90_Minutes_to_Live (35 page)

“Yeah,” Mack agreed. “Especially after the workout we just had today. Besides, I’ve been meaning to try out some of those karate moves I’ve been learning.”

“Me too,” Stretch agreed. “Don’t forget we do that together.”

“Yeah,” replied Mack. “Like everything else we do!”

At that moment they were cornered by the alien forces but before the commander could raise his blaster to stun the duo—or any of the others could, either—Stretch’s long leg came out, hit the commander’s wrist, and kicked the blaster into a nearby clump of grass. While Mack didn’t have her partner’s length, she was able to connect with a couple of the others’ bodies to make them do the same.

“Stupid females!” the commander cursed. “Do you not know who you are
dealing with here?
”

“No!” countered Mack. “And apparently
you
don’t either! Let’s get ‘em, Stretch!”

“Right behind you buddy,” responded the taller girl.

The next few minutes passed in a blur as the two Earth girls boxed, wrestled and karate kicked their way through the battle lines. Red wounds soon decorated the alien’s bodies, as Mack and Stretch were their equals in size and strength, if not even their superiors. Of the nine aliens comprising the unit, only the commander ended up unscathed. Mack rushed in to a swarm of three of them, wrestling one into submission. She knocked another out with a stone-cold knockout punch and broke the third one’s back with a kick directed firmly at his spinal column. Yet these achievements on her part were dwarfed by what Stretch was able to do to the others.

Given that, at six-foot-five, she was already considerably taller than the tallest Prosperian. She had that significant advantage but her great strength and keen athletic mind were two more attributes most of the alien race did not possess. She was able to stop the first, simply by throwing her mighty fist in his face, which caused him to fall down dead. Two others grabbed her arms to check her but she grabbed both of them by their wrists and threw them far away. The remaining alien was more successful in fighting her. He grabbed a stick, modified from a tree branch and knocked her to the ground when she was not looking. Though humbled by this, she was not wounded and proved this by grabbing him from behind and punching a hole directly through his stomach.

Finally, the commander, who had been knocked out earlier, ended the fracas by firing a beam of hot light directly at Stretch’s back, which rendered her unconscious. Hearing Stretch’s shriek of pain, Mack went to investigate and she too was incapacitated by a similar beam. The captain took their limp bodies and loaded Mack and Stretch back onto the ship for presentation to Commander Hamlet.

IV.

Gagged with silk handkerchiefs and bound in Prosperian chains, Mack and Stretch were awakened, stood up, and presented to the commander. When they had their gags removed, they angrily cursed their captors and all of their ancestors before Hamlet finally slapped them to get them to stop. They reeled from the blows, so weakened and humiliated were they from their recent ordeals.

“So,” Hamlet scoffed, once they were alone together in the room, “you are the ones attempting to halt Prospero’s conquest of your Earth, are you?”

“Yeah,” said Mack, “only we don’t know what you’re
talking about
!”

“Then understand
this
, children.” The irony of his having to look up to their taller bodies to say this was entirely lost on him. “We of the planet Prospero are in a difficult social and economic situation and we intend to use your Earth as a means of….replenishing the treasury, as it were.”

“And you think we’re gonna help you?...‘cause we’re sorcerers and we can fight off your men and we got strength and brains and all that?” argued Mack dismissively. “Well, forget it dumbass! Stretch and I don’t work for no one except ourselves. Right Stretch?”

The taller girl grunted a non-verbal assent to her friend’s claims.

“Oh, we do not require your
assistance
!” Hamlet said icily. “We merely want to destroy both of you, since you are the principal obstacles towards gaining our goal!”

“WHAT?” Mack and Stretch both shouted.

“Yes ladies!” Hamlet continued. “It would seem that your liquidation is now required. So you had best be saying your prayers—or whatever it is you Earthlings do before you meet your maker—since it will shortly be that time.”

“The
hell
it will!” shouted Stretch, objecting violently, as were most of her objections. “I’m gonna bust these chains and free Mack and me. And then
you’ve had it
!”

“She’s not lying!” Mack warned, as Stretch began straining every muscle of her body to achieve that superhuman feat. “I’ve seen her do stuff no other girl can ever do! Why, in only one minute, she can in two minutes…five minutes…ten…half an hour, for sure!” Then, in
sotto voce
to her partner, she pleaded: “Come on Stretch! Put it all in there! Show him what you can do!”

“I…can’t Mack!” Stretch whined as her strength began to wane and the chains grew tighter. “This stuff is…unbreakable!
Nobody
can do it!”

“
What
?” Mack said out loud, angrily. Then to Hamlet: “How
dare
you! You humiliated her!
Nobody
does that to us and gets away with it, understand?
Nobody
!”

“She is far from the last strong person who has been humiliated by the chains of Prospero,” Hamlet intoned. “You will find there are many more who tried resisting us by those means and found them difficult, if not impossible to resist.”

He picked up a wand and a sugar bowl-shaped dish and uttered a short, inaudible chant as he tapped the wand against it.

“What the hell are you
doing
?” Mack demanded.

“You will find out soon enough!” Hamlet countered.

Indeed they did. Jets of blue flame covered Mack and Stretch’s bodies and shook them around the room like rag dolls. Then, when they had seemingly survived this most violent and unladylike of treatments, both experienced severe pains in their abdomens which threw them firmly to the ground.

“What did you
do
to us?” Stretch demanded.

“I merely rendered you incapable of ever casting a spell again,” Hamlet pronounced. “That is particularly true for Ms. Mendelson, seeing as it is she who is the more advanced in the sorcery department. And, now you are both powerless and robbed of your individual strengths. You pose no further threat to me and will now be terminated at my discretion, within ninety minutes of my command.”

