The Alarm Clock at the End of the World

Part 26

The Previous Evening.

“They paranormal cleaners from the twenty-fifth dimension or something?” Tyr asks with a stupid smile as he steps between me and the sausages.

“You expect me to just divulge all in the middle of Meaty Boyz?” I hold out my arms to encompass all the Long Island meatheads wearing powder-blue Polo shirts with upturned collars, waving and shouting ‘Ova Hea!’ They will be disappointed when they find the girls they took home are only pretending to be 14 years old.

“You probably make it all up,” Tyr says. His words have a barb.

“They are the strangest creatures I’ve ever fought,” I say, trying not to be incensed. “I first heard of them when I was searching for the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia. They are supposedly bio-robots built by the Piscean Knights to protect the Ark. One of them shot me in the leg.”

Tyr looks from Nepotism to me. “That was Duke! You gotta show me the scar!” he cries out.

“He was small and spindly, in a wild red shirt and fisherman’s cap. He peers out over sunglasses black as night, beady eyes jumping back and forth.”

Before I realize it, Tyr is beside me again. “Supernatural monsters that look like dead writers?” We’re almost to the counter, only a thin wall of sweaty drunks between me and sausage. This is the most dangerous part, and no way I’ll maintain concentration to break the lines with Mephis Tyr talking my ear off. “Pretty far-fetched.”

“Hunter had been dead only a few months,” I say. “There was one called Abraxas, he could pass for Herman Hesse. He was killed a few years back, but nobody got a photo. There is a Kerouac named Sax, and I think a Lovecraft as well. I’ve never met anyone who’s seen him, but there is an Earnest Hemmingway out there somewhere, deep in the center of the woods, killing anyone he stumbles across.”

I try to exploit an opening and get my hand in for sausage, but Tyr presses in close, knocking me back with his chest when a couple guys from the college basketball team lift two girls on their shoulders and move into the gap. The girls pull up their shirts and everyone cheers. The Meaty Boyz reward them with sausages.

“The Ark episode was one of my favorites. Why didn’t you use any footage or photos from your own trip though?” Tyr asks.

“My cameras were stolen by brigands. We lost everything. Shortly after was when I was shot by the Scrubber,” I say, keeping an open eye for a break where I could climb on the counter. These frat boys are so hammered that even male tits could result in some sausage coming my way.

Nepotism analyzes all the angles, runs down  the options, and slips his arms between the right pair of hips to compromise the defense of the human wall, splitting two girls aside and creating a gap wide enough for us three to enter. Nepotism has the Meaty Boyz attention, one hand held out for sausage, the other pointing to the rest of us, making it known we will need more sausages down this way. Seamlessly, Nepotism draws a wad of cash from his wallet. “Indiana Jones was his personal hero when he was little,” Nepotism shouts back. “See where it got him?”

Go to Part 27