Not Very Nice People - Chapter 1/11: Going South free porn video

NOT VERY NICE PEOPLE by Crazy Baron (Sequel to Life Out of Joint) DISCLAIMERS This work is not intended to make profit. It may be distributed to forums where it can be read free of charge, provided that the author gives his explicit permission and that the text is not altered. While it contains copyrighted intellectual property (namely, appearances of fictional characters), no copyright infringement is intended. As the story deals with topics and themes related to sexuality, violence and mental illness, it is intended for mature readers only. The people and incidents depicted herein are completely fictional. THE STORY Chapter 1: Going South Synopsis: Things are looking up for Michael Caldwell. He is feeling better after a confusing, tumultuous couple of weeks, and he and his three closest friends are leaving for a relaxing, fun vacation on Jake White's relatives' ranch in Texas. However, a stranger whom they meet on the road, together with a curious scrap of paper, complicate matters. Was Mike's recent harrowing experience involving transforming skinsuits and battling the forces of darkness nothing but a temporary mental aberration which now belongs firmly to the past, or is he in for another round of bizarre happenings? ***** The weather had changed. Even though the unusually warm closing days of October were only a couple of weeks in the past, chilly winds were now lashing the Greensville area mercilessly, and last night had brought the first snowfall of this winter. A very fine dusting of snow had remained on the ground all through the day, and the sun was shining like a gray pearl in the sky, beautiful but powerless. Tattered clouds, sailing in a cool breeze, veiled and blocked it intermittently. As I was driving towards Smithfield, my mental state was in almost perfect harmony with the morose surroundings. I should have been happy to be going on a vacation and getting to see my friends again, but a sense of exhaustion and numbness continued to press down on me. The period that had begun a few days before Halloween this year and ended about two weeks ago had been an indescribable chaos for me, one that was hopefully over, but its fallout was still to be processed and dealt with somehow. For the first time in my life, I had crossed over the nebulous dividing line between mental health and illness and briefly visited the other side. Even though I believed I had managed to return from there, I could not be sure I had escaped lasting damage. Only time would tell. Smithfield looked much the same as Greensville. It was just another small town ready to shut down and hibernate over the winter, with few people out and about. Even though I was mostly very fond of my home state and its nature, there were times when they could be, truth be told, depressing beyond belief. My mood began to improve when I finally turned onto the White driveway, and a genuine smile found its way on my lips as soon as I spotted a stout figure standing at the edge of the frost-covered lawn. It was Jake White, with an impressive collection of luggage piled up and waiting all around him. I pulled up right next to him and stepped out of my car to help him load his belongings aboard. "Howdy, partner," he greeted me in an exaggerated Southern drawl. "Nice day for a ride!" "You betcha," I responded in kind. "That's quite a bit of stuff you've got there." "Basically just the bare necessities for the type of vacation we're going to enjoy," he said. I opened the trunk, and he lifted an assortment of plump bags and suitcases in, together with three rectangular, thin cases made of dark- colored hard plastic. Two of them were quite long, while another was shorter, perhaps around 16 inches or so. I had a good idea of what they contained; Jake was planning to take advantage of the remote location and privacy of the ranch to do some recreational shooting. I again manned the driver's position while Jake sat down in the right front seat. After we both had strapped in, I turned the car around and started back towards the main road. "So," I commented, "you're bringing all your toys along." "Pretty much," he said, stroking his impressive beard with his hand. "I can't pass up a chance like this to have a family outing." "A family outing?" I chuckled. "Yeah. There's the AR-15, the 12-gauge Benelli and the .22 Ruger. I would be rude to leave any of them out." "I take it you have the paperwork in order, Jake. I'm really not looking forward to an arrest and interrogation at a police station somewhere three states over if it turns out---" "Hey, don't sweat it, man," he said reassuringly. "The thundersticks are all legal and paid for, as I'm sure you know." "Of course, but we need to take them across several state lines, and the AR-15 probably counts as an assault weapon in most jurisdictions." "As long as they're unloaded and inside locked cases in your trunk, it's all good. Don't worry; I've done my homework." "I really hope you have. I don't want to take any shit from anyone because---" "All you'll be taking is a nice, long vacation with drinking and plinking with your friends," he said with a smile. "The only thing that will in all likelihood be missing is a busload of scantily clad, promiscuous women to keep us warm at night, but if I had to hazard a guess, I'd estimate we can just about survive without them." "I knew you would forget something," I commented and smiled. "By the way, is that good-looking chick still living next door to your parents?" "You mean the Woodbine girl? She graduated high school some time ago, last year maybe. I think she moved away to study." "I wouldn't mind if she was coming with us, now that she's legal and everything." "Me neither, but if I had to hazard a guess too, I'd assume she would be less than enthusiastic to hop in this car." I stopped conscientiously at the intersection and then turned onto the main road, heading towards Chesterton. We had agreed to pick up Scott and Charlie there, at the latter's apartment, and then--assuming we could successfully cram them and their luggage into my car in addition to what was already there--we'd set out on our journey for real. There was one relatively sensitive topic of discussion bound to come up at some point. Others might have approached it with caution and reluctance, or they could have attempted to avoid it altogether and rather suffer the resulting awkwardness, but not Jake. He knew me well enough to realize that there was no need for him to skirt around the issue. "So," he said plainly. "How was the nut ward?" "I've got no complaints," I replied with a grin. "They treated me well, and I didn't have to stay there for more than a couple