We immediately ordered our eyes to tear themselves away from what guy-eyes usually can’t get enough of.
The firemen had evacuated the building and now all three hoses were concentrating on the fires raging in the gaping hole of the building.
***
“This is Babe Fox of WNUZ-TV. Fire Chief Brent has just informed me that they had the fire under control, but due to an explosion, it is no longer contained. Furthering the problem is that the water mains in this grid are in unstable condition, so the hydrants are not all accessible. They have called more engines onto the scene.”
The Anchor at the news desk asked her, “Will they have enough water to put out the fires?”
Babe gave the dazzling smile that reporters use when reporting horrible news, “That’s the problem, Brad. Each truck has one thousand gallons of water that disburses at the rate of two hundred gallons per minute.”
Brad gave that fake concerned look that was calculated not to mar his botoxed forehead, “So they each only have five minutes of water?”
“Yes. And worse. The fire has spread to the woods which have been under a horrible draught all summer.”
“That is horrible,” the anchor said, smiling.
“Absolutely,” she grinned back.
***
“I have to help the animals,” Knob cried, when he saw the fire spreading into the woods.
The other students were cheering now that something exciting was finally happening.
“You idiots! This is going to hurt the animals!” Knob shouted, and he ran into the woods to save squirrels.
Knob is an elf. Well, he’s not, but he claims to be. But even I have to admit that it’s kind of spooky how much better his eyesight and ears are than normal. And sometimes he seems able to almost, well, commune with trees and stuff.
… but nah. He isn’t an elf.
“AAAIIIEEE!”
“What?” Seth cried.
“SPIDER!” Wendy screeched.
She leaped into the air, did a series of complicated karate moves that wiped out three small trees, and started frantically stomping the leaves. “OMYGOD, OMYGOD, OMYGOD!”
“It’s not after you!” Seth said, “It’s just trying to escape the fire.”
“Yeah, relax,” I said, manfully trying to stifle a smile.
The fire in the woods was spreading incredibly fast, cheered on by the students.
“Go! Yeah!”
There was swigging of beers and the general hilarity of students who didn’t have any studying to do at the moment.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure this is good,” Seth mumbled.
***
“This is Babe Fox reporting from the campus. The fire is raging out of control and now Allen Business Hall is on fire. Twelve fire departments have responded to the emergency. Most of the campus is more than eighty years old, built with wooden studs and no fire walls. Things are looking grim here,” she said perkily. Her hair looked awesome.
***
The students on the hill were clapping and cheering.
“Check it out. I won’t have to go to Econ next semester,” one pretty coed cried.
***
“This is Babe Fox again. The fire at the campus is getting more dangerous. There haven’t been any deaths reported as of yet, but due to high winds, three buildings are now on fire. Twenty three fire departments have now responded to the call, but the situation is dire.”
***
“Hey, look. The fire is spreading to the Student Center!” a tall kid with spiked hair cried.
“Whoo-hoo!” another yelled.
“No, stupid. The Records Center is there.”
“So?”
“ If it burns down, there go our transcripts.”
“So?”
“So do you want to have to redo freshman and sophomore year?”
The kid blanched, “Uh, no.”
“And look, it’s headed to the women’s dorms,” a swarthy kid pointed.
“Oh, no! My entire life’s in there!” a young blonde cried.
“What do you mean?”
“My laptop, my IPOD, my clothes. They irreplaceable!” She burst into tears.
One of her girlfriends put an arm around her, “It’s okay. You still have your cell phone.”
The first girl looked up, her face splotchy and red, “But my collection of shoes…”
This hit her friend hard, “You mean I won’t be able to borrow…”
They cried together.
***
“This is Babe Fox. The fire is spreading into what is called the Student Slums. Officials are concerned about elderly people living there.”
***
“C’mon,” I said, tugging Seth.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
We jumped on our bikes. Wendy got on Knob’s. The seat was way too high for her, so she sat on the bar.
“We have to get back to the Slums. You know that lady who lives up the road?”
“Mrs. Winston? I shovel her driveway.”
“Yeah. She can barely walk. We have to get up there.”
Fifteen minutes later we were pedaling down the narrow road towards our house. The air was smoky and we were coughing. Fire was racing along the dead leaves in the woods on either side of us.
As we pulled up to Mrs. Winston’s house, we saw it was on fire. The bent frail lady was in the middle of the road, helplessly crying as she watched flames flicker through her home, sweeping away decades of memories.
“Fosda,” she whimpered.
“Fosda? What, your cat’s still in there?” I asked.
“He ran and hid when the fire started. I looked everywhere, but then the smoke...”
During her long life, she’d outlived her relatives and friends. I knew Fosda was her entire family.
“I’ll get him,” Seth cried.
“No, you don’t!” I grabbed his collar.
“I’ll do it,” Wendy said.
“None of you will,” a voice said.
A fire fighter in full firefighting wardrobe stood next to us. Imposing and impressive. We hadn’t noticed the engine pull up. “I’ll handle it.”
