by Danny Freepons
Our story begins with a young man named Charlie. He was of medium height, slightly overweight, and had never had his appendix removed. He was twenty six years old, and worked at a bank in the uptown. It was a Monday when he awoke at 7:47, panicked when he realized that he had not been woken up by his alarm clock, and was halfway out the door (zipper down, tie untied) that he heard his alarm ringing. It was then that he realized he had woken before it went off, not after. A deep breath of relief and a cup of tea later, he found himself sitting at his coffee table, thinking: I hate this coffee table.
An odd confusion came upon him, the kind when you have time to kill before your next appointment, but not enough to really do anything. He was wracking his mind for seven minute activities when a very charming voice said:
“Good morning, cutie”, as a pair of arms slide down the front of his shirt. Charlie naturally said the first thing that came to his mind:
“AAAAAAAAAAAAGGHHH!”
A moment later he remembered that he had spent the night with that pretty girl who had been doting on him every since he took his job at the bank. He had thought he was alone.
“Oh. Hey. You surprised me.”
“Phew,” she said, with relief that was only slightly obscene, “I thought you forgot I was here.”
She walked around him, with the smile like the sunrise visible through his living room window, wearing his favorite T-shirt. He felt angry about the shirt, then happy about the smile. She was a beautiful girl, with short blonde hair, a trim waist, slanted brown eyes and an excellent chest. Yes sir, he thought, an excellent chest.
He stood up, kissed her on the cheek, and walked into the kitchen to get himself a donut and The Man Who Was Thursday. There were no donuts, and the only book present was Twilight.
“Hey C-!” He stopped short. He had almost called her Christine. He would have trembled with fear at the close call, but he had a sentence to finish.
“Katrina!” he finished, ever the pro.
She walked into the kitchen, along with his favorite shirt. He found his gaze lowering slightly as she spoke:
“If you’re looking for that one book you had in here,” said his favorite T-shirt, “Um…Charlie?”
“Huh? What?”
“My eyes are up here.” She giggled, “And that book’s in the bedroom. I tried to read it last night, but I didn’t understand it.”
“Ok thanks,” He said to his favorite shirt, and went to retrieve his escape from the seven-minutes-to-kill confusion. But Providence provided, and just before he located the book (he would have sworn it was in the next place he was going to look), it was time to go.
He murmured a hasty goodbye to his favorite shirt and the breasts wearing it, and was on his way.
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The sky was a cold grey that morning, and threatened to douse him, just like it had the first day he arrived here. However, he soon gained the advantage in the war against Seattle’s weather, in the form of a slick, black umbrella, obtained from a fellow comrade. Now he thought of the weather less as ancient China thought of the ancient Mongols, and more like modern China thought of the modern Mongols.
A crisp click-clack of his shoes signaled Charlie’s neighbor Harold to leap off his porch bench, and shuffle down to the front of Charlie’s walk, piloting his legs with the energy he had bombing the Vietnamese, if not the efficiency. With a speed Charlie was not sure he could fathom, no more than 14 yellow teeth met him just before his car.
“Ay ther!” they grinded, proudly displaying the effects of Harold’s favorite pastime, “Ayer yew gowin tuh thuh baink agin?”
“Yes,” responded thirty two white teeth and a lot of discomfort, “I’m going to work.”
“Will aisle bee! Yah knoo, bak win ah wuz yer age-“
Oh no. no. no no please no, don’t no stop please no, thought Charlie.
“Ah wuz pilott uf a beeh-fefftytoo! Yuh know what uh beeh-fefftytoo is!?” asked the old man, perhaps forgetting he had informed him each day for the past four weeks, when he found that if he scheduled his porch-sit just half an hour earlier, he would be able to give a free lesson on history every day to a youngster who obviously needed it. And after all, it’s so important to give back to the community.
As for Charlie, he figured he knew enough about beeh-fefftytoos already, and didn’t think he could take another lesson today.
“Oh no I’m late for my job I have to go right now I’m sorry sir another time I’d love to hear about wars and Charlies thank you bye!
He didn’t wait to hear an answer. As he climbed into his minivan, he heard shambling, but he couldn’t tell if it was going towards the car or away. He started it up, and exited the cul-de-sac.
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Speeding through downtown, keeping at least five miles above the speed limit (just like his father taught him), Charlie passed the daily cavalcade of angry faces, hopeless faces, and faces that had ceases to be either, but forgot to take on a new expression afterwards. Holding one up himself, he was too busy to notice the others.
Arriving at the bank, he parked his car, leapt out and nearly hit his coworker’s car. He stumbled back in surprise at the ridiculously parking job, and, still grumbling something about a comeuppance, walked into his boss’ car. It was only then he realized how loud her alarm was. He took the side entrance.
As he quietly slid in, his boss angrily waddled out. Phil Higgins was Charlie’s manager, self-proclaimed football referee equivalent, and penguin look-alike. Katrina had always said he closer resembled a walrus, but his nose was beakish, and his buckteeth weren’t that pronounced.
