by Simon Archer
I glanced around again. Tinker was standing in her designated place alongside the other fan wavers, fanning her giant fan-with-a-hammerhead in such a way that you might have thought she’d just been decommissioned from the ‘It’s a Small World’ ride at Disneyland. I had no idea she could get so much motion from the fan feathers with only her hips, especially since she was so petite. They curled under the drag of the wind while Tinker hula danced on her little dashboard right next to the large wooden throne next to her, and the baron who sat upon it. Like I said, a little too close for my comfort, but it was all a part of Big Paw-Paw’s plan. Did he account for the suspicion of planting a new servant among the baron’s assortment of slaves, or was he just banking on the fact that Wolves wouldn’t notice another member of a race they’ve never bothered to give names to? Whatever, we just had to play along long enough for Hopper to get those bunnies safe. Then I could kill Paw-Paw like a dog and deal with Preymeister my own way.
Easier said than done. All that literally larger-than-life legend following Preymeister around was fairly well earned. He was pushing twelve feet tall with his ears, and maybe even just a hair more. Or a hair less. Or hairless. He was hairless. Completely smooth-skinned from the ear tips to the footpads, waxed to the point of glistening in the sunlight. He was the Mr. Universe of Wolves, an Achilles-like paragon of fitness and muscle. His muscles had muscles, and those invited their muscle-cousins for a cross-clan family reunion of biomechanical meat. I only say all of this because he lounged shirtless in his chair, wearing only a kilt, and prayerfully some kind of underwear beneath if God could hear my cries for mercy in my eyes, so it was all hard to miss.
“Sounds like easy money,” Rafael the thug said through an audible con man smile, “and you say that they pay for these little discs and boxes? Do they actually want shite like that? What do they sell for?”
“Ho, boy, I don’t know.” I blew a frustrated gust out of my pursed lips, not having the mental space to calculate my next move in this complicated assassination and the price of a DVD from American dollars into Spanish coins at the same time. “Twenty pieces, maybe? Whatever, sure, super-easy money.”
Preymeister’s transformed state was imposing, at minimum, and also a problem. Based on the implication I got from Paw-Paw’s slip-up, he had to ingest the poison powder while he was in his normal form. How were we supposed to change him back when he could just wear his invulnerable form casually? Tinker certainly had the brainpower to think of or make something, but she cracked under pressure. She’d need some time for any of that, and the peace of mind she wasn’t getting as a fan waver right next to a shaved steroid bear. My boys were too busy and far too stupid to think up of something on their own. Their only hope was to get Tinker somewhere calm where she could come up with a solution. And I certainly had little more to contribute at the moment. How was I supposed to get him out of a combat-prepared form using only fired projectiles? It’d take all of my creativity and wit. Or just dumb luck.
Did you think of this, Paw-Paw, in your master plan? Knowing him, he’d probably blame me for this and kill the bunnies just to salvage the situation. I put his head in my crosshairs, contemplating whether to shoot him in the ass for screwing us over, and for making me care about a plan I’d have otherwise abandoned for something simpler or more fun and efficient.
Except he wasn’t freaking out. Maybe a little nervous, but not nearly as nervous as he should have been if the plan was going so off the rails. He was at ‘pre-wedding jitters’ antsy, not ‘why is there a tiger in the kitchen?’ panic like I was feeling a little. Things were still going according to the plan.
Oh my god, bodybuilder Preymeister was still in his normal form, not the transformed one. He could get even bigger than that.
“Do you know how to make these movie discs?” Rafael interrupted me again, “You trade us the secret. Maybe we can cut a deal. You get a percentage of the profits, eh? Does that sound good to you? Come on. You make some money, we make some money, everybody wins.”
“You’re getting ahead of yourselves, fellas,” I calmed down a bit, though not much, as I kept up the conversation, trying to lead the conversation somewhere beneficial to me. “First, you have to have a pitch for your movie. Then I can tell you if I can make it into a movie.”
“We have to make a what?” Donatello asked.
