Wow! This Is Insane!

WOW! THIS IS INSANE!

Copyright © 2013 by Bobby Alvarez.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-7301-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-7302-0 (ebk)

iUniverse rev. date: 02/22/2013

Contents

Chapter 1 In the Middle of a Mess

Chapter 2 A Little Later

Chapter 3 Quite a Bit Later

Chapter 4 The Other Side of the Story

Chapter 5 On the Occasion of Eunice’s First Attempt at Connecting More Than Two Words Together at One Time

Chapter 6 Finding a Place to Hide

Chapter 7 Final Boarding Call

Chapter 8 Moving Ahead

Chapter 9 Please Keep Your Hands and Feet Inside the Car at All Times

Chapter 10 Though, When I Woke Up, I Actually Cried Out Loud…

Chapter 11 Dollface

Chapter 12 I Finally Get My Scrambled Eggs

Chapter 13 In the Lions’ Den

Chapter 14 Take a Number

Chapter 15 Things Just Keep Getting Better

Chapter 16 Plans and Procedures

Chapter 17 Huh?

Chapter 18 On Autopilot

Chapter 19 Revenge, Revisited

Chapter 20 First things First

Chapter 21

Chapter 22 Hi Grandma

Chapter 23 What Next?

Chapter 24 Reno National Cemetery

Chapter 25 Where the Old Lady Takes the Lead

Chapter 26 I Before E, Except After C

Chapter 27 Peace and Quiet

Chapter 28 What to Do Now… 

Chapter 29 Hey, Mr. Bad Guy… Can You Hear Me?

Chapter 30 How Come Everyone Else Always Wakes Up First?

Chapter 31 Enough Already

Chapter 32 Still Running

Chapter 33 Yes, Mr. Finklestein… Anything You Say, Mr. Finklestein

Chapter 34 So, Denver It Is, Then

Chapter 35 Out in the Middle of Nowhere

Chapter 36 Church… Why Did It Have to Be a Church

Chapter 37 Click-Click

Chapter 38 Nobody Told Me It Was Freezing In There

Chapter 39 Nuthin’s Ever Easy

Chapter 40 Not What I Thought

Chapter 41 Figuring Things Out

Chapter 42 Decisions, Decisions

Chapter 43 If I Haven’t Said I-Love-You Lately, It Doesn’t Mean That I Don’t

Chapter 44 Excerpt #1

Chapter 45 Excerpt #2

Chapter 46 Excerpt #3

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49 Out in the Open Again

Chapter 50Bean Town

Chapter 51 The Magician’s Plan

Chapter 52 The Magician Re-Appears

Chapter 53 Hello, my name is Will Testament.

Chapter 54 #*@!^%

Chapter 55 Deep Breath

Chapter 56 What We Know So Far

Chapter 57 Two Minutes, Sixteen Seconds Later

Chapter 58 Two Hours, Sixteen Minutes Later

Chapter 59 Two Days, Sixteen Hours Later

Chapter 60 Here’s How the Play Transpired

Chapter 61 Stupid Twice

Chapter 62 Wow…

Chapter 63 Really!?!

Chapter 64 Final Destination Options

Chapter 65 Preparations

Chapter 66 Shuck-n-Jive

Chapter 67 Trashman

Chapter 68 Sixty-Eight Hundred Million Options to Try

Chapter 69 Keep Going, I Guess

Chapter 70 I Think It Was The Non-Catholic Version…

Chapter 71 Halt!

Chapter 72 Dead Man Walking

Chapter 73 Mr. Testament, I Presume

Chapter 74

Chapter 75 Will Testament Day at City Hall

Chapter 76 Lost and Finally Found

Post-Script C’mon, Really?

