*****
Ye Olde Crazy Lodi’s Arms Emporium was located on a one-way dead-end street in East Anaheim, California. The building was small and rundown, and the facade of brink and mortar was crumbling, making it seem as if it would be more at home in East Baghdad.
Jeremiah doubled checked the address on the business card and apprehensively opened the door and walked inside. He climbed the three flights and knocked three times on a door. An old sign next to it, written presumably very long ago: “Y O de Crazy -Od ‘ Arms Empori ”
“One more please,” came a voice coming over an intercom above the door.
“Excuse me?” said Jeremiah staring at the contraption.
“Knock one more time please.”
“What?”
“You have to knock four times in order for me to open the door.”
“But you already know I’m here.”
“Listen, rules are rules; if I bent them for you the world would be total chaos.”
“The world is already in total chaos!” Jeremiah said trying to justify his knocking.
“Listen, I would appreciate you knocking one more time.”
“Why?”
“Please! I tried to be nice about it! Would it kill you to obey the rule and just knock once more?” screamed the voice so loudly it shook the wall that held the intercom system.
Jeremiah knocked a fourth time, allowing the person inside to grant him entrance. Jeremiah stepped through the door revealing a spacious warehouse with row after row of towering aisles filled with a potpourri of every weapon ever known to man and some that never should.
The room resembled a sprawling metropolis of steel industrial-strength shelves that reached a hundred feet in the air, casting shadows from the track lighting that hung overhead like a florescent star cluster.
Crazy Lodi’s was a contradiction of everything the laws of physics had held to be long believed self-truth. Outside it was quaint little building, inside it opened up to the expanse of a small town. Jeremiah could have sworn that down one of the aisles he thought he saw a post office and town mercantile.
In the middle of one of the rows there sat a desk with a man waving his hand ushering him over. The man sitting behind the desk was a tangled mess of solvency, his hair laid across his shoulders, matted down under a heavy mixture of oil, grease and sweat, revealing a face that only a mother could love [A mother who had left soon after the birth and had come back years later deaf, dumb and blind and in the worst case of self-denial the American Psychiatric Association had ever witnessed.].
The man swiveled the stub of his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other showcasing a smile of blackened teeth from behind his stubbly chin.
He wore a filthy wife-beater t-shirt, which would have been considered filthier if the man and the shirt weren’t in a combined camouflage of stains and unsettling dankness. There were piles of magazines sitting on the desk with varied titles using some combination of Juggs, Buns and a loose definition of Legal.
“Hi, I’m looking for Crazy Lodi,” said Jeremiah, clearing his throat and trying not to stare at what might be a haphazardly shaven Sasquatch staring at him behind a cloud of cigar smoke.
“Ain’t here, my friend,” said the man, switching the cigar to his hand and scratching his head as the cigar ashes fell into the tangled nest of hair he was using as an unwitting ashtray.
“Will he be back soon?”
“’Fraid not.”
“Will he be back later?” Jeremiah liked people, he liked talking to people, and he just wasn’t sure what he was speaking to was all human.
“Not later either”
“This is, uh, Crazy Lodi’s Arms Emporium, right?”
“Yep.”
“But he’s, uh not coming back soon?”
“Nope. In fact not ever.”
“Ever?”
“Not ever.”
“No?”
“Never ever.”
“Never ever?”
“Dead.” Shrugged the slovenly made man.
“Dead?”
“Yep.”
“But-how long has he, uh-?” Jeremiah’s heart sank. He had come this far to fail because of a dead man.
“Oh god, let me think,” Jeremiah thought he could in point of fact see the cogs in the man’s brain actually spinning as he pondered the question, “about, uh, two-hundred years or so, I guess.”
“Two-hundred years?”
“Give or take a couple, yeah.”
“Oh,” said Jeremiah in a confused despondency.
“I’m Earl,” said the man not skipping a beat in the conversation.