From a road at the bottom of the square, a little light brown hare, maybe four feet tall, scurried along the party floor while carrying a steel stein approaching as tall as he was in his arms, blocking his view forward. The poor thing crashed into several party-goers, most of them taking the bumper-car waiter’s destructive course in stride, some even helping him along with a kick in the right direction. After running into almost every Rabbit and Wolf there, including a very discourteous Paw-Paw’s dropkick away from him, he eventually made it to Tinker, who caught on quickly to the cupbearer’s plight and ran up to guide him along with her hammer fan. In a gentle waltz, they eventually locked the stein into place with the help of Preymeister’s guiding hand. The giant Wolf lifted his mug up from the little Rabbit’s bear hug, nodding his head in appreciation as he twisted to find the handle.
From a road one away from the bottom, four Wolves in white shirts and waistcoats heaved a tun, a barrel the size of eight regular barrels, on their shoulders, into the square, to the adoration of the partygoers, with flailing hands of joy and cheerful screams that I could hear from my post. They brought the tun up to Preymeister’s seat, where he took his mug to fill it up with the spigot. Soon as he was done, he stabbed the mug into the air, mouth open for a yell that whipped the party into a frenzy of dancing and merriment. The four Wolf wine bearers carried the tun around, and every Wolf got their mugs and goblets out to drown themselves in the purple goodness that flowed out of it. Man, maybe I should have had Tinker take the sniper position. That looked like a lot of fun. In no time at all, almost every Wolf at the party was drunk off their ass with the fresh booze.
“A pitch’s like a quippy little line or two that tells me what your story’s about.” I tapped the side of the trigger of the rifle with my finger rapidly. “You gotta give me a story that I can make into a movie. Appeal to the audience. It’s gotta move my spirit into action. Make it captivating, but also make it short, sweet, and to the point. I need to feel like the true crime is that this movie of yours isn’t a real thing yet. Well?”
“Well, what?” Michelangelo puzzled. “What are we supposed to…?”
I kept my sights on Tinker, with an occasional glance at the others to update the mental map of the party. Somehow, she managed to make the waves of her fan even more rigid, the fear of failure locking up her joints as much as the fear of the giant war machine of meat froze her muscles in place. One hand went to her stomach, specifically the pouch of powder hidden underneath her shirt as if to check if it was still there. Her eyes locked on the mug, transfixed in a hypnosis of doubt and anxiety. Yeah, I didn’t know how she was going to get that poison into that mug inconspicuously, either.
Paw-Paw, seeing that Tinker hadn’t moved fast enough for his delicate sensibilities, sifted through the party Wolves like a leaf through a wind tunnel, twirling around dancers and bypassing walls of bodies locked to the shoulders, and jumping over a limbo bar to get ever closer to the terrified little bunny. My trigger finger curled around as I aimed for the bastard’s shoulder, hoping to drop his arm before he could touch the signal charm with some well-placed shots. If he touched one hair--
“I don’t think we have a pitch yet,” Leonardo admitted.
“Sorry, fellas,” I told them, still watching the party and only paying enough attention to the conversation to respond, “No pitch, no movie.” Please go away.
“We’ll come up with something!” Donatello said, tapping on the leathers of the other thugs, “Come on, let’s throw out some ideas!”
As several Wolf paws tapped the rooftops in a scramble to assemble and brainstorm their movie pitch, I saw Paw-Paw break past t
he bulk of the party people, now on a free path to Tinker. The frightened little thing turned her head to face the secret criminal underboss, who was trying his best not to look conspicuous in approaching the baron’s fan wavers. His hand reached out to grab her, and I squeezed the trigger.
16
“Okay, didn’t expect that,” I whispered to myself as I saw what happened next, and my finger halted as the trigger tapped the mechanisms inside the rifle, “This should be interesting.”
To my surprise, as well as everyone else’s and especially of Paw-Paw’s, my anxious little alchemist had taken decisive action against her would-be assailant. With a wide swing and a squeal, she cracked her hammer against Paw-Paw’s stomach, pushing him back a fair ten feet and knocking him flat on his back. All the revelries fell dead silent as they witnessed the shocking breach in social protocol, a bunny attacking a Wolf in broad daylight. The tension was palpable to the point of maddening, every living thing in a couple of miles holding their breath as they watched to see what would happen. No one knew how to react. No one knew who’d react first if anyone reacted at all. I was fairly certain most of them were too drunk to even fully understand what had just occurred.
