I was bitten by a radioactive Jesus

(continued from 7: The Pirate Plague, part one)

I did the only thing I could do: I fled. Hey, I’m not Jesus, I just have super Jesus powers. And they don’t include absolutely everything. I mean, would this nutcase have chased after Christ Our Lord? Of course not. He would have been overcome by the unconditional love that was radiating at him, and would have desisted and apologized. Is that a super power? I would say no. I would say that it was Divine Grace or something, which I, not being a deity, just do not have. But even if you think that such an ability (the ability to be too wonderful to mangle with a hook) is a super power, it’s not that surprising that I don’t have it. Does Spider-Man have a venomous bite? As I understand it he does not. Can he lay hundreds of eggs? Again, the answer is no. I hope.

I mention these speculations because they are actually what was going through my mind at the time. In such situations I can process an amazing volume of irrelevant thoughtage at supercomputer speeds. This is not a super Jesus power, but rather a super I’m-scared-out-of-my-wits power, which many, if not all of us possess.

So I fled. I made my way clumsily and discourteously to the aisle, and ran down the steps. To my credit I neither wet myself nor pitched head-over-heels to land craniofacially on an unyielding concrete surface. I made my way down the steps and down the little wheelchair ramp to the ground before I realized that the cyclopean guy with the meathook was not pursuing me. He was engaged in another battle back up in the stands, and seemed to have no interest in me. His opponent was a tube-top wearing mother of two who for some reason had a thick, ragged beard and was swaying drunkenly while laying about with a greasy paper nachos tray which she had apparently mistaken for a boarding cutlass.

Throughout the stands, in the pilots’ area, and everywhere else chaos was erupting. People were flailing at each other with whatever objects were at hand, which in the plane mechanics’ area meant enormous wrenches and things which made very realistic fencing sounds as they clashed, and which made really sickening “ka-thwunk” sounds when they hit someone’s skull. Some people were attempting to gouge out one of their eyes with drinking straws, and a few were trying, with an alarming degree of success, to remove their lower legs and replace them with the sticks upon which the “This Way to the Airshow” signs had been mounted. I could hear people nearby saying “Arrr” and calling each other “matey.” One man was asking a small boy “Have ye ever been ta sea, Billy?” in a way that I did not like at all, and a group of young locals in “Garth Brooks Used To Wear White T-Shirts Like These” t-shirts were attempting to make an elderly woman walk out on a segment of fiberglass bench that they had torn free and cantilevered into space at the top of the stands, its near end held down by the body of a large man who had been bashed unconscious with that very piece of bench. A girl of about ten waved some convincing-looking Letters of Marque and Reprisal in my face and kicked the crap out of my shin. A man in coveralls who was rushing madly toward the comically stubby Gee Bee race plane paused and shouted “Stand to and prepare to be boarded, swine!”

It was a nightmare. It was worse than Jacques Sores’ plunder of Havana, and uglier than the British cannon assault on Severndroog Island. The situation was more tense than the night after Drake took Cartagena, and more desperate than when the Spanish fleet trapped Morgan as he left Lake Maracaibo. People were turning into pirates everywhere I looked, and I didn’t know how to stop it. I ran around stupidly for a few minutes pleading for sanity and dodging aircraft tires and spare jeep wheel rims being fired from a cannon that someone with MacGyver’s ingenuity and speed but none of his unshakable virtue had made from an oil drum. At one point I made my way inside the announcer’s booth and grabbed a microphone from a confused Air Force noncom who seemed to believe it was a defective flintlock. I tried to remember the Sermon on the Mount, but I couldn’t even begin. Mom would have been a little disappointed that my Sunday School lessons at Calvert Methodist had produced so little result. If you could have stuck your nose in my ear and sniffed my brain at that moment you would have known immediately that my mind was overboiling like an unattended goulash. If only Leonard were here, I whimpered internally, he would know what to do.

But wait. Leonard had sent me here with a full knowledge of what I could and could not do with my super Jesus powers, and he wouldn’t have done so unless this was a job for Jesus-man (although I refuse to endorse that name). From this I could only conclude one thing. The piratical pandemonium which had overtaken this innocent air show must be a disease. If it was a disease, I could cure it.
So I gathered my courage, stood up tall, and prepared to emerge from announcer’s booth and deal with a madness that I desperately hoped was viral in nature and not caused by TV violence, as I wasn’t yet sure of how to cure the effects of media poisoning. There must have been something about my bearing as I pushed open the door, for the befuddled noncom from whom I had taken the microphone rushed to stand at my side and said “Orders, Cap’n?” in a weak parody of an Irish or Maybe Scottish accent.

“Yes, uh, me hardy,” I responded, “Keep me from getting my head bashed in as I, um, walk about the deck.”

“Aye aye,” he answered smartly.

to be continued…