The Banjo Players Must Die | Page 7

ordinance experience extended itself to a few neighboring buildings too. It was a hard-earned lesson for Dr. Ramses Abasiri; cram a stick of TNT inside a hamster and you won't be left with much of a sex partner.
TNT led to milder forms of ordnance such as firecrackers, and Ramses had only just begun to find the appropriate ratio between hamster mass and firecracker yield when the divine recruiters found him.
Ah yes, the divine recruiters; now one has to wonder why. Why did a serial hamster-violator such as this one become the Ordained Prophet of the Acopalypse? What folly of a selection process produced this abomination of due procedure? Was this Ramses Abasiri - this blemish on the left buttock[The right buttock, in this metaphor, has been left pristine and pure such that the reader may compare it to the left one and shudder in revulsion.] of mankind - was he indeed the most shining example the human race could produce? And if so, should everyone else have had the grace to kill themselves? [Most probably, yes.] And the most pressing question of all; why can't anyone get 7 times 8 right[7 times 8 is generally fifty-six.]?
* * *
It didn't make any sense.
One second they were sitting there playing their banjos and singing songs of oppression, civil liberties, and the inexplicable and eternal wrath of God.
The next they were being pissed on, out of thin air too.
Chapter 2
: Goats, Plans, and Lumpy Cushions
Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens[With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.].
Friedrich von Schiller - Die Jungfrau von Orleans
The plan had initially been for Doomsday to occur in the 24^th century. Specifically, the idea had called for Gabriel to sneak his horn in at an Intergalactic Hamburger Purveyors of Doom rock concert in Malawi on the 16^th of November 2311, and therefrom to announce the End of the World. Concert attendance was expected to exceed 70% of the world's population, and the audio setup was better than anything God could have come up with, so the thinking was that Gabriel might as well leverage this. Besides, the lighting systems and special effects frankly put burning bushes to shame. As it turned out, however, there had been a problem with the backstage passes...
* * *
It was Flavio who was sent to obtain backstage passes. Flavio's experience did not prepare him for this unique challenge.
Flavio was small for an angel - bearing in mind that angels are rather small to begin with[Which is one explanation why angels are never ever casted in good kung fu movies. There are of course other explanations too, just as there are bad kung fu movies.]. As such his first contact with Benny was not with Benny in general, but with Benny's knee in particular.
Benny was the bouncer holding down the entrance to the backstage area. As such, Benny was rather large fellow. Benny had been to the kind of educational institution which taught large people how to best make use of their superior long-term calorie intake and retention capability to most effectively keep specific classes of persons out of specific places, this usually by standing in or by anything serving as a doorway and behaving like an ogre. Along with rhetoric and Spanish poetry classes, students of such educational institutions were normally desensitized to beating up on little school girls in thick glasses wielding garish autograph books with little cartoon fairies on the cover with silly Japanese names. They were also desensitized to stomping very hard on people's toes as a general tactic for convincing them that they did not want to be backstage after all. In general, one could say that they were desensitized to everything in the name of Protecting the Backstage Area, but especially to cute young fluffy cuddly things. Such was Flavio, and this was why, when Flavio approached him, Benny's first negotiating ploy involved an attempt to convince Flavio's chin - by means of a very well-spoken steel toed boot - that the body connected to the foot did not wish the body connected to the chin to proceed on its present course.
"Oi, you, get off my shin." Benny swung his leg in a wide arc. This terrified Flavio, certainly, and he only clung on harder. "No one gets in to see the band unless I've approved it." Benny whimpered. "And in your case, I'm not approving it."
Benny made a funny move with his leg. It resembled slightly a mule kicking out behind it at a cement mixer which it had mistakenly thought was taunting it, only in reverse - not an easy thing to visualise, but in this story we tell it like it happened. Apart from being decidedly odd, the only other distinguishing characteristic of this particular move was that it had resulted in Flavio being