Lee
"Budgie" Barnett is a writer of comedy and of comic books. He first
broke into the business with three stories in Imperium Comics' TRAILER PARK
OF TERROR, before getting his first big break with Marvel in X-MEN UNLIMITED
#4, which hit the shelves in August 2004. Well known in the UK Comics industry
for the annual Hypotheticals panel
he devised and presents with Dave Gibbons at the UK Comics Festival, he's been
described as being to accountancy what Indiana Jones is to archaeology. He currently
writes GOING CHEEP at the Pulse.
The Guardian, 12th August 2003 In our interview with Sir Jack Hayward, the chairman of Wolverhampton Wanderers, page 20, Sport, yesterday, we mistakenly attributed to him the following comment: “Our team was the worst in the First Division and I’m sure it’ll be the worst in the Premier League.” Sir Jack had just declined the offer of a hot drink. What he actually said was “Our tea was the worst in the First Division and I’m sure it’ll be the worst in the Premier League.” Profuse apologies.
All things considered, it hadn’t started out as a bad day. In fact, when everything was taken into account, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that the day had started well for Ian Davies.
Then he woke up.
The alarm bell had rung loudly. But then, that was, after all, what it was supposed to do. Davies had rolled over on his side and reached out to turn it off. And then he’d promptly rolled off the bed. It couldn’t altogether be blamed on him, since the bed had only been purchased a couple of weeks earlier and he was constantly forgetting that it was some six inches narrower than its predecessor.
With a heartfelt sigh, and some well chosen swear words, Davies reached up and hit the alarm clock. Its ringing continued and so he hit it again. This cycle repeated itself for a couple of minutes and then he gave up and stuck the clock under a pillow where its noise at least reduced to a tolerable level. Davis got up, leaning on the bed as he did so. He sat on the bed, and then stood up again, since sitting on the bed had moved the pillow just enough to raise the volume of the ringing noise again. Ah, silence again. Or near as dammit, anyway. The telephone by his bed rang and he picked up the receiver and listened for a moment, then spoke a couple of short though direct sentences, before replacing the handset. No, he didn’t want to buy double glazing, not at half-past seven in the morning. Did anyone want to buy double glazing at half past seven in the morning? He almost wished he’d asked the cold caller whether he’d ever managed to get a sale that early, but was depressed about the possible confirmatory answer.
Davies moved a hand over his face and rubbed his eyes, finally becoming fully conscious. He took a brief look around the bedroom and sighed again. He’d intended to tidy up the room the previous night but when he’d got home from the regular Monday night get together after work, he simply couldn’t be bothered.
He staggered into the bathroom and opened the shower door. It creaked as he opened it, reminding him that he’d meant to oil the hinges. One more thing in a long list of “meant to dos” that somehow he never quite got around to. He showered and then shaved, pausing after the shave to look at himself in the large mirror. What he saw gave him pause for a moment: light brown hair with a couple of strands of grey above his ears, brown eyes so dark they were almost black, and a mouth that had been described by consecutive women as kind, sensitive and almost feminine. Not entirely coincidentally, the words had been used to describe him as well, by the same women.
He walked into the main room, wincing at the state of it. Clutter was far too kind a description, but like many single men, Davies was more than able to pretend that it was a suitable description of how he lived. The bookshelves were covered in books, which was, he supposed, the general idea. But when he’d moved in, three years earlier, the books had been neat and tidy, sorted alphabetically by both subject and author. Currently, however, you were as likely to find a book on the Six Wives of Henry The Eighth nestling next to a set of science fiction anthologies as you were to find a book of Bill Tidy cartoons cohabiting with a spy thriller. The furniture wasn’t much better. One end of the three-seater couch was covered in paper and he could, if he squinted, just about make out a bank statement underneath a sketch pad, which was itself under yesterday’s newspaper, opened to the letters page.
His cleaner was due in an hour and despite knowing that he actually paid her to clean the three room apartment, Davies always felt somewhat guilty about not tidying up before she arrived. He supposed it was similar to why people always cleaned their teeth before visiting the dentist, or washed their hair before going to the barber.
He breakfasted, not paying too much attention to the news on the radio and then left for work.
But even if he had heard the news on the radio, it’s unlikely that he would have changed his plans which was a pity, since his life was about to change in ways that he could never have imagined.
Two hours earlier, three men had been in a deliberately anonymous dark blue van, opposite the local branch of National Provident Bank, also having no idea that their lives were shortly to change. Well, to be honest, were shortly to end. But then, you can’t really blame them for that. Not many people think, when planning to rob a bank, that they’re going to be consumed in a fireball just before they commence the operation. Hardly any of them in fact.