To my kids,

Dani and Alex, who make me laugh all the time

CHAPTER 1

In the Middle of a Mess

Okay, just to get you caught up, since I just figured out how to work the personal diary-log feature of my eyecorder (Like that didn’t hurt! Who would’ve thought that selecting that feature would actually force the contact lens to un-embed itself from my cornea, grapple along my iris, turn itself over and embed itself all over again in my cornea—except this time with the vid, aud, olf, and tact sensors facing in instead of out. Couldn’t they do all that in software somehow? Remind me to never switch modes like that again!) and since they’ve had my head locked inside this soundproof, nearly airless box (lit up like the sun inside so that I can’t read anything being written along the Bottom Line on my contact lens display, even with my eyes closed) for what seems like ten hours, but I can’t really be sure, because my claustrophobia is acting up pretty bad and I pass out every so often after I hyperventilate, so I really have lost all track of time, but every time I wake up, I’m scared as snot so I start hollering, I’m gonna die in here! There’s not enough air for me to breathe! at Vinny again and again, begging him to take the box off and promising him for the millionth time to tell him where the time-links are, though both he and I know that I’m lying because I don’t know where the time-links are or else I would have used them by now to go back or forward for a bit and find myself a mace or a long sword to smash the box off my face, but either way, I don’t know where the links are since I gave them to some kid to hold them for me and Vinny off-ed the kid before thinking to get the links back first, though honestly it’s been a long couple days and when the kid wise-cracked, Why don’t you ask your mother where the f#@%ing links are? They’ve probably just fallen in the fat rolls around her belly!, Vinny just kinda lost it and shot the kid through the forehead because his mom apparently really is kinda fat and pretty ugly, which left me as the only potential link to the links, but they’ve downloaded my recordings from before the time they put me in the sun box and brought me up to Tranquilus and they know there’s nothing in there that would even hint that the kid hinted where he had stashed the links, so there’s really nothing to do but kill me, but now the Mob code kinda gets in the way, because Vinny’s not a gun-man right now—since he’s not a citizen of Tranquilus and only citizens who have completed the shooting-in-one-sixth-gee course (which requires a boat-load of credits and a clean nose, neither of which are Vinny’s strong suit) can bring a gun to the Moon—and since everything’s so clean up here that the whole little planet is devoid of rat poison and drain cleaner (which are apparently other honorable ways to kill somebody) and since Vinny’s got something against choking people (though apparently not against nearly stripping them of oxygen inside this stupid box!), now they’re trying to find some sort of weight they can tie to my feet so they can drown me at the bottom of the hotel pool/water treatment facility, which is really hard to do because of some weird thing that changes how Archimedes’ Principle and Newton’s Second Law work on other planetary bodies, so I’m still waiting for them to find something to weigh me down (so far, a deck chair, a deck chair and table, and a garbage bag full of rocks have been unsuccessful, through I am now drenched and cold and maybe will die in a couple weeks from pneumonia), and I think it’s gonna be a while before Sonny (Are they all named that way? Don’t parents know if they name their kid Vinny and somebody down the block names their kid Sonny, that both of them will grow up to be hoodlums or mobsters?) gets back with the sand bags for their next attempt, though who knows how they’re going to secure the bags to my legs, so I should be alive for at least a little longer, so that’s why I started the personal diary, so that at least my mom can listen to my last words if anyone ever finds my body or my head at least (or my contact lens, if you want to be anal about it). [Don’t worry; the auto-corrector is indeed working correctly. The beeping in my ear recommending I use more periods is constantly going off. But, you try to think in coherent, twelve-to-fifteen word sentences when you can’t breathe, see, taste, smell, or touch anything. So, I’m sorry about this, but you’re gonna have to put in your own breaths somewhere, because I don’t have the time or patience to do that for you.]

Where was I?

Oh yeah, about to die. Here, then, is the Last Will and Testament of Will Testament. (Go ahead, chuckle away. My gramps gets high at a concert back in the 30’s, and decides to change his name to William Testament—Was the judge drunk, too? Did he not think this might be a bad thing?—and then makes a boat-load of money for writing some stupid, but apparently necessary and therefore lucrative, software program and decides that the kid-to-be in grandma’s tummy is not just a son, but rather an heir, so the stoner-name gets legs and my dad becomes William Testament the Second, and since I got a Y-chromosome when I rolled the sperm-egg dice and since my dad didn’t have the balls to stand up to gramps and come up with his own radical moniker like Scrub Oak (so I could be called Acorn until puberty) [oops, sorry about the parentheses inside parentheses here] I got stuck as Will Testament III, which sucks, but don’t bother laughing, ’cause it’s kinda old already.)

