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Well, at that
point, everything was going to hell pretty quickly. I remember one elf that
took off running, his little bells all jingling and flapping on the end of his
scarf as he tried to get away. I threw the shotgun up and cut him down with it,
by that point we had decided that the only way to save the world was to
eliminate the threat every time we saw one of the little green-suited trolls.
To stamp the abomination out. The little elf was still kicking in the street,
so I walked over to him and looked down.
"You little ankle biters never learn, do you?" I asked, and let him
have it again. Elves are tougher than you'd think.
I ducked back into the alley where the few of us that remained were hiding for
the moment, trying to sort it all out. There were thirty three that stepped off
the bus into the wonderment of the North Pole, place of Legend. There were only
six of us left. Funny thing about legends is they never have it quite right.
Santa Clause, Chris Cringle, Father Christmas? Oh, he's a real dude, all right.
The North Pole? Really there. Hell, I even saw Rudolph, yes I did. He's the one
that gave me that stupid Pringle's can full of water, told me it was a 'Holy
Weapon' or some such nonsense. This whole place is on crack, let me tell you.
But back to my point, where the legends of Santa Clause went horribly wrong is
that Santa doesn't do that whole toy thing out of the goodness of his heart, oh
hell no. He was sentenced to it eons ago by God. Santa Clause is really Satan
Alusec, the foremost of God's cast down, paying his atonement for mucking about
with the human race with that whole apple thing. One night out of the year he
is sentenced to take human form and do acts of kindness, for the entire human
duration. The rest of the year, he's awful pissed about it. Welcome to my
December 23rd. If we can hang on until tomorrow at noon when they all become
nice for the day, we might make it, but the elves all turned out to be
carnivorous, and we're running a little low on people now. We're sixteen hours from
salvation, and there's no clear way out.
We would have probably had more people with us if we had figured out the thing
about the toys earlier. As I got back to my little group of fellow survivors, I
looked around at our 'arsenal'. I was toting a plastic shotgun, one of the
little brown and orange ones that you see in the last-chance rack at a
supermarket check-out. Jenn had a pair of plastic ray guns that looked
pathetically, stupidly small in her hand, but she had used them to blast at
least ten of the little leg biting baboons that children loved to love in the
last mass-wave attack. We only lost three people in that wave, thanks to the
toy weapons. But hey, it's a place of magic, right? It turns out that all you
have to do is believe that the weapons work, and they do. Some guy whose name I
didn't know had another shotgun, but hadn't used it yet, and Roger, beside him,
had one of those little green machine guns that look just like M-16's that make
that rolling sound every time you pull the trigger. Iris had a replica of a
sword Johnny Depp used in that one movie. She said the spirit of Johnny would
help her in battle. I would have laughed had the plastic blade not been covered
in elf blood when she stated it. It was okay; she could go nutty as she wanted
so long as she kept swinging the sword when they charged. Roger looked up at
me.
"So I take it the coast is clear?"
"For the moment it is, but we need to get moving soon. I don't like being
where they can jump off the roof on us, either. They can be cunning."
Jenn piped up. "Where do y-you think Cringle is?" Her voice chattered
with the cold, and I took off my coat and let her slip it on for a moment. She
was dressed less warmly than the rest; she had gotten onto her bus to go to the
beach for the weekend.7
"You can bet he's out looking for us." I replied. "After the
explosion, he's pretty pissed and looking to have another go at us."
"But we didn't set it off!" said No-Name. "It was that
deer..."
"He's Satan, you think he needs a great reason to be pissed? What do you
think he's gonna be like now that he actually has a great reason to be
pissed?"
