Not Very Nice People - Chapter 5/11: A Journey Interrupted free porn video

NOT VERY NICE PEOPLE by Crazy Baron Chapter 5: A Journey Interrupted Synopsis: Or was it nothing but a dream? This is the question Mike Caldwell has to grapple with as he finds himself back on the road with his friends and Dan Mancini, in a reality which itself does not feel all that real. ***** "Mike!" a vaguely familiar voice called. "Mike, wake up!" The words echoed in my ears. They had to be coming from somewhere below me, perhaps from the basement of our family home. All of a sudden I realized that the voice was Scott's. He was back in his male form and trapped under the floor! With a tremendous effort, I tried to command my body to open my eyes and sit up, but it refused to obey. If only I could get a few more minutes of sleep, a few more seconds! Then I would run to her rescue, punch through the walls with my Slayer strength and help her out of there like the good big sister I was supposed to be for our sweet little Dawn--- "Mike!" Scott repeated, and then someone shook me gently by the shoulder. My eyes flew open, and to my astonishment I saw a completely different room. There was a window with the curtains drawn on the opposite wall, another bed and a small dresser in front of a mirror. I already felt a helpless panic building when my mind, as confused as it was, slowly began to grasp the situation. The room was in a motel, not my parents' house. I was on a road trip to Texas with my friends Scott, Jake and Charlie. The body that I inhabited was mine, hairy, clumsy, a tiny bit overweight, stiff all over and completely male. "Come on, Mike! Is there something wrong with you?" Scott asked and bent down to take a closer look at me. For my part, I turned my head and saw a slightly worried expression on his face. "Uh, I'm alright," I muttered. That statement was not entirely honest. "What... what time is it?" "About eight thirty. We're going to get some breakfast and then we need to head for Bedford ASAP." "Bedford?" I asked. "What the fuck for? What's in Bedford?" "To drop Dan off. Don't you remember?" "Oh, right," I sighed as my brain retrieved a faded imprint of a fat, untidy and mentally disabled young man sitting in our car and babbling to himself. It seemed to me as though several years had passed since we had met him and given him a ride. "Dan. Yeah. Where is he?" "Over in the next room with the guys," Scott told me. "It seems there was some kind of an incident last night. At any rate, Jake is pissed as hell at the sad sack." "Is everybody okay?" "For the time being, I'd presume, but Jake's patience is running pretty thin. Charlie isn't exactly overjoyed either." "Tell them," I began, but a deep yawn stopped me in the middle of my sentence. "Tell them that I'll be down in five minutes. I need to wash my face and change." "Alright. Hurry up so we can get moving." With that, Scott exited the room, possibly to tend to the situation in the other room. I struggled to get up on my arms and knees and eventually managed to sit up on the edge of my bed. I could liken my own condition only to what waking up in a record-breaking hangover felt like. Thankfully there was no nausea, but otherwise I was as good as incapacitated. My mouth was dry and there was a horrible taste in it. The mere thought of driving a car that day seemed like an impossible dream. "Good God," I said quietly to myself and sighed. My mind was slowly clearing up now, but the more it did, the more I became aware of an absolutely chilling fact. Either a new psychotic episode had started in earnest, or I was again jumping back and forth between different realities and times. Of course, I could always have resorted to the logical but grossly inadequate--not to mention increasingly desperate-- routine of dismissing my newest unexplained experiences, together with the preceding ones, as simple dreams, but I knew I was only trying to fool myself. I had spent the last few days in the Greensville of the mid-2000s in my Buffy form, or so my memory testified. The mental images of me talking with Kate, arguing with Dawn and being cajoled into participating in a sleepover that was supposed to make all of us feel better didn't fade away like dreams usually do after the dreamer wakes up. On the contrary, they only became sharper and solidified as the last remnants of sleep left my brain. And then there was the shenanigan by Kenny and his wife, another thing that I had momentarily forgotten. Our entire gang had been there to see how our formerly nerdy acquaintance had morphed into a copy of the young and attractive woman he was married to. Whatever it was that was happening to me, at least some of it was happening to Jake, Scott and Charlie too. Either we had together embarked on a collective hallucination, or the skinsuits actually existed. Additionally, it followed that the bizarre Halloween party from more than ten years ago could also have taken place outside of my imagination. The beginnings of a persistent and intensive headache were making themselves known as I limped to the bathroom and turned the water on. The face in the mirror--even though it was unequivocally mine and not that of a young Sarah Michelle Gellar, fortunately enough--looked worn and tired, with deep furrows across the forehead and creases around the mouth and in the corners of the eyes. Stubble covered my cheeks and chin. I proceeded to wash my face, together with my armpits, but ignored the need to shave. I would take a nice warm shower tonight and get rid of all the grime, but at the moment there was no time for that. Leaving the motel in an expeditious manner and ditching Dan were our highest priorities. I was putting on my underwear when Jake barged in. Scott had left the door unlocked, so there was nothing to stop my agitated friend from entering without asking for permission first. "What's taking you so long?" he demanded bluntly. "We're waiting for you!" "I'm coming," I responded and pulled the t-shirt over my head. "How are things?" "Not good. Our retarded buddy shat himself in his sleep some time during the night, and Charlie and I have been up for an hour already, trying to clean up the mess and find some spare clothes for him." "That's damn disgusting." "You bet it is! Our room smells like a fucking city sewer. He had his briefs full of the stuff, and some more had spilled over onto the mattress. You should have seen the chambermaid's face when we got hold of her and she laid her eyes on the disaster area." "Did something happen to Dan?" I asked. "Is he sick?" "No, he's not, as far as we can tell. He just did it in his underpants by accident and it didn't even seem to bother him. I imagine he would have been perfectly happy stewing in his own excrement if we hadn't forced him to wash up. I have no idea what is actually wrong in his head, but it has to be pretty severe." "No argument there. It makes me wonder where he was coming from when we met him. I doubt he can live on his own, without anyone to watch over him." "We absolutely, definitely need to dump him today. I'm not sleeping one more night in the same space with that... that goddamn turd!" "You won't have to. When we get to Texas, you'll be laughing at this whole little adventure." "I sincerely hope so but I'm kind of losing my faith in a happy ending, to be perfectly honest with you." As