Chapter 4

By: HickWolfe

The day the plant got its revenge OR The plant that ate EVERYTHING

The day started normal. Well, as normal as days started around here. When I woke up on the couch, I heard the normal squeaking sound from the computer cubicle and wondered whether it was Onyx and Zig-Zag, or Draco and his…other type of porn. I sighed, and rose from the couch to look at the TV, and there, as usual, was Agnar, playing his Nightmare-Cast (please don’t sue). Grumbling, I sat up, lifting a paw to rub the gray fur around my eyes.

“Morning Agnar,” I muttered low from the corner of my muzzle.

“Shhh…I just made level 91!” the fox squealed, the excitement in his voice causing it to sound like a little girl’s.

“You do know that’s just a game, right?”

“Quiet, or I’ll use the sword of eternal doom on you!”

I blinked, “I’m…not on the game, Agnar.”

He turned slightly, using his paw to slide his glasses further up his muzzle as he spoke to me, smiling slightly.

“I know. I was talking about that rusty butter-knife in the sink.”

“Oh.”

I nodded slowly, and backed away from the fox as he continued to sit before the idiot box. I hadn’t seen my show in so long that I was going through <obligatory God-Voice> TRENT C. DIGGUM, P.I. withdrawal. But at least I hadn’t reacted like Onyx had when the pair of idiots had moved in with us. You see, the main problem was that one of the bedrooms in our three-bedroom apartment had been converted into a computer room/office. When those two moved in, we had to free up a room and so we had to move the computer…

-----Obligatory Flashback to a galaxy far far away and a time long, long ago (about last Thursday)----

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

Onyx had braced himself against the doorframe, his paws gripping the upper corners and his feet dug into the lower ones. The Folf had been in the shower when we began to turn off the computer to have it moved, but it was like the little bastard had hotwired it onto his beeper. In a flash, he had been out of the shower and into the doorway, soaking wet and naked, crying like a little girl as the three of us, the fox, dragon, and myself, yanked on his sides to try to remove him from the doorframe.

“Onyx,” I grunted, my paws yanking on his upper arm, trying to avoid his fogged over glasses, “This…is…for…the…greater <uf> good!”

“Y<ergh>eah…” Agnar agreed, trying to pull on the other arm.

“Nice package!” Draco commented, licking his scaly mouth from his position on his knees, hands planted firmly on Onyx’s feet, pulling like crazy to get him to detach himself.

The other three of us paused at that, looking down to the gay dragon with the same slightly scared look in our eyes. He looked up with a smile, tongue slipping out to lick his lips…

(Hick: Dragons don’t have lips!)

(Author: Shut up, you!)

…and wink at the folf. Quickly, Onyx let go of the doorframe, shuddering as if we had put something slimy and creepy into the fur on his back. I shot a look to Agnar and let go quickly, stepping away from the dragon and folf combo. Agnar, with a guilty look on his face, quickly hid the jar of slimy creepy things behind his back and made a mad dash for the only room with a lock on it. I stood in silence for a moment as Onyx screamed like a little girl and rushed back to the bathroom. Slowly, the gay dragon rose to his feet….

(Hick: Dragons don’t have feet either!)

(Author: It’d be real easy to write a chapter where you get neutered…)

(Hick: …Point taken. Continue please.)

…and looked at me.

“Works every time,” he said, winking at me and sashaying like RuPaul on a bad day into the computer room, plopping down in the desk chair and logging onto the internet. It took us two days to lure him off of the computer long enough to move it from the room and into the back of the living room, setting up a small cubicle that would spare Agnar and me ANY chance of EVER seeing one of the other two with their pants down.

-Back to the present, as depressing as it may be. You know, I think that this story is getting a little clichéd. What, with the gay guy and the game addict. It’s kinda like a low-rent version of Friends <Gunshot> YOU SHOT ME!!! WHY DID YOU..<Gunshot>-

I looked up from the couch to the screen, where Agnar had just died yet again, the result of too much time yelling at the monsters and not enough time hitting the control pad. I chuckled, and leaned back on the couch, watching him carefully go through the paces of restarting the game, connecting to the internet and such pretty damn quickly. I would have asked him to get off and let me watch a single episode of my favorite detective series…but last time I had tried, he had almost taken my finger off. He ended up getting the houseplant instead, poor thing.

Wait a second…something wasn’t right with this picture.

“Agnar…” I asked, turning around from my place on the couch to face the fox, “…do plants have hands?”

“What? No…”

“Oh…” I replied, eyeing the piece of foliage as it raised on of the green hands and waved at me from its place in the corner, away from any vestige of sunlight. I timidly raised a paw and waved back, and very very slowly the plant extended the green middle finger and lowered the others as the vine that formed the arm of the plant began to reach for one of the boxes from “GunWorld.com” that I figured had arrived here by mistake.

