CHAPTER 20
EXPEDITION WEST
It was a long flight in the Family’s private jet. No nifty stewardesses at all. Plus, on the way, we all figured out about a million times that our odds weren’t too good, and some of us (I won’t mention any names) were a little nervous about that.
“Does this plane have enough fuel to get to Hawaii?” I asked, being practical. “Or maybe Columbia or some other far away country without elves? Vinnie, the Family must have connections all over the world.”
Sensible questions I felt, but Vinnie didn’t even want to talk about it. He made a fist and shook it at me, then made like he was zipping shut his mouth. Then he made like he was cutting his throat. Then he pointed at me. So OK, I figured it out, he was thinking of cutting MY throat.
“Shut the fuck up, Jake,” Joe translated for me further, ending any reasonable discussion about our fate. Mostly people dozed-off for the rest of the flight, or tried to.
We couldn’t land at the Phoenix airport; the elves had firm control of that. Instead, we were supposed to land on a dry lakebed, miles from anywhere.
Joe and I were a little apprehensive about that whole concept. “If it’s a lake it has water in it,” insisted Joe. “That’s what a lake is, a big mess of water.”
I nodded in agreement. “How the fuck can we land in a lake?”
“It’s what they call a DRY lake,” explained Vinnie. “Its dry most of the time. About once a year or so it rains enough to put a couple of inches of water in it and it's a wet lake again. The locals run out with their beach chairs and sit in it, I suppose.”
“What the fuck for?” I asked.
“How the fuck should I know?” said Vinnie. “Maybe because they ain’t got a decent beach like in Jersey.”
“Then it ain’t a lake,” said Joe. “It’s a fucking puddle. It should be called a dry puddle-bed. I’d buy into that one.”
“You can call it any fucking thing you want, but we’re landing in it,” said Vinnie.
Sure enough, the plane landed on a flat whitish desert. No water in sight. No fucking lake, that’s for damn sure. A big black mob limo was waiting, of course. Snake, Tiny, and a driver got out of it, none of them looking too happy. They had guns pointed at us, for one thing, which is always a strong hint that things are not totally OK. Vinnie and Joe had guns pointed back at them, which didn’t seem all that friendly either.
“Show us yours, Vinnie, and we’ll show you ours,” said Snake. “We can’t take no chances; the damn elf controlled guys are everywhere.”
“No problem boys,” replied Vinnie, as calm as ever. Moving slowly and deliberately, he opened his jacket, revealing four fat necklaces of garlic, each one probably made up of a couple dozen smelly cloves. At a nod from Vinnie the rest of us showed off our trendy garlic necklaces too. Snake and Tiny visibly relaxed, lowering their guns. “Your turn,” said Vinnie.
As Snake, Tiny and the driver each showed us necklace chains on which there were only a couple of pathetic looking cloves, Vinnie still kept his gun trained on all of them.
“Here, put these on,” said Vinnie, shaking his head, and he threw each of them one of his own garlic necklaces.
Smiling, Tiny rubbed the smelly necklace on his face and gobbled down one of the cloves before putting it around his neck. Snake mashed up one of his cloves and rubbed the juices all over his face. The driver simply put his on.
“All right, all right,” said Vinnie. He holstered his gun and with open arms greeted his two mob buddies with hugs and slaps on the back, mashing yet more garlic in the process as they yammered to each other in Italian. Everyone stunk to high heaven. The ride together in the enclosed limo was going to be really pleasant, I could tell already.
From the airplane we unloaded guns, ammo, bags of garlic, squirt guns, and balloons. I still wore my Smith and Wesson with the silver bullets. Most of it we put in the limo’s trunk, but we brought quite a bit of it up front with us, where Vinnie proudly showed it off.
“OK,” said Margie. “I understand the regular guns and the garlic. What about the squirt guns and water balloons? Are we going to a birthday party or something?”
“They’re filled with garlic juice,” explained Vinnie.
“Which is better than bullets?”
“Much better,” said Snake, “when you’re going up against your own men that have been turned against you. Much better to turn them back to our side than to kill them. The stuff also bugs the shit out of elves and other bad guys. It bothers them but it don’t finish them off, not by a long shot. But we were holding our own until we ran out. What I want to know is how you plan to finish off that Loranda bitch, white witch.”
“Damned if I know,” admitted Margie. “I guess I’ll just curse at them and hope for the best.”
Great. We guys looked at each other and shrugged, than got busy loading up pockets with garlic goodies and silver lined revolver ammo. Joe got creative with bazooka ammo by replacing the explosive charges of a couple of the rockets with garlic-juice balloons. Me, I was becoming really partial to a supper squirt gun with a half-gallon tank of garlic stink-juice attached to it. I really liked a twelve-shot pistol with silver bullets, but I stuck with my good-old Smith and Wesson. It's better to carry a gun you're familiar with; you folks out there should remember that.
Prince allowed a small garlic necklace to be put on himself, and some really clever, tiny, silver-tipped extensions for his cat claws. Margie had to put those on; the damn cat wouldn’t hold still for anybody else.
Then we were finally underway in the mob limo. We stopped after a couple hours and met up with a dozen other mobsters in several black sedans and SUVs. They split up most of the garlic and other ammo between them.
“We’ll have a hundred men by tonight,” claimed Snake. Then he and all the new guys headed off in different directions to gather more men.
