Part Two
“¡Dios mío!
What’re you?! Some kind of Christmas chupacabra?!”
The Grinch barely comprehended what Carlos meant. “A
cup-of-what? What did you call me?!” He gazed around at the rooftop he stood
upon. “Better question: where’s my sled? And my dog, Max?” He then walked over
to the edge and surveyed the neighborhood down below, taken aback by how
devastated it appeared. “Wow. Definitely not in Whoville anymore.”
Carlos couldn’t get over the Grinch’s alarming
appearance. It was like a Halloween costume worn two months too late. And yet,
it gave Carlos quite the solution to his current dilemma. “Hey, you, chupacabra,” he called to the Grinch.
“How’d you like to get paid?”
The Grinch’s curiosity piqued at the proposal. “How much
we’re talkin’?”
“Enough to make you a happy man…err…whatever…for life!”
The Grinch earnestly considered. “What I gotta do?”
Carlos joined him at the edge of the rooftop and pointed
towards the one building on the devastated block that was virtually brand new.
“All ya gotta do is spook out the folks in that building over there. I’ll take
them away from their Christmas party and bring them on their roof, and you’ll scare them so bad, they’ll never wanna come
back!”
The Grinch grinned large and wide
over Carlos’s devilish plan. “I like it,” he told him, “especially the part
where we ruin their Christmas!”
-------------------
The Christmas Eve party in Frank’s Café was in full-swing. It was the happiest that the leftover tenants had been in a long time, and all it took was a little “miracle” that Lindy brought to their bleak lives, with a little help from her “friends.” And while Lindy had lots of fun with her new friends, she was compelled to return to her TARDIS on the apartment rooftop and check on those other friends of hers.
Her departure from the party didn’t go unnoticed by Harry
Noble, who was the only one to have seen her leaving. Enquiringly, he followed
her, keeping himself at a distance far enough to avoid being seen yet close
enough to keep up with the young Australian woman. All those spy movies he
spent hours watching really paid off. But none of those movies prepared him for
what he followed Lindy to on the roof: a tall, black rectangular alien solid of
some kind. A door had opened on what Harry assumed to be its front side,
revealing an inside that was endlessly (and impossibly) bigger and roomier than
its outside.
Lindy walked right through the door, which might as well
have been a portal to another dimension. Harry continued following her inside,
stepping into a giant room that was like the inside of a spaceship. “Toto, I’ve
a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” Harry muttered to himself (his mental
disability made him quote from the programs he watched, which was the only way
he communicated).
“Mr. Noble?” he heard Lindy address him, appearing from
one end of the large, ultramodern room. She unintentionally frightened him. He ever-so-slightly
backed from her as she tried to approach. Noting his fear, she peaceably raised
her hands and assured him, “I’m not going to hurt you, Mr. Noble. You’re more
than welcomed here in my TARDIS – short for ‘Time And Relative Dimensions In
Space’.”
Harry again looked around at the alien interior design,
from the control console at the center to the large viewscreen directly across
from it. “You’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone,” he said of this
stunning discovery.
Lindy chuckled at the reference. “Well…not quite, Mr.
Noble. That’s a completely different place…that I may have been to, once or
twice.” She took one of Harry’s big, burly hands and led him further into her
ship. “I’m so glad you’re here. You can witness with me the most beautiful
miracle ever.” She brought Harry to a room that resembled a workshop where he
was surprised to see two small, saucer-like alien beings sitting atop a
worktable. “Harry, these are my friends: the Fix-Its,” Lindy introduced. “And
they’re about to be parents.”
Sure enough, the “Mother” Fix-It was being tended to by
the “Father” one until the minute she was ready to give birth. The process was
a bit chaotic and involved sparks and explosions of light. The “Mother” Fix-It
hovered a few feet off the worktable, rattling violently. Three tiny ships then
fell out from a port within her undercarriage – her three newborns. Two of them
flickered with life straightaway, hopping about the worktable on two small
legs, while the third didn’t move at all.
“Awww,” Lindy lamented as she scooped the tiny stillborn
in her hands. “This little one’s still sleeping.”
“Batteries not included,” Harry sadly parroted a common
advertisement phrase.
“It’s alright, Mr. Noble,” Lindy reassured with a smile,
“because we bring good things to life.”
She proceeded in aiming the tip of her sonic screwdriver
at the tiny stillborn and gave a few short pulses from it. It was just the
pick-me-up that the third Fix-It newborn needed to spring to life right in the
palm of Lindy’s hand, much to her and Harry’s delight.
The happy moment was suddenly disrupted by a voice boasting
just outside Lindy’s TARDIS. She and Harry stepped out to see a green-furred
man in a rough-and-ready Santa suit repeating in various tones, “I’ve come to
steal your Christmas!”
“Whose Christmas?” Lindy asked, only to realize
thereafter that this man was none other than the Grinch of Whoville. “What’re you doing here?”
“Well, I…uh…I’m…” The Grinch stammered on an explanation,
only to refuse on it and counter Lindy’s inquiry. “What’re you doing here?”
Lindy circled around the Grinch, curiously examining him.
“It’s pretty obvious that you’ve gotten here through one
of the rifts,” she said.
