One might expect to see dramatic dust floating in the wind as a hero steps forth to do battle with the greatest of foes. If one were expecting this about a half demon trying to steal sandwiches from kindergartners, one would be sorely mistaken. There was a bit of trash that blew about as Steve led his companions down the French Quarter’s Decatur Street, but this collided with Burney’s leg and was quickly incinerated.
Alone save for the hell knight, the Judge, and the tortured soul, Steve surveyed the enemy. Hundreds of children swarmed a small café at a fork in the narrow, stone-paved street. Like fish scrambling for feed, they shoved at the too-few servers. Unoccupied bars and an old book shop flanked the sides of the café. Adults and angels, wearing normal clothes to disguise their holy presence, herded children by the armload toward the paper-wrapped sandwiches.
It was a good day for mustard.
“Burney,” Steve said. “You’re up.”
Burney cracked his knuckles, and screamed.
When a man screams in public, it causes a flurry of attention. People look to a grown man screaming in terror with a sudden shared sense of dread. It’s instinctual, a herd-learned mentality to signal coming danger. This will cause people to immediately search for the source of the fear. When the source is that this man is on fire, the fear can be quite powerful. It also helped that Burney was singing Camptown Races. Of course, all it actually sounded like was “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
The reaction of seeing a man on fire running straight at them made half the group of people gathered at the café flee. Mostly it was self-preservation, hoping to escape whatever had lit Burney on fire, but it was also because Burney was a terrible singer. He was also trying to hug as many people as he could.
Angels in street attire like plain-clothes policemen took notice of the terribly singing, burning man and stood their ground amidst the fleeing people. They weren’t quite sure what to do, and the children seemed to think Burney somewhat funny, and great fun to pelt with empty ketchup packets.
“Dawn, your turn,” Steve said.
“On Chris! Bill! Rachel! Harriet!” Dawn shouted. With each name she tossed a bunny into the air. “Jill! Harold! Matthew!” With each toss the furry creatures hit the pavement, dashing toward the sandwich-devouring cluster of children and angels.
“Juan!” Dawn shouted, and another bunny joined the fray.
“Josiah!” Dawn cried, and sent a white fuzzball toward the children.
“Dave!” Dawn roared, and ten thousand bunny rabbits burst into existence above her head. They came down with a cataclysm of adorable fluffiness and strode forward in a tidal wave of homicidal fur.
“Why do you shout their names?” Steve asked.
“I name all the bunnies.”
“Every one of them?”
“I have a lot of Daves.”
The children and the angels were completely unprepared for ten thousand and nine bunny rabbits to come rushing at them out of nowhere. And of course the sound of ten thousand and nine bunny rabbits running all at once is not a sound one might normally encounter in life. It is exactly what one might think the sound of ten thousand and nine tiny, furry feet repeatedly hitting the pavement would sound like. And the witnesses’ psyches reacted with about an expected level of incomprehension.
Frozen in terror for the approaching wall of white fur, it wasn’t until the first child screamed in cute-overwhelmed terror that anyone gathered the strength of mind to react. Darting each and every direction at the last minute, several dozen children and angels were able to dodge the onslaught before the bunnies swarmed in and around the café’s customers.
The children ran away, abandoning the line to get more sandwiches. Those who didn’t were carried away as the bunnies scooped up the children like adorable worker ants and raced toward Bourbon Street. Unfortunately, the bunnies did not realize that the children would be barred from entering most of the establishments on that street of fun and adult entertainment, and that the bunnies themselves would be barred for being bunnies. No amount of protests or screams from frightened bunny-kidnapped children could overcome this refusal of service.
While most of the bunnies were able to either drag children off to be denied entry into houses of ill-repute or simply chase the children away, a significant portion faced fierce resistance from the angels. The angels were far too large to be scared or carried off by the bunnies. And besides, they had absolutely no desire to visit Bourbon Street. They got plenty of that and more in heaven, and with good tequila in their mixed drinks, not the cheap stuff passed off to tourists.
Tearing off their jackets and cloaks that hid their wings and heavenly armor, ten angels revealed themselves to the public so they might do battle with the furry attackers. They revealed golden swords and quoted scripture while striking down the demonic bunny rabbits. Bunny blood soon sprayed against the walls of the café the angels guarded as the adorable critters valiantly attacked the angels. The scene was quickly resembling the most twisted stained glass window concept art ever witnessed by church-going folk. Of course if scenes like that occurred more in the bible, it would make for much cooler stained glass windows.
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Steve, making a mental note to see if he could find a good stained glass window maker, held up his hand. “Ready Gore?” he asked.
The sword of fury blazed with a black-wreathed flame and darkened the sky above the Dark Lord Gore as he unsheathed his demonic weapon. “I need a good war cry,” Gore said.
“Not now. Wait for my signal.”
“For sandwich?”
Steve was waiting for the right moment, when the angels would begin to press together in the bunny melee. “Hold.”
“For the antichrist? Nah, too cliché.”
“Now!” Steve shouted, and like he was commanding a Roman legion to charge, he threw his fisted hand forward.