He waddled up to Charlie, stammering something about a stupid person setting off his stupid car’s stupid alarm, and whether he had caught a glimpse of this stupid perpetrator when he had arrived. Charlie said he hadn’t seen anyone set the alarm off. After a slightly suspicious stare, he left to investigate other sources.
Charlie walked to his desk, passing Stephanie and Britney along the way, both staring at him with their respective ideas of seduction in their eyes.
Stephanie was a fifty year old divorcee, chubby, with a noticeable lack of breasts due to her battle with cancer. She had cheated on her husband and was left almost penniless after he found out. Since then, she had been working hard at finding a new man. Charlie’s predictions were vindicated when she moved from another man to him.
Britney was young and slim. Very slim, with gaunt cheeks and grey skin, in fact, this was due to her contracting HIV from one of her many night-buddies back when she lived in California. She had joined a church soon after and loved it so much that she made joining churches her new hobby. Charlie could not put his finger on why she was attracted to him.
Charlie was flattered when he came to work at this branch, when so many women had turned their eye on him. The pleasure was short-lived, however, when he realized that the only other men at the branch were a yellow-skinned tobacco chewer and a penguin of a boss. Apparently even a taken man was a better choice than they.
He continued his brisk walk through the feminine cubicles, keeping his eyes low.
Successfully avoiding the predatory gaze of any other office ladies, he landed at his desk. At this point he began to make calls to his customers and potential customers. His day began.
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One hour and thirty eight minutes later, Charlie set his phone down, and followed through his daily ritual by sighing deeply and running his fingers through his chestnut hair, celebrating a hard-earned 17.86$. He did not think of the way his life was going, nor did he think of the payment he gained from the calls. He did not think of how he had wanted to be a superhero first, then a fireman, then a dentist, then a fireman again and finally a famous singer before he had stopped wanting to be anything at all. Instead, he thought of Christi-no wait, Katarina… Katrina? Yeah, Katrina’s-breasts. And who could blame him?
Still thinking of the comfortable chest, a man walked in the bank. He was five foot three, had two blue eyes, hairy hands and a suit as gray as misery. His name was also Charlie, but he did not know our hero, nor did our hero know him. He walked up to Martha, the most pachyderm-like of the tellers, and said:
“I’d like to make a withdrawal,” as he held up a gun. Martha almost thought it was funny before the gravity of the situation fell on her, and then the gravity of the Earth felled her fainting body. The loud thump caused everybody in the bank – about eleven people – to look at villain Charlie, except for hero Charlie, whose mind was fully occupied by better things, and Martha, who had been stopped by a slightly similar situation. Tad, another teller, who did not look like any animal at all, was the first to see that villain Charlie had a gun.
“He has a gun!” the yellow-skinned Texan cried.
“A gun!?” shrieked the anorexic teller Julie.
“A gun!?” shrieked the bulimic teller, Anna.
“Who? Where? How?” squawked Phil.
“Bang!” answered villain Charlie’s gun.
It was then that hero Charlie’s dream of his girlfriend or his ex-girlfriend vanished, unable to hold out against the obtrusive reality. He experienced a moment of satisfaction when his absurd hypothesis that a gun had been fired in the office was vindicated by a repeated trial, but he was barely conscious of it, due to the subsequent terror.
A million thoughts would have rushed through his head, but he only made it through a couple dozen before settling down on Christine, and then terror took the reins once more, and she left him. Meanwhile, villain Charlie was saying:
“Everybody on the floor! This is a robbery!
Beneath the teror, hero Charlie found himself slightly annoyed at the needless declaration: people that insisted on pointing out the obvious were his pet peeve, and pet peeves are stubborn things. Meanwhile, the other tenents continued screaming. What lungs, both Charlies thought to themselves.
“Shut up!” said villain Charlie.
“Bang!” agreed the pistol. The double vote overruled the other proposals of further screaming, and the bank’s remaining population respected the new monarchy.
The first decree was that all cell-phones, pagers and other such communication devices were to be deposited in a state-supplied repository supplied by their thoughtful leader.
The second decree of the bank’s new government was that all curtains must henceforth be pulled down, that no other state may attempt an assassination on the new leader.
The third decree was that all citizens must sit, gagged, along the outer wall, that no inner revolution may attempt to overthrow the recently christened state.
The fourth and final decree was that any citizen would place the needs of his or her leader before anything else, and follow all orders given without question, and for that matter that no questions were allowed at all.
Of course, the penalty for revolt was up to villain Charlie’s second-in-command, the honorable Glock® G27 .40 Subcompact Pistol, and it was apparent that his verdicts were of a terribly monotonous variety. Aware of the dangers that misunderstandings give to legislation, villain Charlie wisely defined revolt as failing to follow all decrees, committing any action that might wrest power and/or control from himself, making their leader angry (or less happy than they had the possibility to make him) and failing to follow any other rules he may think of later.
Anna, apparently too used to democracy, voiced concern over the lives of the others, and attempted to inform her new ruler that he had killed the only person that knew the combination to the vault, and that the manager’s second-in-command would be able to supply the password. Villain Charlie’s vice-president thanked her.