“Agnar, can plants load shotguns?”

He turned, adjusting his glasses with one paw, the other holding the stick so that his character would run in a circle. He shot me a most annoyed look as he responded with a heavy sigh, “No, Hick, plants can’t load shotguns. What the hell is wrong with you today? I’m trying to reach level 100!”

It was about then that the plant’s first shot destroyed the gaming system that sat at the fox’s curled feet. He blinked at the mass of wires and cables that used to be his favorite toy in the whole world, and turned to look at me, tears welling up in his eyes.

“Why’d you have to do that? You only had to say that you were on the phone!” He yelled through the grief that I knew he must be feeling. To say the least, Agnar lived a lonely, lonely life.

“It…wasn’t me,” I said as the next shot took off a chunk of our coffee table.

It was probably for the best. The table was scratched and beaten from the number of times I had sat my food on it, and then plunged a knife into the wood while screaming like a castrated ninja from a bad Jackie Chan movie (or maybe that Chris Farley one, “Beverly Hills Ninja” That was one funny friggin’ movie!). The table had gone through enough suffering for one lifetime, and if it could have spoken, I know it would have issued up a prayer of thanks. No longer would it have to sit and suffer the endless cruelty that it had inflicted on it by open porn magazines and endless re-writes of the smut that I sent in to them. I think I’m digressing from the shotgun-wielding plant a little here, but not by very much if I am. The coffee table and the plant lived together for years, and were thus the closest thing that supposedly inanimate objects could have to friends.

I heard the squeaking of the chair from the computer cubicle stop, signaling that Draco was currently in the process of pulling his pants up and buckling his pants (by the way, I added that little mental image of a gay dragon masturbating just to make all of you go “Errrrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhhhhh”). Meanwhile, Agnar and I were turning the couch, which smelled vaguely of month-old Doritos, over on it’s side as another blast from the shotgun went wildly over head. Agnar looked at me and blinked, his glasses sliding further down his muzzle as he spoke in a panicked tone.

“Hick, you remember how my grandfather used to tell us stories of how he was trapped in a trench and the Germans kept firing at him?”

“Yeah…”

“I don’t feel sorry for that old bastard anymore. At least his enemy made scientific sense.”

I nodded as another shot went way over our heads, and suddenly flying scales leaped over the couch and landed in a pile beside the two of us. Both of us looked over with a blink, and as Draco uncurled, we both expelled a sigh of relief. A sigh that was cut short by another blast from the shotgun, and a pause as the plant took a minute to reload. I glanced over the couch, and saw that it had sprouted a third arm, which was currently reaching for the permanent marker that always seemed to be sitting around for some reason on our threadbare carpeting. I turned back to the other two.

“This…could be trouble,” I said in a wary tone, watching as the plant promptly drew a smiley face on itself, complete with two large eyes and a shit-eating grin.

Draco looked up.

“Could be trouble? The plant has a shotgun!”

“Yeah…but now it’s adding eyes so it can aim.”

That brought an eerie silence from all three of us, and during it I could distinctly hear Onyx in the shower, singing a love song he had written for his cartoon porn skunk. I blinked, wondering how he couldn’t hear the shotgun blasts. It was about then that another one of the blasts went directly into the kitchen cabinet, and I could hear my little friend inside screech in pain. I blinked, and a tear came to my eye as I thought about the rodent that I had been raising for the purpose of shaving and passing off as a purebred Chihuahua to some poor old lady. I sniffled them back, and hunkered down with the other three as the shot flew overhead.

“Alright, we need a game plan guys,” I said looking to the relative safety of our kitchenette counter, where, even as we were under attack from a mutated houseplant, something that looked vaguely like cookie dough was dripping off the formica to pool onto the floor.

Draco nodded, and got that queer (no pun intended) look on his face, a smile spreading across his toothy maw. “I could come on to it,” he suggested, raising his scaly brow in a sexy (although frightening) manner.

I blinked, shaking my head. “It’s a plant, Draco. Unless it draws on genitalia, I don’t think that would work.”

“Oh,” he said, getting a disappointed look on his face. I couldn’t stand to see him looking so down in the dumps, so I clapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey, after this is all over,” I said, “you can hit on Agnar till the cows come home!”

“Hey!” the fox exclaimed, blinking twice behind his thick glasses.

I managed to grin, even as a shotgun blast took out the picture of the pope on the wall. Don’t ask me why we had a picture of the pope on the wall. I think it was there when we moved in. Personally, I’d always wondered why a man so close to God felt the need to drive around in a bulletproof zamboni. But since this is about a shotgun-wielding plant, that is digression, and so I digress. Write that down, English majors!

