He walked into a roil of pavement heat as the telephone in his cargo shorts sang Can-Can just as he down-stepped to the tar-laced tarmac from the coldly air conditioned confines of Emperor Gasoline, wondering how he'd describe his blinded sensation of the quaffed 100 degree heat wall while the traffic creaked and groaned simultaneously in air pungent as white oily stagnation that wafted within sharp clear green glints off windshields, mirrors and rust-pitted shiny bumpers of at least 40 cars that had lapsed purring stationary at the intersection: all 16 lights flashed red.
J set down the grimy bag of Mesquite Instant Light Charcoal Bricquets and slid out the pulsating telephone and stared at the black screen finally lifting his shades and then nailing the methane icon with his thumb while from the corner of his eye you could hear the accelerating whine of a kid in a silver helmet on a chrome crotch-rocket approaching at what must have been 90 miles an hour beneath the high noon cashmere soft summer midday sky.
End Game Exactly from nowhere the noise had begun just as a flatbed filled with drawers of chickens idled from the southbound navigating a tight right turn. A Mastodon Cement mixer apparently preempted its right turn from the adjacent corner and careened and tipped and banged to its flank screeching a shroud of meteor-like amber sparks T-boning the chicken rig mid-ship.
Drawers of chicks as bright yellow as daisy centers sprung loose, the huge drawers filled with two or three hundred chicks each slid out pathetically bouncing the calvacade of petrified yellow dots.
The cement mixer's grey tank spinning:
M a s t o d o n C e m e n t M a s t o d o n C e m e n t
M a s t o d o n C e m e n t
the blind chicks like chromium yellow spackled flecks peeped and seemed to scream chaotically squished and mashed flittering to the road just as the crotch-rocket crescendos nearly invisible with speed and then its blur almost missed but just nicked its rear fender on a blood red Audi that had reflectively left its lane with a jerked reaction just to the left of the trucks' impact. The crotch-rocket incredibly caromed into a swerve and goes air borne over the Mastodon Cement truck and broadsides the box breach of the poultry hauler's flatbed as though suspended in s-l-o-w m-o-t-i-o-n...J dropped the bag of charcoal running toward the melee of metal and dying miniaturized birds.
The bag had torn on the guillotine-sharp edge of a U.S.A .Today paper box and a trail of black powder seeped out as J hesitated in the gully confused by a proliferation of waist-height thistles that somehow grew on the rocky slant of the gully filled with stagnant, prismatic water.
J's methane app going bleep!bleepitybleep! a synthetic female voice going, "Methane sensed at extreme levels...exit exit...methane at extreme levels...exit exit...methane danger detected...exit exit...." As he depressed the camera icon and filmed his shoes for a few seconds before hitting the telephone's button, keypad, and 9-1-1.
"Hello hello hello--"
A Gilda Radner voice on blue speaker going, "Nineoneone. Is there an emergency?"
"There's all this Rube Goldbergian stuff going on here! You've got a stoplight down and at least a one kid down on a motorcycle and a cement truck's on fire from underneath...it burst into a flames..."
"Location? Where are you?"
"Hurry!"
From far away you could hear the hollow wail of a fire truck right when a motorcycle cop walked through the labyrinthine of vehicles and people with their car doors open standing all over the road; memorably, the radio from an aqua '57 Chevy convertible singing, "...you got to walk that lonesome valley..." the song loud over the snap crackle and squawk of the cop's trike.
J turned to his right and did not immediately see the flame-thrower like billow of yellow/blue/black fire ignite the drainage ditch thatch and weeds as it exploded in the greasy water as the teenage clerk with Aztecan cheekbones had distracted him with the white froth of her fire extinguisher foam ejaculating with bubbled swooshes of foam going out of control in all directions, the girl in short-shorts as red as a drop of blood going,"Here! Here! Take it!...get the fire...."
Can-Can sounded once more, his back pocket vibrating right when the fire from the collision licked and lanced the bag of bricquets and J tossed the flamed clump toward the culvert but it had back drafted igniting his T-shirt so without thinking he grabbed the girl away from the blue flames that grappled at her herachis drop roll he's shouting and running with her the cone of the fire extinguisher foaming cold and they hit the pavement rolling manically fast luckily as the conflagration from the accident snaked J's line of charcoal catching the tarred crevices lickety-split toward the pump island where an old lady with hair the color of the sky dribbled drops of Emperor fuel from the gun on a black hose--frozen in terror, gape-mouthed--her spectacles reflecting the acrid cataclysmal blast before her.
The velocity of the exploding gasoline pumps caught the feathers of a hapless seagull that had somehow tried to fly out of a down draft and it continued its descent fully ablaze before smacking down to the gas station across the street.
Like bullets caps on water bottles racked in a big truck at the corner flew off hitting people in the head.
A curious, goggled man on a day-glow gleamed ultra-light throttled straight-up atop the second blackened A-bomb-like cloud and scorched the rotor of an adroit news helicopter that spun crazily like a delirious dragonfly corkscrewing upward like a prone pinwheel until at once its flame engulfed superstructure crashed smack dab right on top of a jet fuel tanker rig eastbound not far away.
The napalm-like cloud instantaneously leaped at least a half-mile having taken on a life of its own, finally sucking into voids of a storm sewer where with an ungodly force of hell it propelled gaining momentum within moments out to the harbor entwining a bowline of a natgas hauler ship that burst into a globball of flames bigger than the whole harbor and three times higher than any skyscraper near the wharf.
The ferris wheel in the park lit up and rolled in rickety hellish flashing arcs out into the forest at a demonic pace. Drought dusty trees exploded. Skunks, raccoon and red eyed opossum ran in circles, flashed briefly into puffs of fire yelping in death gurgles and seemingly at once diminished to skeletal frames as though they were electrified wire stick animals incinerating, blown up to vapor.
Shrouds of aluminum and burnt neon glass caught by a high wind scattered and streamed down covering at least a ten mile radius the ashes hot enough to ignite the gravel roof of the nerve gas plant and then curling lava-hot down through a roof vent ultimately engaging several tons of hebe-jebe bacteria---at least 500 stacked canisters of the deadly poison exploded imploding the armory walls and obliterating its roof emitting a vile thousand foot geyser plume of yellow toxin.
J's telephone reverbed at least one more time....Can-Can blurting in a tinny echo chamber sense...
The screen flashed:
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Heidi Herron
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Comments
ain't nobody here can walk it for you
you got walk it by yourself"
The "Can-Can" - orginally Orpheus in the Underworld -
seems fitting somehow.
Scarlett, that's an animated Kodak moment for sure, damn.
catch-22, you keep the good folk at *Urban Dictionary* running wild.
Those poor animals....
R