“Oh, Earl.” Jeremiah’s head curved toward the ground looking at the tops of his loafers.
“You gotta name, friend?”
“ Jeremiah?” thinking his side of the discussion was over.
“Nice to meet you, Jeremiah.” Earl stuck out a meaty hand to shake. “You from England, right?” Jeremiah took the greasy palm and clasped it. Earl was big man with a tight grip; he held Jeremiah’s hand like he was a kid on a three-day sugar rush clinging on to his last precious Milky Way bar.
“Right.”
Earl liked talking to people almost as much as Jeremiah, but when you’re six-feet of solid muscle and look like you’re the offspring of an orangutan and an oil spill, people don’t always like talking to you. “Good people in England. I was there oh, about 10 years ago, couldn’t be a nicer group people. Real down-to-earth. Class acts all the way.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t look so down friend. No use cryin’ over spilt milk or dead milk.”
“No, I guess not, it was just that I was hoping-”
“You look like a man who needs to do a little shopping,” said Earl standing up and walking from behind the desk.
“Yes?”
Earl beamed the showiest grin anyone with mouth half full of teeth ever grinned. “Then let’s do some shopping!”
“Okay!”
The two men walked through the maze of weapons that glistened and gleaned from their high perches. Earl was a master mechanic who had spent every waking hour of his life trying to invent the perfect weapon.
A noble cause if the effort wasn’t intended for the whole doomsday device part. He had a swagger about him, mostly because his knuckles almost touched the floor when he walked, giving his body a natural swing, but he also knew he was good- Oppenheimer good.
“So, whatcha huntin’? Vampires? Werewolves? Mutant Zombies? We got a real good shipment the other day of Zombie Blasters. These babies’ are Nitro-tipped arrows that’ll cut through those mothers like a hot knife through butter.”
“No, not exactly.”
“What then?” he said quizzically.
“Baby.” Jeremiah said sheepishly.
“You’re huntin’ babies? For sport?”
“No, not for sport!” Jeremiah was enraged by the idea, but back tracked his exchange in his head and reflected that he should have prefaced the whole baby thing with an adverb of some kind; “Devil Child.”
“Devil Child? So you’re lookin' at demon possession in--”
“No.”
“No?”
“Not demon child. Devil child.
“You mean THE Devil’s child?”
“Yep.”
“Oh gawd.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
*****
Dana Plough skipped out to her waiting car reinvigorated; whatever those Venezuelans did to decaffeinate coffee while injecting them with what could only be described as blood-filling pleasure jolts, was a wonderful feat of humankind and should be awarded with a medal. She hadn’t had a morning this good or invigorating in nine months.
For the first time she could hear the birds chirping and the children playing, and even better neither one annoyed her [as they usually did]. Manuel stood by the car watching the figure that used to be his rigid, temperamental boss who had in all likely hood been body-snatched by alien invaders
, come wistfully gliding down the driveway towards him. He opened the door and Dana Plough floated in and lay back on the leather seats on a caffeine rich high.
“Thank you Manuel.”
“Excuse me ma’am?” questioned Manuel.
“I said thank you. Is that so terribly strange?”
“Well-”
“I know, I know,” said Dana Plough her eyes drifting around her skull as if her brain were watching a tennis match on the moon, “I know I don’t say thank you enough to you.”
“It’s not that ma’am.”
“Then what is it Manuel?”
“You called me Manuel.”
“Well, that’s your name isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“Well then, Manuel, thank you so very much.”
Manuel shut the door and walked around the car to the driver’s side. He looked in the house and made out thirteen very large men standing at the window watching him with the attentiveness of a pack of lions watching a three-legged gazelle stuck in a mud hole. He quickly climbed in the car and sped off keeping an eye on the house in his rearview mirror.
Manuel had spent thirty-two years as a professional driver and in that lifetime he had driven some of the most successful people in the modern world. From politicians to actors to singers to heads of industry and State, and the one thing they all had in common was that each and every one of them had been, at some point or another, in some varying degree of a drug-induced haze.