soon as I was somewhat decently dressed, Jake and I exited the room and met the rest of our gang in the corridor. We went to the dining room together, selected a table in the far corner and then made a foray on the buffet. The food was fairly typical fare for budget hotels: scrambled eggs, bread, pastries, bacon and comparatively fresh fruit, to be washed down with orange juice. All the same, it started to warm me up very nicely once it had made its way into my stomach. A large cup of black coffee provided a further energy boost, and gradually the prospect of traveling that day began to feel realistic, if not exactly attractive just yet. This is not to say that the overall mood at our table was mirthful by any measure. Jake was still silently fuming, Scott seemed preoccupied with his own thoughts and Charlie picked at his food with a marked lack of interest. The only one in really good spirits was, surprisingly, Dan Mancini. He was humming something akin to a melody to himself and he frequently made mostly monosyllabic but positive comments in a chirpy voice. "Ah! Good!" he would say when tasting the bread; "Hey, nice!" about a slice of grapefruit; and "Oh, yummy sweet!" upon receiving a cup of hot chocolate and taking a sip. This was clearly a source of additional vexation for Jake, but he limited himself to letting out a frustrated, angry sigh. "Jake," I asked after we had essentially finished eating, "would you mind looking up the shortest route to Bedford?" "Will do," he said and took out his cell once more. He went to work on the phone, and then the device that had saved us from getting lost last night did its part. In almost no time, it had mapped a suggested route back northeast for us, and Jake moved his chair closer to mine to be able to show the results to me more easily. "There you go," he said and turned the phone so that I could see the screen. A red line snaked along the various small roads and wound its way to the smallish town of Bedford. "I think this part here could be unpaved, though." "How long is it?" "Uh, I'd say ten to fifteen miles, but it would save us at least an equal amount by cutting across here." "I don't think that will be a problem. I'll have to wash the car after this trip anyway. Kenny's house is somewhere around this area, isn't it?" I nearly felt as if I had broken a taboo by mentioning the name. Scott, Charlie and Jake all looked at me with a passing reflection of uneasiness on their faces. "Yes," Jake confirmed and drew an invisible circle around a particular spot on the map with his finger. "It's... right there, north of that town, I believe." "Good. As you can see, we will be keeping well clear of that location if we take the shortcut. We won't get closer than about 20 miles to his place as the crow flies." "Let's hope that distance is enough," Charlie said somberly. We then concluded our breakfast and returned to our two rooms to pack up. The others took care of the luggage and ushered Dan into the car while I handled the remaining formalities at the reception desk. Dan's soiling his bedding did not come up in my short, matter-of-fact conversation with the manager. Our payment presumably covered the extra costs of cleaning up, even though I could sense the man was aware of the accident and not particularly happy about it. Under different circumstances he might perhaps have tried to bill me separately for it. With the room keys back in the hands of the manager, I walked out of the main doors of the motel and into my car, where my traveling companions were already waiting for me. I sat in the driver's seat and buckled up as usual. Right then, I was struck by an odd, extremely strong feeling of unreality. I was holding the steering wheel of my car, and yet I knew that I was not actually there. It was as if I had never even seen the car before, let alone the motel and its parking lot. Was this nothing but a daydream? I had to shake my head a little to rid myself of the strange thought, and slowly it let go of me, allowing me to return to the present to such a degree that I had the confidence to start the engine and put the car in gear. "Are you alright? Good to go?" Jake asked me, puzzled that I was wasting time for no apparent reason. He was again seated in the front next to me; his duty as my designated navigator exempted him from having to sit in the back seat next to Dan. "Yeah, sure," I replied. "Let's hit the road." So began our second day of travel. The sky had cleared up and the sun was shining brightly, and while the air was brisk, the temperature had to be above yesterday's levels. The invigorating effects of the breakfast together with the agreeable weather and a clear course to follow conspired to improve my mood little by little until the drive was almost as enjoyable as it had been before we crossed paths with Dan. I commanded a little more power from the engine and let the car head on down another quiet country road. "Put on some music," Scott suggested from the back seat. "With pleasure," I said and turned the stereo on. Knowing now that Dan didn't appreciate Neil Young, I skipped ahead by a handful of tracks and then pressed the Play button. The sounds of an electric guitar with a healthy amount of distortion began to flow from the speakers, and the other instruments soon joined in as the song went through its intro and geared up for its first verse. "This is more like it!" Scott said approvingly. We were being treated to a throwback to the 1990s and the glory days of Britpop, a genre of music that Scott and I loved, Charlie enjoyed a great deal, and Jake at the very least gladly tolerated. "Stop it," Dan said. "What?" Charlie reacted in turn to his reaction. "Stop it," our guest repeated in his characteristic flat intonation. "I don't like this kind of music." "I'll turn the volume down a little," I offered and promptly did so. "Is this better?" "No," Dan insisted. "I don't like it. It hurts at my soul and body and my mind with its negative man energy waves." "Look, Danny boy," Jake said none too kindly and turned in his seat so that he could stare Dan in the eye, "this is Mike's car and our trip. Whatever we say goes. If you don't approve of our playlist, that's your problem. You're getting a free ride, so how about you keep your mouth shut and behave yourself." "I'll have you know well and good that I'm not a boy!" Dan responded, with the elevated pitch of his voice betraying his fluster once again. "I'm a---" "I told you to put a lid on it!" Jake barked at him, unable to contain his anger completely. While he could and occasionally did lose his temper at relatively minor provocations, Jake White was normally far more laid back than this. Dan apparently had a knack for bringing out the worst in him. "Calm down, everybody!" I exclaimed and turned the stereo off. "It's alright. We'll have plenty of time to listen to my MP3s on the way to Texas. Let's just get this leg of the journey over with and take Dan to Bedford." "Why don't you like any good music?" Dan asked in what was his equivalent to a conversational tone. "Miley has some great songs!" "I bet she does," Scott replied in a conciliatory manner. "It's just that we belong to an earlier generation. We grew up on different stuff." "But she has good songs that transfigure your imagination and make you feel more positive in your heart and such, as