of days, anyway." "What was it that got you there in the first place? What exactly happened?" "That's not an easy question," I said in a slightly more serious manner. "To tell you the truth, I'm not sure of all the details myself. I have no firm recollections of the two or three days after I left here, only some jumbled mental images. Anyway, a cop found me wandering aimlessly on a street in the city and took me to the hospital in his patrol car. That's the first thing I remember with certainty. The doctor at the hospital thought I was disoriented and maybe suffering from memory loss, so he admitted me for observation." "And then? What did they do?" "They took who knows how much of my blood and tested me for anything they could imagine, drugs, alcohol and a wide variety of physical diseases and conditions, but they didn't find anything. Even though my mind began to clear up fast and I was pretty much back to normal after my first night in the ward, the senior ward doctor wanted to keep me there for a few days, just to be on the safe side. So I stayed and chatted with him, the other doctors and the nurses and spent the rest of my time reading or doing more of their tests. The chief was a nice and easygoing fellow, a balding guy in his fifties, and he would come at least once every morning and evening to talk alone with me for a while." "Right. Anyway, what diagnosis did you get?" "The senior doctor told me they didn't really have enough information to determine what the trouble was, but he said that it might possibly have been a brief psychotic disorder or brief reactive psychosis; I think those were the terms he used. I got the impression that they are actually much more common than most people believe. An episode can sometimes start without a clear, identifiable cause, run its course and then go away again." "Uh... If you don't mind me asking--what was it like?" "What do you mean?" "The psychosis, or whatever it was. What did it feel like?" I bit my lip, trying to decide what I could reveal to Jake and what I had better withhold from him, at least for the time being. When being interviewed by the senior ward physician, I had not been entirely truthful about all aspects of my experience; I had either been vague or simply claimed that I couldn't remember the details, even when at least some of them were still fresh in my mind. I was reluctant to admit to anyone, myself included, that they were there, and I wanted them to disappear for good. "Do you recall our conversation before I left for the city around Halloween?" I asked Jake. "Sure thing. You came here and told me that it was almost as if you were jumping between the past and the present and you couldn't always be sure which place was real and which was not." "Yeah, well, that's pretty much the gist of it, up to that point. What happened later was like a crazy dream--and maybe it actually was one, I don't know. I was supposedly living in a fantasy universe of some sort. It was otherwise very much like ours but there were all kinds of strange monsters living among humans without most people even realizing it, and my job was to hunt down and kill the baddies whenever I could." "Oh, you mean with an assault rifle and hand grenades, or something? Sounds fun!" "No, it was more of a sword-and-sorcery kind of thing. The good guys had blades and spears and magic spells." "I'd love to hear about your adventures over there," Jake said with a smile. "Maybe you could write a book about them and make millions of money." "I'm afraid that idea's a non-starter," I laughed, trying to hide the discomfort and lingering embarrassment that accompanied my every recollection from the strangest days of my life. "I really can't remember all that much when it comes to details, but just the general way that world was set up." As if on cue, a vivid mental image surfaced: a muscular demon with a hideously wrinkled, thick brownish skin, collapsing onto the ground right in front of me after the axe I held in my hands had sliced through its neck and decapitated it. I could see the abomination die before my eyes and smell its poisonous final breath as though my fight with it were happening all over again. The memory was almost mocking me, declaring me a shameless liar, and I tried to will it to pass into oblivion. Jake, completely unaware of how great a favor he was doing for me, went off on a tangent. "That's too bad, and not only from a monetary point of view. Anyway, did the doctors prescribe you anything?" "You mean medication? No. The chief doc considered it premature with the information they had, or lack thereof. He essentially told me to take the rest of the year off and avoid stress as much as I can, and that's precisely what I'm going to do. The sick leave is already arranged. Should there be any more trouble, I'm supposed to contact the hospital immediately." "Did he order you to lay off coffee and booze?" "He didn't say I shouldn't drink at all, but he strongly emphasized that I must stick to moderation. Aside from that, controlled substances in general are a big no-no, of course, but that's not a problem for me. By the way, I mentioned our plans to go on this vacation to him, and he actually thought it was a good idea, with the above reservations." "Excellent!" Jake exclaimed and rubbed his hands together out of pleasure. "Do you know what this means, old buddy?" "No, what?" "It means that as soon as we get to Texas, we're all going on a good old-fashioned bender together! Just like old times!" "I'm not sure that's wise," I said with a small laugh. "In case you haven't noticed, we're not teenagers anymore. I don't want to suffer through the kind of hangover you're promising to arrange for me." "Ha! Nonsense! That's why we've got painkillers and plenty of time," he pointed out exuberantly and then went on in a more matter-of-fact tone, "The thing is, Mike, we're not all that likely to get a chance like this ever again. Let's live one more time before we are too old." "I've got nothing against that," I said. "I'm only saying I need to limit the intake to levels my liver and kidneys can cope with." Once more, I was being economical with the truth. There was no question that I had gotten older since our heyday and generally drank far less than then, so my body would actually have a much harder time dealing with alcohol and I sincerely wondered with apprehension what a really massive hangover would be like for me now. But the main reason for my reluctance was something else. I feared that any kind of major disturbance to my mind would send me onto another trip to the fantasy universe to fight vampires, flesh-eating demons and the acolytes of the reality-shattering Angronok hellgod who was bent on