“You MONSTER!” Mack shouted. She attempted chanting to produce a demon, to free both of them but only succeeded in producing a fart, which reddened her cheeks and forced her to apologize. Like Stretch, she had been robbed of her greatest gift.

His patience with them now exhausted, Hamlet called for the guard and had the offending Earthlings removed from his presence.

V.

At blaster point, the two Earth girls, now helpless and nearly on the verge of tears, were sent off to the brig at the bottom of the ship. The chains were removed from their bodies but they were warned, viciously, in words that stung them as hard as metal fresh from the blacksmith’s fire, that in the unlikely event they were to escape confinement, they would be placed in the chains again. Including on their necks; which as the consequence would cause them to die almost immediately. Having now said their piece, the guards left and harshly slammed the heavy wooden door behind them as a further warning. Mack and Stretch were completely helpless, weak and cowed in what was surely intended to be their home—at least until the ship returned to Prospero. And then who knew what would become of them?

Mack sat down on the reinforced stone floor while Stretch, who was on the verge of tears since being robbed of her strength, ran to a far corner of the room and began sobbing softly.

“Well,” Mack said, as if it was only a matter of time before they were picked up to go home by their parents, “what now?”

Stretch, infuriated by what she thought was her friend’s flippant response to the desperate situation they were both in, immediately stopped crying, her sadness replaced by a sudden, heated fury. Whirling around, she faced Mack with a burning intensity the latter had never seen upon her face—and which served the purpose of rendering Mack silent for once in her life.

“What now?” Stretch shouted as she advanced viciously towards her friend, completely altering the meaning of what had just been said. “
WHAT
NOW
?
Is that all you can say?
WHAT NOW
?”

“You keep a civil tongue in your mouth, Cunningham!” Mack sprung to her feet immediately and threatened her friend with her fists. “We may be pals and you may be stronger than me, but….”

“
SHUT UP
!”

The words exited from Stretch’s lips as if they were a jet of flame from the largest and most fearsome dragon ever known to exist on planet Earth. As if she had been burned by this jet of flame, Mack fell to the ground, whimpering. She’d heard Stretch use this tone only—
only
—when either her honor, intelligence, or power, or Mack’s—or indeed, Mack’s body and life—was threatened by some capricious assailant at their middle school. At those times, Stretch had threatened the offender with a vicious beating that would leave him or her on the verge of death. Though Stretch was not of a nature that allowed her to actually
act
on many of these threats, would-be assailants were cowed enough by her size and implied strength alone that they immediately backed off.

But now it was
Mack
who was the butt of Stretch’s purple-faced rage. Would
she
now be destroyed at her friend’s hands?

“You listen to me, McKenna Mendelson, and you listen
good
!” Stretch growled viciously. “I am
tired
of being played for a chump! Do you hear me? TIRED! You and everybody else in our backwater hometown, and now everyone in the goddamned
universe
by the looks of it, but especially by YOU! You put me down constantly for being a stupid idiot but my brain’s the only weak thing about me—or it was,
until now
! It was your goddamned fault we got caught in the first place!

“If you had only cast one of your precious spells when that bunch of no-brains that caught us had first come on the scene, then we’d be back home and enjoying ourselves! But NO!
You
had to go and show me up! You should have found some weak spot in those chains so I could break ‘em but you wanted me to make a fool of myself in front of those aliens. Just like I supposedly made
you
look like a fool in front of my cool athlete friends at UND! That was the only reason we got caught and
you know it
! Well, this is the end for me with you, get it? I will find some dark spot in this rusted metal crap-hole, lock you inside it and
sit on it
until you
die
for all the crap you put me through today! YOU UNDERSTAND THAT, MACK?”

Mack
did
understand. Fearlessly and as menacingly as she could appear under the circumstances—and given her short stature—she walked forward and began using the same low, almost masculine tone her friend had just used, in order to countermand her.

“All right
Melissa
! You’ve
had
your chance to insult my integrity and character—now I’m gonna insult
yours
!”

Stretch hated being addressed by her given name (except by her beloved father of course) and this did the trick, as Mack had expected, of refueling her angry fire. Stretch bared her lips back in a snarl, giving her the appearance of an enraged or spooked horse but otherwise did nothing for the time being as Mack spoke back to her in the same manner she had just used.

“You’ve had enough of
my
crap, have you?” Mack blazed. “The pot can’t call the kettle black, Cunningham! You’ve annoyed
me
as much as I apparently have
you
! THANKS FOR
TELLING ME HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT ME, BY THE WAY
! Do you know how much trouble I’ve gotten in because of you? How they tried to drum you out of the Triple W for being such an incompetent witch that I had to threaten to
resign
in order to keep you in? Know how many guys won’t ask me out because they’re afraid Stretch the Giant Killer will smash them into the Earth with her thumbs if they do? No, you don’t!

“You don’t know much of
anything
do you? Except where it happens to be stuff that involves bouncing and throwing and hitting things! You think, now we got female leagues and tourneys for every sport imaginable you can get away with being the dumb jock huh? Well, you can’t! Don’t forget who the
brains
in this relationship is, Stretch old girl.

“And especially don’t forget I helped you pass tests that you
needed to pass
in order to get to the next grade! Plus making sure that you could do those basic spells to pass the Triple W examination. You have speed and brawn aplenty Stretch—but you’re not smart enough to realize you need your grey matter to help you out in this world. But I am smart enough, so if you listen to me we’ll get out of this! If you don’t want to, then you’re dooming yourself to changing the light bulbs of every Prosperian chandelier for the rest of your life. Is that what you want Stretch? Seriously? Or do you still want to stay a
loser
without my help?”

“You
bitch
!” Stretch shouted. “You goddamned little
bitch
!”