if you wake up in all the worlds and dimensions, here and the other places, at the same time." "That's nice," Scott said. Unfortunately, Dan decided to give us an example. He dug up his phone and made it play a kiddie pop song, a track apparently from Cyrus' Hannah Montana years. As the girl singer started with the vocals, he added his own, singing along in an utterly horrendous, loud, atonal wail that defies all description. If anything, he sounded like a wild animal in throes of searing pain rather than a teenaged pop star performing for her audience. "Shut your face!" Jake roared. "Shut up or I'll beat you to fucking bloody pulp!" "Dan, stop it!" Scott ordered, equally firmly but in a much gentler tone than Jake. To my amazement, Dan heeded Scott immediately and closed his mouth. However, he let the Cyrus song play out in the otherwise quiet passenger compartment before he put his phone back into his pocket. "Right," I said emphatically after the song had ended, "there's a new rule. No music of any kind as long as Dan is with us." "Agreed," Jake grumbled. "Oh, okay then," Dan said. Despite just having incurred and faced Jake's anger, which was usually no laughing matter, Dan Mancini stayed in a fairly good mood. He kept up a kind of running commentary, that is to say, he would every now and then let out short words accompanied by incomprehensible, low mumbling not directly addressed to anyone, much like he had done at breakfast. If this output was anything to go by, he was not particularly unhappy or upset, rather the opposite; the words themselves were for the most part positive ("Oh! Nice! Hmm! Wow, look at that! Cool!") and pronounced in a chipper voice. "Oh, Dan?" Scott asked him when the music argument was some quarter of an hour in the past and we had traveled a good ten more miles towards Bedford. "Yeah?" "You haven't told us much about yourself," Scott said. "Where do you live?" "In Chesterton, one and a half miles outside Chesterton," Dan replied. "Why?" "I'm just curious. Is it an apartment or a house that you live in?" "A house." "So you don't live in an institution or something like that?" "No," he said. "Hospitals scare me. They give me the creeps and even the thought of having to go to one makes me blue in the face, out and out. There are really sick and scary people living there." "Do you live with your parents?" Scott continued his interview. "I used to, but now I don't anymore." "How are your parents?" "Uh, Mommy is alright, and Daddy is alright too..." "But they just seem a little weird?" I added with a smirk, completing the lyric. "...because they are in Heaven together," Dan went on, ignoring my supposedly humorous interruption. "They were both senior people when they had me, and so thusly they didn't have very long in this world left at that point in their respective lives. Daddy was older than Mommy so he went away first, and then later Mommy had a big lump in her chest which turned out to be bad, out and out. So she went away too the year before last. My heart was shattered and I felt hopeless, but luckily my big brother came back from the city and moved in." "I'm sorry to hear that," Scott said. "Anyway, how is your life with your brother? You get along well?" "No, not always. Jonathan Wayne Mancini, that's my big bro, he keeps saying that he had a career and a good life in the city and a girlfriend and all, but then he had to give everything up to take care of me, even though I'm fully able to stand on my own two feet. He sometimes says I'm a burden and it's embarrassing that I need a babysitter even though I'm a grownup, but it's not true. He's not a babysitter for me, but he brings in the best part of the money to keep us afloat. We love each other." "I sort of understand where he's coming from," Scott commented to this, "but he sounds like he might be a bit of a douchebag at times." "He's coming from the city," Dan pointed out, failing to recognize the idiom. "He's not a douchebag; he's my good big bro, but he is sometimes tired or angry with me because he had to leave the city life behind." A worrisome thought had been forming in my mind. "Dan," I cut in, "does your brother know you're going to Bedford?" The response came with a marked delay and hesitation: "Yeah..." It all but confirmed my fears that Dan had run away from home. Even if various supernatural forces kindly left us alone, we were on a course for a potentially nasty mess involving Dan's brother and perhaps the law enforcement too. It had been a grievous mistake to get involved in it. "Who did you say was there to meet you in Bedford?" Scott continued the conversation. "I think you mentioned something about a cousin of yours." "Yeah, my cousin, Flint Brand," Dan explained readily. It was plain to see that he was beginning to develop a rapport with Scott, undoubtedly due to his treating Dan with greater patience and kindness than the rest of us had managed to muster. This did not come as a surprise, given that Scott was by his nature empathetic and sensitive to the dispositions of others, by far the best "people person" in our gang. "Okay, so Flint is there." "Not to mention Kent Noggin! Kent is my man, my bestest buddy and wingman." "Oh? Tell us more about this Kent dude. He sounds interesting." "He sure is!" Dan said with enthusiasm. His emotion was genuine and strong enough to break through what otherwise seemed to be an extremely thick outer shell. Even though his neutral facial expression did not change perceptibly and his voice still retained its mostly flat tone, there was a distinctly different sound to it. "Kent is a superhero mouse who was born on Mars. I created him back in eighth grade in high school and I have been writing and drawing about his many exciting adventures ever since. I thusly think of Kent as a little like a son to me, even though that's of course not true, out and out, from a certain viewpoint within this world. But you need to think about Kent and his adventures looking from all the different worlds and dimensions, respectively, and the truths within and such, because otherwise you might leave stuff out that belongs in and then you don't understand fully." "You actually went to high school?" Jake wondered. "A normal high school?" "Right, I see," Scott said. "How come he is called Kent if he is from Mars?" "That's a funny joke," Dan replied. "You see, Kent is the last name of Superman's human self, Clark Kent, and that's why I picked Kent after him because Kent Noggin can fly without an airplane or a spaceship, just like Superman. He is really strong and brave too. Only I made it Kent Noggin's respective first name, so it's different there. Noggin is because it's like a noggin, your brain and such, because Kent Noggin is really smart and intelligent with his bright mind; thusly his name is Kent Noggin." The creator of the Noggin character obviously considered this attempt at wordplay and cultural reference hilarious and he laughed heartily. Nobody else in the car did, but that was not so much due to the joke being stupid rather than Dan's laughter itself. If his singing was awful, his way of laughing was nothing short of blood-curdling. It was a rapidly repeating series of shrill chattering, more akin to the sounds that might come from a malfunctioning piece of industrial machinery about to fall apart than a human being expressing