By me, with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
At first, shortly after it happened, after the funerals, I didn’t care what caused my leg to fall apart. I blamed myself. If only I had reacted more calmly. If only I hadn’t lost control of the vehicle. I could have used my other leg to drive, after all. If only I had just hit the brakes. Coasted onto the side of the road. Parked my vehicle. My parents would still be alive.
For the first few months I was just too busy blaming myself. Blaming oneself is time consuming. Every time you do it, it’s hard to move. It’s like your body slows down. A heavy weight encumbers your movements. Everything takes longer to finish. And then you blame yourself again, and then again, and it gets more severe. It’s like chains pulling you down, down, heavier with every action.
Which isn’t to mean I never wondered about the “disappearing death virus.” But not even the doctors could figure out what that was. I guess for that reason I thought there was no way someone like me could figure it out. It just seemed like someone cast a spell on me, like the “virus” was really black magic or some kind of curse.
And I felt that way about the appearance of Warbell also. It wasn’t natural for a dinosaur to just appear on my doorstep. Why wouldn’t I be suspicious?
Plus there were the Dinosaur Yacht Slaughter movies. They taught me a lot about dinosaurs. In those films, due to pollution and a sun cycle that only comes once every 100 million years, the birds in a particular part of the ocean start to de-evolve into dinosaurs and as a consequence fall from the air and smash all the local ships and boats except a yacht driven by a rich paraplegic and five super models. All those bird-dinosaurs were really evil, even the brontosaurus that fell on a battleship and then stuffed entire human bodies down its throat like a boa constrictor. One of the best scenes is when the bronto uses its lumpy neck like a club to engage in an intense fight against a military tank with inflatable treads cruising across the ocean waves.
Gosh, I love those films. But they also taught me never to trust a dinosaur.
Those were some of the things I was thinking about several weeks after Warbell moved out. I sat at home and watched Dinosaur Yacht Slaughter 8: the Bermuda Triceratops. I was having a hard time concentrating on the plot—the titular triceratops had just appeared in the cabin of a pirate ship and was shooting spinning fireballs from its horns or something. The actor playing Captain Scrapstache was really good, though—he had three peg legs and made it believable.
And I kept thinking about what Colander had said. I had to at least admit the idea of Warbell causing widespread death and destruction seemed highly implausible. But I just kind of wanted to hate someone other than myself for a while.
At about that time my phone buzzed. I nearly lost it when I saw it was a text from Colander.
“Channel 7! Right now!” it read. “Warbell is going to box Punchface!”