conquering the world. I was more than willing to start a life of teetotalism if that would guarantee to keep the hallucinations away. The drive to Chesterton was uneventful, yet much more entertaining than the first part of my journey thanks to Jake, who kept up a conversation about various conspiracy theories related to spaceflight. He had recently been in a social media debate with someone who claimed that the Apollo moon landings and various other space missions had been faked, and defeated the crackpot soundly. We had a few good laughs on the way, and in no time, as it seemed, we were waiting outside the small, newly built three-decker in which Charlie currently lived. Jake was about to dig out his cell phone from his jacket pocket when the door opened and two men emerged. Much to my relief, Charlie and Scott were bringing with them nowhere near the amount of things Jake had, but we nevertheless got out of the car to help them load everything in the trunk. While the bags and cases ended up being packed in tightly and in no particularly good order, we didn't have to leave anything behind and even the lid could still be closed securely. "The payload is go," Jake declared, in keeping with the spaceflight theme, as we all took our seats in the cabin, Scott and Charlie in the back, Jake himself next to me and I behind the wheel as before. "The pilot?" "Go," I replied. "The Entertainment Specialist?" he continued, looking at Scott. He promptly got the joke. "Go!" "The Narcotics Specialist?" "Go!" Charlie laughed. "The launch vehicle?" "Go for liftoff," I said and stepped on the gas, letting the car roll onto the street where we then joined the very modest traffic. "We have cleared the tower!" The years since high school had hardly passed any of us by without adding some creases to the skin around our eyes or thinning out our hair at places, but Charles McGee had endured somewhat better than myself or Jake in that respect. He could still almost pass for a 25- year-old with a full head of usually slightly tousled dark hair, hollow cheeks, a strong, angular chin and a slim body. The fact that he was the tallest of us (if only by a margin of an inch or so) accentuated his leanness further still. Back in school, a fellow 1960s rock music aficionado of mine had once likened Charlie's looks to a young Keith Richards, a view Charlie himself had had mixed feelings about but which was not very far off the mark in my opinion. My cousin Scott, on the other hand, was about the same height as me, fairly lean like Charlie but rather muscular under his clothes. His hair was darkish brown and his eyes were green and lively, perfectly fitting his boyish round face with pronounced dimples. Scott had always been athletic and usually energetic by nature, even if the last decade had brought out a more contemplative and introspective man in him. "How are you guys doing?" I asked the backseaters. "Good, I guess," Scott replied. "Busy with the usual, down-to-earth stuff, but it's nothing to write home about. I didn't have to think twice when you asked me to come." "I've spent the last two days babysitting my sister's two kids," Charlie informed us for his part. "Little girls, aged eight and five and a half. Sweet little angels, who are driving me absolutely nuts." "You never struck me as the babysitting type," Jake commented. "I've done that from time to time before, but it's always a surprise how much energy you need for the job. I can use a vacation after that." "That should be easy to arrange," I said. "Sit back and enjoy, my friends. I'll put on some soothing music for us." "About that," Charlie said. "Just so you guys know, if I hear 'Let It Go' one more fucking time, I'll..." "I see," Jake interjected. "In that case, I have exactly what you need." He took out his phone and ran his fingers over its touch screen. "Not so much soothing as... shall we say, energizing music for the masculine taste. Sir Lemmy, take it away!" The cell came alive at that instant with sounds Charlie's little nieces might not have found as agreeable as the latest Disney hits. I grinned at this. At long last, we were well on our way with nothing to stop us. The next days would be like the good old times, with the four of us on vacation, free from all the anxieties, responsibilities and the general rut that was everyday life. What was more, my confusing and distressing memories from the period of my psychopathological episode were momentarily swept aside. It was surprisingly easy to write them all off as simple hallucinations of a troubled mind that had gone a little bit out of adjustment for a day or two, and I felt as though a heavy weight had been lifted off my chest. "I actually have high hopes for this trip," Charlie remarked as the song was about to end. "Maybe we get to regress back to being a bunch of crazy teens, and that's a good thing. God knows I need to vent out some pressure." "Anything in particular bothering you?" Scott inquired. "No; just all kinds of little things. Three days ago my mother came to visit and found a six pack of beer in my fridge. I got a classic 30- minute lecture on drinking and being a responsible adult. As a quick little reminder, I'm pushing forty, like the rest of you." "Speak for yourself, gramps," Scott shot back playfully. "I've still got some years to go until that." "You're going to hit the Big Four Oh too," Jake reminded him. "Just you wait, buddy. I bet you won't be laughing then." "Imagine my mom still thinks that I have a problem with alcohol and that I need to be educated of its dangers," Charlie mused. "It's as if I was still under twenty." "You've never had a problem with alcohol," Jake laughed. "Obviously---" "Don't say it," Charlie pleaded. "Please, don't say it. It's such a goddamn worn out joke." "Obviously you've never had any problem downing all the alcohol you wanted!" Jake said triumphantly. "So you said it," Charlie sighed with mostly pretended frustration. "Great." "I know someone who's okay with not being treated like a grownup," Scott said. "Buck Griffin." "Oh, the old Bucko!" Jake brightened up. "What's cooking with him?" "Bucko went to the Glastonbury rock festival in England last year," Scott explained. "Apparently he enjoyed it. The guy claims he has no real recollection of the whole event, aside from the pictures he uploaded before his cell got smashed against a concrete wall or stone or something, so he reasons he must have had lots of fun. It was all over his social media." "There's a man who has refined being an idiot loser into a way of life," I commented. "It goes way beyond that when Bucko is concerned," Scott corrected me. "Failing is a form of fine art for him." "Who's Bucko Griffin?" Charlie asked. "I've