joy. I stole a glance at him, and I saw his face contorted strangely and mouth open. Once more I could easily imagine that he was a robot or an alien impersonating a man and not quite making it. The laughter ended as abruptly as it had begun and Dan went on, "I hope to publish the books and the comics one day with a big publishing house, like my big bro Jonathan has done. They will be helpful to children and teach them how to become a person who can better survive in the world." "Correct me if I'm wrong," Scott said to Dan, "but didn't you tell us Kent was waiting for you in Bedford?" "He is, but he can send messages from his mind to my mind with telekinesis. Ever since he won the big battle over the Stinky-Man Bugbears and other evil bullies in Antarctica--that was in Book Five of the stories I have on him, in the year 2010 from my official timeline-- he was given that power of mind linking with me and some other important people, respectively, of his life and quest. He can do that when he collects the force of the Glitter Stone and combines it with his own power from his strong soul." "Alright then. But if we forget about Kent for just a second, is Flint certain to be there to meet you?" "He is. He is always reliable and such, and even if he isn't, Kent and I will see to it that all matters that should come up within this timeframe that will result from what is to, thusly, to come, that it will... Uh, it will be alright." Jake and I exchanged concerned looks on hearing this. While Dan's rambling explanation was anything but easy to follow, the gist seemed to be that in case Cousin Flint failed to show up, he would be happy hanging out with an imaginary friend of his at the Bedford bus station. "What's your cousin's phone number?" Scott asked. "I believe we should call him to make absolutely sure he will be there." "It's taken care of," Dan said simply. "And like I told you, Kent will help me there and on my quest, as he has helped me thusly in the past, and I help him. Because I stood by his side all through his most difficultest mission, which was almost ten years ago in this world now, and also because I created him from my brilliant mind while I was in high school, he gave me the middle name Sparklestar. Our minds are in complete link whenever he needs to contact me." He drew a deep breath and continued, "I'll be writing another book about this adventure. It will be Book Eleven and it tells Kent's story after he came home in Book Ten from outer space where he was looking for the Black Crystal when it was stolen by the Intergalactic Evil League. And he then found it with my help and had a big battle with the Dark Machine but won because of his power of his soul and... and anyway, he came home safe and sound. Because of all that, his wife Coralina Noggin was so happy that she let him have anal sex with her." Jake let out a muffled burst of laughter at this, and even Scott raised his eyebrows. "That's one hell of a children's story book," Charlie commented. "Somehow I foresee that your publishers may have a problem with your content if you are really planning to market that piece of work to actual kids." "There will be good warnings for any people who may not feel ready to have those doors opened within their minds and such. They can just skip the parts and pages with things like sex. And to add to that and the other points, thusly, there are no nasty words anywhere in the novels or the comic. Besides, whenever Kent and Coralina have sex, they do it for mutual want. He only could put his penis in her butt because she said to him ahead of time that it was okay. He won the big battle, you see." "Well, at least you're not advocating rape in your books," Charlie said with a grin. "That's always nice." The road was now taking us across a large, mostly continuous area of agricultural land. Some distance ahead it climbed up the side of a low hill and then passed close by an old farmhouse and a group of typical outbuildings clustered around it. There was a sizable, well-tended open yard surrounding the house, with a small apple orchard and various other planted trees guarding the house and providing some shadow for sunny days. The place looked nice as it was and would probably be just lovely during summertime, I thought. To my eye, the house and its surroundings were far more attractive than Kenny's futuristic concrete castle. The attraction was not to last, though. There was movement in the front yard right next to the road, and at first, watching from a distance, I received the impression that there were maybe around half a dozen people dancing or exercising outdoors. As we got a little nearer, however, a shiver went down my spine. Something was off with these folks. They were clad from head to toe in solid black or white and their heads were strangely shaped. I momentarily feared that another paranormal event had befallen us and I was considering whether I should accelerate and drive past the house and the yard as fast as I could or alternatively stop and try to turn back. Soon able to view them from a still shorter distance, I realized that the beings in the yard were human after all. To be precise, they were people dressed in what appeared to be some kind of horse costumes with masks, manes, tails and bodysuits whose coloration mimicked the coats of horses. Many of them even had bridles complete with bits and headstalls attached to their masks. They were frolicking happily together, with one player evidently dry humping another just as we drove past. None of them seemed to pay any attention to us. "Jesus H. Christ!" Charlie breathed. "That is not real! Please, don't let that be real!" "Those, my son, are what the experts call degenerates," Jake declared in the speaking style of a nature TV show presenter. "Some of us firmly believe they should be shot wherever encountered." "Call them what you want," Scott commented, "but that's... I don't know what to say. Shit!" "Seriously," Jake went on, dropping his impression, "I could take out my AR-15 from the trunk, fill a mag and do just that. It would be a favor to the society at large. Come on, Mike, pull over here!" We all laughed at his suggestion, apart from Dan, who remained totally quiet as he obviously didn't understand that Jake was actually joking. All the same, it was true that we shared Jake's disdain for the fetishists to one degree or another. Dressing up as a horse and then fooling around in somebody's yard with others of the same ilk was, in my opinion, more or less okay for little children but not exactly indicative of a healthy psyche for an adult, especially if it was also a way of expressing one's sexuality. "You can't do that," Dan interjected suddenly. His voice was again high in pitch due to his anxiety. "It would be evil! You can't kill them!" "Why not?" Jake asked and flashed him a menacing grin. He clearly enjoyed Dan's genuine distress over the nonexistent threat of his. "They--they're people! They have mommies and daddies and... They're people with hearts and souls and all!" "They're sick people," Jake pointed out. "I'll simply put them out of their misery and send them to Heaven where they can get better." "You can't do that!" Dan repeated, on the verge of tears. Regardless of his other limitations, he was at least capable of empathy in certain situations, I thought and decided to put an