Round
Acid     The
Clock
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
On the Road Again
source: Rand McNally
posted: Feb 15, 2005, 1:01 PM
by: rgb
We came running out of the explosion. All the shrapnel and flames and heat had just missed us because it had thrown us high in the air, out of its own range.

When we landed, we'd forgotten why were being chased, and maybe the people chasing us had too, but it didn't stop them.

Fortunately up ahead was a hot air balloon warming up and we killed the two people in the truck and the two in the gondola who were making final preparations.

We turned the burners on full, unhooked the rig from the truck bed and immediately soared up and the wind took us out over the racetrack.

But we were sick from the sudden jolts and started vomiting over the side. They were running the 6th race directly below us at the time and several horses slipped on and several jockeys and fans were sprayed by, our puke.

In response, people in the stands started firing their pistols up at us, trying to bring us down (as it were) because they didn't like having their horse-race, their horses, jockeys and themselves covered with our partly digested last few meals and snacks.

The balloon was hit, but the wind had picked up again and carried us farther inland as we slowly descended into the trees. We were too far from the track now for the people there to get to us quickly, but they'd no doubt called their fucking relatives who lived in the hills and we could already hear the engines of their pickup trucks revving as we de-ballooned.

The local animals were waiting expectantly too, all looking through the trees to see what we were about, but only an old bear bothered to roll a washing machine down a hill at us, and even that was pretty halfhearted -- like it was more about the machine than us.

We made it to an abandoned farm house. But inside, it wasn't abandoned. A TV personality was there. Seated in a hard-backed uncomfortable chair, he mumbled some words off a home TelePrompter and then drank urine from a jar. Anything for a laugh.

Enormous will was required to keep his head from turning to syrup and spilling down over his collar. Or so it appeared.

He delivered strident homilies about the church army for a while, then took out a small hand gun and shot himself in the head -- apparently unwilling or unable to continue to exert the force of will necessary to keep it from getting to the point of viscosity where shooting into it would become finally useless.

We reluctantly moved into the farm house and drew straws for who'd clean out the body. We all lost.

After that we got stoned and ate food we found in the cupboards. For dessert we tried to make a SAM-II out of Drano, lemonade and tin cans. When the choppers came and started firing down into the house we shot these up at them and they actually worked, but couldn't be aimed well and ultimately missed. Fortunately the choppers all collided anyway, but, unfortunately, they fell into the house and smashed up everything and blew up.

Fortunately we got out of there in time, but now we had to walk through the woods for days. At this point, we had not heard Velocity Girl or Lush for over a month.

Of course we were running from incarceration for crimes we didn't commit or even know existed till we were accused of them, convicted, sentenced, and jailed.

There's not much to say beyond that about the past because of, you know, national security reasons.

Anyway, we were all hopped up about the partial success of our homemade SAM-IIs and were hot to try again and improve them for better accuracy and control. We vowed to rob some 7-11s and work on this once we got out of the woods.

So after a few days of eating grubs off tree bark and not sleeping much, we finally reached a small town and immediately robbed the 7-11 of all its Drano, lemonade and lighter fluid.

We took over the first house we came to after we left the 7-11 so we'd be near enough to go back and get whatever else we needed once they restocked it.

The people in the house decided to join us because they were renters and had nothing to lose and also hated everything -- except love and beauty and honesty and freedom and truth. And kindness and justice and warmth and healing the sick and predicting the ugly stupid future.

But things didn't go well with the SAM-IIs and we couldn't really improve them and there were several explosions and small fires in trying, and without the pressure of being under attack to spur us on and drive us, we finally just said ehhh fuck it and gave up.

It was only minutes later, while we were relaxing from having taken the weight of building homemade missiles off our shoulders, that we heard chopper sounds and then the release of incendiary bombs.

We dove for the basement and then out a ground level window as the place burst into flames. There were some trees so we had a few moments before we'd be visible from above or from the street.

We made it into a house 2 doors down where they were also renters and decided to join us too, so now we were 8 people, one from each race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and favorite song.

Rather than venture back into the streets where the police would be patrolling, we took advantage of the closeness of the houses and dove through the window of one into the window of the place next door. Since it was winter and the windows were mostly closed, we were accompanied by a lot of noise especially the sound of breaking glass, and by many diverse shards of the broken glass itself.

We did this for 10 houses till we were 2 streets down, where the police weren't patrolling.

At first we thought we'd make a run for it to the freeway and move surreptitiously through the foliage along the divider strip to another town. But a few feet from the house we saw we were leaving too thick a blood trail to cover up and decided to just all go back inside and quietly bleed to death.

Fortunately the bookcases were filled with books and there were huge full screen TVs on every wall and all manner of porno tape and the great classics of film, video game, and search result.

We decided to start a school and maybe blow things up and shoot things down, on the side.

We stopped all our bleeding and after many days had finally dug the last shard of glass out of flesh that was gonna be dug out, and the rest would have to just be left inside to form a visible but translucent barrier underneath our respective dermis.

The police had blown up half the street but not made it to our new home, so we decided to celebrate by starting over fresh, and we decided to start over fresh by opting out of everything, and then opting back in only to those things we really wanted to opt back into, if any.

We figured at the very least we could get a best-selling book out of it called OPT OUT!! -- which would teach people how to opt out of the stupid worthless lives they've had forced on them and how to opt out of the stupid worthless society they've had forced on them too.

In a later book we would discuss how to opt out of eating, sleeping, brushing your teeth, and sex.

And then, in the 3rd volume of the trilogy, we'd discuss how to opt out of both evolution and carbon-based life itself.

But before we got started with even the first book, several RPGs came smashing through each of our first story windows simultaneously.

To Be Continued....

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