Chigger got it all on video. It was an exceptional piece of photojournalism. Despite a head sporting an Adidas tread pattern and the shock of meeting Batman, he stayed on task.
Still recording, he reverted to is personal “go to” maneuver. He stepped three paces off the road and melted into the forest. One doesn’t become an expert poacher by standing around like some doofus waiting for the game warden’s attention.
Watching (and recording) from his vantage point, he saw a lanky young man emerge from the store. He strode like he ate Harley-Davidsons for breakfast, crapped gold bars at noon, and bedded supermodels at night. At first Chigger sneered at such pretentiousness but the kid was soon joined by his pet bear.
His. Pet. Bear?!?
Chigger (as befitting a habitual hunter) had placed himself downwind. A breeze wafted by his nose. He registered that the bear was not just any bear. It was the nastiest, grossest, smelliest death beast west of the Mississippi. He gripped his shotgun tighter; just in case.
Another person followed and joined them. A younger kid. A nerd. Probably an overeducated pansy, escaped from the local university. Chigger ignored him; which wasn’t hard. He instinctively ignored all college students.
The confident one opened the door of his battered Subaru and barked an order. Chigger couldn’t hear it but he got the tone. Two squirrels zoomed out of the dark and hopped into his car. What kind of beastmaster was this?
There was a brief pause and then the unmistakable thump of subwoofers pounding out music which was surely bereft of banjos. (Chigger believed all music, from bluegrass to wedding marches, should have banjos.)
Immediately the car fired up and blasted onto the road. It was a reckless display Chigger could only admire. Bearman drove somewhere on the spectrum between While E. Coyote and a cruise missile.
It tells a lot about the scene that the last thing to draw his attention was a hulking, white, restored, 1959 Cadillac hearse, parked haphazardly, and sporting lit police lights. He barely had time to read the plate (ECTO1) before a klutzy idiot covered in green goo scampered from the building, jumped in the vehicle, and zoomed off. The aged car gave its all and (despite it’s tonnage) nearly equaled the departure speed of the Subaru. Where it lagged was in the matter of control. It sheered off the store’s mailbox on the way out. This was forgivable because he was pursued by another tactical meathead; a near duplicate of the recently encountered Batman.
Chigger was glad he’d hidden. This soldier was sporting a beatific smile and looked less crazed than Batman, but he was still equipped like a human tank. He also smelled exactly like the bear.
Chigger’s well trained hunter’s nose crinkled at the stench while his mind pondered the possibility of a soldier/bear crossbreeding experiment. It was a theory, but a bad one. It didn’t explained the robed sprinter from Foreign Placistan. Nor did it explain Batman, or a man who talked to squirrels. And what about the nerd? And how could anything explain a freshly slimed Ghostbuster?
What unholy deviancy had gone down at the convenience store?
Chigger kept recording as the man talked into his radio and sipped a Yahoo. Shortly, the helicopter returned and landed just long enough for the soldier to clamber aboard.
The helicopter lifted off and hovered briefly over the structure. He saw the soldier toss the Yahoo bottle down. He followed it with an ominous looking canister.
BOOM!
Extreme Greeters have a more or less unlimited munitions budget. Chigger didn’t know this but he did witness its pyrotechnic glory.
The explosion woke half the county. The pilot’s after action report dryly explained “the Area of Operation has been sterilized”. Chigger verified this himself. Inspecting the crater after the helicopter left, he found nothing but a disco CD in a tree (which he pocketed).
Thirty minutes later, the Rural Fire Department showed up and bravely saved the foundation. Chigger was long gone by then.
