Bounty Hunters have feelings too or "You can't kick a ghost in the testicles."

In which the mysterious return of Alexander Wagner recieves due attention and an ocarina is decimated.

Van Gag had very little time to comprehend exactly what was going on, so he just acted instinctively. He placed a foot powered by the Lord’s Momentum and Desperation into the crotch of Alexander Wagner, which sent the man previously believed to be dead cascading out of the window to become one with the concrete below. A lonely street artist, who would become the American Hitler in a very close reenactment of the moral fall and the political rise of Adolph Hitler decades ago, was just about to quit his attempts at providing art to the people. The man could barely draw, and his painting skills at their best could be outmatched by a blind toddler with extreme uncontrollable body spasms. Not even the most kind of people could force themselves to praise, much less buy this man’s squalid work; there was obvious love in the man’s artwork, but it was not enough to shine through the horrendously ugly image which invariably burned a terrible sight into the minds of anyone who viewed it. Who knew a watercolor of a daisy could cause nightmares among the bravest of souls? But the lonely street artist’s luck changed for the better when the body of Alexander Wagner exploded into pulpy, bloody goop all over the chalk sidewalk art that he was attempting.  Cursing so fast and with such fury that it sounded as if he were speaking in tongues, the lonely street artist ceased to notice the world around him, which was suddenly chattering with great excitement. The majority gawked and delighted at what they thought was a simple spreading of meat into an abstract pattern, but the few who saw the terrible demise of Alexander Wagner were puking in disgust. The sound of their retches synchronized in horrific, beautiful perfection with the claps and cheers of the crowd. Stunned, the lonely street artist looked between the bloody, disgusting ruin of a body and the cheering crowds. Doubtless to say, as soon as the smile spread across his lips, you could tell the lonely street artist was going to exploit this disturbing accident to its full financial potential. Later, he would drown in a bathtub full of money, but that was months away and irrelevant to the two figures fleeing the hotel.

           

Annie and Van Gag fled the hotel and nearly dived headfirst into an open taxi. The taxi peeled away and the man in the yellow hat, as well as his pet monkey, gave them the finger for taking his taxi. Annie was by far too freaked out by the apparent resurrection of Alexander Wagner to really notice, and Van Gag was busy polishing his ocarina to care. Where this ocarina came from was a mystery, but not so much as how a man who had had a puppet’s extended nose pierce straight through his head was enacting revenge on those responsible for his demise.

“VAN, WHY THE HELL IS A DEAD MAN HAUNTING US?!” demanded Annie with apparent fear and disturbance of mind.

“I hate when people call me Van. Those disgusting little kids-“

“VAN-“

“gnawing and pooping and vomiting on my seats-“

“VAN-“

“And of course a dead man would haunt us; that’s what we call a ghost-“

“VAN GAG! YOU CAN’T KICK A GHOST IN HIS TESTICLES AND SEND HIM FLYING OUT A GODDAMN WINDOW TO SPLATTER ON THE STREET BELOW!!”

Van sat silently in the taxi for a few moments as if seriously debating if you could or couldn’t indeed plant your foot into a ghost’s testicles and send him to mate with the pavement dozens of stories below.

            “Well, I suppose that’s true, but you can never rule out the impossible. Hell, I mean, Jesus Christ was a ginger and a possible lycanthrope, but-“

            “Van Gag. Who. The. Hell. Is. He? And WHY is he after us?!” said Annie through gritted teeth. She was seriously questioning that brief connection of friendship she had become aware of merely a few minutes before.

            “Creativity and Individuality have many opponents. The modern Republicans in America are notorious despisers of Creativity and Individuality, but this is far beyond their usual acts. Calling them terrorists of Life itself would be like labeling a murderer who had only killed once a genocidal maniac.”

            Annie prepared once again to verbally reprimand Van Gag again for his affinity with tangent-related distractions, when suddenly another car flew straight into the side of the car which Annie was sitting in. Their car slid viciously along the asphalt of the street as it flew into a tree of a nearby park. Three men in dark Italian suits climbed from the antagonistic vehicle; drawing guns from their suit pockets in synchronization. Bullets exploded from their respective chambers and flew like maniac birds into the windows of the car which held our two heroes like a Turkish prison. The driver was yelling at Annie and Van Gag in what seemed like tongues until after the bullet silenced him once and for all. She later realized he was just shouting in some queer mix of a Boston and Irish accent about not getting paid enough for this tripe. Damn right he was.

            The two crawled out of the wreckage like Allied soldiers on the beaches of Normandy; bullets thundering down around them like rain pounding violently against a favela. The vagabonds who slept in the park during those early morning hours scattered like rabbits at the horrifyingly loud sound of gunfire. One rather admirable fellow lost his pecker in the hail of bullets and simply shrugged his shoulder as if to say “s**t happens” and walked off silently. This same casual indifference could not be emulated by the heroes of our tale; Annie frantically scrambling around looking for places to flee while Van Gag looked down at his shattered stump of an ocarina with something akin to fury. Like Vincent Vega would have said if he were more of a mellow musical enthusiast:”You don’t just mess with a man’s ocarina. You just don’t.” In the deep recesses of his mind, the music playing during The Bride’s furious battle against the Crazy 88’s hummed synchronically with some kind of spaghetti western tune roared by a Spartan warrior amongst a field of enemies.

