We Do Battle for the Lord: Snips and Snails

This article is part of the We Do Battle for the Lord series.

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Used to have this big golden retriever named Buster, sweetest dog you ever seen, great around kids, but whenever you went to sleep or left the house he'd go apeshit. Tear up the garbage, tear up pillows, crap everywhere. I remember me and Darla went one time to the King Arthur's Heroes in Puskatoon, came back about eleven and forgot to feed him. He'd ate half the carpet in the bathroom.

Is there a moral to that? I dunno. I guess if you're tryin' to turn that into some sort of Bible story to teach a lesson it would be to keep your eyes on things or they'll get out of control. I thought of poor Buster on that lonely stretch of highway in the middle of nowhere. Wondered what he'd do. Probably eat something expensive.

C2 & C3

"Hey buddy, we gotta go," said Isaac.

The bus was one of those old style yellows. Almost like the Rosa Parks bus if you can believe they still run those things in the winter in Fargo, North Dakota. It was idling, lights on, but turned sideways. Red glow from all the windows. Your usual hell bus scenario.

So we pop the door, head inside with a couple of breakaway 12-gauges full of double-ought. Like a goddang Sunday school in there.

Kids are the worst. If you turn your back on 'em, even for a split second, they go all black-eyed devil on you. Little evil goblins. Easy to blast somethin' like that with a 12-gauge. Problem being, if you turn around and look straight at 'em they're sweet as baked apples. It's the big puppy-dog eyes and the sniffles. Take a move towards 'em and they start crying.

Me and Isaac, who also hates the kids, have done our share of clearing out the devil children. You catch 'em in a barn eating a dead cow, maybe sneak up on 'em when they're in the trees, no problem. You ambush 'em. You can't hardly set up an ambush in no hell bus scenario.

So I was thinking of Buster, and how he was, and I was also thinking of maybe something else a little deeper under that cold, dark water we call memory. But I can't really speak to that because my memory is gettin' to be like Swiss Cheese.

"Waddawedo?" wondered Isaac.

"Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" said the kids, being as conniving and evil as possible with their little apple cheeks and sniffly sounds.

At least they weren't callin' for their mommies.

"We could blast 'em," I suggested, "or hook the bus up to the back bumper of our silver 2005 Nissan Cube."

"One of these kids is good," said Isaac. "That's the whole conum-number-conumbrum. Don't think the Nissan could pull a bus anyway."

So we had a bus full of twenty-five sniffling little brats that turn into blood-hungry hellspawn when you turn your back, but one of 'em ain't a devil at all. So what do you do?

"What.are.we.gonna.dew?" Isaac repeated.

"Let 'em sneak up on us," I said to Isaac. "Get out of the bus, but leave the door open and look at that big mirror up by the driver. Watch for all them rats to turn evil and tell me which ones to shoot."

Well that was the plan anyway. Isaac got in position and I kept my eyes on the kids until he called out that he was ready. I had a shotgun in each hand and a line of shells set up on the dash. This wasn't gonna be easy, but I saw some tricks from Terminator 2.

"On the right! Hurry!"

Boom! Splat!

"Left side! Left, no right!"

Chomp! Aaaah! Punch! Boom!

I had blood all over me from that one. Little bastards bite worse than a Snakemom and the lobster claws some of 'em had weren't helping.

"Right again!" Boom! "Now left! Two of 'em!"

It's a good thing their bites don't turn you into one of 'em like them damn Snakemom's. Took a week to get the cure for that one from some Catholic scroll and by then Isaac was practically to full Snakemom form, putting lizards and bugs and stuff on all them evil teets.

"One more! Left! No!" Boom!

And that was how I shot my first 10-year-old kid.