Preymeister got up from his seat, setting down his mug by the side of his throne. The giant muscle baron stepped toward the downed Wolf, who was confirming his continued heartbeat by picking himself back up and dusting himself off. I watched Paw-Paw’s hands like a mother hippo watching her firstborn with a crocodile, looking for any attempts to touch his cufflinks and ready to remove limbs as necessary to stop him. As Preymeister approached Paw-Paw, I took a quick check on Tinker, who’d taken to hiding beside the wooden seat, right over the mug. She’d stilted herself on her toes, also lifting the bottom of her shirt to expose the bottom of the pouch she’d hidden underneath it. While she kept staring at Paw-Paw, she tore at the bottom to release the powder inside into the mug.
“Oh, Tinker, you’re beautiful,” I congratulated her, though she could have never heard it, “I should have known you’d pull through for us.”
“Okay, I’ve got one,” Rafael explained his story idea while the thugs had their story meeting, “So there’s a Wolf, right? He’s living his life. He’s being a Wolf. Doing Wolf things. Then, one day, all of a sudden, he eats a bunny. How about that? Short, sweet, to the point, and it’s what any Wolf would want, right?”
“That happens all the time, though,” Leonardo argued, “Why should anyone care that this Wolf’s eating a bunny now when they could just watch a noble do it?”
“Maybe the Wolf’s not a noble!” Donatello proposed, “A lowly grunt eating a bunny subverts expectations of class depictions.”
“See, that resonates with me on a deeper level,” Michelangelo agreed, “It appeals to me as a lowly grunt and makes me feel like I, too, could one day live the high life like a noble if I were just given a chance to.”
Paw-Paw had gotten up, hand already reaching for the signal cufflink as he turned around when he noticed Preymeister right there between him and the victim of his psychological hostage abuse. The two conversed, and Preymeister seemed almost apologetic to Paw-Paw during it, while the secret underlord tried his best to look at Tinker nonchalantly and tap his cufflink as punishment for the disgraceful disobedience I was so proud of. When he finally did take a good look at her, he noticed her fulfilling her duty as promised, putting the cufflink threat away as he finished talking with him. They quietly chatted, Preymeister throwing his head back as he laughed along with Paw-Paw’s nervous shuffling, and Preymeister turned himself around.
Tinker pulled the pouch back just as the baron turned to look at his chair again, quickly backing away and dusting herself off the leftover poisonous dust. Preymeister came over to Tinker, standing right over her as I kept a line of sight with the back of his neck if he tried anything. God, I was hoping that being a sniper would have helped ease the tension and give me more options, but I couldn’t have done anything until the challenge started without risking everyone getting noticed and Paw-Paw killing those girls. The constant panic was relentless, making sure that Tinker didn’t get hurt as I left her in the lion’s den. I knew she said that she wanted to do this herself, but I was fully ready to start unloading. But, instead of threatening her, he just ended up waving his finger at her like a father would lecture their daughter. He sat back down in his chair after he was done, and Tinker inched back over to her spot, going right back to her waist-only fan waving.
“What if the bunny had a musket?” Donatello added to their ‘story’ with more ideas, “then the grunt could fight for his meal, and we’d get to see some action!”
“How’s a bunny supposed to beat a Wolf?” Rafael scoffed, having never met Tinker or Hopper, “Even with a musket, she’d get eaten in two seconds. Where’s the fun in that?”
“What if we gave her,” Leonardo paused for dramatic effect, “two muskets?”
“That resonates with me,” Michelangelo agreed, “It’s bold, weird, and maybe a little silly, but in a way that’s fun and exciting. That appeals to me as a lowly grunt wanting to escape everyday life with a fantastical situation with excitement I can’t find in my everyday grind.”