            Van Gag leapt from behind the shattered ruin of the car with cowboy pistol painted scarlet red and fired three furious projectiles into each of the three men. They all fell to the ground and cried death screams before realizing that they were not dead. In fact it was much worse than death.

            To this day no one can even quite explain where in the blue hell the cows came from. Big walking Rorschach blot tests with an affinity for pooping and eating in equal volume. No one could tell you how they got there, but anyone who saw those cows that day would tell you they had never seen something so horny in their entire lives. The men looked up from their spot on the ground and saw those horny cows staring at them from a small hill several dozen yards away. A wooden flute played beautifully as the cows stared into the men’s eyes with the most terrifying display of lust the men would ever see. After that they would always have nightmares of being shagged in endless farmlands by big burly humanoid cows that shrieked at them in the voices of those they had loved in ages past. To the men’s credit, they did not attempt to deny what was happening and ran like hell. Didn’t stop them from being furiously shagged in front of a coffee shop full of film school students who would go on to make documentaries about it, but they took the shagging as a sign to get out of their line or work.

            Annie looked up at Van Gag with a lock of amused shock as he danced on the wreckage of the car and said something akin to being “the next goddamn messiah”. It was a funny and glorious moment of victory for her until a brutal force slammed into the back of her head and made the world go black.

 

            Annie was sitting in an infinite blackness by herself. Endless nothing stretched out around her. The bleak and colorless wasteland was like some cruel mockery of her artistic being. Surely she must be in Hell-

            “Honey, this is no more hell than elementary school” sarcastically uttered a voice from the darkness. ‘A person!’ she thought to herself with maniac glee. ‘Another person!!’ But when she turned around and came face to face with Buffo, her gag reflex tingled unpleasantly. Not only was being stuck in endless nothing-Hell with Buffo for eternity an excruciatingly sickening thought, but his freakin Cuban cigar smelt like a doobie a cat had pissed in.

            “Oh great; I’m stuck in Hell with a creepy stalker clown who may be imaginary.”

            Buffo cackled and put out his cigar on the tips of his disgustingly filthy rainbow hair. Blood seeped slowly from the back of his head but it seemed to not bother him whatsoever.

            “If only you were so lucky” said Buffo, grabbing his crotch boorishly. Annie prepared a retort but couldn’t choke it out past her disgust. Buffo laughed sadistically and continued: “You’re just unconscious.”

            “What happened? Why am I unconscious?”

            “Do I look like the Oracle at Delphi to you? I’m some perverted part of your imagination or a perverted specter visible only to you. Either way I don’t know any more than you know at any time. Truthfully I don’t even know if I’m real or not. It’s a conundrum of sorts but I couldn’t care less as long as I get to look at your breasts.”

            Annie lunged forward to get rid of that tub of lard once and for all when he vomited a large Native American man from his mouth. The man tapped her cheeks and said something indistinguishable. The world was shifting and twisting and waxing grey as two other tongues suddenly burst into life and spoke in a rapid fire speech indistinguishable from cows shagging men or a man landing on the pavement in a bloody pulp after being kicked in the nuts. A piano plunked and a guitar string glided into a gyre and flute flew into finality. The whole thing exploded sideways and backwards and in thousands of directions imperceptible to the human mind. In paraphrase, she was hit pretty hard and coming out of unconsciousness was a head trip that really sucked. It was as if Baz Luhrman shared some LSD with

 

            Annie thrust forward in her chair and the Native American man backed up slowly. Two other men did the same slowly. Van looked as if he were stoned out of his mind on a cocktail of horse tranquilizers and weed; which was likely true in retrospect, considering he hadn’t made the men get violently shagged by cows.

            “I’m glad you’re alive,” said the Native American man. “My friends and I may be bounty hunter scum but we are not killers. Dead is not an option and alive.”

            “Well that’s…virtuous…of you.” said Annie as she struggled through the foggy haze of her senses.

            “Well, moral code and the fact that Allen Athena or whatever the heck her name is wants you alive.”

            “I knew there was a catch.”

            “Please don’t misrepresent us. We may capture people alive for money, but we are not killers and other such miscreants of society. We have standards and morals; family and friends. People, just like you.”

            “Life is sacred ma’am!” chirped in a small Irish man who naturally defied every Irish stereotype ever contrived. Next to him, an Australian man nodded curtly, as did the Native American man.

            “If life is so sacred why are you kidnapping people and selling them to whoever put the bounty out for them? I would rather die than go back to Owl Athena!”

            “Well,” chuckled the Native American man without humor. “When faced with the ugly luminescent visage of the bills, ones philosophies begin to crack a little.”

            Out from the microsecond of silence in between the end of his sentence and her planned retort came the voice of Van Gag:

            “PlEaSe…JuSt lEt uS gO.”

            “And why, I pray to ask you, should we do that?” inquired the Native American man with honest interest as he picked at the skin on his fingers.

            “dO yOU kNow wHAt tAntRiC sEX Is?”