Ketchup (Completed Ch. 2 and beginning of Ch. 3)

And once again...I give you the finished...er...second chapter and the first suspenseful paragraphs of the third chapter.

2. No Control Freak

At the fourth floor, Jack entered the elevator. At the lobby, a short UPS delivery man came out.

Alright, alright. You got me. He's Jack. But so what? It makes for a sleek story. Anyway.

Jack easily exited the building without any trouble whatsoever. His tongue even decided to project itself in the direction of a security camera. Everyone knows such behavior is entirely normal and ordinary.

The sad thing is that he forgot to cover up the signature he had traced on the back of his backpack with a glow-in-the-dark, neon-green Sharpie. In a blindingly bright shade of green, it stated clearly,

Jack Walker Rabbit (this is meant to be in a handwriting-like font, but Blogger has none such)

Several thousand miles away, on a deserted desert island, a large array of high-resolution LCDs, the video played back in slow motion. A man sat in a large chair adorned with many different animal skins. On the front, there seemed to be zebra, tiger, jaguar, as well as a small skin on the top, who, considering the twin, long ears pointing from its head, would be well judged to be a rabbit, or, more precisely, and, I'm afraid, intrusively, on your happy readership, I enlighten you with the intriguing truth that it is, in fact, a jackrabbit skin. Oh, yes. The man. Well, he looked very sinister, mainly because the light of twelve LCDs has an all-around zombifying effect on anyone who sits in front of them, excepting those so adorned with blood so as to make them look like zombies anyway. These cases have proved to be rather rare, as the amount of zombies in the world has decreased so drastically over the last several decades.

Outside of the elevator, Jack walked unhindered out of the hospital. He frowned. Things were so boring these days. You used to have well-trained thugs jump on you from the top of two-story buildings. This was a rather odd technique, but it worked. The sad thing was that few people had large squads of tough men willing to jump off of two-story buildings. For this reason, Jack's life had been a bit of a bore for several months. Considering he was only fourteen, he had a lot left to see, but he was fairly well prepared. He sighed and continued walking away from the hospital.

He was also thinking about being shot. And where the bullet was. But that's about all I, as author, am willing to tell you, the reader, about what he was, or what he was not thinking about at that time.

For now.

Anyway, he was thinking about how on earth he could have not cleared a dumpster so small that, by comparison to some of the ones he'd cleared, was merely a bump in the road. Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit here, but I'm the author here, okay?

Now. As Jack grabbed his bike, which, for some reason, was sitting right outside the hospital, when, actually, he had left it about eight miles north of there in a place quite ruined by poverty. He had “lended” it to a man who claimed quite convincingly that he needed a bike to drive to the liquor store. Jack had, at that time, found this extremely interesting, and set the GPS in his bike to track the man. As it turned out, the man biked to a liquor store. Once there, however, he attempted to rob the place. Being an avid redneck, the store owner scared the man so badly that he didn't even bother to gather the bike. Thankfully, as always happens in such idiotic spy TV shows before now, the bike could “ride” itself. The one problem is that it terrified the northern population of the city, which, by and large, was poor. Word soon circulated that there, “was a witch in town”. I, the author, don't in the least deny that adding a witch at this time would “spice” things up a bit, but this is meant to center on Jack. This means, of course, that Jack actually being self-centered seems rational. I, as author, deny it, and leave it at that.

Ah, yes. Jack was on his bike, riding down a street. He was quite calm, despite the fact that his computer, back in his backpack, was going haywire because police cars were converging on his current location at speeds varying from sixty to one-hundred miles per hour. His computer knew things like this because he made it to. Sadly, he was already going at more than fourty miles per hour, so getting out his laptop and stopping it from sending crazy signals to his brain which were hardly understandable anyway was entirely out of the question.

Upon crossing an intersection at speeds which would make Lance Armstrong faint, Jack finally did turn on his rockets. And then he started to move really fast. Now, today, people seem to relate the word "fast" to their car, or some other means of transportation. Not to bikes. I think the average person doesn't know how fast Lance Armstrong has gone. No matter. I can assure you, though, that, if he wanted to, Jack could have outstripped the Concorde. Only here, he merely had to outstrip several police cars which were converging now, at a point several blocks ahead of him. His computer had calculated the trajectories of all the cars at one-hundred and ten percent of their actual speeds, assuring no police would come to harm. Jack firmly believed that brining people to harm was wrong. Taking this belief into account, he calculated the probability to damage of all things of the city to be wonderfully decreased if he merely increased his altitude by at least twenty feet. This he did without so much as a "click", though, honestly, "click" doesn't even describe what people usually use "click" to describe, i.e. It's as easy as CLICK, and you're hooked up to the biggest financial difficulty the nation has to be in distress over! Anyway, he, being the all-around technological genius that he is, had already integrated mind-computer control so all he had to do was think something which would tell the computer to tell the bike to increase the altitude of the bike to X. X is a variable, for your information. Not to be trifled with.

Anyway.

