We’re Going to Need More Men, by Chason Gordon

Whoa, whoa, do you know who we’re dealing with here? This is no regular guy. Those men you sent in—they’re already dead. Arrange catering for their wakes. I told you to call me first if we ever met this guy. We’re going to need more men.

You ever open a pistachio? That’s how easily he can break your neck, especially with a pistachio. This guy is trained in every form of combat, including the illegal ones, including the ones that haven’t been invented yet. I’ve seen him kill a guy on the moon. His hands are registered weapons in 34 states, his feet in 42 states, and his bellybutton in China. Nothing can stop him, nothing is as fast. You blink you’re dead. He blinks; you’ve got one more second to live.

This guy lives in the shadows; if there are no shadows he builds his own. He knows all the sights and angles, even the ones that aren’t measurable by man. He can see your past, present, and future before you even know he’s there, and if you try to raise a hand to him, he will break it off and give it back to you, saying, “You have three more limbs. Make the best of them.”

Oh I know, you’ve done the training, you’ve learned that any man can be taken down, but who do you think wrote those manuals? Not this guy, but he killed the guy who did. Sometimes the student becomes the teacher, but that’s only if the teacher doesn’t kill him first.

I understand you’ve surrounded the building and set up a perimeter. I heard you yell, “No one gets in or out!” I see the dogs, the snipers, and the tear gas, but let me tell you son, all those tactics are only a drop in the bucket, and that drop is your own blood.

There’s only one man alive who can take this guy down, and he’s in a coma. Guess what put him there? A car accident. Guess who threw the car at him? That’s right. Wherever this guy walks, walls tremble. Wherever he swims, water turns to steam. Wherever he gardens, flowers die, and that’s when he’s in a good mood. I wouldn’t want to know him on a bad day. I don’t think anyone has.

This guy has broken into prisons just to break out of them, including prisons of the mind. This guy singlehandedly fought and protested the Vietnam War. This guy remade the documentary Grizzly Man into a movie about a guy who kills 50 bears. No stunt men, just a bunch of dead bears. Good flick though.

So you can call in another team, you can send another group of fine young men to their death, or you can listen to me and we can come out of this thing alive, by which I mean, less dead.

Here’s what I need you to do: I need you to evacuate this area, and by area, I mean planet earth. Start loading up the spaceships. Select only the best genetic specimens and highest achievers in their respective industries. Gather two of every animal, as well as some fruits and vegetables. After the ships are a safe distance away, we drop the big one. Not the big one you’re thinking of, but another, even bigger one, the one that no one knows about. We drop it, and then we drop 27 more. To be safe, we salt the soil so nothing can grow, we poison the oceans, and we blow the earth off its axis sending it into a collision course with the sun. Then we salt the sun.

But if he still happens to survive, which I think he will, and if we happen to find him angrily hurtling towards our ships, well, then we take out the big guns. I make a call to an alien species we secretly encountered years ago, just one call, and they blow up the entire universe, keeping us only mentally alive in a parallel dimension. If that doesn’t work, than God have mercy on us all, though he’s the one who’s going to need it.

What’s that? Oh, you got him. Good to hear. I guess I’ll get a coffee or something.

Chason Gordon is a writer whose work regularly appears in Seattle Weekly, City Arts, and The Capitol Hill Times, where he is a reporter and humor columnist. You may find less of him at Literally Humor and on Twitter.

The Humor Section features a piece of original humor writing each week. To submit, send an email to Brian Boone.

We’re Going to Need More Men, by Chason Gordon