Chapter Twelve

wherein the author begrudgingly acquiesces to mounting public demand for heightened tension

You race further southward in the mechano-farthing, having left Billy Mitchell VII unconscious on the ground, a small container of three-udders milk awaiting him when he comes to. Lucky for you he’d been easy to defeat. You had no idea he was capable of going Super Saiyan, nor that the only reason you were able to best him so handily was that he was in the midst of a recharge when you encountered him. Though it did speak to the formidability of the assassin that he’d been able to take on Billy Mitchell in his most powerful form and still manage to catch up to you in relatively little time. But you’re not meant to be privy to this information so I suggest you start forgetting it now.

Something that’ll help you forget—the storm gathering in the southwest. You’d noticed a few flashes of green lightning in the distance but paid them little heed. Your mind was elsewhere. But not on all that stuff I just told you. No, your mind was, and remains, on your letter. And the post office is still so far away. A lot further away than the assassin. The southwestern sky is black now, lit only by occasional flashes of green. Again, you fail to notice. What you succeed at noticing—congratulations—is the dust-beaten sign growing closer in the foreground and swaying violently in the gathering wind: Making Plans for Rigel. The last outpost for leagues in any direction, carved out of the earth and topped with a dura-glass dome. You pull the mechano-farthing into a free space, hop out and descend the earthen steps to the entrance.

Once inside, all is mayhem. Some blighter with an effed-up face approaches and says, “See my furry friend here?”

Some furry git at the bar.

“Yeah?”

“He’s indifferent to you.”

You try to wave him off.

“I’m indifferent to you as well!” he says angrily.

Too bad your mentor had been raptured by Stuart Whitesnake or whatever his name is, or he might’ve stabbed the man with a glowstick. But as it is, the effed-up face blighter just shrugs and goes back to his drink.

“You arrive in a vehicle?” asks the bartender.

“Not that it’s any of your business, but yeah.”

“Well not that it’s any of my business, but it’s about to be an ex-vehicle if you don’t get it covered. Acid storm inbound.”

Oh my. Oh your, while we’re at it. An acid storm would make quick work of the mechano-farthing. You rush out and up the steps. The gust front is barreling down on the little outpost like the devil’s own tsunami. Black, rolling and impossibly massive. Green flashes pop across its surface like the devil’s own paparazzi. You sigh and think you’re somehow the victim of the devil’s own simile writer.

No wonder there was a free parking space right out front. All the other vehicles had parked in the storm garage. You yank the old girl arumble and climb into the cockpit, flipping switches and eyeing readouts.

The storm is close enough now that you can feel the sting of acid on your skin, and the taste of it coats your mouth, that unmistakable sharp acidity, the devil’s own citrus fruit. You have precious little time to get the farthing into the garage and yourself back into the safety of the outpost itself. Hopefully there’s a tunnel linking them. You release the brake and begin the three-point maneuver that will point you at the garage.

But oh dear. Oh my. And again, oh your. Billy Mitchell. You’d left him exposed to the elements, with nothing to protect him. Sure, he may be able to make it to an old rusted out car husk in time, but what good would that do? Billy Mitchell VII was an asshole, but that didn’t mean he deserved an acid bath. You’d no choice. You had to go back for him.

The thunderous black mass was now so close you could hear the acid drops sizzle as they pelted the nearby ground.

You whip around, begin to pedal and push the throttle. Your improbable claptrap cycle is off, as just behind you Making Plans for Rigel is subsumed like a locally-owned mom-n-pop by the devil’s own hostile corporate takeover.

You push the lever on, at speeds hitherto undared, your legs burning from the intensity of the record-setting-for-human-legs revolutions per minute, while behind you swells the angry roar of death sleet.

You flip a switch, and a dot appears on the homing monitor. Hopefully Billy hadn’t discovered the ladybird you planted.

You’re just keeping ahead of the cloud now, you can feel its breath on your neck and hear the odd acid drop hit some part of the mechano-farthing. But your feet can’t be made to rotate one RPM faster, whether by petrol or any other means.

There he is—dead ahead. Billy looks as though he’s managed to stand, but switching to your magnification lenses, you notice his eyes are closed, he’s wincing and his arms are outspread as though he’s having a go at embracing death.

Right, you point your fore-wheel at the space between his legs and hope for the best. Drawing closer, closer, you switch off the magnification. Closer, closer, you see him open an eye and try to peek. Cheating, typical Billy.

Both his eyes go big as he catches sight of you. His arms still outstretched, he looks frantically right to left, and before he can process what’s happening, you’ve scooped him up. He’s riding the nose cone of the mechano-farthing like a back-to-front jockey. You grab an arm, steer it to a crossbar and tell him to hold tight. The storm is beginning to envelop you now. Plink, plink, plink as drops hit the cycle’s frame.

“Argh!” cries Billy as a drop sizzles into his back.

From here most lines of dialogue will be shouted, so don’t be perturbed by the overuse of exclamation points.

