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A New Jeopardy Part Six
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Maximus walked to the open doorway and hanging onto the handrail, leaned out, very Jack-like, staring into the darkness ahead of the train. How handsome he looked with his rust-colored cape billowing out behind him. Joimus smiled fondly at the sight and, were it not for the fact that they'd lost five major characters and were hurtling towards certain doom, would have been happy. ********** Gritting
his teeth, he struggled to move it that final inch. His whole body
was numb with the cold and even the sweat of his terrible, terrible
exertion froze solidly on his brow, blowing down then toward his
eyes, making him blink furiously in his valiant effort to avoid
sweat puncture wounds on the surface of his seagreen visual orbs.
His fingers no longer seemed able to execute the commands of his
brain and he fumbled, letting the tip of it drop. It was only by
sinking his teeth firmly into his lower lip that he was able to
stifle the wild "Aieeeeee!" that formed in his throat as
his equipment bounced harshly from tie to tie beneath the onrushing
train. He closed his eyes, feeling the tiny frozen sweat drops
stinging his lids. "I must gather myself together," he thought, encouraged by visualizing the scene of Maximus' self-gathering before bare-handedly grabbing the executioner's descending sword. His calf muscles quivered in exhaustion. He wasn't sure how much longer he could maintain his leg grip on the cable. The cable, too, seemed to be stretching under his weight and his hips were growing dangerously close to the track. But it was his equipment that he needed to focus on. If his lips had not been frozen and had not had his teeth embedded in them, he would have smiled then at the remembrance of his annsmac's focus on that very thing. Alas, though, it was currently in the greatest distress as it smacked from tie to tie to tie. Tightening his left arm around the cable, he let go with his right hand, making a last, desperate grab for the flailing...um...object. There! He grasped it on its upward swing between ties, breaking only two fingers in the attempt. His teeth sank just a tad deeper into lip meat. There was nothing more to lose now, well, except for his life, and with all the strength that was left in his camo-clad body, he jammed his equipment upwards toward the bottom of the passenger car. Annsmac sat
in silence, contemplating a future with no Terry in it, no more
trips to Grand Cayman to visit his money, no more fun vacations
hanging off helicopter skids, no more machete lessons in the dark.
She would leave epilife and return to the bayou, devoting the
remainder of her days to developing a new, mechanized shrimp peeler.
It would be her legacy, her gift to humanity. Idly, her fingers
traced the curves of her deblunter. She would never have use for it
again. Sighing, she twisted slightly to plop it into her backpack.
As she turned, the floor beneath her feet heaved markedly, then
cracked open, peeling back like the skin of an over-baked potato. A
familiar object rose up between her ankles, a beloved object she had
thought never to see again. Her jaw dropped in delighted
astonishment as Terry's equipment continued to rise past her knees,
past her chest, until she had to tip her chin to follow its glorious
eruption through the floor of the passenger car. As the opening
continued to widen, soon Terry's hands were seen, gripping the edges
until he could thrust his whole body up, then, drained completely of
strength, he collapsed across annsmac's lap, his equipment tilting
bluntly down into the aisle. "Now THAT'S an entrance!" Jeff remarked to Marti. "Why don't you ever give ME an entrance like that?" "I'm civilized," she replied, looking at him under half-lowered lids. "TERRY!"
annsmac cried, wrapping her arms tightly about him to keep his limp
form from rolling back through the gaping hole in the floor. Blurry
snow, ashes, and soot, not to mention an occasional woodchuck blew
upward through it, quite thoroughly dampening the comfort level of
the passenger car. After Andy and Jim helped annsmac move Terry to a different seat, Nash, using his remarkable skill with white twine and push pins, quickly wove a covering over the hole. "There!" he said, stepping back, smiling shyly at Franki. She was proud of how he had been handling this whole situation, especially without Charles to lean on. Where WAS Charles anyway? Charles,
were the truth to be told, was busily being Stephen. He had been
sitting quietly, invisibly, behind Nash and Franki as the Polar
Express had chugged out of the forest clearing, but when Biebe's
incisor had scraped Jack's cheek and the Captain's instant
transformation into Jack Rabbit had occurred, he knew where his
loyalties must lie. Jack was in trouble! Even worse trouble than
during the time the tidal wave had flipped the Surprise four times
in a barrel roll and the main mast had collapsed, piercing the
Captain's appendix through completely. That Jack...he was always in
SOME sort of peril! Just look at what Marti was doing to him in HER
new storyline! Now he would be kept quite busy, he knew, pushing the
back button to transfer himself from tale to tale. Such were the
trials of a Napoleonic era Naval spydoctor. Be that as it may, he had followed Himself and Terry as they exited the passenger car in search of Jack Rabbit. In the split second between Himself's and Terry's flips over the side of the car to avoid tunnelwall splattering and the train's entrance into the bowels of the mountain, he had sprung to the roof of the car, grabbed the off-guard Captain around his waist, and hauled him over the edge, plopping down onto the coupling between the passenger and baggage cars. The breath knocked out of him, he lay there a moment, his arms still locked about the wriggling Rabbit. The rails clickety clacked not far below him and he was aware the train was gathering speed. Managing with great effort to gain his feet, he pulled the Captain into the baggage car. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Maximus and Steve out on the small platform at the end of the train, looking for the other bunnybear. What to do?