The high that was coming from the backseat of his car was something he had never witnessed before and he’d driven Keith Richards in his heyday. Dana Plough’s body was slouched over and her head rested against the car window, her mind somewhere in the clouds.
She marveled at the sights she had passed each day on her way to work through a newfound child-like proclivity. She commented on everything she saw with a rambling nonlinear narration that would trail off whenever something shiny or large or both caught her eye and took her attention into a different direction.
The car pulled up at the GNAN studios where Juliet was waiting impatiently for her to arrive. She paced back and forth, tapping her clipboard with her false fingernails while muttering to herself under her breath. Juliet could act like this until she opened the car door. Then it was back to indentured submissiveness.
Beside her stood Henry Angler, a fresh-faced recent college graduate from Yale University, who had been assigned by GNAN against his and his Senator daddy’s wishes to be the assistant for Dana Plough’s assistant. Henry wasn’t over-privileged, sniveling little pissant. He was THE over-privileged, sniveling little pissant.
The morning had not gone well for Juliet, first she had been stuck with this abhorrent, little Ivy League snot that had been grandfathered in, and second Mr. Bidwell had stopped by the office an hour after her boss was supposed to be at work. She used all the skills she had learned at Lambda Sigma Delta [Except the ones that were related to keg-stands. Those only helped at office keggers.] to lie to the company’s CEO, who had become more and more impatient with every passing tick of the clock. He even had the audacity to notice Juliet’s deficiency of people skills and her utter lack of the art of deceit [She was extremely good at keg-stands.].
Juliet opened the car door and was met by a beaming Dana Plough who jumped out of the car and hugged her tightly. As Juliet sensitively pulled herself away from the grasp of her boss’s bear hug she gave a furtive glance to Manuel who looked back at her and shrugged.
Juliet wondered if all these months of drinking straight vodka by the gallon had finally taken its toll on the woman. A woman had been a pillar of rock-steadiness in times of crises. She motioned to Henry to help Dana Plough inside and back up to her office to sober up.
“Get her some coffee or something.” She pointedly said at Henry.
“Oh no, I am never going to drink coffee again. Am I Marco?”
“I guess not Ma’am.” It appeared to Manuel that the Venezuelan coffee high was finally wearing off and the days of “Manuel the sexy, sexy driver man” were gone and he would return to being plain old Marco.
“Well, get her some Vodka then!” she scowled in Henry’s direction.
“I don’t think she should, I mean, she’s pregnant.” Said Henry, who hadn’t been on the job long enough to know of Dana Plough’s propensity for DWP’s [Drinking While Pregnant].
“I don’t care what you think. Get the woman some alcohol!”
This kind of impudence would have never had happened at Yale, thought Henry, where he was well respected by his peers, a leader of men, and thought of as somewhat of a Renaissance man by the other members of his class.
This was, of course a self-delusion; he was a nauseating little turd whom nobody liked or spoke to hardly at all in his six years at school. This could have been rectified if they had known his grandfather and father were very powerful men and could have them all killed with one phone call. If he could only have told his fellow classmates this while they were dunking his head into a toilet.
He took Dana Plough’s arm and draped it over his shoulders as he led her inside, muttering to himself under his breath about his new boss, whose boss he was carrying.
*****
“Is that a recliner with a helicopter propeller and two sidewinder missiles attached to it?” said Jeremiah pointing to a recliner with a helicopter propeller and two sidewinder missiles attached to it.
“A marvel of modern machinery ain’t she?” said Earl radiating with pride. “That, my friend, is the Earlinator Mach Two.”
“How is different than the Mach One?”
“The Mach One went and got blowed up,” said Earl shaking his head in the remembrance of what he considered his greatest invention to date, “But you don’t want that.”
“Why not?”