The fire fighter ran into the building with a hose trailing and commenced battle with the blaze. After some time, he came back out with a squirming animal under his arms.
“Fosda!” Mrs. Winston cried, running up to take the huge cat in her skinny arms.
The firefighter looked at us, “Hey, guys.”
It took off its helmet.
It was Beth. Beth is our sometimes Warrior. I say sometimes because she has two placenta which cause double PMS. This, of course, gives her incredible powers during certain times of the month.. The only other creature with double placenta is the sand tiger shark.
Big teeth, huge temper, man eater.
“You’re a firefighter,” Seth said, his eyes shining with admiration.
“Yep. Volunteer. I gotta go, guys. Check with you later.”
She got back on the fire engine, and it roared off to go defeat the fire.
We turned back to Mrs. Winston, who hugged her cat while staring mournfully at the blackened ruin of her house.
“What will I do? Where will I go? My pictures… my doilies”
“Won’t your insurance…” I started.
“I couldn’t afford insurance,” the old woman cried.
“Don’t worry,” a new voice interrupted.
“Thurman!”
“Yeah. I came as soon as I could. I waited in the airport for two hours before I remembered I’m a sorcerer and don’t need an airplane.”
He whipped out a beautifully varnished wand.
“Hey, new wand,” Seth commented.
“Yup, got it at the convention.”
He waggled the wand, pointed at the house and a purple cloud leaped out of the tip. The cloud enveloped Mrs. Winston’s house. When it dissipated, her house was as go
od as new.
“Oh, Fosda. Look what this young man did for us.”
She was crying and clutching Thurman, who was lightly hugging the fragile lady.
It was very touching and if I wasn’t a guy I probably would have cried. But guys don’t cry.
Nope, not us. No crying.
(Sniff)
Benny’s eyes creaked open.
It had taken him two days of frantic binging to exhaust his remaining stash. Now his high was low and he was stone sober rather than stoned drunk. He felt weird … well, weird for him, since feeling weird was his normal feeling. It was feeling normal that felt weird. And he felt normal, er, weird.
He was also starving because he’d had to abandon his munchies in his room due to the minor issue of them being on fire. Vaguely, he wondered what had happened to the dorm.
Nah, he didn’t, but let’s pretend he did.
He was more concerned that he was alarmingly clear headed. This was something that needed to be remedied as soon as possible.
He looked around. He was in the back seat of his PT Cruiser. The keys were in the ignition, too. How very fortunate.
Now all he had to do was drive to his supplier and get an emergency ration of drugs so he could get the room spinning comfortably again.
He climbed into the front seat, fumbled with the keys and finally got the car started. Then, driving at geriatric speed, he maneuvered the car out of the parking lot. As he turned to go down the steep hill, a doobie rolled out from under the passenger’s seat.
Manna from heaven!
“Dude!”
As he reached for the roach, his foot jammed onto the accelerator and the car leaped forward assisted by gravity and momentum. The reefer rolled away from his groping hand, so he shoved his torso forward and stretched out. Finally he snagged the errant joint and a slow grin spread across his face.
There was a jolt as the car left the road and plummeted down a steep ravine.
“Whoa.”
The car hit a bump and the door popped open. Benny lost balance and was confronted with the choice between holding his doobie, or grabbing something to hold onto.
Easy choice.
Next thing he knew, with the luck of drunks and potheads everywhere, he and his roach were safely and comfortably dumped into a cushy bush.
He never saw the car burst through the fence into the college’s main electrical transformer. And his personal haze was such that he barely felt the force of the explosion that would knock the lights out at the college for the entire next week causing all kinds of havoc.
But that’s a different story.
He took a toke, and smiled blissfully.
I hope you enjoyed this story. These characters are the same as in my full length novels, The Adventures of Guy and its sequel The Next Adventures of Guy, which are available in all kinds of places. Here's a preview:
The Adventures of Guy
...written by a guy (probably)
By
Norm Cowie
The Adventures of Guy was originally published in 2006 by Draumr Publishing, and thanks to the miracles of today’s publishing…
…it’s back.
All rights Reserved.
Copyright © by Norm Cowie
www.normcowie.com
www.normcowie.com
The Adventures of Guy
...written by a guy (probably)
Prologue
Some years ago, the Federal Trade Commission issued an amendment to the Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) mandating a Federal “Do-Not-Call list.” Millions enthusiastically signed up, happy that they might recapture the sanctity and serenity of their dinner times, and the freedom to answer their phones without having to worry about fending off some jerk, whose thinly veiled purpose is to convince you to take your money, and put it in his pocket.
Unfortunately, though, not everybody paid attention to what their government had done for them (quite likely because most people are not used to this kind of help by our elected officials).
“Ring…..”
“Ring…..”
“Ring…..?”
“Ring!!!”
“Ring…..ring …. ring…..”
The answering machine didn’t kick in.
