SCOTTFREE chapter three: dead bird
Danny crept out into the hallway, and desperately tried to move towards his locker without attracting the attention of anybody. He unlocked it as quietly as possible, snaked his arm in, and pulled out a ziplock bag with a single sandwich inside.
Suddenly, a wadded-up ball of paper hit him from behind.
“The hell,” he muttered under his breath, turning in the direction the impromptu weapon had come from.
god i hope it wasn’t josh
What he saw was Allison motioning at a door at the end of the hall, moving her hands like crazy. She was basically doing interpretive dance. It was really impressive.
He moved slowly and cautiously towards her, like an action hero approaching a serpent. People were moving all around him, the hallway a claustrophobic meld of what seemed to be everybody in the school.
“Danny!” Allison shouted enthusiastically as he approached. Some people turned to look at them. He wanted to scream.
“D-did you throw that ball of paper at me!?”
“Quite simply, Daniel,” she rasped, her voice much quieter now.
“So here’s what’s gonna happen, okay? We’re gonna stroll at a leisurely pace until we are off the premises, and then I am going to explain some extremely important things to you. I can guarantee ahead of time that there’s absolutely positively no way you’ll believe me, which is when I will dramaturgically provide proof.”
Before he could respond, or perhaps for want of a better term decline (Josh was starting to seem rather appealing to him at this point) Allison swung the door open and pushed him outside in one fell swoop.
Danny nearly fell down the stairs, and took about five seconds to regain his composure. By the time he had suitably calmed down, Allison was trekking across the field to a picnic bench that was ambiguously on school grounds. He broke into a mad dash, desperate to catch up to her.
“Alright,” he stuttered, “I’m really not enjoying what’s going on here. Are you taking me off school property? Is this…is this a drug deal?”
“God, Daniel. You gotta chill, man. Not a single teacher comes out here for…” She mimed checking a watch. Danny squinted at her wrist and noticed she wasn’t wearing one.
“Thirty minutes. Yeah, we’re good for thirty minutes.”
“Are you trying to sell me substances?”
“This would be a fuckin’ awful place to do so, man.”
They were now near the picnic bench. Allison reclined dramatically on it, and Danny hesitantly sat down on the opposite seat.
“What are you trying to do right now?” he whispered, somewhat fearfully.
“Danny. I’ve gotta tell you something, man. Something that concerns you.”
“What? Just get it over with, seriously.”
she’s gonna tell me that she likes me
i legitimately have not thought about that possibility until right now
is this like the first person who’s gonna tell me she has a crush on me
and will i have to, like, turn her down, or-
“At 3:00 on the pm, a gigantic automaton will come out of nowhere and beat you to death.”
The wind whistled around them. There was nobody around as far as the eye could see.
“Now, I understand that this information might be confusing-“
“No, that’s…hey, how do you know about this?”
Allison grinned, in perhaps the most ominous way conceivable by man.
“Which brings me to point B, Daniel. The entire fucking town is caught in a gigantic time loop.”
There was a brief, excruciating pause.
Danny’s eyes darted around, and he looked over to the school to see if anybody was watching them.
Allison coughed. “Pardon me,” she muttered.
Danny glanced around again, and then leaned over the table.
“Like…like in the Marlon Wayans movie Naked?” he whispered.
“And…so…hey, wait…how do you…”
“I’ve been in the time loop in question for about…ummm…I’d say twenty years as a rough estimate?”
Danny felt a brief glimmer of compassion, but snapped out of it almost instantly. This was ridiculous.
“And you’re just thinking to talk to me about this now? Also, are you…are you older than me? And, to reiterate, why are you JUST THINKING TO TALK TO ME ABOUT THIS NOW?”
Allison leaned back and giggled. “Aaaah, but therein lies the problem, Daniel. You don’t remember jack shit. I’ve told you all this a million times. Rough estimate.”
Danny felt his eyes drifting upwards. It was a dismal, cloudy day. October was upon them.
“You’re lying,” he whispered. “I don’t know why you think this is funny, but-“
A brief flash of…something passed over Allison’s face. Some sort of ungodly mixture of anger and fear. Danny lurched back a bit.
“Humor me,” she muttered, her voice almost a growl.
