-
"Abandon all hope," screamed one of the hippies.
Nothing seemed to phase the circling Comanches, not a huge white whale, a pointy-eared alien, a cloaked man with gargantuan incisors, a '60s muscle car, a train reconstituting itself, or even a disc-shaped space ship hovering nearby. But when a large black man materialized out of nowhere, the Indians stopped cold.
The man filled in from the feet upward, like a Coke bottle filling itself with the static of a television set tuned to a dead station. And there he was: bare chested and bare footed, bald head highly domed, tattooed face, and holding a harpoon.
Ahab was elated. "Queequeg." He shouted.
Baggins commented, "Those effects weren't very special."
The Comanche Chief dismounted and advanced on foot towards the new arrival. The black man threw his harpoon to the ground. The Indian cast away his bow and quiver. The two men circled, eyes locked on each other. The black man raised his dukes. The Indian closed. The black man jabbed, but the Indian caught his left arm by the wrist and pulled him closer. The men went into a clinch, foreheads mashed together, each man with a hand on the back of the other man's neck, each man restraining the other man's free hand. A clinch of death.
Or was it? Slowly the two men relaxed their grips. Slowly their muscles unknotted. And ever so slowly their clinch of death morphed into a bro-hug. They slapped each other on the back and disengaged.
The Indian spoke first, "You're no paleface, my friend."
"My people come from Africa." Said the black man.
"We're pretty sure our folks come from Asia, but there's some dispute about all of that."
"Your English is good, my friend. Where did you learn it?"
"From my mother. She was a Parker. I am Quanah. Are you the one they call Queequeq? Because it would be odd to have two leaders of men out here in the middle of nowhere both with first names that start with Q, eh?"
"That'd be weird all right. But I'm not Queequeq. Must'a been some sort of mix up in the teleporter with that harpoon and all. I'm Iron-Mike Tyson." He stuck out his hand. "Pleased to meet you, Quanah."
Holmes had wandered over and was holding out his pipe to the Comanche Chief and the Prize Fighter. "Peace Pipe, fellas?"
"Don't mind if I do." They said in unison.
Kirk chimed in, "Go easy on the loco weed, boys. We gotta get to Kansas, pronto."
*In this episode, El Sancho ripped off: Dante Alighieri, Gene Roddenberry, William Gibson, Mike Judge, and Mel Brooks.
**Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was a very special book for young Sancho. It was when I first realized there is more than one version of history - and more than one version could be right (and wrong) at the same time.
-
Quanh Parker turned to the Comanches. "I don't think these are the men we were looking for. Stay on watch, but let the Iron Horse go. I will travel with Iron Mike for a time. Isa-tai, you are in charge until I return." *
The Comanche withdrew taking their wounded. Miraculously, no one was killed on either side. The train had finished reconstitution, and Ismael bellowed, "All aboard!
This time the group spread out over several cars. Quanah Parker and Iron Mike Tyson took the car recently vacated by the entity known as RuPaul and the fake Kirk. They exchanged stories of daring deeds and smoked a peace pipe with some really excellent Mexican Gold.
Holmes and Watson stayed with Kirk and Spock.The Shadow now appeared as Lamont Cranston, and joined them, smoking a cigarette rolled from "leaf". His eyes were now like limpid pools.
Dracula joined the Frankenstein Monster, The Mummy, and the Wolfman in the next car. The four began a poker game.
In the fourth car eleven long haired friends of Jesus were buying more "leaf" from Bilbo Baggins, and beginning to sing "Kumbaya." **
Ahab shared the next car with Jack the Ripper only because the next car in line was the tanker with Moby Dick inside.
"Next stop, Albernathy, TX!" Ismael announced.
Just then Scotty's voice came from the Enterprise. "Captain Kirk, the Admiral would like a word with you!"
And on the outskirts of Coffeyville, the dust begin to circle above the graves of the Dalton Boys, and a white hot lightning bolt struck their headstone squarely... ***
* Isa-tai (White Eagle) was a genuine war chief for the Comanche.
** "Kumbaya" or "Kumbayah" (Gullah, "Come By Here" — "Kum ba yah") — is a spiritual song from the 1930s. very popular with Hippie protest movements in the 1960's.
