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Robot Hobo
May 18, 2002

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Robot Hobo
May 18, 2002

robothobo.com

I went for 666 words. It's a nice, round number.

Bring the Light

“Ok,” I asked, rubbing my temples while I waited for the ibuprofen to kick in, “Tell me once more exactly what happened in there.”

“What, again?”

“Yeah. We’re going to keep doing this until it makes some kind of sense.”

The man across the table from me shifted in his seat impatiently and absentmindedly fiddled with his handcuffs. “poo poo, man. If that’s the case then we ain’t never gonna be done here.”

The higher-ups had demanded answers. That involved questions, which meant dragging my rear end to work on my night off to ask them. There weren’t many, just the same few queries, repeated ad nauseam. The worst part wasn’t a lack of answers. I had matching accounts from the three remaining inmates so far, but there’s no way in hell I could put them in my report.

With a resigned sigh, the exhausted-looking inmate wiped a bit more soot off of his grubby face and started recanting his story once more from the beginning.

“It was dinnertime in the mess hall. Nothing special was going on that night, we were all just shootin’ the poo poo and eating our meatloaf. Normal night until… until that new guy started shouting. I never heard his name, don’t think anyone did. He’d shown up just that morning, nobody paid him any attention until then.”

“And what was this man saying?” I asked for at least the thirtieth time that night.

“Crazy poo poo. Dude started screaming that he was a goddamn demon from hell, that he was here to save us from… I don’t know, man. Save us from something, anyway. He wasn’t making a lot of sense to begin with, and his accent wasn’t helping.”

We had no idea who this mystery man was either. He didn’t match the description of anyone who should have been in the hall that evening, and there’s no recent arrivals that aren’t already accounted for.

“You say he had an accent? What kind?”

My witness tilted his head back in thought for a moment, staring at the ceiling. Then he leaned forward again and met my eye. “Maybe German, or Russian. Maybe fuckin’ Klingon. I was across the room from him anyway. That’s why I’m still… y’know…”

“Alive?”

The man swallowed and nodded. “Yeah. Anyway, dude said something about a prison of flesh. I remember that one line, he kept saying it. Started asking around for a lighter. They’re contraband, but not the kind anyone really cares much about, so they’re around. He offered to trade cigarettes for one, and pulled a pack out of somewhere.”

“Just one pack?”

“At first. Nobody took his offer, so he pulled out a second, then a third. This started getting him attention. He kept doing it, until he had pulled ten pristine packs of smokes from thin air. At this point, one of the guys stepped forward and handed him a lighter, I think just to see his next trick.”

“And then?”

“The crazy fucker took it and lit himself on fire! He started with his hair, but somehow it spread to the rest of his body, and fast. Before anyone knew what was going on, there was this man on fire, laughing and… growing. Within a few seconds I swear he was at least twelve feet tall! He kept laughing, and his voice got real deep. The the trays on the tables were rattling, smoke poured from his eyes, and the whole place smelled like rotten eggs and dogshit.”

“And then?”

“And then I flipped my table over and hid. Nothin’ after that, just curled up and hid until it was quiet. When I looked up… well you know the rest. You saw the crater, the lava, that white throne sitting in the middle of it all. What the hell does it mean?”

I balled up my notes and tossed them into the corner with all the rest.

“Well," I sighed, "I don’t think we can call this place the ‘City of Angels’ anymore.”

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