“Well, the Mach Two ain’t for enclosed spaces where there might be lots of civilian casualties. It’s an outdoorsy kind of toy. I assume that you’ll be battlin’ mainly in hospitals and playschools and what not. What with your target being a child and all.”
“Good thinking.”
“That’s what I get I paid for.” They both paused for a moment to reflect on that particular piece of wisdom, “Well, I actually get paid for making stuff to kill people with, but I gotta think of em to build em.”
“Gotcha.”
“What you want is your basic up close and personal combat-issued weaponry. I assume that the Powers of Darkness you’ll be engaging is well edjumacated in hand to hand combat?”
“I would assume so. Yes.”
“You see where you’re at the advantage is that you- um- well-”
“Where I’m at the advantage-?”
“I’m thinkin’- You got anyone with you?”
“Uh, no.”
“You’re planning on taking on the Dark Overlord of the Underworld and thirteen of his most ferocious minions on all by your lonesome.”
“No. Of course not.” Jeremiah gave a chuckle of hesitant shame. “Don’t be silly.”
“Who you got?”
“Well--”
“You ain’t got nobody, do you?”
“Well-”
“The book clearly states you need thirteen to go up against his thirteen.”
“I know. I guess I just didn’t think that far ahead.” Jeremiah tried to whitewash over the fact he had sort of leapt into the whole saving the world from the forces of evil a little on the unprepared side.
“Didn’t think that far ahead!? Didn’t think that far ahead!? What you need to do is set aside some personal reflection time for yourself and start thinking that far ahead buddy,” Earl seemed to begin to get red under the pounds of grease in his face.
“Well, there’s got to be others who know about this. You know about this. I assumed that-”
“Don’t assume. You have to get out there and find others.”
“I know.”
“Well don’t just stand there. Get out there and find them!”
?
??But I haven’t finished my shopping.”
“’But I haven’t finished my shopping’,” mocked Earl who nailed Jeremiah’s nasally inflected voice to a tee. Which was an impressive feat by a man whose drawl would make the denizens of the swamps of backwoods Louisiana seem downright regal.” Leave the rest to me.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome! Now go!”
*****
“Well,” bemused Henry, coming out of Dana Plough’s office, and shutting the door gently behind him “I gave her two glasses of Vodka and seems to be settling down now.”
“Great,” said Juliet slinking back in her chair, “Hopefully that will get her through her meeting with Mr. Bidwell.”
“If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to sit in on the meeting with Ms. Plough and Mr. Bidwell.”
“It is too much trouble. I don’t get to sit in the meetings, so I’m damn well sure my assistant doesn’t get to sit in.” her words shot out like cannon balls at the very thought
“Yeah, about me being your assistant.”
“Listen, college boy,” she said rising from her chair and pointing her finger, backing Henry off. ”I’ve worked too damn long and too damn hard to let some little pipsqueak, who should have started his illustrious career in the mailroom, but because his Daddy has money and power he gets to be my assistant, leap over me in this office.”
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry I said anything.” whimpered Henry cowering.
“Good,” she huffed sitting back down.
As the two assistants were having a small face-off Mr. Bidwell appeared as if out of nowhere.
“Good Morning Sir,” said Juliet lunging to greet him.
“I take it that she’s in?” Bidwell said, as if to no one [as far as speaking with subordinates, there was no one there].
“Yes sir.”
“Sir,” said Henry straightening himself up and extending his hand, “May I just say that it is an absolute honor to meet you.”
“And you are?” slurred Mr. Bidwell with disdain as if had just watched Henry eaten his beloved cat Mrs. Pussywinkle MacNamara.
“Er, Henry Angler, sir,” he said trying to recover from Bidwell’s general lack of interest of who he was, “I’m Mike Angler’s-.”
“Ah yes, Senator Angler’s boy. I had heard you’d joined us in my little company.”
“Yes Sir.”
“I like your father very much.” As if he didn’t.
“And he likes you very much.” As if he didn’t.