heard the name before, but..." "Just another one of Greensville's multitude of perennial underachievers," I said. "Think of a person who once wanted to be like Kenny Taylor but is essentially his polar opposite and has half of his IQ points, and has failed at pretty much everything he's ever tried." "That sounds like someone from our neighborhood alright." "Bucko is around two years younger than our Kate, if memory serves, and had a huge crush on her back in high school. He came to our house one day during her junior year with roses for her and a glass vase he had allegedly made himself. The guy was drunk, shitfaced actually, and the vase broke in his hand just as he was giving it to her. The porch was covered in shards and Mom had to dress his wounds." "Why was he drunk?" Charlie asked me. "He was so nervous to meet her that he had stolen a bottle of vodka from his father's cupboard and emptied it. I guess he thought he had to make sure he'd embarrass himself, even though he's shown himself to be perfectly capable of it when he is totally sober. Anyway, he blathered on for a while, told us how his anxiety has always held him back, complained how his parents don't understand or support him and eventually passed out at our dinner table, with his hand packaged in gauze. My dad and I walked him to my car afterwards, and then I had to drive him home." "Then he had that nerd phase," Scott went on after the laughter and chuckles had died down. "He wanted so badly to fit in with the geek crowd that he would buy or borrow every single superhero comic book he could get his grubby hands on and memorize the plotlines to impress his new friends. He even bought a pair of glasses although there's never been anything wrong with his eyes." "How'd that turn out?" Charlie laughed. "He was basically nowhere near smart enough to be a legitimate nerd, or even a passable poser," Scott recounted. "Something like a D plus average student among the straight A types. The other Lifeless Ones were too nice to boot him out, but from what I've heard, they felt extremely awkward whenever he was around and were overjoyed when he finally gave up on them around his senior year. He graduated and moved on to alcohol and a career as an all-around clown and a welfare moocher." "Are you guys in contact with him?" "I'm friends with him on Facebook," Scott said. "Nothing more than that, but I follow him out of curiosity. He's entertaining, I've got to give him that, albeit in a train wreck sort of way; you just can't look away, no matter how hard you try." "I actually wonder if there are a few neurons missing from his frontal lobe," I remarked. "It seems he's completely incapable of understanding that things you do tend to have consequences." "That, and the value of money, or distances and measures, or how common household appliances work, or anything, really." "Where does all his money come from, anyway?" Jake pondered. "It can't be cheap to fly around the world, go to festivals and make a fool out of yourself in front of the locals on a regular basis." "Beats me," Scott replied. "He has a girlfriend who works at a job that pays slightly above minimum wage, I think, so chances are she helps him stay afloat." "And again," Jake sighed, "this goes on to show how any old useless imbecile, or worse than useless, is more popular with the opposite sex than us." "Don't speak too soon. It could be there are some clouds in the sky when it comes to their relationship." "How so?" "He explained on Twitter how he fell in love with one of the stewardesses on his flight back from England. Apparently he passed out while taking a dump in the plane's bathroom, and a stewardess and some random passenger had to pull him out of there. The woman even wiped his ass clean, he says, so now he's in everlasting love with her and will always fly Air Canada." Everybody erupted into hearty laughter at this piece of news. There was perhaps a smidgen of evil satisfaction to be gleaned from the knowledge that not everyone we had once thought of primarily as a goofy number of comic relief had made something great of themselves. "Why do people call him Bucko?" Charlie asked. "What's his real first name?" "It's Judd, if I'm not mistaken," I replied. "Yeah, Judson," Scott helped me out. "His dad has called him Buck ever since he was a little child, but the kids at school thought that sounded way too plucky and cool for a guy like him, so they added the O." "It's a combination of 'Buck' and 'wacko'," Jake said. "A... What's it called again?" "A portmanteau," I supplied. "That has to be the most sophisticated word anyone has ever referred to Bucko by," Scott chortled. There seems to be a universal rule dictating that perfect (or nearly so) happiness must never last for more than a couple of seconds. Whenever a mortal human thinks everything is going his or her way, there are no troubles whatsoever and the world is all sunshine and joy, something unpleasant just has to happen--or, at the very least, a jarring, worrisome thought that has been blissfully forgotten for a while appears out of nowhere and ruins the mood. As I was steering the car and speeding up a little after clearing a relatively tight curve, with the lively banter of the guys in my ears, rock music blasting and a smile still playing on my lips, I remembered a piece of paper tucked in the back pocket of my jeans. On the surface, it was about as inoffensive an item as anyone could imagine, a grocery store shopping receipt that detailed a list of thoroughly prosaic purchases for a small family, with a total cost of around 40 dollars. It included he address of the store, the words "Thank you for shopping with us!" and, at the bottom, the date of the transaction; again completely commonplace things. The address was the only remarkable feature, but it was so remarkable that my heart had skipped a beat when I had first read it: 1135 Mathieson Boulevard SUNNYDALE, CALIFORNIA I had found the receipt in my pocket on the day the patrolling police officer took me to the hospital and I had kept it since. It was the only piece of physical evidence to show that something truly odd had happened to me, and even though a part of me passionately wanted to destroy it, another part insisted that I save it instead. If it weren't for the receipt, I could have explained everything away as a psychotic episode, or just a dream--but a tiny scrap of paper kept telling me that was not the whole story. It was the piece of the jigsaw puzzle that simply did not fit. At first, I had believed that the town name had to be Sunnyvale, with a V, and my mind was playing a trick on me by twisting the letter into a D, but no matter how many times I dug the receipt out and read it