Kresge Writers' House Presents...

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Enjoy the turkey eating, blogians!

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Henry Collins’ Finest Hour

1.

So…

Ever played an RPG? You know, like Final Fantasy? Dragon Quest? Or even one of those lame western ones, like Mass Effect or Elder Scrolls? You’ve played at least one of them. If not, you know someone who’s abandoned at least five social gatherings for their game of choice. Don’t try to deny it. It’d be like saying you’re a complete basement dweller with no social interaction while simultaneously never being exposed to any Japanese pop culture. As we all know, this doesn’t happen. So don’t lie.

Why am I bringing this up, you ask? Well, going into the final battle and whatnot, I figured I was also headed into the final dungeon. For the uninitiated, ‘dungeons’ are the places where the hero and his team of lackeys go and fight monsters and bosses throughout the story. They fight in random battles, level up in experience, and fight a big, hulking dude with more power than God at the end. The final dungeon is, well, the last one. However, some things set it apart from the rest.

For instance, in Final Fantasy IV, the game takes place in kinda-sorta-not-really Medieval Europe.

The final dungeon is on the moon.

Or another one! In The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzymiya, the whole story takes place in an everyday high school. The final dungeon? An alternate reality with the eponymous character’s manifested subconscious both destroying and assimilating the real world.

Get the idea? By the time you’re watching your party get on a spaceship and take off to outer space, you look at your team’s skills and levels and items and whatnot and realize that hey, maybe this is the end of the game. In about two hours, you’ll cry over the credits, either out of the plot’s ending or because you realized what else you could have done with those 40+ hours. Then you’ll put the game on the shelf and buy another one, in lieu of homework or class readings or, worst of all, attempting to find a romantic relationship.

I had that feeling.

Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), it’s not a good feeling.

“Operator, we’re backed up all the way to Lincoln,” I said into my cell. Lincoln is at least five miles away from the boardwalk. What were a ton of cars doing by the boardwalk at night? That’s not rhetorical; it beats me. Hell, this would be weird to encounter during the day. Miranda Cove’s known for the rich kids burning through their wallets like no tomorrow, not for its lovely beach. The beach isn’t even lovely. I went swimming in it during a high school beach party and my legs came out sticky, to say nothing of my dead-feeling hair. In retrospect, I’m surprised the puke-green water didn’t give me a tumor.

Knock on wood.

“I’m looking at it now,” Carina said in her distant tone. I could hear the tacks of the keyboard and her fingers at full blast through my receiver; being that laptop at the moment must really suck. Or at least, just be really painful. That said, being me withoutthat keyboard getting blasted for our sins would suck worse. So thank you, laptop keyboard. We’ll hold a funeral for you after this is all said and done.

“What,” Kenneth groaned, one hand on the steering wheel and another on his forehead. He looked like my mom after seven consecutive hours of rush hour traffic. “Don’t tell me every crew in town actually showed up. That’s just nuts.”

Not to mention overkill. What, is Forest that afraid of us? He had to put out the Bizzaro-Avengers-Assemble call to stall us while he enacts the menacing scheme that I still don’t really understand?

No way. He’s a card-carrying supervillain. Doctor Doom could eat us for lunch. Maybefor an afternoon snack with his good friend, Darth Vader.

And for the record, I’m perfectly aware of the fictional inconsistencies with those last two lines. Like I said, it’s the final dungeon. I’m running low on observational humor. If I hear one more complaint about it, I’m going Bella Swan on all of you.

Which would be, as she says, to all of your chagrin.

“If I were Forest, I’d be a little worried,” Carina said, grounding me back in an admittedly dire situation. “I found a work-around. Take the next left, onto Second. It’s a five-minute detour, but it’s completely empty. Call when you get to the Boardwalk.”

I shut the phone as Kenneth pulled a hard left. My phone had the loudest receiver in the world, making me one of the deafest kids in the world.

‘Deafest’? Is that a word? It looks wrong. Anyway. Kenneth heard her over the subtle purr of the engine, and reacted only the way a powerfully masculine guy like Kenneth could.

Our sexual frustration symbol with wheels screeched past the stacks of cars in front of us, drifted into the left turn lane, and before we knew it, we found ourselves U-turning onto a completely empty street. Either that or we were dead, but I knew for a fact that wasn’t true. For one thing, we weren’t up in the clouds. It’s funny because the ‘angels’ up there would be pretty ticked off.