As me, Vinnie, Tiny, Margie, Joe and Marty the driver resumed our trip in the limo I was beginning to feel better about our little quest. A hundred garlic-armed mob guys would raise quite a stink, and I felt pretty invincible with my own Smith and Wesson and garlic juice.
“Hey what’s that stuff?” I asked, pointing to what looked like a field of giant mushrooms along the road. “I don’t remember seeing those things on my last trip.” They looked like purple mushrooms, but they were tall as a man and had heads the size of garbage-can lids. There were other odd things scattered around them too, including stringy little pink trees that looked like jungle-gyms with big, fat purple toads climbing on them.
“Weird elf stuff is growing all over the damn place,” explained Tiny. “The weather is changing too; near their stronghold we’re getting more rain and even fog, especially at night. Me and the boys was just getting used to the desert and now it’s disappearing.”
The elves were even changing the weather? But what was I worried about? We had a growing army of gun and garlic slinging mob toughs on our side. At this rate, within a few weeks we could be invincible!
Then Vinnie made a little announcement. “We’ll hit them in two hours,” he said.
“What?” I exclaimed. “Today? Already? We don’t even get to freshen up in a hotel or nothing? We’ve been in cars and airplanes all day!”
“Best to hit them quick, before they know we’re here,” agreed Joe. “Surprise them.”
“Won’t nobody be more surprised than me,” I said. I didn’t like it but mostly I already didn’t like it anyway, so what the hell? “What’s our plan of attack?”
“They’re headquartered in an abandoned town up ahead,” said Vinnie. “It’s located near an Indian holy spot where the troll figurine was found. Snake and the boys will hit them from all sides, with about a hundred men. But that’s just to distract them. We’ll hit them a few minutes later. Lady,” he told Margie, “you better start thinking up some good curses.”
“That’s it?” I asked. “That’s the grand plan?”
“You got something better?” asked Vinnie.
/> I didn’t. I needn’t have worried about the plan though, since we never got to use it. About ten minutes before we were supposed to reach the elf headquarters, Marty our limo driver started swerving all over the road. The rest of us looked out the windows but saw nothing. “Dragon!” shouted Marty, as he finally slammed on the breaks, swerved the car into a ditch, jumped out of the car, and ran.
Maybe that last part wasn’t the wisest thing for him to do. As the rest of us piled out of the limo carrying all the weapons we could, with a whooshing, explosive noise like a dozen flame-throwers, bolts of exploding fire rained down on poor Marty. There was a hideous scream from the resulting pillar of flame, and then the guy was gone except for some ashes and smoke.
With bulging eyeballs I followed the fading flame trail up to the dragon. It was the damnedest thing I ever saw; it was huge and deadly, a thing of nightmares. Crap; dragons were real! It hovered a couple of hundred feet above us, mega-sized and mostly black, with airplane-sized bat-wings attached to a T-Rex sized body complete with giant tooth-filled jaws, claws and arrowhead-ended tail. There was a tiny figure in green riding on its horned head, probably an elf or a dwarf, at that point I couldn't tell and it didn’t matter anyway.
They hadn’t even seen the rest of us maybe, but then Joe and Tiny managed to get their attention by uselessly shooting small caliber guns and curses at them. It was enough to piss them off. The monster promptly flew a nifty one-eighty and headed back for us, and we ran towards nearby hills, where we could hopefully hide among the rocks, as rocks are the one department where Arizona has it all over Jersey. Dodging through a scattering of giant purple mushrooms, we all dove behind some bigger than refrigerator sized rocks that we figured to be perfect as dragon protection.
Except for Joe. I looked back and the big dummy was still standing next to the limo, loading his rocket launcher as the dragon made its pass.
“Joe, you idiot, get the fuck out of there!” I shouted. I doubt that he even heard me, above the sound of monstrous flapping wings and roaring.
Joe’s shot was perfect. The rocket hit the creature dead center, right in its white colored chest, and silver fragments blown apart by high explosives should have ripped a hole in the monster big enough to drive my Ford through, but that’s not what happened. Instead, the big lizard got splattered with garlic juice. Joe had shot the wrong damn rocket!
“Shit,” I could see his lips say, though the roaring of the pissed-off dragon was too loud for us to hear him.
In a rage, the dragon huffed flames at Joe, the limo, a nearby cactus, a billboard selling cigarettes, the giant mushrooms, the rock I was hiding behind, and everything else in sight. When I looked out from behind my still smoking rock the monster was flying off, shaking and sputtering in confusion, like a wasp that had caught a whiff of bug spray and figured to work it off by flying around. Joe’s smelly shot had saved us after all.
I ran back to where Joe and the limo had been. There were smoking bits of limo scattered all over, mixed with other charred remains. It stunk bad, all that burning stuff.
There was nothing but burned stuff, everywhere I looked, but no Joe or Joe sized cinder. “Joe!” I shouted. “Joe Kebony!”
In response I heard only flapping wings, getting louder, even though I could clearly see the dragon in the distance, still flying away from us. I couldn’t figure it out. I pulled out my Smith and Wesson but there was nothing to shoot my fancy silver bullets at.
“Look out, Kid!” I heard Vinnie yell. “Second dragon!”
I turned just in time to see a giant, black, scaly, clawed hand-thing coming at me. My life, pitiful as it was, flashed before me. Like in slow motion, the big clawed hand of death came at me, and I tried to duck away from it, but gravity wasn’t anywhere near fast enough to pull me down and out of its way. There was a brief sensation like being hit by a Mack-truck, and then everything went black.
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