end to the drama before it got out of hand. "Alright, nobody is going to kill anyone for real," I said. "What Jake means is that he thinks those people should be treated and maybe put in an institution. Playing games like that is not normal." "Yeah," Jake confirmed. "I don't actually want to kill them. Still, it would be fun to see them canter and gallop after a bunch of five-five- six bullets started whistling in their ears. Maybe they'd appreciate the need for doing their depraved shit in total privacy some more after that." "You are not very nice people," Dan commented, slowly shaking his head. "You got that right!" Jake chortled and then went on, "Here's the thing, Danny boy. We don't gladly tolerate bullshit, no matter what shape or form it comes in. I'll explain it to you so you'll understand. If you get off on the thought of fucking a farm animal--fine, but keep it to yourself. Leave real animals alone and don't flaunt your degeneracy. Flaunting it and saying that you're better because you're different is bullshit. If you say you want to right some wrong in the world but your only real motive is to get attention and money for yourself, that's bullshit. If you claim you want equality and happiness for everyone and then go on to blame men for all the evil in the world and spread hatred all day long, that's bullshit too. As a rule, we have very, very little tolerance for any of that." "Amen, brother," Charlie added with a chuckle. "No, honestly. That is what I think. I'm sick and tired of the crap some people try to feed you if you so much as allow them to talk for two seconds. The world is full of those bullshit peddlers nowadays, no matter what they pretend to stand for." "I didn't mean I don't agree with you," Charlie said. "It's just that I admire your pathos." "When the spirit wants to speak through me, I'm but a conduit." I assumed that Dan Mancini had been shocked to silence, and he did keep quiet for some minutes, but soon afterwards he was again humming to himself and making his own little private observations of the world outside as if no conflict between him and us had ever occurred. Perhaps, I conjectured, his brain had a habit of saving its scarce resources by simply not dwelling on anything less than immediately relevant. The bloodbath threatened by Jake had not materialized, so there was no need to think about the whole discussion anymore or to feel hurt by his words and attitude. Essentially the same thing had happened earlier, after the disagreement over the choice of music to listen to had come to a head. "By the way," Charlie spoke up. "Do you think those horse fetish types would like to read your Kent Noggin stories, Dan? They could be your biggest fans one day." It goes almost without saying that Dan failed to notice the sarcasm in Charlie's words. Instead, he reacted with enthusiasm. "Really? Yeah, I do, I think they would be interested and such. It's very bad luck that I don't have my hand-written stories and comic books with me. Too bad I didn't take them with me. I could have handed copies out for them to read." "You never know when your big break comes," Jake added in an even more sarcastic tone. Dan then fell completely silent for a good quarter of an hour, deep in thought due to the missed business opportunity, as it appeared to us. I was virtually certain he would bring it up again, maybe insisting that we turn back or, God forbid, return to Chesterton to get his priced works. He had yet another surprise in store for us, however. "Why did we have to leave the nice couple's house so soon?" "What?" I blurted out. I sincerely thought I had misheard him. "Why did we have to leave Kenny and Christine's house so quickly?" he repeated. "They were such nice people and they were letting us stay with them overnight." I was dumbstruck by his question and unable to come up with anything even resembling a sensible explanation that a person like Dan might be able to comprehend easily. Instead, Jake took it upon himself to tell him, "They were weird people, Dan. They wanted to do some really strange and sick things to us." "No," Dan argued. "They are not sick people and those are not sick things! Christine told me they had these magic skinsuits that would turn us all into beautiful girls. I really wanted to put on a suit like that and have a fun time with everybody, and such. I've always wanted to be a pretty girl." "If that's how you feel about it, no problem," Scott said calmly, having regained his composure. "Nevertheless, you need to understand we don't want to be part of that. We were scared by those people and their suits." "Why?" Dan was genuinely puzzled. "We have never seen anything like them before, and they shouldn't even exist outside of fiction, you know, like TV shows and movies. They are not supposed to be real." "Kent Noggin says they are real. Me and Kent know all stories, comics, TV shows and movies and such, and books, are also real, although not by necessity in all worlds and dimensions, but just some; but if you can go to another dimension, you will find them there. Every time you think of an adventure of your respective favorite comic person, or story character or whatever, it really happens and becomes real in their home dimension, or multiple dimensions, depending on many things and such." "Kent himself is not real," Jake remarked pointedly, "so his opinions are hardly worth anything." "They are real, and Kent is real," Dan repeated stubbornly. "Me and him were talking when we were drinking coffee in Kenny and Christine's house, and he said we need to combine our powers and make something cool happen, and that is what we did with our respective hearts and souls and minds. And then right after, Christine came and told me about the suits and how we can all have fun with them when you guys were outside with Kenny. So there--Kent is real too." "I don't claim we fully understand what went on back there," Jake said, "but in any case, I wouldn't credit it to a flying cartoon mouse from Mars you made up back in school." "We talked last night too, and he wants to connect with me now. He's calling to me." "Go ahead," Jake grunted. "Talk to him. Knock yourself out." Dan bowed his head and closed his eyes, mumbled something to himself and added in a louder and clearer voice, "Oh, okay. Do you want to do that? Okay. I'll help you." He lifted his head and opened his eyes, reporting to us, "Kent told me we need to combine our strengths again. Wait a moment." After that, his eyes again fluttered closed, and with his lips tightly pursed he leaned back as if he were meditating. I did a quick calculation in my head as to how much distance we had covered since the morning and came to a disappointing conclusion: we were hardly more than halfway to Bedford, with at least two hours to go. Traveling with Dan was getting more awkward by the minute. This time, I was certain that what I was witnessing was not physically real, even though it was extremely vivid. A daydream or a vision began to unfold before my eyes. I was conscious all the time, aware of the outside world and definitely sitting in the driver's seat of my car and steering it along a narrow country road--and yet the drama that played out in my mind was only a little less tangible. I am standing on a rock, or perhaps a mountaintop; thick black smoke is billowing all around me; there