again, the stubborn ink stayed put and conveyed the same impossible message. After that, I had spent hours on end trying to find a logical explanation for the receipt, one that didn't require a real trip to the Buffyverse, but the only even remotely possible one I could come up with was the assumption that I had written and printed the text myself. Maybe in the throes of my mental aberration it had seemed like a good idea, a necessary thing to do for whatever unfathomable reason. That was my working hypothesis, and I had managed to convince myself of its merits up to the point that I could almost assign the paper to the same category of "Not Real" as the memories of my time in Sunnydale. However, a nagging thought still remained, saying that I was fooling myself and trying to sweep a discordant data point under the rug instead of taking it properly into account. Regardless of these considerations, it was best not to mention the receipt to the guys. I wasn't so much afraid of ridicule as I was concerned with the atmosphere of our trip; suddenly learning that they were going to Texas in a car loaded with firearms and driven by a wackaloon who was even crazier than they had imagined would have made our time together unnecessarily awkward for everybody. ***** A few moments later we had left the town center of Chesterton behind. There was a straight stretch of the road ahead of us, going mostly through open fields punctuated by scattered houses and the occasional small patch of trees. While the landscape was still gloomy and bathed in the same gray, faltering daylight as before, driving was becoming more and more enjoyable for me. Each passing mile brought us closer to warmth, sunshine and a badly needed break from the inner chaos of the last couple of weeks. According to our tentative travel plan, we would take our time on the first day, driving mostly on small roads. Tomorrow we would move onto the interstate and start pushing on, but today was reserved for doing everything at a leisurely pace. While the final decision was yet to be made, we might also pay a short visit to an old friend who lived not far from here--Kenny Taylor. I had only a sketchy understanding of what he had been doing, having had limited contact with him for the last ten years, but apparently life had been good for him. He had already been employed by a big software company by the time he graduated from college, and now--as my information had it--he was in an upper-mid level managerial position and making the kind of money I could only ever dream about. Most of the time he lived somewhere on the West Coast, but he had built himself a country house close to his childhood home to serve as a retreat. Kenny, always the nice guy, had learned about our trip via social media, and he had invited us to visit him and his wife. It would not have been quite accurate to say that I was hesitant or reluctant to go and greet him. Our timetable could accommodate a diversion of a couple of hours without much trouble, and if the man himself was anything like he had been a decade ago, he would still be one of the kindest people I had ever met. Nevertheless, I had no real enthusiasm for the visit either. We had never had very much in common when it came to our personalities, and we could only have grown further apart during the years since we had last seen each other in person. Kenny had lived in a world of his own when he was in high school; and as a (perhaps surprisingly) successful thirty-something, he lived in yet another world completely separate from mine, or that of Jake, or Charlie, or Scott. I considered this a good opportunity to tackle the issue. "Guys," I said, "cast your votes. Are we going to go see Kenny Taylor or not?" "Yea," Jake voiced his opinion without delay. "Let's go. I'm fine with that." "Chuck?" "No objections," Charlie said. "Scott?" "Do we have to?" my cousin asked. "I mean, I've got nothing personal against the dude, but it's not like we really even know him anymore." "We don't have to," I answered, "but I guess it would be the polite thing to do. Besides, we're not going to stay there for more than two hours, three hours tops." "Still," Scott argued. "It will be weird to face a person you sort of looked down on... Uh, scratch that, not looked down on, but thought was a little bit pathetic way back in school, and then see he's doing far better than you in life. I can't put it in words properly, but that would make me a little uncomfortable, regardless of how I think about it." "It's pointless to define yourself by comparing yourself to other people," Charlie philosophized. "If you look hard enough, you can always find someone who is better than you at any given thing, and then you'll end up feeling inadequate, no matter what." "Okay, fine," Scott yielded. "You sold me. Let's go pay Kenny a visit." "That settles it," I declared. "We'll stop by at his digs, chat a little with him, and then we'll be on our way." No sooner had our conversation concluded than I spotted a person walking on the side of the road ahead. It was probably a man, going in the same direction as we were. At first glance, there was hardly anything extraordinary about this figure, maybe apart from the fact that the road was otherwise almost deserted and the nearest settlements of note were miles away. Then, as the distance closed rapidly, I realized the man was wearing very light clothing, just a multi-colored striped sweater and baggy jeans, in a weather that was only a few degrees above freezing. He was bareheaded and walking slowly in a hunched posture, and the thought struck me that he was probably in some kind of trouble. "Look," Jake said and pointed at the man. "A representative specimen of the local village idiot population, methinks. They should put up a traffic sign to warn people of those." "He must be damn cold out there," Scott commented in a more sympathetic tone. "You think he's lost or something?" "Could be," Charlie weighed in. "He doesn't exactly look like he's alright." I had lifted my foot partially off the gas pedal and let the car slow down as we passed the lone walker by. I managed to get a good, even if brief, look at his face; he was rather younger than I had assumed at first, perhaps younger than any of us. The face was rotund, like the rest of his obviously out-of-shape physical form, and it was showing an indifferent, blank, absent expression. It could very well be that the poor fellow had no idea whatsoever where he was and where he was going, I thought. "Should we stop?" Scott asked. No one else said anything for a few seconds, and I allowed the car to roll on at little more than creeping pace. My sense of duty was impelling me to pull over and check on the