Chapter XII, The Twelfth

Stan Devlin looked at his watch. It seemed to be 1:00 A.M., but he didn't trust it. He was in his office playing with his toy cars. Toy cars were a guilty pleasure for Stan. He preferred Matchbox, but he would play with some Hot Wheels every now and then. He was about to make a tiny F150 jump the ramp over the alligator moat to save the princess, when all of the sudden two men rushed into the office.

"Ay, Boss, we got some baaaaad news!" a large Jewish man bellowed.

"Quiet, Franklin. Your stereotypes don't match. Jack, what is it?" Stan murmured.

"Those kids escaped!" Jack grunted.

"The two after Hubert?"

"Yeah, Boss! We caught dem at ta airport outside Springfield! We was posin' to be guards like ya told us to, but we got some baby-boomin' big brainfreezes!" Franklin alliterated.

Stan pounded his fist on the table in anger, knocking over his moat setup. This further angered him.

"We hired Hubert to take out these mayors for a reason!" Stan paused, reminded the two of the reason, then continued, "How two kids have managed to get in our way is beyond me!"

"But Boss, one of them is an idiot and the other is just an 18 year old girl. They haven't even stopped us at all." Jack stuttered proficiently.

"But they know of our plan! They were at Phoenix when those two mayors were eliminated, weren't they?"

"We dunno Boss, our characta's didn't exist then!" Franklin said as he broke the fourth wall.

"No matter. These two must be stopped so we can finish our task. Listen here. If they get in the way one more time..." and Stan drew his finger across his neck.

"You gonna kill us, Boss?!" Franklin interrobanged.

"What? No. I had some mustard on my neck." Stan had indeed had a Subway mustard sandwich 30 minutes prior to the events of the narrative.

"We'll get right on it, Boss." Jack said.

"Good. If I don't hear back from you in five hours, I'm dealing with things myself and with the rest of the gang." Stan menaced. "In fact, why did I choose you two in the first place?"

Ignoring this plot hole, Jack and Franklin sprinted towards their Ford Crown Victoria parked outside of Stan's hideout in the alley. After about five seconds, they got tired of sprinting and simply moseyed.

As they climbed in the vehicle, Jack asked, "Do you have any idea where they might be? We were given a really unspecific task."

"Well, I been readin' this blog, longbandnames.blogspot.com, and these two guys are writin' about these two people solvin' a murder mystery, an' right now, they at some shoe store 200 miles outside o' Springfield. I say we check there, Jack." Franklin spurted.

"Let's check there." Jack rambled.

As Franklin logged the coordinates in his GPS, he accidentally pressed the "Launch Nuke" button that was inconveniently placed next to "Start".

The two watched as a missile flew overheard. "Follow it! It's going where we need to!" Jack squealed.

With a blast of ape fury, Franklin turned the ignition on. The two set off towards the shoe store, going at a very illegal speed.

They arrived about 4 1/2 hours later. As they approached the shoe store, they saw it was now a crater. Neither of them could come to a logical conclusion as to why. Unharmed, however, was a tent stationed outside the previous site of the store.

"It's the two kids!" Jack illogically concluded .

"Oh no! They've come for us! Come on, Gary the P, we've got to get out of here!" The girl screamed.

Jack and Franklin grabbed their emergency spear guns and exited the vehicle.

"Yo Yo! It be time fo' you ta surrender!" Franklin proclaimed.

However, the kids were too fast for Jack and Franklin as they hopped onto their Land-Doo and sped away.

"No worries, Franklin," Jack smirked as he fired a spear at them. He watched as it struck the man in the ankle. "Heh heh...that should slow them down."

Meanwhile, Stan groaned as five hours had passed and he hadn't heard a single word from Jack and Franklin. He called for the other members of his team, Marcus, Nahim, Reggie, and Karen (the woman).

"What it is, Boss?" Nahim said.

"Jack and Franklin are idiots. We need to take care of this ourselves." Stan hummed.

The five walked outside to the alley when Stan saw two young adults curled up, one badly injured.

"Well, well, well, I guess everything worked better than I possibly could have expected," Stan said in the coolest possible kind of way.

He pulled another Subway sandwich out of his pocket to snack on as the gang dragged the two unconscious kids to his office. It all seemed to be working perfectly.

TO BE CONTINUED BY JAKE "LARVAE WRANGLER" SMITH