are huge fires burning below and the clouds reflect the fiery glow. The air is hot and it smells bitter. I am facing a nightmarish monster, not unlike a dragon; its yellow eyes are fixed on me and its mouth is agape, revealing a set of sharp triangular teeth. Its scaly, thick skin is radiating heat. I am holding a sword in my hand, but despite its weight and its long, shiny blade, the weapon feels pitifully small and weak against the massive foe I am supposed to fight. I am all alone and I know that the fate of the world is in my hands. If I lose this battle, the forces of darkness will win decisively. I have no choice but to attack and try to strike the monster with my sword, even though my knees are so weak I can barely stand up. The monster is almost exactly like the one I fought in the Halloween roleplaying session, only more frightening and powerful; and unlike then, I have no one to support me now. It raises its head, lets out an ear-shattering roar and then lunges towards me. I hold the sword up, ready to deflect its blow and strike its head or front legs, whichever I can reach. Its hideous serpentine head is only a few feet away from me; its breath smells of sulfur and is almost enough to suffocate me by itself. I must concentrate, I must control my fear, I must... The vision thankfully faded away at this point. Although the car was pleasantly warm inside, thanks to the heating and air conditioning system, I suddenly realized I was drenched in cold sweat. I looked quickly around to see if the faces of my traveling companions were showing any signs of their having just had similar experiences, but none were apparent. Dan was still in his meditating pose, Jake was staring impassively ahead with his jaw slightly clenched, Charlie leaned to the side and eyed the landscape through the rear door window without much interest, and Scott was leaning back in the seat and seemed to have dozed off. Perhaps, then, it was just me and my already overworked nerves. Up ahead, the gravel road connected with a larger, paved one and ended. "Take a left," Jake advised me. "Take a left," I replied. "Roger." "Why is it that everybody says 'roger' when they mean they received and got the message?" Charlie wondered and yawned. "I need to look that one up." "What would you have them say instead?" Scott asked, aroused from his nap. "I don't know, but 'roger' sure sounds kind of weird to me. It's a man's name, for one thing." "So is Charlie," Jake pointed out, "and that's one of the code words in the standard International Phonetic Alphabet." "Yeah, I know, but why?" "It makes letters easy to transmit and understand over radio if you don't have a good connection. C for Charlie. Victor Charlie. Checkpoint Charlie. Charlie don't surf." "It can be pretty useful in some other circumstances too," I remarked. "For instance, if we wanted to be polite, we could say that Dan's brain is Foxtrot Uniform." "More of that military doublespeak," Charles McGee snorted. "I think I'll just stick to plain old English, thank you." Dan exhaled, inhaled again and opened his eyes, his telepathic discussion with his cartoon creation finished. "Kent Noggin left my mind just now," he reported. "He says you are all very interesting people with bright brains and souls and sound minds." "Right back at him," Charlie quipped. "He also says that he wants us all to help him in his next big adventure and such. He has this good and faithful friend named Angronok, but Angronok has been thrown into prison by the Intergalactic Evil League. But if we all work together, we and his other friends, we can go on a quest and help release Angronok from prison." I nearly drove off the road upon hearing his words. Dan's talk was his customary pointless blather about make believe things for the most part, to be sure, but the name "Angronok" sent a shiver through my entire body and made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It was the name of an evil and extremely powerful energy being whose goal was nothing less than complete disruption and utter domination of every known plane of existence through opening a dimensional portal--or so at least Rupert Giles, my friendly school librarian and Watcher, had advised me in my Buffy-themed hallucination. If my sojourn in Sunnydale had had no physical reality (my favorite view on it), it was truly uncanny for Dan to have hit upon that very name by sheer coincidence; after all, it was meaningless in every real human language, so far as I knew. On the other hand, if I had indeed been transported into another world to serve as the ultimate heroine there and if Dan was somehow in contact with Angronok, the implications were dreadful. "What did you say the friend's name was?" I asked Dan, trying to retain as casual and disinterested a tone in my voice as possible. "Angronok," he said. "How do you spell it?" "A-N-R-G-A... Uh, no, A-N-G-O-... No, no, A-N-G-R-O-... -N-O-K. Angronok." "Where did you hear a name like that, anyway? Did you lift it from a comic book or...?" "Kent Noggin told me. He's friends with Angronok, like I said." I made one last deliberate effort to push the whole issue out of my thoughts. It failed. Every rational brain cell I had was screaming to me that this coincidence was not important and did not mean a thing; it could not mean a thing. So what if Dan had given the same made-up name to a good guy in his comics that I had given a bad guy in my psychotic episode? Maybe he had seen it somewhere and just stolen it, and I had done the same unwittingly, in a subconscious way--that had to be it. Yet one part of me was not willing to write this off so readily. There might exist a connection after all, no matter how tenuous and baffling. I was sufficiently disturbed that I decided to stop for a while and get a cup of coffee, mainly in order to give myself an opportunity to think. Perhaps another quarter of an hour or twenty minutes later we did sight an old gas station with a caf? (grandiosely calling itself a restaurant), and I made up my mind immediately. "We'll stop there," I announced without letting the others voice their opinions on whether we should take a short break or not. "The effect of the breakfast is wearing off. I need something to strengthen me." "Maybe I misunderstood," Scott said, "but didn't we agree not to stop before we get to Bedford?" "I suppose we did, at some point, but we need to be flexible." Without further ado, I turned off the main road and maneuvered the car across the station yard in a wide turn that led neatly into a parking space right next to the main building. Even though the gas tank was now less than half full, I thought it better to fill up in Bedford or shortly after leaving there in order to give us as much mileage as possible before we would again have to stop for gas, and therefore I gave the pumps a pass. "Can I have a word with you?" Jake asked me in a lowered voice as we were getting out of the car. "In private?" "Sure," I said and nodded. "Let's just go inside first and get a table for us." The gas station and the caf? had clearly stood there for decades, and judging by their looks, they had seen better days. A typical flat metal fuel island canopy protected the four pumps from rain, and a squat, box-like restaurant and service building with dull gray walls were keeping it company. Judging by the outside view, the