individual, but another part of me was dead set against it. There was an irrational premonition of trouble and outright danger in my mind, even though the man's appearance was by no means threatening in itself. Finally I stepped on the brake and stopped the car completely. "We'll ask him if he's alright," I told the others. "If he says he is, we won't get involved. At the most, we'll give him a ride to a nearby place and drop him off; that's it." "Whatever you say," Jake agreed. Charlie and Scott simply nodded at this, and then I got out of the vehicle. Jake and Scott joined me. The man had not paid any mind to us and kept on trudging forward as we approached him together. At close range, he appeared even more disheveled than from a distance: his sand-colored, long hair was stringy and greasy, his clothes looked dirty and his complexion was almost sickly pale. He had a pair of oversized glasses on, and his smallish green eyes behind the thick lenses seemed to stare right through the three of us into nothingness. "Hi," I called to him. He stopped dead in his tracks but didn't say anything. "Are you okay? Do you need any help?" "Where are you going?" Scott tried. "I---" the man began but fell suddenly silent again. The voice was squeaky and higher-pitched than I had expected, almost as though he had just inhaled some helium. "What's your name, buddy?" Jake asked. "I am Daniel Sparklestar Mancini from Chesterton," the man responded suddenly. The words came out in a fairly rapid staccato burst but still with a pitch that was much higher than that typical for grown men. "Pleased to meet you. You can call me Dan, like my friends do, thusly. I'm a big name artist and a champion of this world, and all the other worlds, in the fight against closed-minded, evil people and forces, too. But still, it's fine for you to just me Dan." "Okay, Dan," I continued. "My name is Mike. This is Jake, and this is Scott. We---" "Is that like your real name, or your full name?" Dan asked me, much more slowly and in a moderately lower pitch this time. "No," I responded. It had already dawned on me that we were almost definitely dealing with a mentally handicapped person, and getting him to cooperate might not be a straightforward job. "It's Michael Caldwell." "Pleased to meet you, Michael Caldwell," Dan repeated back. "How about your friends?" "Scott Anderson and Jake White." "Pleased to meet you, Scott Anderson and Jake White," the man recited to Scott and Jake. "Alright, so, we have settled that, and... I think I need to get going. I have to be in Bedford by tonight to meet my cousin Flint Brand and Kent Noggin at the bus station there." "Bedford? That's more than 40 miles away," Jake pointed out. "You're not going to walk all the way there, are you?" "No, I... I thought I would hitchhike and such." "Good luck with that, around these parts," Jake said with a laugh. "So, anyway, where do you live? If you're lost, we can---" "No. No, no, no," Dan responded and shook his head forcefully. "I'm not going back. There's nothing for me back there, and, that is to say, I need to meet Flint Brand and Kent Noggin in Bedford. They're waiting for me already. I promised them I would come, so I must keep that promise." "Would you like a ride?" Scott offered. "We could take you to Bedford if you want." "Yeah," Dan said. "That is to say, yes, yes, I would. It's so cold to walk all alone here. It's, uh, so cold." "Fair enough," I commented. "You can come with us. I guess there's room for one more man in the car, and Bedford is not too far off our planned route." "I protest that name-calling in the stringestest of senses!" Dan exclaimed without warning. His voice had suddenly climbed in pitch again to comical heights. "I'll have you know well and good that I am not a man! Most men are nothing but evil bullies at heart, and I'm not one of the bullies." "Well, what are you then?" Jake asked bluntly and no more as amicably as a little earlier. "I'm a multi-flavored, uh, non-binary, basically female beautiful soul in fluid-born but most essentially and among other things masculine, but not exclusively, and out-and-out way, physical body," he babbled. "Call me Dan, or my own best-liked inclusive pronoun, 'thim' or 'thir', as depends on the things to be said." This mostly incomprehensible serving of word salad left all of us dumbstruck, and we stole glances at each other's faces. I could tell that Jake for one was already regretting our decision to interfere with Dan's quest, and I also began to have second thoughts about giving the beautiful nonsensical soul a seat in my car. However, it was too late to take our offer back, and we could not simply leave him here to freeze to death while looking for his cousin and the other person he called Noggin. Despite the growing misgivings, we guided Dan to the car. He (or "thim", to honor his own strange request) sat down in the middle of the back seat, between Scott and Charlie, and I started the engine again. Dan Mancini brought a stale, unpleasant odor of dried old sweat with him. It presumably emanated from his clothes, which had not been washed for quite some time, and it also strongly implied that he took no better care of his own personal hygiene. Scott and Charlie looked out of the windows and leaned away from Dan, both clearly trying to hide their aversion to our new traveling companion, whereas he dug out his cell phone and was soon completely focused on it. The car occupants were now totally silent, aside from the occasional monosyllabic word and incoherent low mumbling from Dan. "How about a bit of music, gents?" I suggested hopefully and turned the car stereo on, setting it to play the MP3s on the USB stick. "Yeah, please," Scott said. "Got any British rock?" "Sure. I think there are a couple of tracks from Neil Young first on the playlist, though." "No problem. I love most of his stuff." The opening chords of a slow song sounded over the speakers. They felt soothing to me, almost dreamlike, and I began to relax behind the wheel. There would be time later for more raucous rhythms, but right there and then this was what my soul yearned for. "What's this one called?" Charlie asked. "'Cortez the Killer'," I said. "Essentially a ballad about how the Central America was supposedly a paradise before the Spaniards came. The lyrics are a little nutty, granted, but the song as a whole is a goddamn masterpiece." "Kind of like 'Atlantis' by Donovan?" Jake asked and smiled. "Somewhat, only not quite that nutty." "It's one of the few Donovan songs I know and listen to. It's an okay piece, even though I always lose it completely when he gets to the 'My antediluvian baby' part. It's freaking hilarious." "I've always wondered if the guy was