INCIDENT REPORT
8/28/11
11:57 AM
Transcript begins:
Oh !@#$ me, can't we get any decent booze in this !@#$ place? I refuse to touch that brown heroin, son. It's worse than !@#$ coke. At least you can get help to quit coke. Coffee? They just laugh at you.
Well, okay, maybe some tea. It's not as bad for you. But I want it black, you hear? None of this cream and sugar !@#$.
That's it. Black as death's big shiny !@#$. Only people who take cream in their tea are steers and queers, and I ain't no bull.
Yes, that was a joke. You can laugh. I won't shoot you.
Okay, incident report. We're live on this, right? Oh, we've been live the whole time? Well !@#$. Okay. Let me adjust my !@#$ tie, here. Oh, wait, don't have one. Never mind.
Yeah, it's not every day I walk back to storm emergency central wearing nothing but waders, a gun, and a smile, huh? Been one !@#$ of a !@#$ed-up morning, son.
So, the report.
It was about 9 in the AM, and I was waltzing through Coney Island, making sure anyone who needed saving got it.The wind and the rain are up, the streets are flooded with water and strewn with trash, and if I were normal I wouldn't be able to see more than five or ten feet in front of my face.
Of course, I'm not normal, so I'm just the right person for this job. I mean, if you're going to look for people who got left behind...
I ran into a few people disobeying the evacuation orders, and I made sure they had no !@#$ kids with them. Anyone with kids got SPYGOD VISIONed to the nearest shelter. Anyone without, I gave them the speech and kept on walking.
Hey, it's like I told you when I took this job, I don't give a !@#$ about civilians and mandatory evacs. You want to stand there in the face of a Hurricane and pretend you're Leonardo DiCaprio and this is the !@#$ Titanic? Have at it. Just don't drag your kids into it, for !@#$ sake.
Anyway. I'm on Sea Breeze, heading for West 5th, and I see one guy I know doing just that. It's one of those Free people. You know, the ones who stay behind and have a party in the park when the city converts?
Well, he's just standing there, arms open in the wind like he's waiting for Kate !@#$ Winslet. I ask him if he's okay and he says yeah, he just wants to make sure the Temple's okay. Guess he used to go there or something.
I don't even give him the speech. I figure he knows what he's doing, so I tell him to get scarce when the water hits his knees. He says he can't promise anything, but that's good enough for me. So I go on my way.
And I swear I don't get twenty feet into the mist and the wet before I hear him scream.
I turn around and all I can see, where he was, is a big dark shape. For a moment I wonder if my vision's failing me, but then the shape stands up, holding that poor guy up along with him, and I see what it is.
Best description? A big brass minotaur, maybe ten feet tall, with metal-strip muscles and black gears inside and out. His eyes are black as, well, black as this tea, at least until his rib cage hinges open on both sides and he stuffs this poor guy inside of it.
The guy wasn't even dead when he put him in there, but suddenly there's this whoomp like a gas stove lighting up, and the shape's on fire on the inside. I can hear the poor guy screaming, and the thing's eyes light up, and fire boils out of its eyes and mouth and ribcage, and that poor guy isn't dead yet.
Jesus !@#$. I ain't forgetting that in a long time. You know how a man screams when he's burning to death? Now imagine him burning and not !@#$ dying.
So what's a guy with a trench gun to do? I start stalking over there, thinking this mother!@#$ gonna get my metal. It sees me coming and starts laughing balls of fire.
And it says "I have been looking for you, little man. Come feel the fire of Moloch."
And I say "!@#$ you you !@#$ !@#$ piece of vagrant eating !@#$ !@#$ !@#$," and let him have it with some SPYGOD VISION.
Which, of course, does not !@#$ work on giant metal supervillains with flames for insides.
Nasty thing decides to !@#$ fire out of its mouth, right at me. So I'm dodging and weaving, trying to get close enough to get a good shot in with the trench gun without getting barbecued. And it's tossing fireballs out of its mouth and throwing them from his hands like something from Super Mario Brothers on Martian Speed, blowing up half the !@#$ neighborhood in the process and laughing fire.
And yes, he gets a good bead on the !@#$ Temple. !@#$ jerk.
At a time like this, a man wonders why he didn't bring a more complete armory with him. But at a time like this, wondering such things is highly !@#$ counterproductive, and likely to get you killed. So you have to take in some facts and improvise.
Fact one, he's fire, but with all the water and steam he's probably not seeing too well, which is the only reason I'm not a big shish-SPYGOD yet.
(Yes, it's shish, not kebab. Shish-kebab is lamb. Shish-taouk is chicken. Shish-SPYGOD is me.)
Fact two, this is the third time in recent times someone's targeted me specifically using fire. It's like they know something maybe they shouldn't.
Fact three, there's trash all over the place, some of which may be useful.
So I duck behind a wall, grab a floating mannequin, and do a quick costume switcheroo while trying to get him to engage in some expositional, pre-kill dialogue that used to be all the rage with supervillains back in the day. Unfortunately, he really wasn't interested in telling me who sent him, or why, or how much he's being paid. But, fortunately, he was really !@#$ slow to get over, and since he was in range of my trenchgun, he was a little more cautious now.
(Fact four.)
He did say one thing, though, which both amazed me and got me the perfect moment to prop that mannequin up. Then he blew the !@#$ out of it before he realized it wasn't me. And then I stood up and returned the favor.
Silly me, I aimed for his mouth, and it didn't do a whole !@#$ of a lot. Lucky me, I hit his chest instead, and the poor fellow inside of him took the brunt of the damage. He died, right then and there, and promptly stopped burning.
Which meant that Moloch lost his mojo.
Now, maybe he didn't have a backup plan, maybe he's just another coward who's useless without his gimmick, and maybe didn't like the looks of my alien love penis, but he really looked !@#$ surprised and scared without all that fire. He took two steps back, pointed the finger of I'll Be Back, and pressed something on his chest that made him go all Star Trek.
And that leaves me standing there in the rain, buck naked except for the waders and a gun. Someone staggered by and gave me the WTF look, and I said "I said mandatory evacuation!" And that got everyone heading out and off to their nearest shelter, including a few kids I'd missed.
So yeah, that's my report. One decent dead guy who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, one supervillian assassin with one !@#$ of a nasty gimmick, and one more for the power of improvisation in the face of impending doom.
Gotta love this town, huh?
Hey, got any more of this tea? This !@#$ is actually pretty !@#$ good.
Transcript Ends:
(SPYGOD is listening to Lunchbox (Marilyn Manson) and drinking all the black tea he can get his cold hands on)
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