*** The Dalton Gang were natives of Coffeyville turned outlaws. On October 5, 1892, five members of the Dalton gang, including three of the brothers, attempted to rob two banks in Coffeyville on the same day. The disastrous attempt left all dead except Emmett Dalton, who was not expected to live, having taken both barrels of a ten gauge in the guts. He had a final total of 23 gun wounds.He was given a life sentence in the Kansas penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas, of which he served 14 years before being pardoned. He lived until the age of 66, a writer and actor in Hollywood.
-
When the admiral rang in, Kirk had been watching the countryside go by his window. He knew they needed to get to Kansas pronto, but he didn't know why. It was as though there were great cosmic forces drawing them there, sucking them in, like the gravitational pull of a black hole. Their whole universe seemed to be spiraling inward. Perhaps an apocalyptic cyclone was drawing them unrelentingly towards a singularity in the middle of Kansas. Or perhaps they were just a turd in the intergalactic toilet bowl circling a couple of times and then down the pipe, to be forgotten like yesterday's chili burger.
Whatever the case, Kirk watched the angry night sky turn angrier. It truly was a dark and stormy night. The day prior, before the battle with the Comanches, he remembered seeing high feathery cirrus clouds decorating the western sky. Then as the Indians lined the caprock, huge towering cumulonimbus had been their backdrop. The thunderheads had reached maturity as the train motored north through the night and Kirk was certain he'd seen a tombstone explode under a direct hit by a bolt of cloud-to-ground lightning.
Now with the sun rising yet again, the train was running under blood-red mammatus clouds. Kirk recalled from his climatology class back at the Star Fleet Academy that mammatus clouds were so named because of their resemblance to a woman's mammary glands. It occurred to him that these particular clouds looked less like a woman's breasts than they did like malignant blood-filled tumors. He also remembered the warning his primary flight instructor had given him, watch out for mammatus clouds - the mamas will spank you. As he headed for the communication center to take the admiral's call, he remembered another rule of thumb he'd been given at the academy - when in doubt, run towards the gunfire. This, it seemed to him, was exactly what they were doing. Perhaps the admiral had the answers.
Meanwhile a few cars back, the hippies were deeply involved in a discussion about the transcendental nature of cataclysmic weather and how it relates to the circle of life, the seasons, and the transmigration of souls. Bilbo Baggins would have joined in, but he was ensconced in the reading room of the car, reviewing the headlines of the High Plains Tribune. He learned that a hurricane was battering Louisiana's gulf coast; a tsunami had made landfall on Japan's Honshu Island; a real shaker of an earthquake had precipitated a city-wide fire in San Francisco; and a meteor shower had hurt hundreds of people in a small town in Russia.
Out in the main part of the car, one of the hippies yelled, "Jaysus Christ, Baggins! How about a courtesy flush?"
"Sorry."
*Okay, sometimes I just feel like talking about the weather.
-
My contribution- from 2:10 to 4:10:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdiTHlWkN_8
Feel free to use the rest if it works with the plot.
-
Kirk flipped out his communicator. "Kirk here, Admiral Decker."
"I ought to have you up on charges, Captain!. He said the last word like it was a curse.
"Read you loud and clear, Admiral!" Kirk said, making a face and a rude gesture
"Of course you read me loud and clear, idiot! I'm standing right behind you!" *
Kirk's face turned red. "Ah, that gesture was for a guy in the other car."
"Save it, Kirk. How did you get our flagship connected to a multidimensional railroad train?"
"Believe it or not Admiral, but it was a one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eater." **
A dark shape was watching from far away. Q was having a ball. The chaos he was creating was hilarious to him. He snickered nastily as the train rolled into Albernathy. Time to add in the Mad Hatter... ***
And as the cyclone swept away Dorothy and her house, the lightning struck the graves of the three Dalton brothers and seemed to cling. Inside the graves, they began to move...
* You may or may not recall this famous line from Mad Magazine's The Adventures of Captain Klutz
** 1958 hit by Sheb Wooly
*** Q, the godlike entity from Star Trek: The Next Generation is a good explanation for all of the illogical combinations of characters and the Enterprise/City of New Orleans (Big Easy) train combination.
