was a simple circle consisting of six holes. Every bullet
after the sixth should've restarted the chain, bullet seven passing through the
same hole that number one had dug, and so on.
Instead
I beheld two concentric circles, each ring of holes still glowing lime green.
The inside ring was a matching size of Heschita's nozzle. The second was about
twice the size and each hole was spread farther apart.
I then
noticed a third, and outermost ring. It was only half-made, and with so much
space divorcing the three holes on its circuit, I didn't see it until I took a
few steps back from the wall: the addition of the half-ring, leaving the left side of the
template heavy. And interspaced along
the wall, maybe six feet apart, shone fluctuating crescent moons. They stood in
a line, unbroken except for the pattern of bullet-rings: three on the left and
two to the right. Each moon was the same height, around seven feet tall from
tip to tip, nearly spanning from ceiling to floor.
Five
in all. Dead ringers of the sliver in the night sky.
Apparently,
three bullets summoned one crescent--nine deep holes to the left, six to the
right, if you drew a vertical line through the center of the smallest circle.
It
was eerie, like staring into a pool of water in the wilderness on a starry
night, moon’s reflection bobbing to the beat of ripples, wandering from an
indeterminable point to yet another undetermined outcome.
“How
is that possible?” I reflected, mesmerised, eyes returning to the fifteen
lesions I had gouged into the surface--not truly of my own will. “The cylinders
would have to move, expand, or… or go through a metamorphosis of some kind, during
the process of firing.”
“I’m
actually not sure how that contraption works,” he admitted. “Besides that it
otherwise ignites and spits out rounds the same as any other gun.”
It
was as puzzling, as transcendental as how the universe came into being. What had
caused these moons to exist; the gun, the object that blasted the rounds forth,
or the bullets themselves, creating a reaction as they contacted the wall?
Could it be me, the shooter? It would be illogical for the gun to fire itself.
Wouldn't it?
And
I couldn’t help being a little resentful, almost envious, of my pal. “What the
hell did you run into during your stay in the military? In Vietnam
particularly?”
“Oh,
you dear lamb,” he bemoaned. “It was, is,
much larger than Vietnam.”
“Really?
I said saucily. “Cause that was a whopper of a war.”
Malibu
nodded. “Let’s just say that once upon a time, I was a naive troop. Until I
turned over a new leaf with the Big Boys--not to say that that leaf was
healthy. Seen my fair share of shit.” He shook his head gravely. “Back then, I
was a reckless junkie: a fool to have wanted to see that stuff."
One of his grey-white eyebrows strolled over me sardonically. "Like some
guy I know now.”
I
longed to ask him where he got such tools as that code cracker and this
throwback gun imbued with unique powers, and that invisible tarp, who or what
the frick he was connected to, if he was conspiring, or worse, if “they” had an
ax to grind. Who was running the show, behind it all, and I mean all of this.
Just straight up demand some straight answers. I need all the answers!
But I had the feeling an inquisition would only lead to more questions.
Who
was this guy that acted like Gutterson's younger self anyway? I smirked at my
own sarcasm. So despite my basket-case state, I simply asked. “Okay. What’s
next on the agenda?”
And
I strictly meant our immediate agenda. The one that might end up saving
our butts. Because my agenda had been blown out of proportion, probably into
the next dimension, and if I tried to entertain it or decrease its swelling, it
was going to get us all killed. Hey there, for once you thought!
“We
go through.” he said.
I
scanned the perimeter. “Go through where?”
He
pointed to the moons. “It might be a little tricky, you have...complicated
things a bit, but straight ahead.”
“But
those are holograms or something, right? Not a passageway.” I thought for a
split second and perceived that I had come to a perceivance. But I didn't see
how it would help us fight the monster. “Oh. You mean we have to go to the moon?”
“Absolutely
not,” he clarified. “It is a passageway. Except that we don’t walk down it.”
What
a mind bender.
“Your new name is
Crypticson, okay? Okay.” I told him.
He
laughed. “The only thing difficult about this concept, is what you,” he
said poking me in the chest, “have done to it. However, it shouldn’t be a
problem for the first use.”
I
was still interested. “And what might that hitch be?”
“Each
Spinal Tap, as I call them, can only be accessed one time, from whichever side.
