Back to Story TimeAt first I had actually thought that Ron Staggs was a kind of nice guy. Well, fat and stupid, but somewhat nice. I was sooooo wrong.
One night during play practice for Grease I was standing in the wings, waiting for the cue to open the flat so Greased Lightening could get out on stage, and I noticed that my headset was being kind of wacky. It seemed like it was just randomly letting bursts of static into my ear. But hey, what could you expect from cheapo Radio Shack headsets?
Anyway, I was standing there, waiting to open the flat, and it seemed like the bursts of static coming through my headset were becoming longer. I could almost hear a voice coming though. First, I tried turning my headset off and then back on again, then I took it off my head, pushed my long blonde hair behind my ears, and put it back on, making sure that the earpiece was fitting tightly to my ear. Then I turned to Robin, my best friend, and asked, "Who are they talking to?"
He stood up to his full 5' 10" height to look me in the eye, pushed his own earpiece into his ear, and began to open his mouth to make a response, when Ronís voice bellowed from the audience "CHAD! GET UP HERE NOW!!!"
I stared at the wall in shock momentarily. After all, directors weren't supposed to throw temper tantrums like that. I gave a glance at Dustin King, who, also standing ready to enter the stage, looked somewhat stunned.
I walked down the well-lit, empty stage, gingerly stepped down the stairs, and walked up the center aisle of the theater. I could hear the actors who were sprinkled throughout the frontal tridrant of the theater whispering my name and exclamations of shock.
As I approached the magical table of light and sound, I heard Ron say very quietly "Don't you EVER make me do that again!" From that moment on, I knew what I had to do.
Which brings us here. Almost ten full months after the incident, my plan for the death of Ron was being put into action. Just from the knowledge of his name and his license plate number, I was able to look up his address and just about everything else that I'd ever want to know about him on the Internet.
We, that is, Robin and I, were now waiting in the suburban ranch home in Longview by the lake of one Mr. Ron Staggs. He wasn't home, of course, but we're waiting in the darkness of his living room for him to arrive. The homing device showed that he was a few minutes away, moving rather quickly toward us in his gray 1995 Mercury Sable sedan. On the laptop screen, along with the display of the location of Ron's lard-mobile, were displays of the hidden cameras we had installed along the driveway and at the front door.
We finished loading our weapons, me with a KF Soviet and Robin with an AK-47, checked to make sure that they were both set for fully-automatic operation, and waited in silence. The laptop indicated that the Pigís mid-sized sedan was coming up the driveway. Robin and I hunkered down behind the distastefully upholstered sofa, and he folded the screen of the laptop down over the keyboard, extinguishing what little light was emitted by the 32-bit color active-matrix liquid crystal display.
I'll have to admit that we looked kind of stupid, hiding behind this idiotís sofa with guns that were about the same size as we are. But the revenge that we were about to get was more than enough to make up for our humiliation.
We could feel the rumblings in the floor of the house as the embodiment of all that is cellulose approached the front door. The little spot of light coming through the peep hole dimmed, and a key could be heard being inserted into the lock.
As soon as the deadbolt slid out of the jamb, the door flung open, and a pseudopod slid into the entryway. In a few moments, the gelatinous blobís disgusting head, pudgy arms, and stubby legs came into view with a vacuumy-suction sound. A glob of fat, which some doctors may call an arm, whacked a wall switch, and the living room was immediately illuminated by a large, ceiling mounted lava lamp.
Robin and I jumped up. Ron looked a little surprised. I guess I can't blame him, we're probably the last people that he'd ever expect to see waiting to kill him from behind his couch.
Anyway, I immediately screamed "Die Butter Boy!!!" and with a cackling laugh was about to pull the trigger of my KF Soviet when the Swine let out the most massive belch that it scored an 8.0 on the Richter scale. The sudden expulsion of gas blew Robin and I across the room and into the wall, while the quake of the earth had pushed the already weakened floor joists to their limit and they collapsed. We stood up, and waited until the dust settled enough to see.
