A Chipmunk Comes Calling, Kevin Miller [best way to read ebooks TXT] 📗

The sound of chewing snapped me out of this incredible dream I was having about a redhead in a convertible: a glossy red Ferrari 454 Italia Spider with camel color leather interior and custom chrome wheels with the high performance, low-profile tires. I just wanted to drive it around the block four or five times and see what it could do, maybe hit the open road and really open it up. In my dream, I was just about to ask the redhead to scoot over and then sit in the driver’s seat when I heard the loud gnashing sound.

I could feel tingling and moisture on my arm, sharp teeth were tearing into my hand. Surprisingly, I couldn’t feel pain – I guess that’s the first stage of shock. I believe shock is appropriate when being chewed on by a very angry chipmunk. It serves me right for falling dead asleep in that old sagging oak tree in the middle of nowhere. The most important question I had at that time was not: what this pissed off rodent was doing snacking on my arm, but where were my pants?

Pants are strangely important when lost in the middle of nowhere. My keys, wallet, and a .40 S&W pistol with custom grips and extended magazine were all missing. I’m hoping they were together, waiting for me, maybe huddled together. After kindly removing my bloody appendage from the chipmunk’s mouth, and scolding the little rat for taking advantage of a passed out traveler, I sat up and looked around. The tree was the same, but last time I checked Earth had a blue sky, not green, and we only had one moon not five. I think this situation might bump the pants down to priority two.

The air smelled like rotten garbage mixed with old motor oil. The green sky was surprisingly clear and the five moons shone bright, lighting up the vast emptiness surrounding me. I’ve got an oak tree, a chipmunk, and no pants – what was in that last cocktail and this is either an incredibly vivid trip or the most elaborate hoax I’ve ever seen. I guess a distant third choice was that I wound up on some alien planet after having the most insane night ever.

Things started normal enough: dinner at Jimmy’s Fine Italian dining with my buddy Sal, then out to Bubble’s club on the west side – where there was this amazing act involving a…chipmunk! I knew I had seen that little guy before – he does good work! From there I was just a passenger in Ms. Cheeky LaPoosh’s limo. Cheeky kept plying me with lubricant to get me to talk about what I do for a living, but why would Cheeky be interested in a trauma monkey like me. I told her I worked the late shift at the Emergency Center on the south side, the one in the neighborhood where gunshot wounds were passed out like popsicles on a summer day at kid’s camp. My job was a lot like working in a Hong Kong sweat shop making Nike’s – keep on sewing and keep the stitching tight.

The limo stopped at a place called Flush and we all stumbled out. The bouncer recognized Cheeky and hurried us in and got us a private booth in the back. And that’s when thing got interesting, a bottle of some unrecognizable liquid and 3-4 bags filled with an assorted rainbow of pills. I wasn’t the type to participate – I usually just watched and waited for someone to pass out. I’m not sure if something fell into my drink or if it was deliberate, but I think I swallowed a green and a red, and maybe a blue. I do know that the room was spinning and I was on the floor.

I woke up in the back of the limo with Cheeky and Sal and 4-5 other people I didn’t recognize. There was a deep conversation about some pop psychology drivel, but I couldn’t hear it over the roar of the freight train running through my head. Someone handed me a glass of something and I drained it – thankfully it was only water. I leaned my head back against the window and closed my eyes.

I was startled awake by a gunshot and a scream, the smell of gunpowder was close so “we” must’ve done the shooting. Of course, the sound of the scream was also close, so “we” must’ve been shot! One of the girls with us shot Sal in the leg for having inappropriate body boundaries. Can’t say I blame her. But eight years as a trauma surgery in the nastiest hospital in the metro-area had prepared me for this moment. I doused the wound with a half-bottle of Vodka then used the ice cube grabber to dig into the wound to remove the bullet. My tie made a decent tourniquet and then my Armani shirt became a compress. Armani uses a specific type of wool found only in one particular area of Italy, it is known for its high-absorbance properties – in fact after a rain, the sheep usually can’t move because of the amount of rain they soaked up. Crisis averted, I took away the gun and stuffed it in my pocket – why did they need a .40 S&W pistol with custom chrome grips, easy-pull trigger, and extended 16-round high capacity magazine?

Sal was a little worn out at this point, but I was running on adrenaline. We dropped Sal off at his place, it was a dump – walking in you would think that the place was tossed by thieves looking for something, but no, Sal was just a slob. I made sure he was in bed with some pain killers. I figure I would check up on him tomorrow on the way to work. I glanced at the clock on the microwave while walking out the door, it screamed 3 A.M., plenty of night left.

I decided to hitch a ride back to my car with Cheeky. I had parked in a dimly light space on the second floor of the hospital parking garage. Cheeky invited me back to her place for a night cap. I figured it would be prudent to turn it down at this point and head home – plus after witnessing the shooting of my best friend, and the strange mixture of whatever I had taken earlier, I figured that would be the safest place for me.

Unlocking the door of my midnight black 2013 Mercedes-Benz AMG CLS63, I sat in the plush leather sport seat for a moment to catch my breath. I had expected a simple dinner and maybe a few drinks, instead I wound up hanging out with a stripper queen named Cheeky, a gun wielding psycho, and had one hell of a headache. Time to go home, take some Tylenol, (yes, Doctors really recommend it) and go to bed!

I backed out of my space carefully. Despite my foibles, I was a fairly cautious driver, mostly. I cruised down the spiral to the garage exit. The road was empty, so I gave it a blast with my right foot. The twin turbo V-8 engine roared 557 horses to life and left a decent strip of tire and smoke in my wake. The zero-to-sixty time of 4.2 seconds passed quickly and the speedometer told me I hit 100 mph in around 6 seconds.

Yellow lines blurred into a paste smeared behind me as I cruised on the highway. I decided to take the long winding road, the path I rarely travelled. I had the speedo pegged at about 110 mph when a deer bound out into the middle of the road. Hitting anything at that speed is like running full speed into a brick wall – it’s going to hurt and something will break.

Blood splattered the windshield. I went off the road straight into a tree. I heard the bang, slam, and smelled the acrid smoke pouring out of the engine compartment. Michael Bay would lead us to believe that the car would burst into flames at this point and then explode into a three-story fireball. Michael, fireballs don’t happen most of the time. The Mercedes was a crumpled mess. I survived, thank God for air bags. I opened the door – good engineering required that the door still be able to open in a catastrophic accident. The deer was in the middle of the road, writhing in pain.

I never shot anything before. But the poor bastard didn’t deserve to go out like this – suffering. The .40 S&W was a powerful round, but highly accurate – the bullet caught the deer just below the eye socket, leaving a small entry wound but the back of its skull was blown out onto the asphalt. I figure that was the most decent thing I’ve ever done in my life.

This is the point where I get a little fuzzy. I was standing there shaking from the crash and from putting the deer down and I remember a bright light. I heard a ringing in my ears and a loud sound like a bomb exploding – and no, it wasn’t the Mercedes exploding into a Bay-esque fireball, I checked.

And that’s when I woke up to being a chipmunk snack.

The green sky and the smell of the air had a disconcerting effect on my fragile mind. I had one weird night, but this was over the top. Where were my pants? I don’t swear much, but I feel that