establishment was rather a relic from a bygone era than a modern all-in-one center offering everything to the spoiled motorist of today. However, once we stepped inside--a bell above the door frame chimed to signal our arrival to the employees--we found ourselves in a surprisingly tidy and cozy room filled with the aroma of coffee, eggs and bacon. A few fellow travelers, an elderly couple and a fat bearded man who was apparently the driver of the truck parked outside, were sitting at the tables. The old man and woman were having coffee while the truck driver, in defiance of what had to be already alarming cholesterol levels, was busily consuming a huge hamburger. There were some sun-bleached posters on the walls, together with a selection of local high school and sports team banners. "Hello there!" the waitress, a brunette woman in her early fifties greeted us and gave us a warm smile. She was in perfect harmony with the place and had probably aged together with it for years. Another waitress, a blond with her hair in a tight bun, passed behind her and scurried into the kitchen. "Can I get you anything?" "Uh," I began, "we'll just have some coffee and..." "Doughnuts," Jake completed my sentence for me. "Those ones over there look delicious." "They sure are!" the waitress told us. "We make them ourselves by our own recipe, and they're fresh." "I'll have Sprite, if you've got it," Dan piped up. "Coffee makes me feel blue in the face, out and out." The refreshments having been chosen, I picked up a tray at the start of the service line. The rest of our gang congregated behind me. "Oh, damn," I cussed to myself, pretending to have unexpectedly remembered something important and not all that pleasant. "I need to check the tire pressures. I think the car was pulling a little to the left on curves when we were on that gravel road. There, the drinks are on me," I added, took out a selection of bills from my wallet and put them on the tray. "I'll buy something for myself when I get back." "I'll come and take a gander at your tires too," Jake added, and we took off and went back outside, receiving suspicious looks from Scott and Charlie. The excuse was more transparent than the one I had used yesterday for the same purpose, and my acting was subpar as usual, but as long as Dan was fooled, it would do. I felt guilty for excluding two of my friends a second time; however, there was no way for us to leave Dan alone at a table and then go outside to have a huddle without possibly risking an incident. Even if he didn't see it fit to regale the waitresses and the other patrons with stories of his imaginary pals and their adventures involving space battles and anal sex between cartoon mice, the caf? employees might have assumed we intended to abandon our mentally challenged traveling companion in cold blood and leave. We probably attracted enough unwelcome attention from outsiders as it was. I walked to the car and studied its front wheels with exaggerated interest, giving the right-hand tire a kick. Jake stood next to me, with his eyes fixed on the vehicle as well. "What's on your mind?" I asked him. "I'm guessing the name Angronok rung a bell for you. It did for me, in a sense." "No, I wouldn't really say so," he stated but with some minor hesitation. "It did seem a bit off for someone with Dan's level of maturity and intelligence, though, but I see no reason to get worked up over something so insignificant. Do you think it's important?" "Most likely not, but it caught my attention and it's been bothering me for whatever reason ever since Dan said it out loud." "There might be a fantasy book character by that name. I thought of J.R.R. Tolkien's stuff at first, but to me it doesn't sound like a word he would've come up with. It's been a while since I last read through all of his books, though, so I can't be certain." "Eddings?" "Maybe, but unlikely." "Um... Terry Brooks?" "Brooks? Where did you get that one?" he laughed. "Joss Whedon?" I suggested with fake innocence. This was an intentional little ploy on my part to sound him out in a roundabout way and estimate what his reaction would be if I were to reveal my secrets later on. The last name clearly startled him, even though he did his best not to show it and maintain an unperturbed facade. "You're grasping at straws here, aren't you?" he said and added another laugh, less convincing and more forced than the previous one. "Say what you will about Brooks and even Eddings, but counting that hack among actual bona fide fantasy writers is---" "Alright, I was just kidding," I interrupted him, not wanting to push too hard. "So Angronok was not your point, I gather." "You're right, it wasn't. It's something else." Jake put his hands into his trouser pockets, took a deep breath and began, "About last night. Before I had the displeasure of waking up in a motel room that smelled of fermenting shit, literally, I had this... I don't know; it must have been a dream despite... Okay, whatever, let's call it a lucid dream for the lack of a better term. What I mean is lucid in the sense that it felt real when it happened even though the memory is fading fast and the contents no longer make sense." He paused again for a second or two to collect his thoughts and then continued, "If I had to take a guess and there was nothing else to go by, I'd most likely assume that the whole thing was brought about by Kenny's little party trick. Right, anyway, there were you, me, Charlie, Scott, your sister and a bunch of other people, and we were all supposed to be going to a public event, perhaps a party or a comic convention. Somebody told us that everyone had to wear a costume, so we each put on a skinsuit, like the one Kenny presumably had, and went there." My interest in his story was growing dramatically with his every word. Here was tentative proof that somebody else besides myself had gone through the mad Halloween party which had set my trials and tribulations in motion, and it also lent a bit of additional credence to the shopping receipt from Sunnydale. "Whoever was arranging the event had said we could get out of the suits when it was over, but then something went wrong and we got stuck inside them and couldn't take them off. The rest is pretty badly jumbled. Maybe the dream ended there, or maybe it flowed into a regular dream that I've forgotten. I'm not totally sure, but I think I've had a couple of other dreams like it before last night, only less detailed, or else I no longer remember them so well. That's why I believe there may be more to this than just the shock we all had yesterday evening, courtesy of Kenny and his liberal dingbat of a wife. Of course, it's not like we have a plausible explanation for that either, but in my opinion we had better tackle one psychedelic occurrence at a time." "Fascinating," I remarked after having waited and hoped for a few moments that he might have more to say. "What do you think your dream means?" "I was going to ask you that, Mike," he said and aimed a scrutinizing look at me. "I have a feeling you know more about this than I do, and also way more than you're letting on." "What gave you that idea?" I asked and chuckled to hide my nervousness. Jake was quite perceptive and he had immediately noticed that I was hiding something. "For one thing, when you paid me that visit before Halloween," he