I Am Demo-Man
by
McCallum
J. Morgan
Gaston stepped
over the wreckage of the huge wooden doors, tiptoeing around the bodies of
the tellers and guards. The vault gleamed silver, a red
light blinking on the screen of its fancy
lock system.
“Fire, Boss?”
Henchman 1 asked, peeking out of the mini tank’s hatch.
“No,” Gaston
said, waving his red-gloved hand dismissively. “The canon won’t take this
door. You take it out on the steps and destroy the law
enforcement; I hear the sirens now.”
Henchman 1 closed
the hatch and turned the mini tank around, crushing desks and couches
and leaving tread marks in the carpet. Gaston smiled.
“Are you going to
hot-wire the system, boss?” Henchman 2 asked.
“No, you imbecile!”
Gaston said. “Get my art kit!”
Henchman 2 went
over to Gaston’s red Rolls-Royce Phantom, parked on two famous
actresses who had been at the bank making enormous
withdrawals. Gaston had arrived just in
time to stop them. All the money was still in the
vault.
Henchman 2 brought Gaston his palette, brush, and case. Gaston took a
bottle from the case
and dumped acid on his palette. Then he daintily
dipped his brush and set about the methodical
destruction of a highly expensive piece of
equipment.
The
screen fizzled and drooped, the wires hissed and melted, sparking. But the
metal held.
The acid dripped off and pitted the concrete
floor. Gaston got out another bottle. This acid
steamed on the metal. He dribbled it around the
hinges and cracks. Explosives were all very fine,
but they’d just blow off the hinges, wreck the
locking mechanism, and short the wires. This
particularly nasty acid would cause irreparable
damage, reacting with the metal and making it
unrecyclable. The vault would have to be excavated
from the stone building it had been built into
and dumped in the landfill. This would at last
crush his nemesis, Moneyman!
Gaston
heard explosions from outside the bank as the Bamberg police were blown to itty
bitty
bits. He grinned at his reflection in the melting
metal door. His black Will.I.Am/Elvis hairdo
looked simply dashing (in the most destructive
sense of the word) with his glittery red suit.
Everything about him was square—like a fuse
box—even his malignant eyes seemed rather
cube-like. He leaped back as the vault door
buckled and collapsed, nearly coating him in gooey
titanium.
Gaston stepped
into the glorious interior of the vault of the Bockhurst First Bank of
Bamberg.
Money, money,
money.
Gaston dropped
his palette. It splattered on the floor, steaming and hissing. “Henchmen!”
he called. “I want every
last thing in here moved out to
the lobby!” He set his case down on a
stack of gold bars.
Henchmen 2
through 7 hurried to obey, toting the stacks of crisp hundred dollar bills and
bars of gold, silver, and platinum out into the lobby. They
piled them into a vague pyramid of
gleaming currency.
“Hurry!” Gaston
urged, waving his brush around, splattering acid on everything and
everyone. “Moneyman will be here soon!” He threw his brush
against the far wall where it stuck
into the titanium. He pulled out his shiny red gun and
stomped out of the vault, eyeing the
staircase from the upper floors and the big stained glass
windows.
The henchmen had
just laid down the last bill in the lobby when Gaston heard henchman 1
call from outside.
“Boss! There’s
some pansy in yellow plastic says he wants to negotiate the release of the
hostages!”
Gaston sighed. That was just like Moneyman.
“Let him in!”
Moneyman stepped
through the gaping hole where the bank’s front door used to be. As usual,
he was dressed in yellow-gold latex with his ridiculous
coin-shaped mask. He held a white flag
in one hand.
“What the hell,
Moneyman?” Gaston said. “There’s a roof, you know, why didn’t you have a
helicopter drop you off and then come flipping down the
stairs and karate chop me?”
“Helicopters use
a lot of fuel,” Moneyman said. “Obviously.”
“Whatever,”
Gaston said. “But it would have been the least you could do. I know I can’t
expect you to jump through two-hundred year old stained
glass on a stolen motorbike, but really,
a white flag?”