Charlie Jones, all of twenty-one years of age, was the youngest of the three. He’d been in and out of youth custody for six years, starting with a conviction for petty theft. That may seem harsh – being sent away for petty theft, until you discovered that the court had taken a hundred and seven similar offences into account when sentencing. This was his first big job and he was eager to get on with it. He was still shaking off the effects of the previous night when, unknown to his colleagues, he’d tied one on with his best friend. They’d started on beers, moved on to spirits and he just about remembered the drink that had turned his brain upside down, shortly followed by his body. Despite the occasional shudder that ran through his frame, he felt the steering wheel with some confidence. He’d tuned this baby well so that it was ready, with just a touch to the pedals, to break the speed limit in seconds.
He turned to his uncle, Samuel Withers, with a grin. “We up for it, Unc?”
Withers turned a cautious eye on his nephew. He’d not wanted to bring his sister’s boy on the job, but two days earlier, his planned getaway driver had been done for driving without due care and attention. Despite the lad being out on bail, Withers wasn’t that keen on using someone who was that careless about driving, not on this job. This one required someone with an icy calmness. And he knew that when it came down to it, his nephew could turn his considerable skill with anything on wheels to good advantage. As with most bank jobs, the danger wasn’t inside the bank, it was outside, in the ten minutes after they left the bank, weighed down, hopefully, with bags of cash. “Not for an hour or so, Charlie boy, you know that. Not until about half an hour before the bank opens, when the first couple of staff arrive.”
“But what do we do until then?” asked Charlie, almost petulantly.
“We wait,” came the calm voice from the third of the men in the van, the voice seeming to float out of the distance. Whereas Withers carried about him the calm assuredness of experience gained from several stretches at Her Majesty’s pleasure, the man sitting in the rear of the van carried his confidence from never having been caught. The huge black man sitting there was named by his mother as Everett, but was known to his criminal fraternity as Everest, or more accurately Mount Everest. “We wait and we consider. We think about the job, and we go over the plan again.”
“OK,” said Charlie, “when the…”
Everest interrupted him. “We go over the plans… silently. As in ‘no noise’.”
Jones moved around, staring at the black man, willing himself not to be intimidated by him.
“Silently, I said,” Everest pre-empted and Jones didn’t even form the words of protest before Everest raised his head and his eyes nailed Charlie’s. Charlie turned around, suddenly very interested in the dashboard, and desperately trying not to think of the gun that Everest was cleaning. The final player in the events about to unfold was aged 53, was overweight and was ready for a heart attack. He also wasn’t paying attention to his driving, which would have been unforgivable in any driver, but was particularly so given the package placed on the passenger seat of his small car.
A courier employed by East End Deliveries, John Ellis had given up wondering about what it was that he delivered. In the ten years of doing a job that was more calculated than any other to destroy a love of driving, his favourite account, or least horrendous anyway, was that of Dance-Oliver Medical Research; he’d delivered false limbs, real limbs, medical equipment and on at least two occasions to his certain knowledge, carefully packed and preserved brains. He always found it amusing that these brains were meant to be something special. Well, they weren’t able to do anything, were they, he reckoned, whereas he was still alive and his brain was still working. So shouldn’t they have been ferrying him around?
The precise error in logic of this argument didn’t occur to him, though that wasn’t unusual, since not much occurred to Ellis unless it directly impinged upon his personal vicissitudes.
He glanced at the parcel by his side. They’d not said what it was, but it was obvious to him that it was important, if only from the packaging and the labels carefully stencilled upon it. He didn’t recognise the symbol on its side, but even if he had, he wouldn’t have cared. He would have admitted though, if he was put under oath, that he was more than curious about the sticky label placed on top. It had a strip of light blue on it and the legend: “If this strip turns black, immediately return it to Rad Lab #7”. What was all that about?
A horn blasted close by and he jerked his head away from the package. He looked up and ahead and his mouth ran dry, the sharp bitter taste in his mouth the adrenaline flooding his system as just in time he saw that he had drifted onto the other side of the road and that a large lorry was bearing down on him, far too close. He barely registered the urgent horn blow by the other vehicle before he reacted, his hands already turning the wheel.
“Jesus!” he shouted and turned the steering wheel hard to the left. He could see out of his peripheral vision the half angry, half shocked look of the other driver, high up in the lorry’s cab. The car started to lose traction and Ellis stamped on the accelerator, getting the car out of the path of the lorry and then he shifted and stamped equally hard on the brake pedal. The lorry slid past the car, barely clipping the wing of the car. Ellis was thrown hard against the seat belt and he felt a vast pressure on his chest. He also saw the package react to the sudden deceleration by leaving the seat and crashing hard against the hard moulded plastic of the passenger side shelf, before tumbling to the ground, finally coming to rest in front of the passenger seat. There might have been a small tinkling of glass, but if there was, Ellis was unaware of it.