being deliberately funny or tripping his balls off on LSD and actually imagining he was visiting Atlantis." The long instrumental intro of the song played out, and then Mr. Young's vocals began. Almost immediately Dan piped up: "I don't like this." "Come again?" I said. "I don't like this music," he repeated. "It's boring. I don't want to hear it." "It's a great song, and we enjoy it," Jake said. "When it's over, we can listen to something that you like." "No!" Dan insisted. "I don't want to hear it. It hurts my ears and makes me feel blue in the face, out and out." "Alright, fine," I said and turned the stereo off. "What kind of music do you like, by the way?" Scott inquired. "Miley Cyrus," Dan replied without missing a beat. "Her songs are so uplifting and they send this positive energy and message on how to be yourself and stronger, respectively, in your mind and soul and body, and such." "Do they now?" Jake commented sarcastically, but this went entirely unnoticed by Dan. "I really admire her," our guest continued. His tone remained flat but the voice rose in pitch, which apparently was typical for him whenever he became excited or angry. The combination created an extremely strange and unnatural impression; it was almost as though Dan were an alien being trying to pass as a human. "She is so smart and pretty and powerful, and she has the beautifullest soul of a goddess of all worlds and dimensions. I wish I was her. I could do whatever I want and better focus my strength. I could overcome all the bad things, instead of having to live thusly inside a man's body, because being born that way forced me to it." "So," Charlie asked him, "in that case, I take it you're a tranny--- Uh, sorry, I meant transgendered?" "No, I'm not!" he denied. "I'm a non-binary, multiflavored beautiful soul, female, living within a most-ways-but-not-all male body. So I want you to know I don't need to be labeled but instead given respect as the unique out-and-out person that I am." "But you just said you're a female soul in a male body and you want to be Miley Cyrus," Charlie pointed out. "I want to be like her," Dan explained in the same grating voice of his, "but I'm not transgendered, or anything else that puts me in a box with a name on it, least of all a bully man. My own beauty of the soul is outside of it and any respective labels and names people try to give me, out and out." "Just let it be," Scott told Charlie quietly. "Don't bother." "This is going to be one hell of a long ride," Jake sighed. The look on his face spoke volumes. The sullen quiet that ensued should have helped me to concentrate on thinking about our options, but I had difficulty coming up with any useful ideas. It would probably have been better not to have meddled with Dan's business to begin with. Even though this was by no means a densely populated area, he had not been in the middle of wilderness and would almost certainly have run into someone else after a while. He was a total stranger to us; the only thing we knew about him was the fact that he definitely had some kind of a mental condition, and for that reason there was no telling how he might behave under given circumstances. Apart from the moral side of the issue, the smart choice would have been to drive on and leave him alone. I began to look for a suitable rest area or a wayside to stop for a moment, but there was none to be seen. Eventually we arrived at a place where a narrow, nondescript agricultural road, leading into the woods, joined the main road in the middle of a grove. There were no houses nearby, so I turned onto the forest road, drove a few hundred yards and pulled over after reaching a suitably secluded spot. "I need to take a leak," I told the others as I opened my seatbelt. "You can stretch your legs in the meantime." "I think I'll join you," Jake said and gave me a quick wink. He had obviously understood my real intentions. After we had grabbed our jackets from the trunk to keep at least reasonably warm, leaving Scott, Charlie and Dan to stay close to the car and guard it, I walked for a few dozen yards with Jake in the direction leading away from the main road. When I estimated we were safely out of earshot from Dan, I stopped and turned to face Jake. "We can't keep lugging that retard around," he stated, leaning a little closer to me. "I think we'd better call the authorities and find out if he's gone AWOL from an institute or something." "That's exactly what I'm going to do," I explained. We both spoke with lowered voices to make absolutely certain Dan would not overhear. "The County Sheriff's office has a missing persons desk, and we'll give them a call. I just need the phone number." "They've got a web page, so what's the problem? I'm sure you can get the number from there." "No doubt, but the thing is, my phone might not be up to the task. It's got an application that is technically speaking a browser, but---" "Don't tell me you've still got that ancient piece of junk!" Jake exclaimed incredulously. "When are you going to join the rest of the world?" "Hey! My phone is perfectly good for making voice calls and sending text messages, and I bet the battery lasts much longer than yours." "Okay, whatever. You stick to smoke signals, old timer, and let me take care of the real communication, 21st Century style." Jake took out his cell with an exaggerated hand movement, sighed theatrically and fired up the web browser of the phone. About a minute later he was calling the Sheriff's office. "Hello, this is Jake White," he introduced himself to the person on the other end of the connection. "I thought I'd check with you if a certain person has been reported missing. Yeah... The name is, uh..." He gave me a questioning look. "Daniel Mancini," I whispered to him. "Daniel Mancini. He's a white man, around thirty, maybe five foot nine or ten and pretty fat. Wears glasses. I don't know, but he seems like he could be a mental patient of some kind. Okay... Where? Oh, about seven, eight miles west of Chesterton. He... Yeah. He was walking down the road and looked lost and confused, so we picked him up, and he says there's a cousin waiting for him in Bedford. What? Okay, I'll wait." The conversation paused for a few seconds. Presumably the officer working the missing persons desk was checking the database for Dan, and Jake and I both waited anxiously to hear back from him or her. "Yeah?" Jake said suddenly. "Yeah... Okay. Okay, sure. Thanks, and bye!" He took the phone from his ear and ended the call with a gentle touch to the phone's screen. "What's the word?" I asked him immediately. "They had nothing on him," Jake reported. "Nobody has reported Dan missing, and there are no arrest warrants or anything else of