"You stupid kids!!!" Ron was shouting as he was sliding toward us, consuming everything in his path.
With a grunt, Robin whipped up his AK-47, and pulled the trigger, except that it wouldnít pull! "Wait a minute...this thing's not wanting to work."
"Here, lemmie try mine," I said, and pointed my KF Soviet in the general direction of Ron (which wasn't that hard) and tried it's trigger. It wouldn't pull, either. "This stupid piece of crap!" I said as I threw down the machine of death. "Now the whole plot of this story is screwed up!!!"
"No, wait a minute, maybe you have to plug it in or something..." Robin said as he looked for a power jack on his pistol.
"Are you guys going to shoot at me or what???" Ron asked, getting a lot closer to the dynamic duo than was written into the script.
"No Ron," I replied, "something's wrong with the guns. Maybe the bullets got corrupt and need to be reinstalled."
"No, I don't think that that happens to guns, Chad," Robin said. "I wonder if this little buttony thing does something," he pressed a small button, then tried the trigger again.
Of course, the gun immediately shot off a couple rounds.
"What'djya do?" I asked.
"I pushed the little buttony thing next to the trigger. It must be like a safety switch or something, so that way you don't accidentally fire the thing and waste bullets."
"A SAFETY BUTTON??? That's retarded! It's a gun! It's supposed to kill things! Like a little button's going to turn a flying projectile throwing tool of carnage into something that Martha Stewart would use as a center piece!" I exclaimed.
"I think that the politicians make them do it. Here, lemmie fix yours," he said as he pushed the button on my KF Soviet.
"Can we hurry up here? I'm not getting any thinner," Ron said from the other side of the debris in his basement.
"Okay, okay, letís try this again," I said.
"You stupid kids!!!" Ron was shouting as he was sliding toward us, consuming everything in his path.
With a grunt, Robin whipped up his AK-47, and pulled the trigger, and the gun responded by blasting out a multitude of slugs of lead.
Which did nothing but bounce off the ultimate definition of obesity.
"Ahh! Hey, that tickles!" Ron said with a little laugh as his flesh began to ripple.
I pulled the trigger of my KF Soviet, remembering that Mr. Wheeler had said something about how the KF's bullets are kind of explody or something.
"Ow! Now that's starting to hurt!" he said, and pushed another pseudopod up and out of the front door a floor above him, then pulled the rest of his body out of the house.
"Now that's got to be the only advantage of being that fat. You don't really have to climb, just push some of your fat where you wanna go, then pull the rest of it the rest of the way," I said.
"But why are your bullets all blowy-uppy and mine are just normal?" Robin questioned.
"Mr. Wheeler was telling me all about the features of these guns, and all I wanted to know was how big they were, but he started talking about how they worked and the size of the bullets, so I was just smiling and nodding, but he said something about how the KF's bullets were supposed to be kind of explody or have two bullets for the price of one or something...I don't know. Here, lemmie show you," I fired a couple rounds into the wall, then took the AK-47 from him and fired a few rounds just above the still-smoking holes. "See, the holes from the KF Soviet are kind of bigger. I guess old people can be right sometimes."
"Yeah, but then there's Pat," Robin said with a smile.
I laughed, then gasped, "The chase scene!"
We immediately dropped our firearms and began climbing out of the rubble and through the front door. Ron had already rolled into his Sable and rolled it out of the driveway, and was waiting patiently in the middle of the road for us to chase him. We ran to our vehicles, me with my mom's gray 1986 Honda Accord LX-i, and Robin with his family's white 1985 Chevy S-10 Blazer Tahoe 4x4.
Robin stopped. "I wanted to drive the Bronco!"
Okay, so I ran to my mom's gray 1986 Honda Accord LX-i, and Robin ran to his family's blue 1976 Ford Bronco II with white removable hard top.