“You’ve caused
enough destruction for today,” Moneyman said as he surveyed the room,
sadness nearly oozing from his eyes. “Look at this,
Demo-man! It’s so senseless! You don’t have
to be so backwards! Why couldn’t you rob people on the
internet? You know you could. That
would still be theft, loss of money and all, but look at
this! That door! These couches! That cute
teller who always cashed my pay-check!”
“So you are on government payroll,” Gaston said.
“This carpet!
That vault! It breaks my heart!” Moneyman blew his nose on his truce flag.
“If you’d just buck up and fight me,” Gaston
said, waving his gun in the air, “you could stop
me.”
“You’ve got seven
henchmen,” Moneyman pointed out, wiping his nose and sniffing. “And a
canon.”
“Well…” Gaston
began, nearly sucked in by Moneyman’s flawless reasoning before
indignation swelled in his villainous breast. “So?! I
thought you were a hero!”
“I am,” Moneyman
said. “And I won’t let you take all this money!”
“Oh, I don’t want
the money,” Gaston said, pushing the safety button on his pistol. “I just
want to see you completely broken.” The Rolls-Royce roared
to life, the souped-up diesel engine
caterwauling like a chorus of rhinoceroses on microphones
with the reverb on max. Gaston
pulled the pistol’s slide and the Rolls-Royce’s lights came
on. Sort of.
Fifteen-foot-long
jets of flame spurted from the headlights, curling with vehemence and
singeing the carpet and actresses black.
Gaston smiled and
pulled the trigger. The car started to roll towards the money pile, flame
throwers wide open, consuming a henchman that didn’t jump
out of the way in time.
Moneyman’s eyes
widened in horror and Gaston laughed.
Moneyman looked
back and forth between the stack and the car, calculating out loud, “The
Bank of Bamberg holds thirty-three million; a Rolls-Royce
Phantom is normally almost 400,000,
but with a turbo charged diesel, two flamethrowers, custom
paint job, bullet proof, remote
control, we’re talking over 600,000…
“But…since gold,
silver, and platinum won’t burn, the money in danger only amounts to
about three million…”
“Watch the money
buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurn!” Gaston hooted.
Moneyman seemed
to weigh the car and the money in each hand. “600,000 or 3 million…”
his eyes hardened. “I’ve gotta stop the car.”
With a cry of
agony, Moneyman turned and ran down the steps towards the mini tank. The
henchmen looked at each other.
“Should we..?”
henchman 5 began. Gaston shook his head. He clicked the catch releasing the
clip from his gun-shaped remote and glanced back into the
vault. It was completely empty; his
acid case wasn’t there.
The Rolls-Royce
moved inexorably towards the cash. Gaston heard the thwap! Ah! As
Moneyman karate chopped henchman 1. The flames were about to
touch the money. The green
paper curled in the heat.
Then the mini-tank
roared into the bank, smashing into the Rolls-Royce and turning the
flames around onto the empty desks. Firemen, no longer
deterred by the mini tank, rushed in and
began to douse the car. The police charged in,
pepper-spraying the henchmen.
Moneyman
clambered out of the mini tank’s hatch, tears streaming from his eyes as he
gazed
at the dents in the Phantom. “It’s been devalued two hundred
grand!” he cried.
“Bull$#*%,”
Gaston said, pushing a key on his clip. The mini tank turret turned towards the
stack of money.
“No!” exclaimed
Moneyman.
“Yes,” said
Gaston.
He hit the red
key. The mini tank fired.
The nitro
glycerin in Gaston’s acid case, sitting in the middle of the money where the
henchmen had moved it along with everything else in the
vault, lit up three million and the other
thirty million started to dissolve and evolve in an
incredible reaction of rare chemicals.
Gaston cackled as
the police pepper-sprayed him. One last look before his eyes watered over
revealed a distraught Moneyman leaping into the
conflagration to try and save even one bar of
gold.
The police
clubbed Gaston in the head and stars sprayed gleefully across a black galaxy,
exploding and wrecking in cosmic demolition.
When the Haz-Mat
crew finished sifting through the molecularly unstable slime that was once
the riches of Bamberg, they found Moneyman. And he was still
alive.