interest that the cop could tell us. He said that as far as the authorities are concerned, we are basically free to do what we like, as long as we don't outright abandon Dan in the middle of nowhere. But he also told me they might call us back if something turns up, so we'll have to be sure to answer the phone." "Oh shit," I cursed and looked over my shoulder at Scott, Charlie and Dan, who were standing around my car. "That means we're stuck with him." "For the time being, yes, but if the cousin is there to meet him in Bedford, that's as far as we need to go." "Precisely--if the cousin is there, but that's a mighty big 'if'. I wouldn't be surprised if there was no cousin at all. I mean, look at him! He's seriously out of it." Jake spent a couple of seconds deep in thought, staring past the others into distance. Finally he said, "I tell you what. We take Dan to the Bedford bus station and cut him loose, cousin or no cousin. Let somebody else worry about him after that." "There's one more thing, though," I pointed out. "If we head to Bedford first to ditch Dan, it will be pretty late before we can get to Kenny's place because we have to double back almost all the way. The courtesy visit needs to be really brief if we don't want to blow up our timetable completely." "Right," Jake admitted. "I didn't think of that." Even though we had tried to plan our travel so that there was the absolute minimum amount of stress involved--inflexible routes, strict deadlines and headlong rushing from waypoint to waypoint were all eschewed--we had to live with certain hard constraints. The most pressing of these was accommodation. None of us liked the idea of sleeping in the confines of my car, so I had made room reservations with select affordable but reasonably classy motels beforehand. As most of these establishments had fixed check-in hours, I wanted to avoid arriving late. Furthermore, driving at night and in darkness while on vacation didn't appeal to me very much. As it happened, more than 200 miles of road separated Kenny's house from our first overnight stop, and we also had Dan in tow to complicate matters. "The way I see it," I commented, "is that we have a trilemma. Option one, we scrub the Kenny visit, take Dan to Bedford and then be on our way; two, we take Dan to Bedford, hurry back, visit Kenny and drive like crazy to the motel; and three, we bring Dan along to visit Kenny, leave as soon as we can for Bedford, jettison Danny boy and then head for the motel." "And four," Jake added, "we tell Dan his cousin is waiting for him in these woods and dump him here." "The folks at the Sheriff's office know Dan is with us, so if his corpse is found around these parts some time next spring, guess who gets to be the prime suspect," I reminded him. "Damn. There's always some technicality." "Let's see," I said, trying to go over the distances, average speeds and times in my head. "Option three ought to work, but we cannot stay at Kenny's for longer than about... I'd say roughly two hours, and that may already be pushing it. Of course, it also depends on what happens in Bedford, but assuming we simply drop Dan off and don't stick around, we should be able to make it to the motel without problems." "Are you sure it's a good idea to bring the guy to Kenny's house?" Jake asked me. "I'm absolutely sure it's not a particularly good idea, but what choice do we have? And no, let's not even joke about putting Dan out of his misery with your hardware." "There you go again," Jake laughed, "slamming my proactive thinking!" So we had arrived at a decision, blissfully unaware of what its consequences would be. Time was now pressing, so Jake and I returned to the company of the others, and then I had my passengers re-board the vehicle. Scott and Charlie no doubt realized that relieving my bladder had been a transparent excuse to have a conference with Jake and that we had made new plans without consulting them, but I hoped they would understand and not hold this against me. With any luck, we could return to doing things our way first thing tomorrow. "Dan?" I addressed the source of our latest headache. "Yeah?" "We're going to see a friend of ours," I explained to him. "There is no time to take you to Bedford first, so you have to come with us. It won't be long, and you will get to your destination later this evening. Is that okay with you?" "Yeah," he said in his characteristic colorless tone. It was impossible for me to discern what his actual thoughts (if any) were about this turn of events, as his facial expression and voice conveyed no emotion at all, but since he had not disagreed outright, he was along for the ride as far as I was concerned. "The friend is a very nice guy," Jake continued. His every word was spoken slowly and clearly, as if to a preschooler, to make sure Dan understood. "You need to be on your very best behavior when we go to his house. We don't want to hurt his feelings." "Okay." In passing, I briefly puzzled over what we could and should do if Dan became physically violent. He certainly didn't give the impression of being a possible threat, in view of his copious body fat, atrophied muscles and the generally listless way he carried himself, but then again, there was no way to know for sure. Assuming there was a warning of some kind well in advance, we would probably be able to subdue and restrain him, but an unpredictable bout of ferality was a different issue entirely. I decided that I would stop the car straight away at the first sign of trouble. Then we would get out and deal with Dan together. At any rate, it was reassuring to know I had my friends with me. While not unusually tall, Jake was a strong and burly man, and Scott was in fact not far behind him in physical strength despite his much slimmer form. Charlie and I were not exactly pushovers, either. Dan would have to put up a very respectable fight to beat us. Although all the immediately relevant matters again seemed to be more or less sorted out and under control for the time being, I was harassed by an intense and persistent feeling of unease as I drove on. The carefree happiness with which we had started out our journey had disappeared, and some sense of foreboding was whispering in my ear that the worst was yet to come. We had not left the state, or even the county, and already an unforeseen and potentially thorny problem had cropped up in the form of Dan Mancini. And then there was the shopping receipt, still lying on the bottom of my pocket as a concrete reminder of the invisible burden I carried with me everywhere I went. I could reasonably hope that the bizarre occurrences would leave me alone--but hope was all I had, and reason I could not trust. (To be continued...)