Chapter 7

“BAD BATCH!” hollered a wild-eyed woman in a trendy green chef hat. “There’s PCP in the Hash, man! This hasn’t hap­pened since the boot­legged days! Get this freakin’ ostrich off of my head, some­body!” The milk adorn­ing the upper-lips of most patrons became a cer­tain badge of men­tal insta­bil­ity. No won­der such tune­ful chaos had erupted! What had been pleas­antly sur­real turned imme­di­ately and quite dis­mally macabre. Mewl­ing and claw­ing at one another, cof­fee lovers and ston­ers alike fell into a fray so fre­netic that a bird’s eye view of the sit­u­a­tion would have resem­bled some­thing like hip­ster pop­corn, hot on the stove. Jerry detached him­self from the now des­per­ate grip of the feline like Frankie Val­ley femme-fatale and looked for the the frothy barista queen of his now balls-tripping heart. She was nowhere. If she had been snatched away, taken hostage in some hor­rif­i­cally cliche Princess Peach sort of sce­nario, or if she had loaded up her RPG and gone out in search of those respon­si­ble for besmirch­ing the good name of The Leaf’s leg­endary green­ery; he had no way of know­ing. All he knew is that it was time to go. Shit was just a lit­tle too crazy. This place was giv­ing him the fear. More than the fear, it was giv­ing him the buzzing.

An intense buzzing that made him feel as though he was trapped in the lungs of a giant on the verge of a hearty sneeze. Things were slow­ing down. Around him, the panic had qui­eted into an unnat­ural still­ness. He cow­ered in the cor­ner and watched as the fran­tic eyes of the afflicted came to gaze, unfo­cused in dif­fer­ent direc­tions. He sobbed into the crook of his elbow feel­ing hope­less as an oth­er­worldly light set­tled over the grisly scene.

“This one isn’t freez­ing, boss,” said a squeaky, dis­em­bod­ied voice. “What do I do with it?”

“Kill it!” grunted a gruffer baritone.

“Knock it out,” came a cool, cal­cu­lated response.

Of course, Jerry could not under­stand any of that for­eign com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In fact, research results were incon­clu­sive as to whether or not this pecu­liar species could even reg­is­ter the vocal res­o­nance of the peo­ple of The Fil­gram Star Base Amul­gam, pre­vi­ously known as the war­ring sec­tors of Silge-Grabuuk. But no one ever men­tions that. Cer­tainly not Jerry, whose last con­scious thoughts were ones of use­less dis­be­lief at the sight of human bod­ies, frozen in time, being loaded onto shim­mer­ing blue float­ing gur­neys by what appeared to be tiny men in black hats and black trench coats. He could not be sure of what that implied. He could not even be sure what was real and what was drug-induced cof­fee fan­tasy. One thing was sure for those of us in the comfy pur­chase of dra­matic irony, two pre­vi­ously dis­tant chunks of the uni­verses’ spat­ter of ran­dom noth­ing­ness had just encoun­tered one another for the first time.