As we went away from the suburban street and toward the beachfront stores and palm trees, the sky grew more and more gorgeous. Every star in the sky and not a cloud in sight, circled around an unblocked and glistening full moon, looked to me like something only possible off of a green screen in post-production. At least something was going in my favor tonight.

Great, I probably just jinxed it, didn’t I? The clouds are going to turn bruised and the sky black, won’t it? Eh, it’s best not to think about it.

“Tell Carina to stop smoking,” Kenneth delivered the line with both annoyance and amusement. “There’s no way there. Does she see this?”

I repeated the line, sans road-rage, into the receiver. A slight pause, then louder, closer keystrokes. What, was she working on two computers now?

“Two computers, three monitors, two keyboards, Henry, get with it,” she snapped back. It was kind of refreshing, in that masochist sort of way. “I see it. There’s a blockade up ahead, right?”

Eyes in the sky never failed. That’s why they were called ‘eyes in the sky’ and not ‘that worthless seeing dude’. We had stopped five cars short of crossing past the traffic and onto the Boardwalk, thanks to a series of orange cones. Kenneth slammed his hand against the steering wheel—apparently hurting himself in the process—and leaned back into this seat. I pretended to ignore his hands cradling one another.

“Oh no.”

“What happened?” I said in that asking-but-really-stating tone.

“There’s checkpoints lined up all along the street. That’s what’s slowing everything down.”

In other words, they know I’m here. Huh. Score one for the intimidation team. I wonder if this is what a Republican in California feels like.

Of course it took me a moment or three, but then I figured out just how screwed we presently were.

“Get out of the car, Kenneth,” I demanded. I didn’t even open the door to his cute little ride; I leapt out over the door and stood at the sidewalk, staying careful to not be spotted. Those hulking mooks of a goon squad were here somewhere. I didn’t have to ask Carina to know the place was likely swarming with them.

“What are you talking about, Collins?”

“Leave it. The second they see us, we’re dead.”

Is it sad that I could clearly see the conflict—my life or my car?—written across his face virtually in ink? He pursed his lips, furrowed his brow, then relaxed both of those and ran a nostalgic hand over the steering wheel.

I looked away. Something about this felt wrong, and looking at it while it went on was just wronger still.

Yes, wronger is a word. It means ‘to be even more wrong than some predefined condition.’ And no, I’m not aware of the irony in that definition to that particular word. Moving on.

Kenneth pulled the ignition from his love mobile and put the keys in his pocket. What, was he really keeping that as a memento or something?

“Say anything about this to my crew and you’re dead, Collins.”

Well, there that goes.

We started moving through sidestreets, staying away from the main road as best we could. This was still a horrible idea; regardless of what we did, we’d get discovered eventually, and I can’t say a surburban neighborhood like this was conductive to fighting. 

“I’ve got it.”

Leave it to Carina. She’s much better than that one annoying ‘Beaver’ kid. And talk about an unfortunate childhood name. What happened, did his mom lose a bet?

That said, if you’ve got a legitimate answer, I won’t get it because I never saw the show. All I know was that for some reason, it was always playing Saturday at 9 instead of Digimon. After I’m done here, the Fox network is next.

“We’ve got your backup coming,” she said vaguely. “I need to cut the phone for a moment, but once you’re done, call me back immediately.”

Wait, what?

“It’s the brown duplex to your left, three houses down,” she was hurrying her words now. “Call me back right away! I mean it!”

Click.

…You know, looking back on the Henry/Carina dynamic, I feel like I have a thing for being treated like hell. I should bring this up to my mother later.

“What’s the news?” Ken asked as we walked seemingly aimlessly. “Where do we go from here?”

Three houses down…brown house.

Right here.

“It took you long enough,” a familiar voice said. “I get that traffic’s backed up, but for fuck’s sake, you took your sweet time. It’s not like we need you for anything.”

Sitting on the front cement steps was the being that told us what to do, and hopefully how to do it: Samantha the Familiar.

I smirked. “If you’re joining us, then this is totally a final dungeon.”

“Excuse me?”

Kenneth chuckled, and that was enough for me. “Never mind,” I said. 

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Read the next installment here.