Gore was more powerful than a Roman legion, and had on one notable incident faced off against three Roman legions under the command of Emperor Caligula. It was considered a neutral affair in the realm of evil-vs-evil combat, and had won Gore quite a few bets with his demonic peers. And thus, the Dark Lord Gore, Emperor-humiliator, nation-defiler, stronger than three legions, charged to do battle with the forces of heaven roaring his battle-cry, “For pickles!”
The angels had just enough time to contemplate how awesome their bunny battle would look when they immortalized it in a stained glass window in their favorite bar in heaven before the black-armored hell knight slammed into their clustered bodies. Gore hit them like a horned freight train, shattering swords along with the hopes of having a cool stained glass window to brag to the Angel Michael about.
Wasting no time in his surprise assault, Gore swung his sword against the armored side of the nearest angel. A few bunnies were incinerated in the swing, but that merely accentuated the angel-hurling blow. Like a master samurai swordsman, Gore ducked beneath a coming strike and whirled, cutting out the feet of three engaging angels. He then sprang from the ground to deliver a Spartan blow to the chest of another angel who dared raise his sword.
Then Gore tapped another angel on the head with his knuckles. “Knock-knock,” he said.
The angel responded by striking at Gore’s black heart.
Gore easily deflected the blow with a swipe of his gauntleted fist, and then repeated the tap on the angel’s head. “I said knock-knock!”
The angel again tried to strike Gore, this time with a blow to the legs. Gore tilted his sword like an Olympic fencer and blocked the blow, then he rammed his fist into the top of the angel’s head, hammering him into the pavement like a railroad spike.
“You’re supposed to say who’s there!” Gore roared.
Only one angel remained in the group that had previously been doing so well against the unarmed bunny rabbits. This angel, knees shaking, stood his ground against the hell knight with golden sword held at the ready.
“You!” Gore challenged, pointing his sword at the angel. “Knock-knock.”
While Gore was busy with the angels, Burney was busy keeping everyone in a square block fearful for something that had set a very fast-running man on fire. All this while Dawn struggled with figuring out new names for bunnies other than “Dave.”
His distractions firmly established, Steve saw his break, and rushed toward the café.
Steve had to dodge what was essentially a twisted nightmare of a Christmas card. He sprinted around the bodies of bunnies and unconscious angels and entered the café, stepping over its one-step threshold and onto its creaking wooden floor. The boards protested Steve’s approach to the cash register as Steve surveyed a black chalkboard menu hanging over a single counter. The heavily used chalkboard had been recently wiped clean, and only read Free sandwiches.
Steve stepped around a ruined motorcycle on the café’s floor to place his order. “I’ll have a sandwich please,” Steve said to the understandably terrified last remaining server.
Understandably, the server did not immediately respond.
“One sandwich please,” Steve said, raising a finger in case that might help.
The server responded by hiding under the cash register and crying. Again, understandably.
“Hello! Paying customer here!” Steve said, leaning over the ketchup and mustard pack-strewn counter to wave at the server. “Or, I would be if it wasn’t free. I’m not a kid so I’ll probably be a paying customer. But I can tip you if you want.”
“There’s no more sandwiches,” the server blurted out through a wash of understandably-justified tears.
“No sandwiches?”
“We ran out five minutes ago! Kids ate them all! Please don’t kill me!”
“Do you know a place that still has any?”
“Try Jax! They’re big, they should still have sandwiches.”
“Thank you very much,” Steve said, and tilted his hat in gratitude. This allowed the server to see Steve’s horns, and the server promptly feinted. Again, completely understandably.
“Fall back!” Steve shouted as he exited the café.
“Femur? I barely know ‘er!” Gore said, adding a punch to his punchline. The angel he’d been fighting fell to join his unconscious brothers, laughing at neither the punch nor the punchline. “Ah, you angels got no sense of humor.”
“Burney, Dawn, follow me!”
“No sandwich?” Dawn asked, gathering bunnies around her.
“They’re out. There’s one more place we can try, though,” Steve said.
Burney realized that his companions were no longer fighting, and ran toward them. He let out a scream of a question.
“No we’re not going to make another bunny sandwich, we already know those are terrible,” Steve said.
Burney screamed in relief.
“Then to the next locale. Gore desires to share more knock-knock jokes,” Gore declared while cleaning his sword on the wings of his recently defeated foe.
Steve led the rush of his companions, and several thousand remaining bunnies, back toward Jackson Square.
The Jackson Brewery, or Jax, is in a large building at the river’s edge. It’s a short run from Jackson Square along the brick-paved boardwalk lining the Mississippi River. Despite its name, they don’t actually make beer at the Jackson Brewery. It used to be a brewery, hence the name, but has been converted into a shopping center with a particularly good bistro restaurant at its center. When Steve and his companions reached the boardwalk, however, they immediately froze at what they saw.
Thousands of children of all races and creeds flocked in a jolly melting pot of Americana and goodwill to the many entrances of the Jackson Brewery restaurant. They smiled the smile of children given free food, and laughed amongst the company of police officers who guarded their happiness, nuns who prayed for their well-being, adults who were there to take them and their full bellies home, and forty angels standing in phalanx formation to wall them off from the forces of evil.
“There’s going to be a lot of collateral damage this time,” Gore declared, readying his sword.