"I hear bells..." said Jenn, and that got everyone off their butts. I
grabbed her hand and headed back out into the street, checking carefully to
make sure that none of the little toothsome elves were close, and we took off
running towards the edge of town, the other four trailing closely behind as we
stayed close to the buildings--actually made of gingerbread and peppermint, oh
God, I'll never eat them again, I promise. Just let me survive. Well, me and
Jenn, anyway. We ducked in and out of alleys and shadows, trying to
inconspicuously make good time at hauling our collective asses out of the
nightmare dream town. I was trying to make my way back to the bus again, in the
hopes that something new might have happened and the road would have opened
back up, but I was becoming more and more convinced that another figment of old
legends might be coming true around me, too. Whenever there is a thing of power
about to happen, they offer a sacrifice, and I was beginning to think that was
what the magical mystery bus that appeared here with all of us in it was. The
sacrifice to Satan, to bring about peace and joy on earth for a day. Well, if
me and my plastic shotgun have anything to say about it, then this year I'm
making the 'Naughty' list, but good.
That was the exact moment that I figured out just how cunning the little
demon-elves were, when I rounded the corner and discovered they had filled an
alley and remained still, so their little silver bells wouldn't make noise as
they approached. They had run us into a trap by jingling some of their stupid
little bells behind us, and a fine one it was. I frantically pumped the little
plastic shotgun for all I was worth, blowing many of them right around me back,
but they swarmed around us. No-name with the other shotgun got pulled down
without ever firing a real shot from his make-believe gun, screaming and bloody
as they chewed his legs right out from under him. Jenn was behind me firing,
and screaming, and Iris was hacking the little buggers to ribbons, yelling
"Do-we-have-an-ACCORD? Do-we-have-an-ACCORD?" the whole time, the
words coming out in harsh exhales of air as she swung. Roger was mowing them
down like clockwork, his little green machine gun chattering like mad as they
fell in front of him. I blew a hole through their ranks and yelled, taking off
running through the gap and firing to either side as I did. I felt an impact
and warmth on my leg that I didn't want to think about, and then cleared the
mass of snapping, hungry elves, turning and firing backwards as I retreated
into the alley they had come from. Jenn saw me and began to make her way to me
as I fired back into the rapidly thinning mob. Roger and Iris were cleaning up,
both of them surrounded by a ring of little elf bodies stacked like cordwood,
some of them with three inch fangs exposed to the waning light of the day. We
all kept firing, and then it was over just as quickly as it had begun, the last
three falling into five pieces at the same time. No-name was dead, most of the
flesh gone from his exposed areas, and Iris was sliced up pretty bad, and
bleeding from several deep wounds on her legs. Once the adrenaline got back out
of her system, she'd feel them all, but she needed medical help right now, and
there was none. We didn't even have bandages with us. Just plastic guns. The
sixth person had disappeared before the ambush, and I had no idea where. I
wasn't going back to look, either. We were almost out of town, and almost
wasn't quite good enough under the circumstances. I looked down at the warmth
and growing pain in my leg, and realized for the first time that Iris wouldn't
be the only one requiring medical attention. I had a free-bleeding bite wound
in my right thigh that needed to be patched up, too. Probably stitched. Dammit,
there wasn't anything that could be done about it. I grabbed Jenn by the wrist
and began moving again, Roger and Iris fanning out to either side and sticking
close. I noted, with relief, that Iris had thought to pick up No-name's
shotgun, and was holding it in her left hand along with her Johnnie Depp sword
in her right. She was drenched in both elf blood and her own, but never made
complaint. Jenn had a couple of superficial wounds, but Roger was our unscathed
champ for the moment.
We didn't run into anything else between us and the bus, and when we got there
I washed the bite wound to my thigh with snow outside the bus and wrapped my
leg with a t-shirt from a Motley Crue concert. I staggered back into the bus
with Jenn, and closed the door to the bus behind us. I sat down in a seat, and
through no fault of my own I passed out. We'd only been on the run for ten
hours at that point, but hey, I'm a housepainter. I'm only used to an
eight-hour day.