-
As the little train rumbled ever closer to the vortex known as Kansas, things were getting exponentially stranger. It was as though time were a piece of wax, falling on a termite, who’s choking on the splinters. Kirk smirked when he noticed Admiral Decker was wearing beefcake pantyhose, and Ismael’s voice came over the P.A. saying, “I’m a driver, I’m a winner. Things are gonna change. I can just feel it.” Ripper was contemplating what to do with a guitar string and Scotty looked at Ismael and said, “Careful, laddie, don’t believe everything that you breathe. You’ll get a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve.” So he killed the headlights and put in neutral. The Count needed butane in his veins and Ahab shaved his face with some mace in the dark. The hippies were getting crazy with the Cheeze Whiz while Watson and Holmes were watching rerun shows and the daytime crap. Iron Mike stuck his head in the room and said, “You know what I’m sayin’?”
Q, proving himself to be a fickle Q, laughed maniacally and reached with two fingers for the lever on the Cosmic Commode, and then…
http://i971.photobucket.com/albums/a...psb2c0c49e.jpg
Bilbo Baggins smacked the side of the set and said, “Goddammit! Aerial’s out again.”
*My sincerest apologies to Beck. http://youtu.be/6DnD9RBdkfE
**Sorry about punting it back to you, Pen, I needed to get to work, and I wasn’t quite sure where to go next anyway.
-
Q yawned and turned away, bored with what he considered playing with his toys. He snapped his fingers and the connection between the Enterprise and the City of New Orleans ceased to be. The train also vanished. But out on the plains of Texas a motley group of beings found themselves stranded out of place and time.They soon realized that there was no hope of returning to their various timelines.
Captain Kirk with his usual aplomb for taking action, spoke up. "I guess we'll have to make the best of it, somehow."
"How screwed are we?" Asked Admiral Decker
"Pretty screwed." Spock said. "A snowball's chance in hell that we ever return to our old lives."
And thus the Fellowship of the Train broke up, going their separate ways.
Kirk and admiral Decker ended up traveling the world as members of the Peace Corps, although they often argued about who was in charge. Spock had his ears surgically altered and became Professor of higher mathematics and logic at Texas A&M. Jack the Ripper ended up dying by lethal injection in the Huntsville TX death row. Ahab wandered West and ended in an old sailors home in Monterey, California. Dracula and friends set up a haunted theme park in Coffeyville, which drew a million customers a year, although some were mysteriously found dead, either drained of blood, strangled, or ripped into pieces. The Eleven, as they now called themselves, managed to buy the Waco, TX land once occupied by the Branch Davidians and set up a commune dedicated to peace, love, non-violence and "leaf" appreciation, having drafted Bilbo as their "herb master." Sherlock Holmes set up a Private Investigator's office in Austin. Doc Watson ended up in Nashville cutting CD's and rapidlly becoming a National sensation. Dorothy and Toto were whisked off to Oz, their adventures recorded by an aging Frank Baum, and eventually she was joined by Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. The Shadow returned to New York, and worked as an highly effective vigilante, much to the dismay of the NYPD. Ismael was now a Subway Train Engineer in Dallas. Quanh Parker returned to his tribe, taking Iron Mike Tyson with him as a blood brother. Moby Dick's skeleton is a tourist attraction at Abernathy, TX. The Coffeyville Zombie Incident made headlines around the world as the three undead Dalton Brothers, Bob, Grat, and Emmett were pursued by authorities. Later the three undead brother became part of Dracula's Creatures of the Night theme park. And a short man with a large head, strangely dressed in a large top hat with a label that read "In this style 10/6" was locked in the looney bin after stealing tea and eating china teacups in a major department store. Meanwhile, in the far future, Captain Montgomery Scott of the USS Enterprise spent days unsuccessfully trying to build a time machine. The days passed, and each person always dreamed of a dark and stormy night when the laws of time and space meant nothing.
-
Roll Credits
Sancho <Fist Bump> Pendragon
Hey, that was so much fun I'm thinking of starting another story. Hmm. Something totally original. Hmm. Wait, I know:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."
Nah, that'll never work. Nobody'd ever start a story with a comma splice.
-
Yeah, I really enjoyed the wild ride Sancho. My wife got many a laugh over our madcap blending of TV, literature, Horror films, pulp magazines, songs, and of course real life characters. It was a good run and I'd love to do it again sometime. I'm going to miss waiting to see what you had added and thinking up ways to make it more illogical than before. Thank you. It's been great!
God Bless
Pen