“Ring….ring….ring….”
Mostly because we don’t have an answering machine.
“Ring….ring….ring….”
Which doesn’t matter, because we won’t answer the phone anyway….
“Ring….ring….ring….”
…because of telemarketers.
“Ring….ring….ring….”
Telemarketers don’t seem to mind that we don’t answer the phone.
“Ring ….ring….ring….”
They keep calling.
“Ring ….ring….ring….”
Over and over.
“Ring ….ring….ring….”
Patience and stamina … telemarketer virtues.
“Ring ….ring….ring….”
That is, well, if you feel like you can put ‘telemarketer’ and ‘virtues’ in the same sentence.
“Ring….ring….ring….”
We didn’t know that the attorneys had waged successful war against the telemarketers, giving us certain rights against their invasion of our privacy.
“Ring…ring….ring….”
As a result of the litigation, the telemarketing firms had to cut back on employees.
“Ring ….ring….ring….”
Nearly wiping out their whole industry almost overnight.
“Ring ….ring….ring….”
But not everybody knows about the Opt-out laws.
“Ring….ring….ring…”
There are still some clueless people out there.
“Ring ….ring….ring….”
Like us.
“Ring ….ring….ring….”
For all I know, there’s only one telemarketer left in the world.
“Ring….ring….ring….”
And he has our number.
Chapter 1
It all started when the phone rang at the house one day…
“Ring…ring….ring….”
The phone kept ringing.
And I kept ignoring it.
Actually, it wasn’t that I ignored it. Since it’s always ringing, we just tune it out, so now it’s part of the background noise of our apartment, like Dave Matthews, Monday Night Football and DVD’s that usually have a woman’s name in the title. Nobody important ever calls us anyway. They know better. Even Mom gave up trying to call, and when she wants to reach me, she simply sends a messenger-kid to me, like my little brother Seth.
Seth’s over right now, in fact, playing Donkey-Kong on the PlayStation. After his message from Mom was delivered, he was released from further responsibility, regardless of my response, or lack of response.
“Ring ….ring….ring….”
Outside, I could hear one of my roommates, Tim, shooting hoops on the neighbor’s driveway. The neighbor doesn’t know Tim plays on his driveway while he’s at work. Tim figures that what he doesn’t know, won’t hurt him. After all, why let a perfectly good hoop go to waste all day? He’s got similar thoughts about their refrigerator.
“Ring….ring….ring….”
Tim works nights at a lab, and…
…wait. I can’t keep calling him Tim, because that’s not what we call him. We call him Knob. I couldn’t tell you why, though. We were pretty drunk when we came up with the nickname, and later we couldn’t figure out where it came from. Still, the nickname stuck.
Me? My name’s Guy.
And… get this…. I’m a guy.
“Ring…ring….ring….”
That’s when it happened.
At first, I didn’t notice it, because all of a sudden it was silent in the house. Even Dave Matthews was between songs.
Then a great echoey feeling took shape in my hea
d as a thought successfully passed completely through without bonking into ringing and music.
The thought was, “What is that?”
The ‘that’ that I was trying to identify was something we had not heard in the three years of rooming together.
Silence.
Not only silence, but a huge silence. One of those silences so huge that it had its own echo. I was hearing silence, and then its echo. Silence squared.
A shiver went down my back.
Then it came back up my back.
It took a turn or two around my chest, and my nipples hardened from fear, anxiety, surprise and some unexplained emotion I’d rather not explore.
The ringing had stopped.
All of a sudden, Dave Matthews started in on his next song, splintering the silence into little shards of chords and notes and coolness.
But I was frozen, because of the strange sound that I didn’t hear.
It was like the time a tornado had hit our neighborhood, wiping out Madame Nirvana’s little house down the road. It hadn’t destroyed anything else, except for her house and a little sign advertising that Madame Nirvana would read your palm and tell you whether your future would include huge clumps of ear hair.
So wouldn’t you think Madame Nirvana would have noticed something like a tornado in her own future?
Her little house had been found a mile away, wrapped around a telephone pole. It knocked out our phone lines for thirty-seven minutes, wiping out pizza delivery profits on a crucial Friday evening.
That’s what I was reminded of now.
“Seth?”
My words sounded freakishly loud.
“Knob?”
The silence overwhelmed me with its silence.
Silence, quiet, stillness, calm, and other words that evoke the image of absence of noise. Not even the twitter of a bird.
Well, there was a Dave Matthews song going on, but that doesn’t count. Because other than that, there was nothing.
“What?” a voice said quietly behind me.
“SHIT,” I screamed, whirling around.
It was Knob, his mouth stuffed with a Cardiac Arrest, a monster sandwich stuffed with whatever’s in the kitchen at the time of creation. Ingredients can vary from French fries, Sour Patch Kids, hot pepper, jalapeno peppers, entire slices of cold pizza, green beans, conch fritters, cow tongue, ice cream, and whatever else one can find.