Then it swallows itself.” He paused for emphasis. “I told you to spin it once,
because I thought that’d be an easy regimen to follow for an inexperienced
whippersnapper like you.” He looked at me
disdainfully. “If you’d have behaved yourself, only two Spinal Taps would’ve
appeared, and we could’ve gone in and out. Together. But since you didn’t, and
overspun, we have an odd number. Capiche?”
“That
would mean odd portal out. I get it. But hey, we could use two apiece, and the
fifth one will fade out over time.” Wait. Only in theory. I looked at
him, somewhat anxious. “Just how long do they stick around if you don’t employ
their services?”
“Oh.”
He scratched his head.
My
eyebrows crashed into my hairline. “You mean you don’t know!”
“That’s
a real conundrum. I never spawn more than I need. I only keep eighteen shots in
that thing at all times, although I almost always go alone and use just two
Taps, it never hurts to have a little extra.” The man blew out a long breath.
“It doesn’t matter. We have to go through and retrieve the only hope we’ve got
of playing competitive with that bird. The time to bluff has passed; our hand
is forced to wager.” He stared uneasily at the wavering moons. “But you’ve made
it as big a gamble as I’ve ever taken.”
Your mistakes always catch up with you, huh big guy? You
should’ve just listened closer, Egghead. Well, he didn't exactly tell me not to
let go when I was spinning the handle. I let loose a whistle hoping it
might expel that sinking feeling with the air. “Damn. I’m sorry about that.”
The
sinking feeling in my lower chambers did not ride the whistle out of my body as
instructed.
The
Gutter just grunted. “No time for sorry. Over there.” He pointed to a spot
beneath the prehistoric machine gun. “Get us some gloves out of that slot.”
I
went over to the specified zone, and began searching on my hands and knees. The
concrete was no bed of roses. Under the gun was a lid, well-camouflaged as the
ground. I mean, I guess all you have to do is paint it matching colors with the
floor. It popped open, exposing oodles of white gloves (blinding in contrast to
the ground) in a compartment that had a volume of a few cubic inches. I pulled
out a clump of four and rose to give Gutterson his pair.
“What?”
I joshed. “Gonna burn our hands when we get inside?”
“No,”
he said matter-of-factly, “We’d burn for it if they caught our
fingerprints on the cookie jar.”
I
could only assume he was alluding to the government. But where had assumptions
gotten me today? I had thought Dudley a corpse, had believed, before this day,
that Pheonix didn’t like me back, had thought it would be cool to try and ruff
Squeaky, a.k.a Dallas, had picked up on small interactions between people that
I had simply imagined (Malibu gnawing on his lip as I fled to the bathroom? I
had only heard a sound because I was chewing my own!). So I left that chapter
blank and dis-assumed that “they” were anyone or anything I thought I was
familiar with.
“Do
I really want to get involved in this shit?” I asked Malibu, almost
rhetorically.
He
caught on like a frog knows it was born to eat bugs, answering query with
query, “Aren’t you already?”
I
finished choking my hand with the last glove and said despairingly, “I know.
Just let me be in denial for a second."
“You know,” he said giving me a once
over. “You’re not going to want to leave hair follicles behind either,” and
flicked right underneath my ear at my shoulder-length hair.
I immediately slapped
his hand away from my dirty-blonde locks that managed to keep mostly off of my
forehead with product, and put up my defenses. “I don’t shed!”
“Whoa
horsie,” he took a step back, “just a precaution.”
He may
have had gloves-to-go, but something for my head, no way. I looked around and
scoffed, “And I suppose you have a hair net readily available?”
“Matter
of fact,” he panted through rich peals of thunder, “I do!” He produced two from
his back jean’s pocket. “And even though my hair isn't all there, I'll wear the
other so you aren't too humiliated.”
My
friend knew how much I despised being humiliated.
“Oh
the joys of modern entertainment.” I grumbled and snatched at the one he
offered me. I wasn’t sure why that was my line of choice. In times like these,
all I had to boost morale was my own wise ass.
“Hey,
don’t worry, I’m just giving you a hard time about it.” He laughed more
heartily. “In the sixties, when I was your age, my hair was so long I could’ve
used it as toilet paper.”
Goodness
gracious, I couldn’t envision him like that. And he was older than I thought.
Good for him; he was spry, came off as younger than his age. Bad for me;
another incorrect assumption to add to the list.
Once
my net was in place, I griped, “Let’s get this show on the road, Hippie. Just
not in your smoke-filled shroom-sniffing lily-toting van.”
Points: 11170
Reviews: 508
Donate