. . . Damn, they found the sandbags. I don’t have much time left. Mom, I love you. Dad, I love you. Have a blast with the rest of your lives.

. . . Hey, Vinny, you don’t have to do this. Give me a little time to think! I’m sure the kid gave me some hint of where he put the links; just give me some time to look over the recordings.

. . . C’mon Vinny, have a heart. Ouch, hey, that’s tight enough. You wanna slice my feet off? Then, what are you gonna tie the bags to, idiot?

. . . Vinny, you douchebag, don’t do this! At least pull this box off my head so I can spit in your face before I drown! Vinnnnnnnyyyyy! . . .

CHAPTER 2

A Little Later

So, I’m not gonna lie to you: it took a bit longer than it probably should have to finally toss out the Br’er Rabbit line. First, I had to hold my breath (Like that was gonna help! I’m holding onto all my oxygen until I get twenty-five meters below the surface and then I’m gonna let it out and die down there! Boy, am I a genius!) Then, about thirty seconds later, when I finally had to take another breath (Shelly Winters I definitely am not!), I started screaming (another genius move—I’m so far under water that nobody can even see me, let alone hear me, and I’m screaming like a baby for my mommy). Then, when my feet finally hit bottom, the light bulb in my head finally went off and I realized I was safe in my own little scuba-helmet and that I wasn’t gonna die for a bit and that I finally could toss out the No Massa, please! Massa Vinny, please don’t throw me in the br’er patch at the bottom of the hotel swimming pool/water treatment facility. Anything but that! line with impunity. Ha-ha, stupid Vinny.

I hit the bottom pretty softly since the sandbags weren’t big enough to completely overcome my 20% bodyfat. Not having spent very much time at the bottom of a seven-story pool, though, I had no idea what to expect next. I had assumed it was basically a flat floor, but quickly found out differently, since that’s where the water treatment facility part of the structure comes into play.

Since Tranquilus is pretty far from the Moon’s polar ice, they’re pretty protective of all their water. They can’t afford to let any of it sit stagnant, so all the water all over the place gets recycled constantly. And it all gets churned up, even the water in the pool, in a big water treatment facility under the pool. So, the bottom of the pool is more like a drain than a floor, where all the water slowly escapes through a sandbag-sized hole. Pretty lucky for me, huh?

Sure, except the cage on my head (Ooh, I just thought of another reference: the cage mask in the book, 1984. For about the last five minutes, I’ve been screaming, Noooo! Do it to Julia! and cracking myself up.) is bigger than the sand bags on my feet and bigger than the drain hole, so now I’m stuck. The water rushing by the sand bags is pulling me one way (down) and the box on my head is holding me in place and pulling me the other way (up). I can feel myself getting taller with each passing minute. I wonder if my vertebrae will ever connect correctly again.

My elbows and knees keep hitting the side of the tube, which sucks, and I’ve begun to worry that the fans recirculating the air inside my head box have a short life span when under high pressure and rushing water, which sucks even more, so I’ve tried banging my head against the opening to the hole, but I’m not sure if having no head protection seventy meters down is better than having no air.

To get my mind off this conundrum, and since I’m hoping beyond hope that the guy who finally approved the head box design listened to the engineer who said, You know? The recirculating fans that can operate under all pressures and temperatures are only 1.2% more expensive than the non-waterproof fans, and not to the accountant who said, Will you guys cut it out with all the bells and whistles? Who’s gonna need to use this thing under water, for God’s sake?, I figure I’ll tell you, for the record, how it was I ended up being the chunky meat part of a water sausage at the bottom of a Tranquilus swimming pool.

It all started