🚀 go-pugleaf

    Caddman
    Part I:  "Introducing..."
      by Jeff Pruitt
        (Six months and twenty days of being thankfully staple-less)


    He'd been walking casually down Fayette street, whistling the theme to
Hogan's Heroes.  He couldn't get that blasted song out of his head!  Of
course, what he wasn't telling anyone is that he simply loved the show.
He'd even seen a Hogan's Heroes marathon on channel 63 a few weeks before.
He couldn't get enough.  He was addicted.  He needed his daily fix of Klink!
    A glimmer caught his eye.  He stopped, and looked down to find a plastic
grocery bag.  'Litterbugs!' his mind screamed.  He picked up the bag and
stuffed it into his pocket.  He would throw it away once he got home.
    He stopped suddenly, breaking off the song in mid-whistle, and turned
slowly around, sure that he'd heard footsteps following close behind.
    Or had the sounds been from the side?  He turned to look.
    Nothing.
    'Fine' he thought.  'Destiny is just playing games with me again.'  His
ex-girlfriend, an utterly annoying creature, Destiny Joy Fate by name, had a
habit of telepathically screwing with him.  It was her way of revenging their
separation.
    Dan Salzman, an equally annoying creature, and completely mundane
citizen of an mostly unknown upstate New York small city,  shrugged his
shoulders and turned back to his late-night walk.  He did this with some
regularity.  The walk calmed his nerves.  The walk relieved stress.  And
Buddha knew he had a nearly overwhelming dose of that.
    Buddha was the name of his iguana.
    No sooner had he resumed his walk, and acheived only four steps, when
three enormous men suddenly appeared before him.  Literally.  They appeared,
grabbed Dan, and shoved him into the trunk of the Lincoln Mark 8 that had
also appeared directly behind them.
    "Who are you?"  Dan shouted.  "Where are you taking m...."  His words
were cut off by the slam of the trunk lid.
    The shouting raised the attention of only one person.  He broke himself
away from the television, shuffled to the window.  In the darkened street
half a block away, the bare-chested man saw what he thought were three
hoodlums shoving another man into a trunk.  It didn't matter though.
MacGuyver was on.  MacGuyver was all that mattered in life.  The Kevin
turned, wheezed, and settled back down into the corner, against its pillow.
'MacGuyver will make the world a better place' it thought.
    What the Kevin missed seeing were three hoodlums climbing into the Mark
8, making an illegal U-turn, slamming the car into gear, and at 88 miles per
hour disappearing in a flash of lightning.
    It is a strange coincedence that so many time-traveling vehicles these
days need to achieve 88 miles per hour to blast through the time-gate, and
then commence to show off with flashing lights and explosions.  Kind of like
a Pink Floyd concert.


                                *** subliminal ***


    Raising from his desk, the Overlord walked into the hallway beyond.  He
shifted within his new Armani suit.  He had had it custom made:  black with
orange pin stripes.
    It looked fantastic on him.  The only person on Earth that it could make
look good.  He certainly couldn't look any worse.  Well, maybe if he wore a
purple mini-skirt, a yellow turban, and tie-dyed his mustache a pale shade
of mauve.
    His useless employees would be back soon.  With any luck they would have
succeeded in his quest.  A quest he had been working on for many long years
now.  A quest that had begun with the birth of Dan Salzman.  A quest that
would end with the death of Dan Salzman.
    His stride toward the conference room showed his concern for the success
of the three he had sent into the past.  Not far, really.  Not far when
considering the age of the Earth, and that Man had been around for only and
enth of that time.  No, not far at all, just a little while had he sent them
back.  The time span of one of his footsteps; his father had always told him
to stay one step ahead.
    The boardroom was barren.  The Overlord liked it that way.  He felt in
control in his barren boardroom.  Everyone was forced to look at him.  There
were no windows, no pictures, no awards to distract the attention of his
worthless subjects.  Nothing.  Actually, there wasn't even a meeting table;
only a single chair for he alone to sit on  The room was completely void of
life.
    Overlord felt right at home here.
    He unbuttoned the Armani suit, turned the chair around to face the other
way, and sat down to await the return of Henchman and the others.