When I was awakened, it was pitch black, so magically dark that it was
impossible to guess what time it was. Jenn was the first thing that I saw when
I opened my eyes, but the worried look on her face as she was shaking me awake
helped me try and snap to. My leg was afire, and stiff, but bearable. Iris and
Roger were at the windows, peering out into the snow.14
"There's something moving out there in the shadows." explained Jenn.
"Bells?" I asked groggily, and she shook her head. I rubbed the sleep
from my eyes and sat up, looking outside the bus. I saw nothing at first, but
then saw a shadow moving within a shadow under the closest evergreen tree. I
saw a brief red glow, which was quickly put out.
"It's Rudolph!" I said. I reached down and opened the door to the
bus, the cold air blasting me, taking my breath as I hobbled down the steps
into the snow. Jenn and Roger followed me, but I told Iris, who looked pale and
in pain, to close the door and guard the bus, in case we needed to retreat in a
hurry. She gratefully agreed, closing off the cold air as soon as the three of
us were all off. Looking like refugees, armed with toys and Jenn still wearing
my coat, we made our way as quickly as we could through the snow drifts to
where Rudolph was hunkered down, his little button horns adorned with colored
twine. He had pulled a sled full of things behind him. He was looking
cautiously back the way that he had come.
"Hey again. How are you doing?" he says to me. I had seen him earlier
that day.
"Not so good, dude." I replied. "There are only four of us left
now."
"Ouch." Said Rudolph, shaking his head. "Still, most years you
guys are already dead. He cooks the bodies into a meat pie, and eats it at
11:00 in the morning, right before the change into human. He laughs as he eats
it. He's pretty sure that it pisses God off." Rudolph turned and looked at
the rest. "Hey, I figured you guys might be hungry, so I brought one of
everything we have that humans like to eat. Oats, gingerbread, and
peppermint."
Roger uttered not a sound as he stared with unease at the talking reindeer, but
Jenn managed a confused "Humans don't eat oats. We use them to cook
with."
Rudolph looked at her. "You sure ain't got time for that, lady. Santa is
coming soon. He knows you're here. I brought you some stuff that I hope will
help." His stuff was mostly a pile of toy weapons, which Jenn and Roger
leaned over and began rummaging through. Rudolph turned his attention back to
me. "Do you have what I asked you to smuggle out of the compound for
me?"
For a second I was dumbfounded, then remembered. "The Pringle's can? The
holy weapon?"
Rudolph rolled his eyes, and his nose flashed a deep red for a second. He
called me something that I didn't know a reindeer knew to say, then "No,
you idiot. Not holy weapon, holy water. For you to splash him with. He's a
fallen angel, and all? I figured that it couldn't be pleasant for him. I just
couldn't get it out of the compound, and since you were kinda coming this way
and all..."
Suddenly the Pringle's can full of water made a lot more sense to me, and I
frantically tried to remember what I had done with it. Backpack, it's in my
backpack, which is...which is...beside the door at the steps of the bus where I
bandaged my leg, right. I turned and began limping through the snow to go back
and get it. Since the trail was already broken, it was faster than before, but
still quite a trudge. I live in the south, before yesterday on the magical
mystery bus the highest drift I ever saw was eighteen inches, and that was
against the side of a house. I hate cold, and snow is evil, and that's just how
I feel. I grabbed the bag, tossed a wave to Iris in the window and turned back
when it happened.
A loud, booming, rolling "HO HO HO!" fell across us like a sonic
boom, and I began sprinting through the snow just as fast as I could back to
the tree. There was a crash of metal and glass behind me, and Roger screamed
something about Iris, and then I was under the tree. I turned back to look and
the biggest bleeping sleigh you have ever seen is where the bus was a second
ago, I mean, the bus, and the slightly loony but very dependable Iris, are both
just crushed flat. Santa is about fifteen feet tall when he stands up in the sleigh,
and he's got patches of scaly stuff still showing where the flesh isn't grown
back in yet. His sleigh looks about the same, rusty or black grimy in spots,
and fresh red and clean trim in other spots. We all just stood there in shock
as Santa kicked open the door to the sleigh and stepped out, tendons popping
loudly in the quiet night air. He looked aimlessly, harmlessly into the sky.
