By: Aithne
No, dear reader, this isn’t that kind of story. Stow your filthy imagination! This is a tale of journalistic ambition, beginning with me hunting for a story and my boyfriend, an off-duty peace officer, appearing at my doorstep. He accepted my offer to join the safari, clearly envisioning a quiet tour of the city. He was adorably mistaken.
We’d barely puttered a block in my little red car before I struck gold. Outside the Grind, a spectacle of pure, uncut Hathian chaos was in full swing. A blonde officer and a fiery redhead were engaged in a ‘cat-fight’, which in this town means a full-throttle WWE-style brawl, complete with body slams that rattled the pavement. This glorious display of sidewalk combat, worthy of pay-per-view, was all for a single prize: the officer’s hat, which the redhead had audaciously pilfered. As a random man drifted towards the fracas, my passenger, his internal alarm bells screaming, made the sensible-yet-seemingly-boring choice to alert the authorities via 911.
Who could have guessed such a trivial matter would detonate into such a magnificent disaster? I could. I absolutely could. My camera was already out, its lens ready to partake of the beautiful absurdity.
The action escalated with theatrical flair. The redhead, holding the hat hostage, brandished a Zippo lighter with the menace of a Bond villain threatening to set it ablaze. In response, the blonde officer, apparently having exhausted her entire supply of de-escalation tactics for the decade, drew her service weapon. The squabble over headwear was now officially a gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
While the threat of being perforated would stop me cold, Hathianites seem to view bullets as a minor inconvenience. The scene exploded. The man who had approached earlier sent a machete cartwheeling through the air as he dove for the sanctuary of a condemned fire trap. At that exact moment, the redhead launched a strategic, technicolor stream of vomit directly into the contested cap. I leaped from my car, my camera shutter clicking like a geiger counter in a meltdown, capturing every glorious, grotesque detail as the enraged officer delivered a brutal pistol-whip to the redhead.
Tires screeched as Officer Snakebite’s cruiser slammed to a halt, his expression a perfect portrait of a man staring into the abyss of paperwork. The now-soiled hat was launched like a disgusting discus, smacking the blonde officer. Another cop with a shock of white hair arrived just in time to witness the blonde officer fire a shot at the now fleeing, unarmed redhead.
I saw the dawning horror on Officer Snakebite’s face as he realized the situation had leaped from ‘manageable’ to ‘certifiably insane’. He had no idea how much further it had yet to spiral. I snapped more pictures as the brawl metastasized. New combatants swarmed in, including a wild-eyed woman armed with a baseball bat. I was in the eye of the storm, a frontline correspondent embedded in a warzone of flailing limbs and flying lead.
Then I heard a muffled suggestion about getting down, paired with a backhanded compliment to my posterior, before a hand seized the back of my jeans and unceremoniously yanked me to the ground. My camera met the pavement with a heart-shattering CRUNCH. My photos were safe on the data card, but my beautiful lens was a goner. My boyfriend, who failed to appreciate the sheer journalistic ecstasy of this ‘sombrero sh*t show,’ used my disadvantaged position to scoop me up and execute a tactical retreat.
His foresight was uncanny. My little red car, our former shelter, was now useless as the fray swelled around it. Officer Snakebite was stabbed, then immediately shot his attacker, who was then also promptly tased by the white-haired cop. The bat-wielding woman, a seemingly unstoppable force of nature, began wailing on that same white haired officer as she mounted the hood of my poor car, stomping dents into it with maniacal glee. A chemical weapon–some sort of gaseous Molotov cocktail–arced from the building, and the tide of battle turned against the HPD. Officer Snakebite, the white-haired cop, and another all went down. The last I saw of the blonde officer, she was dragging Snakebite’s unconscious form while protectively clutching her uniquely odorous hat.
As my boyfriend dragged me definitively from the scene, a massive HPD SUV with a Japanese rising sun painted on its roof came roaring in, its driver apparently ready to make a kamikaze run on the whole mess. I may never know the final outcome, but I do know my little red car is in the shop, being treated for a severe case of boot-shaped contusions.
The moral of the story? There is no problem so small that it can’t be made infinitely more interesting with the addition of a firearm, a machete, and strategic vomiting.
(Damage to personal property is to be expected and budgeted for accordingly.)
