To say today had been a bad day for Jeremy Bayer was an understatement.
It all started off pretty okay when he woke up and was able to reach the shower before his twin sisters stole it and all the hot water. But things had started to go downhill when he turned on the faucet and instead of nice, warm water pouring onto his head, Jeremy had faced a low groaning noise, then a tepid
splort
of something brackish and black and grimy.
"Great," Jeremy said, quietly, before turning the shower off.
That wasn't the only thing wrong with the plumbing.
With a flashlight caught between his teeth and his feet sticking out into the kitchen while his mom tried to cook breakfast for him and his sisters while packing herself up for her early morning shift, Jeremy had found the pipes that the half-mad, half-insane, half-malicious people who had built the cheap ass house that his deadbeat father had bought for the family before he'd fucking
bounced
and vanished into Las Vegas...were busted. Not only were they busted, they were growing something. Not only were they busted and growing something, but
somehow
, the showers and the faucets on the sink were both managing to break due to the exact same problem.
Jeremy had filed this away for something to deal with after his second afterschool job just in time to smell the scent of something burning.
"Shit!" Mom hissed. "Uh, honey, your...toast..."
The taste of the carbon char that was his breakfast hung around for the rest of Jeremy's morning, despite several shots at trying to wash it out with a stop at a few drinking fountains at school. It was at one of those fountains that his day got perceptibly worse by about one loosened tooth and a bloody nose because Morgan B. Clark decided that he was going to express his dissatisfaction at Jeremy's hard work by clocking him in the face with one meaty knuckle.
"Listen, Beyer!" Morgan snarled at Jeremy as he shoved him against the lockers and a few of the girls who were walking past tittered and took pictures on their phones for Twitter or TikTok or the websites that were for people who didn't still use a 2009 Nokia flip phone. "I got a fucking C+."
"Have you tried studying more?" Jeremy asked, his voice a bit dazed.
Right. Wrong question.
Morgan proved this by punching him in the stomach and leaving Jeremy wheezing. Morgan stepped backwards just enough to give some plausible deniability as a teacher cruised by and glanced at them before continuing to wherever the fuck he was going. Once the teacher was gone, Morgan pushed Jeremy back upright and glared at him.
"Remember, Bayer, I don't got time to read fucking Dances with Wolves or whatever," Morgan said. "I got shit to do. And if you don't want some of that shit to be kicking in your...shit, then, you'll get me better than a fucking C+. Got it?"
Jeremy knew that saying anything but 'Sure, Morgan, whatever you say, Morgan' would just get him another bruise. So, he nodded, and said: "Sure, Morgan. Whatever you say, Morgan."
Morgan nodded.
Then he punched him the stomach again.
Jeremy wheezed, fell to one knee, and gasped as Morgan leaned forward and whispered. "And tell your sisters to buy bigger condoms next time."
And he was off.
"Great. Yeah. Needed to know that you're fucking my sisters." Jeremy whispered, rubbing his stomach as he glanced up. The girls who were tittering and whispering to one another were leaving -- clearly, happy that the show was over. Oh, wait, no, they were being scared off by the frowning expression of Cindi Fong, the head of the cheer team and prettiest girl in school. Cindi's frown swept from them to him and went from a fierce 'come on, ladies' frown to a pitying look that...honestly, Jeremy was okay with.
Pity was better than the alternatives!
Mind numbing tedium for classes... followed by arriving at the cafeteria just in time for them to run out of the pepperoni pizza rectangles that tasted like cardboard, leaving Jeremy with nothing but the cheese pizza rectangles that tasted like boring cardboard... followed by mind numbing tedium for classes... followed by finding that his P.E shorts had been ripped right along the ass and he was going to have to pay for their replacements...
And, as the final bell rang, his crappy phone buzzed and Jeremy managed to flip it out while juggling his backpack and his textbooks, and found that his manager for the local branch of the Crazy Nick's Wing Dump needed him to take an extra shift. You know.
If he could.
Jeremy Bayer quietly closed his phone. Set his textbooks back into his locker. Slung his backpack down. Then he quietly put his head against the locker, closed his eyes, and contemplated returning to monkey. Just...forcibly de-evolving himself into a chimpanzee and running off to the local woods.
Knowing your luck,
he thought.
You will immediately be killed by the current alpha of the local chimp pack.
"Do chimps have packs?" he whispered, before starting to cram the books into his backpack. He'd have to run to make it to the bus to reach Crazy Nick's on time. And if he didn't reach Crazy Nick's, he'd be fired. If he was fired, then he'd lose the paycheck. If the family lost the paycheck, then his Mom wouldn't be able to pay for the house. If they weren't able to pay for the house, they'd all die on the street!
Jeremy took one step from the locker and heard the unmistakable RRRRRRIP of his second hand backpack's nylon deciding that twenty pounds of textbooks was just too much to deal with and giving up the ghost.