I pointed to the counter. “Listen guys, this couch isn’t going to hold up much longer. The counter would be better protection for us, at least until we can call in the cavalry.”

“Cavalry?”

Agnar raised his paw, and then put it quickly down as the plant, getting used to its ink eyes, sent a blast dangerously close to turning him into an amputee.

“May I suggest our battle plan be running, screaming like little schoolgirls, down the hallway and finding someone that knows how to handle a crazed houseplant?” He offered, not daring to look over the couch as the bathroom door opened and we heard Onyx exit.

“No,” I said, listening to Onyx’s exclamation of surprise as he dove over the counter, sliding his belly fur right in the cookie-doughish food substance that was pooling there, and land on the kitchen floor, “we don’t need professionals. I think four incompetent students that can barely hold a 2.0 GPA should be able to handle a homicidal plant.”

The other two behind the couch looked at me as if I was crazy, and Draco blinked as he offered his opinion. “Are you completely crazy, or is this just a rare moment of complete and total mind-loss?”

“It works in the sitcoms,” I said, waving to Onyx, whose eyes had grown to roughly the size of ceramic plates. Of course, I had been eating off of a paper plate for the past three years, so I wasn’t sure exactly how big real plates were anymore.

“The plant has a shotgun!” he yelled over the din of the constant firing.

“Well you’re a fast one, aren’t you, Mr. Wizard!” I yelled back…and then the plant stopped to reload.

At this point, the three of us behind the couch darted to join Onyx behind the kitchen counter, darting from side to side like retarded running backs. Sliding to a stop, I grabbed a pot from the top of the counter and place it squarely on top of my head, flattening my ears against my skull. I looked over to Onyx, and raised an eyebrow.

“So…how’s your day been so far?”

“Other than getting shot at by a freak of nature?” he replied, finding a small soup kettle to set on top of his head.

“Other than that.”

“Fine and dandy.”

I nodded and looked over the counter again as Onyx picked up a soup ladle, wielding it like a sword in one paw. Agnar, watching the pair of us, and clearly thinking that we were both insane, leaned forward. “What did you feed that plant anyhow? Miracle-grow?”

“Naw,” I responded, wincing as another shell thudded into the front of the counter, “Too expensive.”

“Yeah,” Onyx added, “We just fed it some nuclear waste that we found sitting around in the basement. Never gave us any trouble till now. Stand back, I have a plan.”

With that, the folf crouched and launched the ladle. It bounced, without doing any damage, off of the top of the plant, landing with a clatter on the floor behind it. When he sat back down on his haunches, narrowly avoiding another blast from the shotgun, we stared at him for a moment. He adjusted his glasses, hitched up his boxers and stared right back.

“What?!?!?” he asked in a defensive tone.

“What…was the point of that?” Draco asked, huddling forward as the barrage of ammo continued to fly overhead.

“I thought I could hit it on the head and knock it out!” Onyx exclaimed, his tone still defensive.

“Onyx,” I said, keeping my tone low and reasonable, “it’s a plant. It doesn’t have a head.”

“Oh, but it can hold a shotgun?” Agnar asked.

“Don’t blame me for the writer taking extensive literary license with this dilemma!”

“But,” Draco was quick to point out, “You’re nothing but a furry personification of the writer!”

“Yeah…but…but…” I stuttered, trying to find a way out of this dilemma. It was about then that we heard glass twinkling, and the furious blasts of the shotgun stopped.

We peeked over the counter, knowing that the plant hadn’t run out of ammo yet because of the inordinate number of crates from internet military sites that had been delivered to the apartment recently. The sight that greeted us was a wolf, wearing a pair of tighty-whiteys and a faded superman t-shirt. Around his head, covering his eyes except for a pair of holes cut out so he could see, was a knee-high sock. In both paws were jars of weed killer, which he promptly spun the caps off of and dumped into the plant. Before our eyes, the plant withered into nothing, the arms turning brown and snapping off under the weight of the shotgun.

The mystery wolf let out a cry that sounded like a Tibetan Monk being strangled, and stormed towards the door. He paused only to snatch my favorite red ballcap off of the rack that sat beside it, and headed out of our shotgun-riddled apartment without as much as a word spoken to any of us. Slowly, the four of us stood from our hiding place, all eyes turned to the doorway through which our savior had exited.

“Who…or what…was that?” Draco asked, blinking furiously.

I looked at him and shrugged, “That was Nigel. He lives upstairs. Has a bit of a complex, thinks he’s SuperWolf.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t know that,” Onyx said, heading quickly towards the computer cubicle to claim the internet whilst I headed for the TV. If I hurried, I could just catch the end of my show.

The other two, meanwhile, looked at each other, shook their heads and started to go out the door, no doubt heading out to find some Jolt cola and something to eat.