Danny desperately tried to depressurize his organs. “Fine. I’ll ask you some questions about this whole thing, huh? Will that make you feel better? Okay, number one- if we are in some sort of eternal time loop situation, do you have any idea of how to get out?”
Allison sighed and began cracking her knuckles. “Presumably the loop ends if we kill the automaton. That’s…”
Danny stared her down. “Is that just another rough estimate, though? How do you know?”
Allison popped the knuckle of her pinky finger with extreme prejudice. “I mean, it’s a pretty reasonable assumption. The robot shows up on the same day the loop starts, right? So…I mean…there’s gotta be some sort of correlation between the two. And then there’s the fact that it always tries to kill you and me…y’know, the works…”
“And it goes after us, specifically? Does it kill any other people as like…preparation, or…?”
“I’ve…we’ve lured it out into public areas before. It doesn’t kill anybody who’s not actively in its way for a long period of time. It’s less Terminator and more like the thing from It Follows. I don’t know. You’ve seen movies.”
“And…you’ve been in this loop for ten-“
“Twenty years, which apparently means you’re older than me, which is a really messed up thing to lie about, if you are lying, and more to the point you still haven’t killed it, it being the giant fucking Terminator murder robot. Why are you roping me into this? Even if this is all true, why do you still care?!”
Allison leaned her head back. “Geez, I don’t fuckin’ know, Danny. Put yourself in my shoes, dude. The world doesn’t change. It’s the same thing every day. Nothing’s new. I can’t watch new episodes of shows I used to enjoy. I don’t know what sleep is like, what dinner is like, what Micheal Wayne’s gonna talk about on the evening show…who’s gonna fucking win the election…what a SUNSET is like, Danny, it’s…it’s just waiting, even on the days when I try to do something. Waiting.”
Danny glanced at her again. She had now sort of sunken into herself, a mess of a person. “It’s fucked up,” she muttered. “You didn’t have to see that.”
Danny almost extended a comforting arm, before dropping it immediately. “So…what…what’re we going to do?”
Allison sprung upwards, fully renewed, and Danny leaned back in defensive terror again. “Which brings me to point C!” Allison grabbed her backpack- it had been sitting beside them the whole time- unzipped it, and pulled out an entire fucking grenade.
The grenade was sitting in front of them.
Before he passed out, the last thing he heard was her telling him to watch out, there was a rock on the ground and she didn’t want him to hit his head.
Danny’s eyes snapped open and he realized that Allison had dragged him behind a tree. She was now hunched over him like a gremlin, as he lay completely prone on the ground.
“ALLISON, YOU HAVE A FUCKING GRENADE!”
Allison was still holding the grenade. It was really harshing his mellow.
“That is true, Daniel,” she said, before slowly putting the grenade in her backpack.
Danny slowly stood up and cracked his back. “Listen, the whole monologue you did back there was really sad and I definitely want to believe you, but…”
She stared at him expectantly.
“Hey, wait. Shouldn’t you know what I’m about to say next? You knew that I was gonna faint, but-“
“You were about to ask me for proof about the existence of the time loop, like in most time loop movies with the exception of the 2017 Netflix comedy Naked starring Marlon Wayans, in which Wayans wakes up repeatedly in an elevator completely nude.”
“That movie still has a better twist than Shutter Island,” the two of them said simultaneously.
Danny clapped a hand over his mouth in genuine (!) surprise. “Hooooooly jimblegimbles.”
Allison smirked and cocked her head to the sight. “Oh please. I’m just giving you proof that I’ve spent decades trapped in a temporal void beyond human comprehension, not doing a backflip.”
Danny regained his composure and then proceeded to point at her dramatically once more. “That’s still not enough proof! I need you to…like…point out something that will happen in the surrounding environment! And tell me about it, and then…then it’ll happen, and I’ll do a super exaggerated voice and say ‘oh me oh my you sure were not kidding!’ You know! Like in the popular 2019 film Happy Death Day 2U!”
Allison pointed up at the sky. “Dead bird.”
Danny looked upwards expectantly.
Allison grinned. “Nahhhh, I’m just kidding. Imagine, though.”
“You still haven’t told me where you got the grenade from, by the way.”
Allison almost pulled it out of her backpack again, only for Danny to begin waving his hands like a madman. “Whoawhoawhoa, I’m not suggesting you take it out. I’m suggesting you…like…explain to me. I don’t need a visual demonstration of the grenade’s properties. I am ninety nine percent sure that it’s one hundred percent real, alright? I’m just gonna need some context before I put all of my trust in your extremely, extremely dubious methods.”