                                 *** messages ***


    The Lincoln Mark 8 flashed into existence in front of the grey-aluminum-
siding, two-story home.  The driver mashed down on the brakes, throwing his
front-riding passenger headfirst into the windshield; threw it into park,
jumped out.  He was a hurried man.
    The passenger in the vehicle's rear seat unbuckled his seat belt,
adjusted the pink beret on his balding, oval-shaped head, placed the
electronic organizer into his inside breast pocket, and stepped slowly out
of the car.  He was a careful man, who had been a passenger in this vehicle
before.
    The passenger in the front seat of the Mark 8 slumped back against his
seat, a trickle of blood running down his forehead.  He refused to move from
his seat, content to remain precisely where he was.  No one could talk him
from the position.  Why, some might say that he would have to be dragged
away from the car.  He was a dead man.
    The driver, a man who went to great lengths to see that he got his way,
stared over the top of the car at the slow, careful man.  They had, of
course, plotted this whole thing out.  Hooligan would sit in the front seat,
and not wear his seat belt, as was usual for such a careless, lazy Hooligan.
They both thought then of Grandpa Stumpy Hooligan, who had died quite
suddenly when he got tired while crossing the railroad tracks, laid down,
and took a nap. He actually woke up before the train came along, but
stretched both arms and legs outward just as it approached.
    Hooligan had never been liked.  He was sloppy.  He was shoddy.  He was
in the way.  He needed to be out of the way.
    Hooligan's so-called friends opened the Lincoln's trunk and stared in.
    Their prisoner was unconscious.
    "You forgot to shoot him some air holes," the careful man said, "you
stupid, stupid...man."  He was not at all good at insults.  He had tried on
many occasions, and could never quite get the hang of it.  They all seemed
to come out wrong.  They weren't forceful enough.  They didn't get the point
across, and he always seemed to come away looking like an inept eleventh
grade English teacher, who had done far too many drugs while coaching the
boys varsity basketball team.
    "Jus' git yer arse in gear 'n' he'p me carry 'im to 'is cell."  The
hurried man had practiced hard to talk like this.  He enjoyed talking in
such a way that anyone transcribing his speech would use a lot of
apostrophes and phonetic spellings.


                        *** are spread throughout ***


    There was no light when Dan next opened his eyes.  He recalled being
thrown into a trunk and then the sound of arcing electricity, and a burning
smell, as if someone had tossed a squirrel into a power transformer.  He
remembered nothing more until waking moments ago.
    He couldn't be sure that he had even opened his eyes.  After squeezing
them shut, opening them again, and finding that he couldn't see anything he
tried again.  Still nothing.
    He felt the darkness about him.  It was closing in!  Strangling him!
Choking away his very last breath!  The air was growing stale!!  How could
he survive?!?
    And then the air conditioning clicked on.
    There was a wall to his right at arm's length, another to his left, also
at arm's length.  Behind he felt another wall.  Dan reached with both hands
directly in front of him, expecting to grasp a door handle.
    Instead he found a not unpleasant, well-rounded, soft fleshy feeling.
The sensation was disrupted by a woman's scream, and a hand rushing out of
the blackness, to connect with his face.
    "Gotcha!"  Destiny's voice rang through Dan's mind.


                                ** this episode ***


    Overlord sat in the sole conference room chair, facing away from the men
he could hear entering behind him.  He sat there for a few minutes, making
them uncomfortable.  Making them restless.  Making them grow tired of
standing.  Making them wait.
    At last he stood, turned the chair around, and sat again facing them.
He furrowed his brow.  He was sure that he had sent three of them.  Now only
two stood before him.
    "Hitman."  He spoke the second man's name in a low, growling tone.
    Hitman took a single step forward, his attention focused on Overlord's
tie tack.  He knew he wasn't worthy to even look at the master's face.
    Overlord was pleased.  It had taken a very long while for the training
to stick in the minds of the overgrown rugrats he called employees.
Training snakes to firewalk couldn't be much more difficult than it had been
to teach his men to step forward and back on command.
    "Hitman."  He said the name again to command full attention.  "Where is
Hooligan?"
    "In the car, sir."  He knew better than to talk unintelligibly to
Overlord.
    "And why is he not here with you the two of you?"
    Hitman hung low his head.  He shuffled his feet.  He shrugged his
shoulders.  "I don't know."
    'This is getting to be a habit' thought the Overlord.  Every time he
sent Hitman out on a mission, he came back with that Why can't Jimmy come
out to play? expression on his face.  "Tell me why, Hitman.  I know that you
know."
    Hitman was silent.
    "Come, now, Hitman.  Have I ever punished you before?"  Overlord felt
like a mother.  He was using the sweeter-than-Bailey's voice that he so much
despised.
    Hitman shook his head.
    "Then tell me, Hitman.  Why is Hooligan not here?"
    "I...ki...ki..."
    Overlord was getting sick.  Not from the killing, mind you, but that
Hitman would never confess to the killing.  It was like the guy had a
conscience or something.  "Did you kill him, Hitman?" he coddled.
    Hitman nodded furiously, snapping his head up and down.
    Overlord smiled.  "I'm proud of you, Hitman."


WHAT IS DAN'S MISSION IN LIFE?
TO BE A PROFESSIONAL ABDUCTEE?
TO BE A TELEPATHIC PLAYTHING FOR DESITNY?
AND WHO IS THIS DESTINY WOMAN, ANYWAY?
WILL MACGUYVER MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE?


Stay tuned to Superguy to find out the answers to these questions, well some
of them.