• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 142 0

my sweet, loving office or feeling the warm embrace of my condominium, as I held back a mighty tsunami of tears with the last strength in my desperate eyelids, clinging boldly to my dwindling rations of hope … all at once I heard a sound, the sweetest sound I’d ever known: the sound of my own name, shouted out in the forest. A search party! Using a combination of loud coughs and elaborate beer can rapping, I announced myself to the Alaskan Forest SWAT Ranger Search & Rescue team. But as these brave men approached my position, I warned them (via morse code) that my ferocious captor would not easily offer up his trophy. Indeed, just then, from out of nowhere, the crazed predator I’d come to know as Mister Bear charged furiously at the phalanx of rescue professionals, his muscular thighs pumping with ursine fury, an ancient battle-snarl echoing from his inhuman, animal, mammalian, beary snout!

They mowed him down instantly in a blistering hail of high-powered ammunition. “Don’t worry. Mr. Pushkin,” the bald-headed mustachioed Ranger-in-chief told me as he stuck his head under the car to survey my wounds, “the bear’s head is still intact, and I’m sure your Seattle taxidermists can patch up the pelt.”

Then as the Forest SWAT Ranger Squadron Leader called back to base on his high-powered two-way radio, the other SWAT Rangers jacked up my Rover with military precision, being very respectful of the paint, and polished the mud and grime off the axle. Luckily, these Rangers were accompanied by a team of Search & Rescue field neurosurgeons who fit me with a remarkable pair of self-tightening “smart tourniquets”, the newest thing from Japan. They stemmed the loss of blood while preventing gangrene and gently massaging my raw, exposed neurons.

“Oh Marv, you’re so brave!” oozed Marcia from Product Dialogue, looking succulent in a tight halter-top and shorts. She wore a dainty clothespin over her nose. “I just can’t stand the stench of those nasty evil bears! They swarmed over camp like bees! They ate Edna, they ate Harvey and Jim and the others, oh gosh it was awful! Hold me, Marv!”

So I held her, and she felt good, damn good, her warm, heaving bosom, her trembling chin. I kissed her, and squeezed her ample posterior. “If I hadn’t been fixing my makeup in the truck,” she trembled, “they would have got me too! So I asked myself, what would Marv do? And I decided to drive back to the ranger station, and I brought the best Search & Rescue team in all Alaska! I can’t live without you, Marv, and neither can Image Team!”

As Marcia clutched my hand in hers, the SWAT Rangers and their neurosurgical attaché lifted me onto a sumptuously upholstered stretcher and carried me over to have a look at Mister Bear. There, lifeless in the mud, lay my tormentor, the killing spark snuffed from him. This crumpled ball of meat and insulation had for nearly a week toyed with my life, my being, my very existence as a small Papillon dog might toy with a goat tendon. And yet, I felt no hatred, no anger. I felt only the soothing rush of relief and the bracing flush … of Victory.

“Violence begets violence, my ursine friend,” I said. Then I borrowed a Benelli M2 semiautomatic shotgun from one of the Rangers and pumped a few more rounds into his lifeless body, while they took pictures.

The doctors gave me an injection, a fundamentally excellent injection, an injection of pure health and restitution, pain relief and succor. Then the loud chopping of a Red Cross SWAT Ranger Search & Rescue helicopter began to macerate the air around us as its gleaming white belly of aerospace aluminum floated overhead. A life-saving hook was winched down to us, and the SWAT Ranger medics carefully secured my stretcher to it.

“Thank you brave sirs,” I screamed over the howl of the chopper blades, “but what about those killer bears? Something must be done! They’re a menace to peaceful humans like us.”

“You’re quite right, Mr. Pushkin,” replied bald, rippling, mustachioed, ex-Marine looking SWAT Ranger Jock Thrustsworth — ten year veteran of the Alaskan Bear Wars. “We’ve tried