Steam began to curl from around his semi-booted and clawed feet.
"Alright, you little asses. I'm in a mood for some serious retribution.
You've wiped out more of my bleeping elves than AIDS did before we caught on.
Do you know how hard it is to recruit demons to be elves? DO YOU? Get out here
now. I'm not asking anymore." As he finished his little speech, he rolled
his eyes down towards us for the first time, red flickers of hellfire that
chilled the soul. That was when he snapped.
"RUDOLPH!" he roared, and this time there was a nasty, reeking wind
that went with it. Our noble tree promptly dropped every bit of snow that had
been on it, forming a ring around the base of itself. Santa continued to lose
his cool. "You little MEDDLER! Why do you plague me every year with this?
I will have your guts for SAUSAGE this time!" Fifteen-Foot Evil Satan
Santa was so furious that he spontaneously burst into flame, an awesome
spectacle to behold. The heat of it blasted us like a furnace, but closer to
Santa, the effect was even more spectacular. There was a roiling gray explosion
around him as the intense heat boiled away the snow into steam, and snuffed him
back out like a candle. That was when Rudolph nudged me.
"Hey, I'm not trying to spoil the show for you, dude, but now would be a
perfect time to... say... throw some holy water on him?"
"Right!" I said, and dropped to rummage through my bag. I came up
with the Pringle's can, but the lid was popped off. The water had frozen as it
sat outside, and expanded. I had a twelve-inch cylinder of frozen holy water
that was entirely unsplashable in my hands, and just as soon as Satan gets done
coughing over there across the cloud, he was gonna have us for lunch. Damn.
Then I spied it. I picked it up out of the pile of toys on the little sled and
looked it over, and it felt right in my hands. Maybe just this once God was
looking over his flock, I thought.
"I'd like to point out that Santa is getting up now." remarked Jenn
worriedly, and Rudolph was back on his hooves with us, and yes, 'ol Rudy looked
worried, too. I showed them what I had. Three blank faces looked back at me, so
I flipped the toy rocket launcher on end and dropped the Pringles can down the
barrel of it. It slid down the plastic breech with a tight whoosh of air.
"Ohhh." they replied in unison, and I threw the thing over my
shoulder and bravely stepped out from under the tree. Santa was just rising to
his full height again, and paused when I stepped out, looking at me with both
confusion and rage. Then he actually laughed. And pointed, with a three-foot
finger that ended in a bright red claw.
"You have a toy weapon!" He gloated, and actually rocked back on his
heels once laughing. Then he moved, but by then I had him locked. I pushed the
plastic button, and the holy water blasted from the end of the launcher, the
Pringle's can tearing apart like a sabot, and the cylinder of ice took the
giant in the throat through a hole in his patchwork beard.
"Tempt that." I said, and tossed the rocket launcher into the snow at
my feet. The plastic barrel was exploded anyway, and there was a greenish smoke
rising in loose tendrils from it. And it was my only ace. If it didn't work, we
were dead.
Santa staggered back, grabbing his throat once, and said "What the
hell...?" Then his eyes rolled up in his head and his backwards knees gave
out, and he hit the freshly-melted ground flat on his back with a sharp splat,
throwing mud across his sleigh as he did. He began gently snoring.
"Well, huh." said Rudolph. "That's new."
That's mostly the story, I guess. After we knocked him out, the snow receded
back off the road the same as it had closed in when it trapped us, and we took
off walking. There wasn't any food, so me and Jenn ate Roger after about a
week, and maybe a week after that we finally emerged from the 'anomaly' in the
middle of Atlanta
in a bar. We had our son Orphan two years after, and so far we've lived happily
ever after. We don't talk about it much, you can understand.
And the sound of jingle bells kinda irks me. *twitches*
Copyright 2008 J. Brown
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