What to do? Spying a large FedEx box with golden wings painted on
it, he was reminded of the Captain's epaulets and decided that was
the perfect depository for his Master and Commander for the time
being. He lay Jack on the floor, keeping him securely there with a
boot placed firmly on his sternum, while he opened the box and
discarded its contents of video tapes, ice skates, and a leopard
print dress. Stuffing Jack inside with a minimal amount of folding,
he duct-taped it tightly closed, remembering at the end to use his
scalpel to make a small breathing hole. He knew with Jack's being a
bunnybear currently unengaged in any sexual activity, there would be
no sound emmanating from the box. When the door from the platform
began to open, Stephen, being so slender as he was, hid himself in
the shadow of a shovel handle while Maximus and Steve made their way
through the baggage car. He had not, alas, counted on the great hind
leg strength of the mature male Jack Rabbit, and within a matter of
minutes, the large FedEx box began to woggle violently from side to
side and then sproing vigorously up and down. Before his astonished
eyes, two black-booted bunny feet popped their way through the
bottom of the box. Phyllis, busily attempting to bring Himself's dangerously low body temperature up in the only way she could think of, and annsmac, busily applying herself to the unblunting of the terribly, terribly blunted equipment of the limp K&R agent across her lap, both, despite their busyness, jerked their heads around when the back door of the passenger car burst inward and a large box began to hop down the aisle. Stephen puffed along behind it, trying to grab it with little success. Jeffrey stood, completely blocking the aisle, and the box rammed ineffectually against his belly. Stephen, panting, stopped on the far side of the box. Stephen, since he'd taken up hanging out with Jack, often found himself on the far side of things, even when it would not have been his first choice to be there. "What's in the box, Doctor?" Jeffrey asked. "J...Jack," Stephen stammered, quite worn out from his effort at CaptainContainment. "A
Jack-in-the box?" Jeffrey continued, unable to resist the
verbal temptation. "I don't see a wind-up handle." "And lucky that is, " Stephen said, sinking to his knees. Jeffrey cocked his eyebrow and so Stephen explained. "If Jack were loose, he could turn the lot of us into bunnybears." "Right!" agreed Maximus, who had just re-entered the passenger car from the other end."Then who would there be to keep us from plunging off the destroyed trestle into Bottomless Gorge, Kentucky?" he added. "We are going to plunge into a Bottomless Gorge!" Susan cried, concerned that epilife would be ending and with nary a blue poppy in sight. "It is a definite possibility," Maximus affirmed. "When?" Susan asked, not really sure she wanted an answer. "Before dawn," Joimus replied helpfully, "probably sooner." Jeffrey
volunteered to sit on the box to keep Jack safely inside while
Maximus and the others tried to devise some plan to stave off
imminent disaster of epi-ic proportions. The train was going far too
fast for them to consider leaping off. There was no way to slow it
or brake it at all. They had no way to communicate with the outside
world and three of their major characters were still probably
deceased. Both Himself and Terry were incapacitated and the Captain
was a danger not only to himself but to the rest of epikind. Ando
wandered back to the engine, deciding to spend her last moments
watching Hando sweat. Buggie wove away; Sue sat, her black leather
stiletto-heeled boots propped on the top of the seat in front of
her, running the coil of her whip through her fingers, over and over
and over; Berti was perfectly still, staring out the window into the
night, her thoughts centered on the first time she'd seen Bud, his
seagreen eyes filling her world as he looked through the windshield. The small,
blue engine chugged its way out of the Gassaway station, heading
northeast through the almost heavenly mountains of West Virginia.
Never had the little engine pulled so heavy a load as now. Before,
its boxcars had been filled with toys for all the good little girls
and boys that lived in the valley. Tonight, though, it was pulling
the circus train. Car after car followed along behind it, each of
them carrying the elephants, the lions, the tigers, the monkeys, the
costumes, the folded tents, all the equipment needed to move the Big
Top from one town to another. The mountains grew steadily higher and
higher as the engine made its way toward Pennsylvania, and the
higher they grew, the harder it was for the little blue engine to
chug its way up their steep slopes. The number of cars and their
combined weight was almost too much and as it struggled and strained
up the high mountain tracks, the sound of its wheels seemed to be
saying, "I think I can...I think I can...I think I can!"
How was the brave little engine to KNOW that speeding southwesterly along that very same set of tracks was the enormous Polar Express, completely out of control? Maximus looked around at his fellow epians in the passenger car. "Unless we run into something that will stop us," he said somberly, "this train will crash off the destroyed trestle into Bottomless Gorge."
Next
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