SPY HEAD by Chet Nickerson

SPY HEAD

I was in the mall riding the ‘up’ escalator. I was looking around, distracted, not paying attention, when a semi with a wide load came round the corner above me and got on the down escalator.

It was hauling an earth mover, or some sort of road construction machine, built by the John Deere corporation, I believe. I never got a very good make on it, since I was looking away, watching some very babe-ish girls popping their gum and click-clacking their way across the mall’s tile floor. In particular, I was checking out the cleavage of one who passing almost directly underneath me.

Anyway, since I was looking away I didn’t see the wide load coming. And it was coming down and I was going up and it came down and —pop!— knocked off my head.

My head went tumbling down the escalator right into the middle of some boys’ soccer game and they shouted “Cool!” and ran off dribbling my head away down the mall.

Then a foreign-sounding voice rang out, the driver of the semi as it turned out, saying, “Ha-ha! Lost your head, you ugly-faced bourgeouis swine!”

And that is how I lost my head.

Then a stray bit of spy training came floating along—there’s a lot of excess spy training floating around since the Evil Empire collapsed—and this nsa or cia or MI5 or whatever spy training came floating along and fell down my unprotected neck.

And that is how I got my training.

Then suddenly there was a man in a trench-coat with a gun in front of me and a shot rang out —bang!— from behind me, from the pseudo-semi-driver, who clearly must have been an ex-kgb spy, and the Trench-Coat Man collapsed on the top of the escalator. And with the stairs bouncing him up and down and dragging his coat into the gears under the floor and pinning him down, he said to me, “Here! Take my gun!”

And that is how I got my gun.

So I turned and I shot the Pseudo-Semi-Driver Soviet Spy holding the hand-gun straight out in front of me with both hands—just like my training told me to. The semi went out of control and like ten-pins it knocked over a large group of extremely fat people all wearing obnoxiously bright lycra stretch pants who were in town for the Obese Wearers of Garishly Coloured Lycra Convention. But Trench-Coat-Man shouted, “No, you fool! We need him alive!”

So I pulled the wounded Trench-Coat-Man out of his trench coat before his arms got pinched off and tucked him under my arm. And then I ran to the wounded Pseudo-Driver Semi-Soviet Spy and tucked him under my other arm, and ran off to find a hospital.

But because I didn’t have my head, I didn’t have my eyes, and so, I couldn’t see. So I couldn’t find the hospital, and so they both died, in my arms, together. May they both go Espionage Heaven, especially Trench-Coat-Man, ’cause he gave me my gun.

And that is how I became—Bond.

Icabod Bond, the Spy Without a Head.

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