Top of His Game
This Apex Products catalog is amazing. Yes indeed. Look at this thing–a catapult that fires an anvil. Guaranteed accurate over 300 meters! Creezy! That's almost a third of a kilometer!
And to think I spent decades and sent thousands of dollars to those morons at Acme. Rocket propelled skates, flying bat suits, giant magnets ... what the hell was wrong with those people? They must have liability lawsuits lined up for the next century! They are just lucky I'm not the litigious type.
Oh no, not litigious at all. Just single-minded. Some would say monomaniacal, obsessed, even ... mad. But no, I am not mad, simply committed to a goal. A simple, single and very natural goal of ridding the earth once and for all of that accursed BIRD!
Ahem. Yes. Well. Anyway, look at that catapult. Took me three days to set it up. Cost the better part of ten grand, and it is worth every penny. I had to haul the anvil onto the basket with a truck winch.
Oh, but it is a beauty–nothing precarious at all about it, nothing slip-shod or makeshift. All the parts were included, and the directions! Oh, a CHILD could have followed them. Not that a super-genius like myself needed them, but I used them anyway. Anodized alloy pipes, solid construction, laser rangefinder, Jiminy Christmas, just looking at it makes me want to cry!
The time is now. I switch on the LCD screen; it lights up with bright blue sky, beige desert and bright red crosshairs. What ho! A small yellow sidebar lights up, calculating windage and servos whine, fine-tuning the aim. I am in heaven.
Hark! Is that a strange, beeping sound I hear over yon horizon? Yes, indeedy, a plume of yellow dust spirals up into the cerulean desert skies, reducing cacti and mesas to hazy ghosts. Moving with preternatural swiftness he comes, I begin to adjust the sights. I twist the tiny knobs and the accursed creature centers in the viewfinder–so careful! So precise! One shot at this, then never again. One shot and it goes into the dismal yard sale of my failures with the rocket-assist hang glider and the spring-loaded shoes. There! He's in my sights!
My hand moves instinctively, with no conscious thought. I never remember hitting the glowing, red button–I flinch instantly. Decades of falling anvils and long falls, explosions and malfunctions have ingrained in me an almost Pavlovian response. My shoulders shrug in a natural, defensive gesture.
But there is no boom, no splat, no sound like five tons of springs falling from a great height. There is a "swish" like oiled leather and the anvil flies high into the bright blue afternoon sky.
I can't believe it! It is flying straight AT him! Unlike that piece-of-garbage catapult that flipped upside down and shot a boulder high into the sky, so perfectly that it came right down upon me. Or the one that went ape-stuff berserk and pinned me against the wall of my laboratory for three days. No, this one worked without leaving the ground or throwing a single part loose.
The bright display still shows my nemesis, running obliviously through the middle of the trackless deserts. A red X is superimposed over his smug form, blinking with increasing fury. I don't breathe. My heart doesn't even seem to beat.
A funny thing happens when there's sufficient distance between a thing and the observer. Well, it is not funny as in "comical," although one supposes that it could perhaps be put to some comedic usage if one were of such a mind. No, I mean funny in the sense of "peculiar." Ahem, yes, so ... The lag between the speed of light and the speed of sound is intensified. I see the bird disappear under tons of solid steel and, moments later, I hear the thud. No, actually I feel the thud. It is almost infrasonic, but so powerful that it nearly throws me across the cave that has been my latest makeshift lab, headquarters and home.
I got him! I really did it and I got the son-of-a-biscuit! He's gone!
Oh by gum! He's gone. I fall back against the warm, soft leather of my tall-backed swivel chair. My held breath leaves my body as I throw back my head–a single, exhausted exhalation. I close my eyes. After all those years, and all those failed plans and foiled schemes, the bird is finally gone.
My eyes snap back open, then narrow to near-slits.
What now?
You bought a mask, I put it on
You never thought to ask me
If I wear it when you're gone
Get real
Get another—Sisters of Mercy, When You Don't See Me