A Fable

Once upon a time there was a happy grasshopper named Maxwell. One day he was hopping happily along his favorite path along the railroad tracks by the sea when he stopped on the tracks to enjoy the bright sunny day.

It was while sitting upon the tracks that he noticed a slight vibration in his feet.

This vibration was caused by the world’s first napalm-powered bullet-train, the Tennis, rocketing towards destruction on its maiden voyage. The crew had been overcome by carbon monoxide and the captain, in a tragic twist of fate, happened to slump over onto the accelerator as he collapsed. The train was at maximum velocity, barely staying on the tracks. Just then, the captain awoke in a state of panicked, half-aware delirium. He reached for the brake, but his quaking hand instead found the TURBO button. The train lifted up off its glistening tracks and arced through the air towards the unsuspecting Maxwell.

Moments earlier, Maxwell had noticed an odd, gray shape on the horizon, small but growing larger.

This shape was the good ship Knowledge Bowl, an aircraft carrier named after Chester A. Arthur’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kenneth “Knowledge” Bowler III. Its crew, unfortunately, had been laid low and then brought back by a zombie virus from the Caribbean, hidden inside the thousands of tons of hot-pants secretly concealed below the deck. The zombies soon ran out of victims when confined to the ship, so the zombie crew made a course for the nearest land and gave the order for full steam ahead. The great knife-like prow struck the beach with tremendous force and the ship reared up for a split second, seeming to hang in the air above Maxwell’s head.

A few seconds before this, Maxwell had been distracted away from the gray shape by an odd whistling above his head. He craned his little grasshopper neck up see what was making the racket.

It was a hydrogen bomb, hurtling through the atmosphere at breakneck speed towards the very spot where Maxwell stood. Astride it was the reanimated skeleton of Slim Pickens, in costume and character as Major T. J. “King” Kong. An extraterrestrial gas had awakened the long-deceased actor and mysteriously put him into character in his most famous role. He had stowed away on a top secret military plane, the A.P. (Advanced Prototype) Class Bomber. He found the largest bomb, sat astride it, and used skeleton magic to open the bomb-bay doors and arm and release the bomb. He waved his tattered, worm-eaten cowboy hat in the air as he screamed down towards the train, ship, and grasshopper.

Maxwell blinked.

Moral: Maxwell is screwed.

P.S.: For the symbolically disinclined, the train was tennis, the ship was KB, and the H-bomb was AP classes.
P.P.S.: I realize it really isn’t this bad for me and will be worse for others, but it was fun to write.
P.P.P.S.: It really is this bad for Sam Walker. Just rename the train “Mystery Vacation.”