"Chad, help me remove the white removable hard top!" Robin said as he unlatched the white removable hard top.
"Just throw the white removable hard top on the ground," I said, standing through the sunroof of the Honda. "The story's fiction, it's not like the white removable hard top will get hurt."
"No, because then I'll have to come back and get the white removable hard top."
"So what do you want me to do about the white removable hard top?"
"Help me remove the white removable hard top!"
"Just ask the narrator to remove the white removable hard top!"
"You ARE the narrator!"
"Oh, I forgot."
The Bronco's white removable hard top was removed, so in effect it was topless.
"Very funny, Chad."
"I thought so," I said as I turned the key of the Honda.
We backed carefully out of the driveway, because after Robin's little incident with the Blazer out at the bottom of Mount Pleasant (can you say, "One Door Wonder"?), well, let's just say we didn't want that to happen again.
When everyone was ready, Ron floored the Sable, smoking the tires under his heavy payload, and Robin and I followed. We quickly got to Ocean Beach highway, and took our vehicles up to about 80 miles per hour.
After racing from Coal Creek road to the Twin City Mall a couple times, swerving through traffic and having many near misses with pedestrians, I got tired of it and pushed the seek button on the radio. Seek meant heat seeking missile.
The ashtray slid out, and a small touch-sensitive 32-bit color active-matrix liquid crystal display angled up out of it. On the display was the view of a pinhole camera installed next to the launching system on the car. I touched the screen, telling the computer where to lock on its targeting systems. A little red circle showed that I was targeting the back of the porker's mucus-filled head. I touched the screen again, telling the system to fire.
The missile blasted out of the front of the Accord, started to go for its target, then swerved suddenly and hit the left rear tire of the Sable instead.
"That was so stupid of me!" I scolded myself. "I knew I should've calibrated the targeting systems when I installed the missile launching relays!"
However the slightly mistargeted missile was having a positive effect. Ron had lost control of the Sable, and was currently doing 360's in the middle of the road. Apparently, the folks at Detroit had never imagined that their vehicles would ever be used to haul a person of such immensity at such a high speed for this long a period of time. Then, the beams of the headlamps of the Sable swung around one last time, and the mid-sized sedan flew off the road, bounded over some grass, and with a loud splash landed in Lake Sacajawea.
The Accord and the Bronco bounded easily over the curb, Robin and I parked the two vehicles on the grass, then got out. We stood there, watching Ron slowly slide his carcass out of the window of the Sable before it became completely submerged. Then, because fat is so buoyant, he just sort of floated there in the water.
"I thought he was supposed to melt like the Wicked Witch of the West," Robin said to me.
"Oh, I forgot," Ron said from the Lake.
"God Ron, youíre so stupid!" I shouted in frustration at how long this short story was getting.
"Well excuse me, but it's not like we rehearsed this or anything!" Ron came back.
The Pig began screaming "I'M MELTING! I'M MELTING!" and melted into a gigantic glowing amoeba-like thing, which quickly dispersed itself throughout the entire lake. Then the ducks and swans started glowing a radioactive green color, and they started violently attacking the PE students from RA Long.
"Well, that was easier than I originally expected," I said to Robin.
He nodded, then turned to see a helicopter landing about fifty feet away.
President Clinton stepped out, with a bunch of Secret Service agents running about. He approached us, and handed a Congressional Medal of Honor to each of us.
"I don't know what you kids did, but whatever it was, it caused world peace!" Bill said, patting us on the back. "How would you like to come back to the White House with me and watch some dirty movies?"
"Uhh...I can't. I have to do my homework!" Robin said, and ran back to his Bronco.
Umm...Yeah, and I left my computer running," I said, thinking "as if I ever turn it off," and went back to the Accord, getting covered in the mud and dirt and grass that the four wheel drive Bronco was flinging up.
"Oh, well thatís okay, Monica will keep me company," President Clinton said, waving. "Some other time then." He got back into the helicopter, and it flew away.