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Eight of the nine citizens of the new monarchy (not counting the king or his right-hand man) lined up against the far wall, while our hero was prodded by his eponymous enemy to collect the available money within the cashiers, each prod bringing excruciating pain to hero Charlie’s side. He made sure not to let it slow him down too much. He bit the inside of his cheek to distract himself from the quite unnecessary jabs.
He found momentarily release after he emptied all of the available cash into the same state-supplied repository that was used for the cell-phones (at the very least, none of the onlookers could complain about a lack of frugality), and was assigned to the hostage district. He wondered what the leaves outside would look like. When he was a kid, he had always loved the colors of fall leaves: every plant was green, so who cared if something else was, and dead leaves were fun to step on, but as for looks… well, they just looked kind of sad. But the oranges, the yellows, the reds –oh, the reds! – were fascinating. Every tree changed color at a different rate, so he could walk down a park and see all the different colors intermingling with each other, like arboreal fireworks, frozen in the air. He remembered last fall when he and ChristiGODDAMN IT WILL YOU STOP POKING ME YOU F-
His small convulsion and look of fury was enough to silence Britney for a moment, but with a courage that would have greatly inspired any other neurotic, she poked him again and whispered the plan the six of them had devised while he was making the trips and villain Charlie was considering the advice of his main advisor and Tad, who had managed to tell him that Phil’s assistant would be coming in to help Phil with something or other in two hours.
They would wait until villain Charlie was opening the vault, then hero Charlie would sneak up, feign some pain in his side, grab the gun while villain Charlie thought you were incapacitated, and shoot him while everyone else escaped. Charlie sullenly agreed to the plan, hoping she would just stop poking him already.
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The hours slowly ticked away, and Charlie’s adrenal glands discovered that their reservoirs were not infinite, and since they had never learned to husband their stores. Now exhausted, he drifted off to sleep, forcing himself to ignore the painful poking of his side, unaware that nobody was poking him. He dreamed of a girl with brown hair, blue eyes, and a smile like a new sunrise. They were skipping down a park with a cascade of Thanksgiving-colored leaves showering them. After jumping in a great leaf pile and making snow-angels in them, he tried brushing off the sudden torrent of leaves pouring over her. When he finally got all the leaves off, there were two people in front of him: her and… him. The newest arrival poked hero Charlie in the side. Then again. And again. And again and again and again and again and it was really hurting and he was crying stop it just please stop and when he looked up he didn’t know which one was poking him or if they were even two separate people anymore and then-
“She’s here!” Britney whispered, her left finger stabbing his aching appendix.
Katrina walked into the building, saw the citizens and the ex-citizens, and almost got a scream out before villain Charlie clasped his hand over her mouth and informed her of her new citizenship, including her new duties. She wobbled over to hero Charlie’s side and sat down between him and the hyperventilating Martha, while the villain Charlie was checking all the windows to make sure his rule would not be contested by any external governments.
Hero Charlie had been in too much pain and/or fear and/or exhaustion to realize that she was the one coming in to help Phil with the quarterly reports. For a moment they both perfectly mimicked each other’s look of surprise. It would have been cute under different circumstances.
“What is going on?” she whispered to her new lover.
Hero Charlie bit the bullet and became the perpetrator of his biggest pet peeve by explaining to her that they were hostages and they were going to try and steal villain Charlie’s gun and get everyone of the building, then wait for the cops.
After explaining that there were no other valid courses of action, Katrina sniffled and begrudgingly acquiesced. She started sobbing into his shirt, and had only soaked the upper half when villain Charlie came back from his inspection. He saw the couple leaning against the wall and barked at them to separate. He summoned both of them up for the opening of the vault and the loading up of valuables.
As Katrina was opening the vault, villain Charlie realized that he couldn’t think of a better time for an some Anarcho-atheistic speech. What it was about, nobody really could tell, except that the grand conclusion was that they were all Satan’s servants or bourgeois swine, or both. While reiterating the grand conclusion (like every self-respecting maniac, he understand that some important things needed to be gone over multiple times), hero Charlie realized that this was a better distraction than keeling over would be, and jumped on villain Charlie. They grappled for half a minute, neither gaining a significant advantage over the other, Katrina paralyzed with either fear or stupidity, until they came to that classic deadlock where they both had a hand on the gun, trying to point it at the other. Then one of his coworkers shouted out
“Get ‘im Charlie!”
At this, villain Charlie bewilderedly look up, which was all the invitation hero Charlie needed to plant his elbow firmly in villain Charlie’s eye and tear the gun away from him. Hero Charlie backed away, shooing his light-headed lady away from the corner where the deposed king was snarling at the savior of the people. Meanwhile, the hostages ran out of the building, leaving the three alone, then the two when our hero finally got through that Katrina needed to get herself to safety and he’d be okay. Hero Charlie debated with himself whether he could bring himself to kill another human being, even one staring at him in that horrible gaze, like a rat who intends to chew through anything, human or steel, to get away. While mulling over whether he even could do it if he wanted to, his appendix flared up once again, this time more painful than all the other times, causing him to keel over in agony.
Villain Charlie took this chance to rush hero Charlie, punching him right where he saw our hero gripping his side, and picking up the gun.
Then he shot hero Charlie.