Jack totally missed the police cars and vaporized a good portion of a dense oak tree. Dense here means that it was “having the component parts closely compacted together”, not “stupid; slow-witted, dull”. Because of this, Jack's flight pattern, if it must be called that, was quite changed. He was, by resisting the gravity of Earth, going up. In going up, people feel a strange feeling. They start barfing, in extreme situations. I, the author, assure you that Jack has a stomach which seldom decided to eject it's contents. However, Jack really did have to try hard not to eject it this time. This time, he not only kept his stomachfull, but also regained his balance and some of his common, everyday composure. However, a common, everyday composure is quickly decomposed when one is decidedly rocketed through clouds, and, consequently, drenched. I, the author, acknowledge that the scientific accuracy of this entire story is based in as much fact as it takes to validate the existence of mosquitoes when near water on a good, Minnesotan summer day. As such, I maintain the fact that Jack was, in fact, drenched, when he came out of the top of that cloud.

Thankfully enough, his entire electronic system was perfectly waterproof and was unharmed, as such. However, he was further knocked off course because his vision. By the time he could see where he was going, the gravitational pull on him had decreased noticeably. Jack blinked several times, muttered, "I didn't know it could do that," and continued downward. Now, when people go down, they gain velocity. Velocity is speed over distance. I think. And gaining speed over distance is acceleration. Therefore, I, the author, can say, with some certainty, that Jack was accelerating.

Now, under some circumstances, acceleration is good. For instance, when you're pointing away from gravity's pull and have a good force propelling you away from the said. However, when you're accelerating in a direction not opposed to gravity, you eventually either gain such velocity that you don't hit our dear planet, or you do. I haven't had the opportunity to investigate this thoroughly, but I think it's true. You either hit something, or don't hit something, in instances when you're accelerating directly at it. In this rare case, Jack just managed not to hit that which he was originally pointed at. Instead, he found himself flying straight at a battered American flag. As you can see, Jack doesn't have a lot of luck. This might have to do with the fact that he accidentally burned his rabbit's foot, upturned and melted his horseshoe, walked under few more ladders than there are people in the United States, and, to top it all of, saw so many black cats over his left shoulder that, if proportion maintains sway in this situation, he ought to have suffered for the two years of his life which he had, so far, had to himself. As it was, he was fairly happy, and hadn't encountered much suffering of any consequence.

This being said, he did happen to be flying at an American flag. For the twentieth time. For this reason, jack said, "Probability rockets. Blast," after which he managed, as always, to miss the flag. By this time, he had managed to decrease his velocity to a speed entirely manageable. With direction under control, Jack returned to his home.

3. Home

Jack's home was extraordinary, and yet plain. It was a small, abandoned apartment building outside of the main city. To him, it was valuable, not only because such things were rare in his town, but because he did, in fact, call it home. He lived alone, yet he had several pets which were quite good for him.
The apartment that he primarily lived in was fairly large, and, over the years, had become as well-furnished as any five-star hotel would be. In the manner of such, there was, at a certain place, a large screen TV. However, Jack had, with his own hands, made it. It was a few feet across and seemed to have a very large block of wood behind it. For your woefully uniformed readership, I'll reveal it's purpose quite simply. It was a computer.
Around this time, I ran out of time describing his house because Jack decided to go find something to eat.

He made scrambled eggs with more minced bacon than any pig could live through seeing. He also had more oil in the pan than would be healthy for just about anyone. However, he'd done this multiple times and wasn't dead yet. That was, in a good bunch of areas, his philosophy for defining what to do. In a good dose of others, though, he put sense and morals into a decision.

In a few minutes, he had some steaming yellowish matter stuffed into a tortilla which could only be home-made. Jack was incredibly industrious.
"Hands up!" a voice said in a voice which couldn't exactly be identified as anything in particular.

"Not with breakfast, Xink. I could use some orange juice, though, thank you," Jack said.

Xink was a computer. Yes, you probably guessed by the time that you read this, that she was the large block behind the screen.

"I don't have any more orange juice, sir," Xink replied in a tone which suggested with almost painful obviousness that it wasn't true.
"Oh, quit your bawling, you great brown blockhead," Jack said mercilessly.

"Yes, mastah," Xink said, sniffling a bit. A clear glass glass full of fresh, cold orange juice popped out of almost nowhere and landed on his table. Sadly, orange juice is fairly transparent, so, me saying his table was splattered with orange liquid would be just plain evil. However, it was true that there was orange juice all over the table. Jack licked the juice off of some of his more reachable areas. Xink sighed, the table was wiped up in a second, and Jack drank his orange juice. He might have drunk it, but I haven't tested the Hangoverer's Guide to Hanging Over with orange juice.

Anyway.

He was drinking his juice when a bullet made a uncannily clean hole through his glass. It also made a bit of noise, but it's most important that it made a clean hole, and that it was remarkably uncanny. Though his expression would convince anyone who didn't know him well that he was totally unbothered by this occurrence, he was rather surprised and slightly worried. He was aware that his bones wouldn't have set perfectly yet, and, for this reason, he didn't enjoy the idea of another bullet in him. Especially outside the main city, where the nearest doctor professed ardently that he was a reincarnated gorilla king. On most occasions this wasn't a problem, thankfully.

TO BE CONTINUED

OH, THE SUSPENSE!

Your dear honkin' writer of the third class,

!Noah!