Free Ticket to Nowhere Chapter 13
Rarified Air • A Stark Mystery
At a hundred and forty floors, lionhearted determination was required to consider any escape option, solid or otherwise, involving the other side of the glass panels out onto the honeymoon perch.
Pretty useless. About as useless as my decision to face the lesser of two evils. Like a voter squeezed to the system, my life’s blood running wasted on some politician’s Italian marble floor, I put the glass behind me, stuffed the manuscript down my back — steeled my vision — and promptly pissed my pants.
The immediate blossom of alcoholic, energized urine showed all over the front of my favorite biker motos, now a color of grandma’s trinkets, the ones she tried to give me at Christmas cause her social security fucked her over ten years ago.
The plaguer and her demonic hound took in the steaming mess at my feet, looked at each other, and barreled over with the sniggers.
I’ll forever count humiliation among the many blessings encountered at death’s door. The smell? Well, another place another time — don’t be so greedy.
Art reflects life; so do comic books. When Rambo Lion (who the fuck gave him that name) bursted the rented suite, all I focused on was Fred. Good old Freddy-boy; the munchkin behind the scenes. He was just standing there.
What did I really know about this cigar munching, manipulative, pint-sized fairy? I never could pick him out of the mob scenes in the movie. General consensus was that was easy, due to his weight problem and penchant for no-color hats; the flaps met under his chin, suspicious, like an alien headdress. Then there was the boots. Man I’m talkin ugs. No distorted fictional personality, I’m sure that’s the way he saw himself, would don a pair of river bottoms as those.
I’m trying to tell you the only serious role Fred would excel at, is doing parlor favors for the great and almighty wizard: Late night red light stuff the talking flick was too anemic to touch.
“Jesus, Fred,” I said, praying on my hands and knees like Christ on top of the water. “I could kiss your ass in a Macey’s display.”
Fred showed me his teeth, then bellowed to get out of the way. A couple of silver bullets, forged in Colorado ice, screamed past my ear; in sotto, as they did, whispered “duck, you lucky son of a bitch.”
Ballistophobia gripped the heart of the disastrous Krystal. Her body moved across the floor, unsuccessfully, in an attempt to become one with an invisible cosmos, but far enough to avoid the parting missiles, which sought a target much more to their liking.
Toto’s head, inches from my own, exploded in a sea of biological mist. Teleported graphics of the violence showed outlined on the side of the mini-bar. The beast arrived at eternity looking for addiction without the slightest thought of Dorothy.
“Where’s the manuscript?” Munchkin boiled through my head with his eyes and the business end of the gun.
“Trust me, you lolly-pop lane freak, you don’t want to know.”
Michael Stang 2020
Continues in Chapter 14…
Previous Chapters:
Chapter 1 • Chapter 2 • Chapter 3 • Chapter 4 • Chapter 5 • Chapter 6 • Chapter 7 • Chapter 8 • Chapter 9 • Chapter 10 • Chapter 11 • Chapter 12