“Would you stop…whatever it is that you’re doing?!” The
Grinch demanded, prompting Lindy to discontinue analyzing him. “If you must
know why I’m here, I’m here to ruin
Christmas for the people in this building – me and my new friend, Carlito.”
“You mean Carlos?” Lindy corrected him.
“Yeah, something like that,” the Grinch passively verified.
This news alarmed Harry, but Lindy remained calm. “I
don’t believe your plan’s gonna go the way you think, Mr. Grinch.”
“Is that so?” the Grinch contested. “And what makes you so sure?”
“Another Christmas miracle,” Lindy
simply replied.
--------------------
Dollar signs floated all across Carlos’s line of vision.
He already imagined himself walking into Lacey’s office and Lacey himself
handing over the million-dollar paycheck for a job well done. The Grinch was at
his position on the roof of the renovated building, leaving Carlos to set their
scheme in motion.
He was about to enter Frank’s Café to “warn” the Rileys
and their fellow tenants of the “creature” he saw on the roof of their
apartment. But then a greasy-looking man in a cheap suit approached him and
asked, “You’re Carlos, right?”
Carlos warily gazed up and down at the man. He was
lugging a suitcase in one hand. “Who are you?” Carlos questioned him. “Did
Lacey hire you? That ain’t right, man! I’m getting the job done right now! So
you can go and tell him…” He paused just as soon as he whiffed what could’ve
only been gasoline from the man’s suitcase. “Hey, what you got in there, man?”
“Enough to burn this whole place to the ground,” the man
said.
Carlos’s chocolate brown eyes flared in furious
realization. “You’re an arsonist! He didn’t trust me with this job, so he goes
and hires an arsonist?!”
“Don’t take it so personal, kid,” the arsonist mocked
him. “Ya just didn’t have what it took.” That comment earned him a swift and
unanticipated punch to the face by Carlos. It was vigorous enough to send the
arsonist falling into a collection of steel garbage cans nearby. His suitcase
fell to the ground, popping open and spilling all of its contents out all over
the sidewalk – including the gasoline Carlos smelled.
The ruckus that the two men stirred attracted the
attention of the entire neighborhood and even the tenants inside the very
building they fought over. Mason, Marisa, and the Rileys rushed outside to find
Carlos threateningly standing over the arsonist he clocked.
“What is going on here?” Frank inquired.
Mason discovered the spilled contents of the arsonist’s
suitcase, recognizing who the man was and his purpose for being at their
apartment. “He was going to burn our place up – and with us inside!” Mason went right away in going back inside and calling
the police, making sure to note Lacey’s involvement in it. Meanwhile, Marisa
and Frank held the arsonist at bay; Frank pinned him down with a broom handle.
Faye ecstatically hugged Carlos. “You saved us, Bobby,”
she told him, still confusing him for her departed son. “You’re a hero!”
Carlos hadn’t predicted this turn of
events. He initially set out to scare away the Rileys and their fellow tenants.
Now he was just thankful to have kept them from suffering a horrible fate. And
that feeling was worth more than any money that sleaze-ball Lacey would’ve
given him. He’s gonna need it to bail
himself out of prison!
-----------------
“Christmas miracles? Bleh!” the Grinch scoffed. “What a load of…!”
As ready as he was to contend with Lindy’s claim, he was
interrupted by flashes of blue and red lights that he sensed at the corner of
his eye. Glimpsing over the edge of the rooftop, he saw a police car that
pulled up in front of Frank’s Café. A man that the Grinch thought at first was
Carlos was loaded into the back in handcuffs. In fact, Carlos was leading the
massive crowd of people (including those he and the Grinch were supposed to
have been scaring out of the building) in a Christmas carol.
The scene brought a warm smile to the faces of Lindy and
Harry. “Well, would you look at that – it’s another Christmas miracle,” Lindy
cunningly observed.
The Grinch was flabbergasted. “B-B-But…I don’t
understand! We had such a great Christmas-ruining plan! It was foolproof! It
was ingenious and it would’ve made both
of us rich beyond our wildest dreams! Why would he throw it all away like that
for Christmas of all things?!”
“Because Christmas isn’t just ribbons, tags, packages,
boxes, or bags,” Lindy told the Grinch. “Christmas doesn’t come from money or
even a store.”
“Christmas means a little bit more,” Harry finished. He knew the story, too.
Hands on his hips, the Grinch dismissed the sentiment,
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!”
Amused by his rejection of his own logic, Lindy
reflected, “You’re certainly different from the other Grinches I’ve met.”
The Grinch’s ears (if he had them) prickled from her remark.
“Other
Grinches?” he echoed specifically those words, a look of wonder masking his
furry green face. “You’ve actually met other
Grinches? M-My whole life…I thought there was no one else like me.”
Discerning the warmth swelling inside him, which may or
may not have encompassed a small heart that grew three sizes, Lindy invited the
Grinch, “Why don’t you come with me in my TARDIS and I’ll introduce you to
them. It’ll be my Christmas gift to you.”
And so, the Grinch accepted the Gladiator’s invite. Even
Harry Noble joined the two strangers from beyond his world, all of them
entering the Type-Z TARDIS, leaving the dimension, and entering the infinite DC
for a new journey.
No comments:
Post a Comment