He picked up the package from the well in front and put it back on the seat, not realising as he did so that he’d placed it upside down, the blue strip, or rather the previously blue strip, down against the seat, for the strip was no longer blue.
It was the darkest ebony possible. And John Ellis was already dead. He just didn’t know it yet. The day was continuing just as well as before for Ian Davies and the local tube station was shut down because of an ant on the line, or at least that’s what the tannoy message had sounded like. He hadn’t been able to get on the first three busses and although he’d managed to get onto the fourth, he’d been standing now for half an hour, while the bus had been similarly immobile for twenty minutes. Davies was at that stage where he was balancing up the certain knowledge that it would be quicker to walk and the equally certain belief that were he to disembark, the traffic jam in which the bus was currently stuck would miraculous vanish.
It was the body odour of the woman standing next to him that finally decided Davies. It was a pity, since she was a real looker, despite the painted make-up that didn’t do much to enhance what Davies was sure was an already attractive face. He extricated himself from the strange position in which he’d found himself, his head bent over and stuck under her armpit, and moved slowly along the bus, until he smelled that blessed fresh air. The bus moved slightly and he took the opportunity to suddenly reach for the pole at the rear of the bus. He pulled himself through and then off of the bus. Miraculously, the expected clearing of traffic didn’t happen and it was with an almost jaunty stroll that Davies walked past the bus, turned a corner and walked towards work, some twenty minutes away.
Behind him, of course, the traffic melted away and the bus stopped at a request stop, where fully half the passengers alighted, leaving the rest of the journey more than pleasant for those remaining on the bus. But Ian Davies didn’t know any of this, and there was no reason he should ever have found out. Several streets away, he walked another half a mile and then turned into the High Road.
In the middle distance, he could see the logos of the various stores and businesses, including that of the National Provident Bank. John Ellis was beginning to feel unwell. He wasn’t sure what the reason was, but the nausea that had commenced about ten minutes earlier had grown to the point where he was struggling not to throw up inside his car. It didn’t occur to him that the package on the seat next to him was responsible, and he assumed that it was something he’d eaten the previous night.
Worse than the feeling that there were a couple of hundred beetles in his stomach doing the Macarena, was the cloudiness that had stolen over his vision. It seemed to him what a slipping contact lens must be like, since one moment his vision was clear, the next it would cloud over and become distorted. Moreover, the headache that had commenced five minutes earlier was about the only thing countering the dizziness that had started at about the same time. He kept rubbing his eyes, but didn’t worry until he went to scratch his head and found some hair attaching itself to his hand when he did so. That worried him, but it was only when after a particularly bad itch, he scratched his head and felt a clump of hair and skin come away that he freaked out.
When he saw that, he panicked and lifted his hands from the wheel, in almost complete contravention of section 3 of the Road Traffic Act 1988. The car, naturally enough, continued on its way and it was only through a trick of chance that there was no one in its way before it crossed into the High Road at speed, heading towards three men, who were exiting an anonymous dark blue van.
They weren’t having a very good day either. And it was about to get worse. It was Mount Everest who saw the car heading towards them. He barely had a chance to make a classic fight or flight decision, and then that moment was past as Charlie Jones panicked and lifted his shotgun, not really aiming, but firing point blank at the car. The blast finally put Ellis out of any misery he was going through, although the slumping of his body on the wheel fractionally amended the direction of the car.
Withers spun around at the noise and saw the car change direction and plough into the van towards the rear. He thought he saw a package fly out of the window, but he wasn’t sure for a second. There was a moment of complete calm, and it seemed as if the world had stopped. That moment of perfect silence ended violently when the petrol tank of the van breached and a moment later, the petrol vapour ignited. The package fell at Withers’ feet and again he wasn’t sure as to what it was.
Then Withers wasn’t sure of anything at all as a massive explosion rocked the street. It blew the package up off of the street and vaporised it, sending the material through Withers’ remains, continuing as a cloud of densely coloured thick vapour heading away from the crash.
With each metre, more and more of the mist dissipated, but it was still enough to cover, soak and otherwise drench the poor bastard who happened to walk into the area of contamination just before it completely disappeared.
Ian Davies’s day had just gotten a whole lot worse.
You'll Never Believe A Man Can Fly continues this Thursday! Be sure to check back here for the second chapter then.
Mark Layne is 32 and lives in Florida, U.S.A. He's been drawing comics for 6 years now and has done work for Imperium Comics on their TRAILER PARK OF TERROR line. He's also currently working on a mini series for them Mark can be contacted on mlayne@yahoo.com.