Now, it was just a matter of time before Preymeister drank the poison. And that was all time we could have spent running out the clock until Hopper got back with confirmation that the girls were safe. Also, finally, it was my moment to do something constructive instead of just watching everything unfold. As long as I kept my shot placement subtle enough, and didn’t kill anyone, I could have distracted Preymeister from drinking the poison while not raising Paw-Paw’s suspicions. The impacts of the bullet were just as silent as the shot fired, and the bubble protection kept each shot flying in the air as straight as possible, so my precision was off the charts. To top it all off, I had Tinker switch up some of the charms on my guns before we went into the Mangy Hide Inn last night, so I wasn’t running out of ammo on this gun anytime soon. Now it was my time to enjoy myself at this party.
The first step was stopping him from picking up the mug at all. That was easy enough, and I’d already started that as soon as Tinker had finished pouring out the powder. A few well-placed shots at the base of the mug, and it slowly crawled along the stone under the outdoor throne until it was firmly tucked away behind it and out of sight, and therefore out of mind. Keeping it out of mind was the next step, and that was cause for distraction. In an emergency, I’d have knocked out the legs of the chair, tipping him over and forcing him to stand up for the rest of the festivities or pick a spot away from the poisoned drink.
For now, I settled for starting a giant brawl between a bunch of drunk Wolves. Would that have pissed Paw-Paw off? Yes. That was a heavily weighed factor in my decision-making, possibly the deciding factor. As long as he didn’t notice that I was pulling the strings, which he hadn’t, judging by the look on his snout, the bunnies were safe and would have continued to be while we were still pulling off the assassination attempt. That being said, now was unofficially the point where my team was independent once again.
With that fantastically precise aim, a steady hand, and a consistently slow heartbeat, I gave some of the dancing Wolves some glancing shots, like the tip of a tooth when their mouths were open, or a finger claw as they raised their hands up or out, sometimes a grazing shot to the arm or leg. I was waiting for what felt like five minutes between each shot to make sure I only hit exactly what I was aiming for. High-powered rifles were no joke, and many folks would have considered this a very unsafe display of marksmanship. I was competent enough to get away from it, but only just so.
Sure enough, stupid and drunk made for a quick catalyst for a fight at the first sign of pain. The only hard part was getting them to notice pain when they were so bombed. But, the best way to make a situation tense is to put the drunk people next to sober people, and my boys were staying sober enough to qualify. I’d have to apologize to Blue later for grazing the arm of the Wolf next to him, who was very up
set about it and very unstable on his footpaws. With some dramatic hand motions and what looked like yelling, the drunk Wolf thought it best to take a wide swing at Blue, missing just as dramatically to hit another drunk behind him. Like a chain reaction, the next drunkard blamed the person next to them, swung, and hit someone else entirely, until everyone was a part of the madness.
“Still, though, one bunny?” Leonardo asked, “Even if she had all of the muskets in the world, how is she supposed to handle all of that Wolf? He’s a Wolf!”
“Do we have to have only one?” Rafael asked in response, “If we have, like, three bunnies, or even like five, then things might be interesting. They can even have different weapons.”
“Will people think that’s kind of like hoarding?” Donatello questioned, “What if another Wolf comes along, and they want to fight one of the bunnies. Would he have to fight him, too?”
“Only if he wanted a smackdown!” Rafael shouted, “Our Wolf is a powerful force to be reckoned with. If he wants all the bunnies, no one can stop him!”
“That resonates with me,” Michelangelo agreed, “Even if it’s a touch abnormal, it fits within the extravagant situation he’s put himself in, and it establishes him as someone with importance. That appeals to me as a lowly grunt who has trouble garnering respect from his peers, and desires to live vicariously through an idealized version of himself as an outlet to nurse his esteem.”
“You’re a weird Wolf, you know that?” Leonardo commented on Michelangelo's strange additions to the conversation.
“Hey, I know what I like,” Michelangelo stated, “I can enjoy a conspiracy or a mystery, some thrills or drama, a brain teaser, or even some good comedy, but sometimes I just want to sit back, relax, not have to chew so hard with my brain, and just feel awesome for a while.”