“I can’t keep up! We’re not going to make it!” you say.

“You have to!”

“It’s no… use! I used up all my leg strength just getting to you!”

The farthing falls back a bit, against the hulking death wall.

“Get up!” says Billy.

“What?”

“GET OUT OF THE SEAT!”

“I… I can’t!”

Then nothing. Your legs give out and the storm swallows the cycle whole.

While it roars on, the author would like to freeze frame and let Waylon Jennings do a little narration: “I doanno how them Dukes’re goan git outta this one!”

And now a word from Polysorbate 80. “Ladies and gentlemen, the history of bates is a long and complicated one, fraught with avarice, duplicity and intrigue. Ever since the first cavemen took a regular bate and turned it into a sorbate, humanity has been obsessed with perfecting this shit. The eons wore on, and it turned out a single sorbate wasn’t good enough for you f***sticks, so you had to bind a whole mess of them together to create the polysorbate. But you couldn’t let sleeping dogs lie, could you?! Nooooo! You just HAD to iterate on that shit. Then we get polysorbate 2, polysorbate 3, on and on and on until at last you came to polysorbate 10, and everyone looked around, panting heavily from exhaustion, and said, Okay, this has to be it. I mean, it’s version double-digits. Surely there’s no way we can improve on this tenth polysorbate. OF COURSE YOU CAN, whuh-pash! whuh-pash! (that’s the whip cracking sound, ladies and gentlemen), like this whole polysorbate enterprise was a ship sailing off the edge of the earth, and you were its broken-backed galley slaves! Invent! Invent, I tell you! whuh-pash, whuh-pash! One-by-one you all DIED! Until finally at polysorbate 20, the last of you presented what he knew could never be surpassed! But a new crop was brought in! Polysorbate 30! Dig another mass grave… Polysorbate 40! Just dump them into the landfill… Now 50, now 60… Is there no end to this madness?! And 70! There are none of us left! Polysorbate has all but claimed the human race!! DARE WE GO ON?!?!? DAAAAAARE WEEEEE GOOOOOOO ONNNNNNNNNNNN?! Then darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the earth was without form, and void. And the spirit of god and by god I mean me, moved upon the face of the waters, and on the seventh day, he created Poly… Sorbate… 80. Available in whipping creams nationwide, whether you want it in there or not. And we don’t have a jingle so just look at our product and think of the By Mennen one.”

“And now,” says the balladeer, “back to the Dukes I mean the Mitchell. And some other guy.”

Flashes of sickly green danced about the cloud as it barreled ever forth.

But what’s this? First a whirring sound, then out spits the mechano-farthing with such a force as to send ripples through the storm. Carried along at speeds faster than you could hope to attain, faster than even gasoline could ever manage, the cycle shoots forth with Super Saiyan horsepower. Indeed Billy Mitchell’s legs carry on awhir, a fluid loop like the roadrunner cartoons your grandad grew up on.

Billy seethes with monomaniacal intensity as the mechano-farthing tears over the scorched earth. His eyes blue-green, leg muscles inflated. His mullet and beard rigid and gold-flamed. He lets out a scream so deafening, he can scarcely make out what you’re trying to tell him.

“There!” you say, pointing from the gunnery seat to roughly two o’clock. It’s the old country estate you’d been squatting in. He pulls the yoke toward the garage.

But the garage is closed.

As though out of spite, the storm gathers momentum and prepares to finish you off.

Closed or not, you couldn’t stop right now if you wanted to.

The storm roars over you.

Billy carries on screaming.

You brace for impact.

And then impact. Rather impressive impact, if I do say so myself. Splinters, dust, a few drops of acid here and there, and the second unit director provides us a shot of the storm-pummeled facade with a mechano-farthing-shaped hole in the garage door. Inside, you emerge from a pile of empty cardboard boxes, the very empty cardboard boxes that drew you to squat in this house to begin with.

Billy wasn’t so lucky. He’d landed in the garage’s saw pavilion. When you first got here, you admired the previous owner’s saw collection so much, you undertook to create a little pavilion for them. You set them all out, gave them each a name and a little origami hat. You’d then strung non-working Christmas lights about the place and hung a sign that read, “Saw Station.” And now you resented Billy for upheaving the lot of it. But you’d express your anger later, when you hopefully manage to dislodge some of the blades. But he was a Super Saiyan at the moment of impact. He’ll be fine. If he ever wakes up.

But never mind about that now. You’re back home! Where you live. A fact the assassin knows about you. Where you live.

You hear a commotion in the next room. Billy is out cold, recharging his Ki. The storm rages on outside. You know your umbrella must be somewhere in this mess, but you’ve lost it in the crash. Again, a commotion. A sharp pain sets in, and here you realize your shoulder may be dislocated. What, then,

do you:

…do? No multiple choice this time. This one’s entirely up to you. The most upvoted comment will determine the story. If everyone puts forth his own option and there is no clear winner, the author will cast the deciding vote.

The voting period for this chapter has ended.