replied, "you told me how you thought you were shifting between two frames of time and reality. The way I interpret it, you're describing a phenomenon which is similar to my lucid dreams. The major difference is that your dreams are, I assume, more realistic and detailed because they obviously bothered you enough for you to come and see me to talk specifically about them. Still, we might well have a connection there. It's high time we sat down and compared notes. We need to find out what the hell is going on." "Sorry to disappoint you, but I really don't have the answers you want," I said. "I have had a number of dreams like yours, true--and that's it. I haven't gotten any further than you when it comes to solving this mystery." "Did the dreams have anything to do with your stay in the psych ward?" Jake's questions had now gotten much too close to the bullseye for my comfort, and I found myself desperately searching for a decent way out of the situation. I might well have told him far more than I thought was prudent to reveal at that point, were it not for a last second rescue courtesy of Scott. He strolled to us and asked, "What is it that you guys are scheming behind our backs? Me and Charlie suspected you were planning to take off and leave us here with Dan." "Don't worry," I said with a smile. "We're not quite that evil." "Nice to hear," my cousin remarked with a lopsided smirk of his own, "but I'm still staying as a representative of myself and Chuck. We need to know what you decide, even if you gents refuse to let us have our say before you decide it." "So Charlie's still there with Dan?" "Yeah. We reasoned we shouldn't let him sit there unsupervised and thought we take turns if your secret little conference runs more than half an hour longer." "Good thinking," Jake commended. "So, what's up?" Scott inquired. "Where are you going to take us next?" "To Bedford," I said. "That hasn't changed, and the car is actually perfectly okay." "What were you two whispering about then?" "Jake was relating a strange dream he had and we both were wondering if we're on the brink of going nuts." "It wouldn't be a miracle after yesterday," my cousin remarked. "What kind of dream was it?" "It had those skinsuits in it," Jake explained. "The four of us and a few other people were made to wear them to a costume party and couldn't take them off after the party ended." A thoughtful expression appeared on Scott's face, and for a fleeting moment my pulse picked up speed as I anticipated another important revelation. However, he simply went on to shrug his shoulders and flash us a brief smile. "As far as nightmares go," he opined, "our memories from the Taylor happening have potential for much worse, methinks." I was tempted to offer a rejoinder that Jake's apparent dreams--if they indeed were the same thing as mine--were nothing to sneer at when it came to their horror content and that the skinsuits and the reality changes had already turned out to be an inexhaustible source of nightmares for me personally. Nevertheless, I kept quiet about the whole thing, not wanting to drag Scott into this mess if it had mercifully spared him so far. "In other words," Scott said, "the plan for the immediate future is still to go to Bedford, drop Dan off and head south as fast as we can. Right?" "Right," I confirmed. "We're sticking to that." "And if there's no cousin in Bedford?" he asked. "We'll perform what the folks in the space exploration circles call a contingency abort," I said. "What's a contingency abort?" "It's when you recognize that the rocket blew up, your mission is shot to hell and there's nothing more you can do but to try to save your own hide." "In other words, we ditch him by the wayside." "Something along those lines, yeah." Although this conversation had certainly given me a lot to think about, I realized perfectly well I would not get to the bottom of the mystery there and then. I needed more time to sort out my ideas and to select the best way to handle the issue. Jake and I would sit down and compare our notes at some point, that was for sure, but not just yet. What is more, somewhere deep within my mind there was still a tiny remaining belief, no matter how ridiculous and counterfactual, that all of this just might go away if we stopped talking and thinking about it. Strangely enough, the most emotional and the most logical part of me were convinced of this; everything between those two extremes disagreed emphatically, however. A little later we were back on the road. The coffee at the gas station restaurant had been slightly stale, but the doughnuts had lived up to their reputation, and the combination did me plenty of good. Even Dan had apparently enjoyed his soda and he seemed sleepy. The most distasteful thing he was responsible of at the moment was a fairly weak but intrusive odor wafting around him. "When we get to Texas," Charlie said, "I take it there's going to be beer. Am I right?" "Oh yeah," Jake confirmed cheerily with a wide smile. "Gallons and gallons of refreshing beer. We won't waste a single day being sober." "I was thinking that maybe we should have paid a quick visit to Stevie Hillwood and bought something else to go with the alcohol before we left, you know, so as to get a more varied diet." "Stevie's in prison," Scott pointed out. "What? Since when? How did that happen?" "They arrested him last January, or about that time. He got eight years in the slammer for possession, manufacture and distribution. It was all over the local papers and everybody was talking about it as the biggest drug bust in the recent history of the county and one of the biggest in the whole state. Didn't you hear?" "I don't recall that I did. I suppose it just didn't register with me." "The guy basically started out by growing some pot at home for himself and his buddies, but I guess he got greedy and the operation expanded until he was selling the stuff by the kilogram and had a huge network. Meth, LSD and prescription pills too for select clients, from what I've been told. The rumor has it the cops found only a small fraction of what he had." "Stevie should be awarded some scientific prize," Jake commented. "Between his business and all the brouhaha that followed, he's probably done more to increase awareness of the metric system around our neck of the woods than Greensville High." Out of the blue, the feeling of unreality I had experienced at the motel parking lot returned, along with mild dizziness and nausea. I had to blink a few times to keep my eyes focused before it subsided. Jake had obviously noticed something wrong with me. In a concerned tone, he asked me, "Mike? Are you okay? You look a little pale." "Oh, it's nothing," I said and tried to smile. "I guess overdosing on caffeine is getting to me." My body seemed to sort itself out and a minute or so passed without incident. But then another wave of dizziness washed over me, and I began to look for a spot to pull up in case the condition worsened. "Guys?" I said to the others. "I think I feel a little lightheaded. Maybe one of you should---" There was no fadeout, no gradual blurring, no strange sounds, no warning of any kind. The car, the road and my friends vanished from my eyes faster than the pitifully limited human brain could react--and I was alone, standing on my feet, under a night sky. (To be continued...)