"Great," Jeremy whispered.
With his books in his arms and his backpack flopping off his back, Jeremy arrived at the bus stop just in time for the bus to cruise away, groaning and creaking as it headed away from the suburbs and towards downtown, where his job was.
"Great," Jeremy wheezed.
The shortcut that Jeremy tried to take between the bus station and Crazy Nick's required cutting through the finger of forest that had survived the centuries of infill and suburbanization that had consumed this portion of Washington. The rains from earlier in the month had left the loam thick, and the mud plentiful. This was why his legs swept out from under him as he tried to cut across a narrow defile and Jeremy felt the thick, gloppy stuff cushion his fall and skid alllllllllllllllllllll the way down to the bottom of the defile.
"Great!" Jeremy groaned, laying on his side.
That was when his eyes processed that he had come down within spitting distance of a pair of huge Army Surplus boots. The boots contained tree-trunk thick ankles, which were attached to meaty calves, which were attached to muscular thighs barely shrouded by some heavy duty jeans. Those thighs attached to hips, which supported a triangular mass of muscular flesh that, itself, was contained within a leather jacket, with long arms that were tipped by finger-less gloves that, themselves, were wrapped around sausage thick fingers and broad palms.
The teriminus of Jeremy's slow pan up along this figure, was a bald head that looked recently shaved, with a bulldog face, ruddy red features, and large sunglasses that screamed '
I am a pedophile, undercover cop, or FBI agent'
to the air. Just, pure shadiness. Shady sunglasses. Hah. Jeremy would have laughed, if he hadn't noticed that the man was holding a fucking machete in his meaty palm.
"Great," Jeremy whispered.
"Leave," the man growled. Jeremy rolled onto his back, ignoring his lost textbooks, and scrambled backwards. The man glared at him through those sunglasses -- but the instant that Jeremy was out of his immediate reach, he turned back to what he was doing, which was...
Advancing towards five eggs.
The eggs each seemed to be about the size Jeremy's head -- meaning they were the biggest eggs that Jeremy had ever seen in his entire life -- and each one was a different color. One was bright coppery-bronzey and it was nestled up against an egg that was nearly the same color as the sky in the two, three days of the year where it wasn't gray and raining. Next to that egg was an egg that was even redder than Mr. Machete's head (and considerably more attractive, all things considered), while the next two eggs were both shining metallic colors: Silver for the first and...a kind of glossy black with silver highlights along the pebbly surface.
The man lifted his machete.
Jeremy Bayer was not vegan. He liked red meat. He enjoyed omelets. He had never ridden a horse, but if he had been given the chance to do so, he was pretty sure he'd have at least wanted to
try
it. But even so, there was a big part of him that had a whole lot of unease around the ways humanity had been...really kind of shitty to animals. Part of that was inculcated by an early life exposure to images of a chicken factory farm by one of the more eager to traumatize PETA members that had ambushed him on the way to elementary school. Part of that was just an innate sense of justice. Humans were sentient. Had fingers. Thumbs. Guns. Nuclear bombs. Like, if one side had atomic bombs and the other side was 'a cow', then it was kind of incumbent for the guys with nukes to be nice to the cows.
When Jeremy had tried to explain this idea to his fellow classmates, he'd been laughed at.
Right now, after the day he'd had, Jeremy didn't want to
explain
shit.
He just saw a man, about to mercilessly smash up some random eggs for no good reason, and he thought...
Fuck this
.
Jeremy grabbed his Biology textbook -- a meaty four hundred page snoozer that could be used to anchor boats -- off the muddy ground where he had dropped it...and he threw it directly at Mr. Machete's head. The book was not exactly on par with a throwing spear or boomerang or one of those throwing stars that ninjas used.
But on the other hand, Mr. Machete was pretty damn close.
And his head was pretty damn big.
The book thunked into the back of Mr. Machete's head and he stumbled forward, his machete flashing wildly as he fell forward. "Ow!" He grunted as Jeremy scrambled to his feet. He grabbed up a hunk of mud and threw it directly into Mr. Machete's face as the dude swung around. This forced Mr. Machete to scrabble at his eyes as Jeremy snatched up his math textbook -- which was
even bigger
and even more boring than Bio, if you could believe it -- and smashed it into Mr. Machete's face as hard as he could.
Something crunched and Mr. Machete sprawled onto his back, dropping his namesake as he splatted onto the mud.
Jeremy stood, panting, above the prone figure, then swung his tattered backpack around. He crammed each egg inside of the backpack, clutched it to his chest, and began to run as, behind him, Mr. Machete groaned and reached towards his broken nose.
"Great, great, great, great!" Jeremy hissed with every footstep, his face streaming with sweat. "
Great
!"