Allison cracked her neck dramatically. “Welll, it’s kind of a complicated story. All you need to know is that I won’t be able to have a grenade in the loop again…ever, really. And I think you may have gleaned by now that I intend to kill the robot with it.”
Danny nodded. “I did indeed assume that…thank god you weren’t intending to use it for anything else…Anyways, if this is your only chance to kill the robot with a grenade…do you have, like, a plan of attack? We can’t screw this up.” Danny realized with a kind of gnawing fear that Allison had begun walking forwards at a kind of mild stroll, and followed her with next to no reluctance. Allison was starting to seem less trustworthy and more like some kind of last resort.
Allison stroked her chin as she hustled through the grass. “I usually like to lure the robot to out of the way places when we fight it,” she muttered. “On the off chance that we do escape the loop, I’d really enjoy not having to explain the fact that we were fighting a gigantic robot to the death to the authorities the day after. So, I usually go to the warehouse near Shelley Field. Just a big open area, with a place where we can hide right in the middle.”
Danny paused. “And? How does the grenade factor into this?”
Allison jerked her neck around in an almost owl-like gesture. It kinda freaked Danny out. “I’m getting to that,” she snarled. “I don’t really feel comfortable explaining in anything but broad strokes until we get to the warehouse, but here’s what you need to know, alright?”
Danny nodded like a good little soldier.
“We’re gonna hop on a bus and take a ride to Shelley Field. We get off, we saunter over to the warehouse, and then YOU…”- she pointed at Danny dramatically- “-you are going to be bait. In every single loop, the robot goes for you first, no exceptions.”
Danny paused. “Wait. You want me to be bait?”
“At least until I throw the grenade, yeah. It goes without saying that I’ll be in the warehouse at this point. And please don’t forget that I’ve done this a hundred bazillion times before. You’re in good hands.”
“Allison, I met you twenty fucking minutes ago! I’m not gonna put myself in the way of a murder…demon…thing! No matter how ambiguously real it is!”
She groaned. “And yet! And yet is the proof I have provided you with not enough?!”
Danny groaned even louder in response. “It is very impressive! Extremely impressive proof! And yet! You may just be a crazy psycho!”
“I mean, I’m not not a crazy psycho.”
“Allison, this is all beside the point, man…one question I have, how durable is the robot?” He paused. “This HYPOTHETICAL robot.”
“Well, for context it basically looks like someone dumped a bunch of CRTs on top of each other and stuck some arms and legs on it, but once you break through all the computers it’s got a weird sleek metallic shell or something. And that thing can take a beating. But…I mean…it took…I’d say…three gunshots in the same area to make a semi-large crack, so a grenade should do just fine.”
“Hold up…you know how to use a gun?”
“Well, yeah, duh. Twenty years, dumbass. And plus, the warehouse will collapse on top of it immediately after anyways, so if the grenade doesn’t fully take it out we’re not done for.”
“Wait, but you’ll be in the warehouse, Allison…you plan to get out how?”
She sighed. “Well, I mean, we’ve all seen movies. Grenades don’t detonate instantly, and this warehouse is about twenty metres across, so I can make a mad dash and get out pretty quick. Meanwhile, the robot seems resigned to a constant Micheal Myers leisurely stroll, so it presumably won’t dash out to escape. It’s not insanely smart, that much I can confirm.”
Danny realized somewhat passively that they were now at the bus stop. “Well,” he muttered. “Fine! I’m following you! I am going in the direction you’re going!” He paused, and then raised a hand up exaggeratedly. “Which is NOT the same thing as trusting you!!!”
She slapped him on the back of the head. “Danny. Daniel Callahan. This would be the weirdest fucking practical joke ever. I simply do not play.”
He sighed. “Fine…I guess…don’t have any problems with that…geez, man you slapped the back of my head really hard…”
Allison groaned. “C’mon man. We’ve got infinitely bigger problems.”
As the bus pulled up and Danny and Allison stepped on, Danny couldn’t help but feel as though he was being carted off to die.
gummygunk
gracieabrams
2087
romaincrisis
gamechangershow
vaporwave
titsay
kianamaiart