Chapter Three: Bitter Beginnings

Donald Duck is a registered trademark of the Walt Disney Corporation.

It would seem, if the world had retained any sort of logic, that the story should've ended right there, with me lying face-down on the pavement, and Foghorn Leghorn standing solemnly off in the distance, smiling into the fading echoes of his own gunshot. If things had happened as expected, without any twists or turns, the picture would've slowly faded to black and the credits would've begun to roll and the whole flick would've been over. But if you know me for who I truly am, then you should know that I'd survived death more than once, and if I had to, I could survive it again.

Several months earlier . . .

My eyelids were heavy, as if they'd been anchored down somewhere by two or three huge invisible bricks. Getting them open proved to be a task in itself. Light flooded in like the waters of Nazareth and stabbed daggers into my pupils, dilated as they were, and finally, after a few seconds of pain, settled down in the back of my skull, throbbing rhythmically in the form of a migraine headache. My vision was blurred to shit—nothing but undefined blobs of color and shadow slumping over and falling on top of each other. I blinked a few times to sharpen the image, then a few more times, and a few more until each blob was clearly defined, and to the point where I could begin to see again.

As everything slid into focus, it became apparent that I was, in fact, not the only one in the room. Quite the contrary. Standing over me with his beak curled into a deceptive smirk that seemed to grow wider by the second, was Donald Duck. A bright light swelling up behind him seemed to highlight and amplify his presence. His light blue eyes stared into mine, glowing eerily, piercing into my head like an unmanned jackhammer. There was something strange about him, something surreal, something odd and out of place that I couldn't quite put my finger on.

"Feeling better?" He whispered, narrowing his eyes as if he already knew the answer.

I couldn't reply—I needed a few minutes . . . to figure things out, to put everything back in its place, to gather my scattered thoughts, and to figure out exactly what the fuck was going on, where I was, and how I got there. My eyes broke away from Donald's paralyzing stare and ran their course around the immediate area. The room was dimly lit, save for a few oddly placed floor lamps, and its colors altogether seemed to radiate with a cold, almost wet, blue sheen. I was lying in an awkwardly uncomfortable bed with a pillow that, sadly, seemed to have been made of duck feathers and, judging from the heart monitor beeping steadily at my side, it seemed safe to conclude that I'd been hospitalized.

"Know how long you've been here?" Donald continued, disregarding his first question. "A year. Well, almost. If you'd stayed out for about . . . " he looked at his watch, "two and a half more days, you would've cracked the one-year mark."

"Am I supposed to be proud of myself?" I hissed, trying to sound as menacing as I could with half my voice missing.

His smile faded and he took a step back, slipping out of view. Donald had always been somewhat of an anomaly. Way back in his early days, he'd hung out with Bugs and a few of the others on an almost semi-daily basis, despite his always-conflicting affiliation with Disney—an unwise business move if I'd ever seen one. As any well-rounded cartoon buff will tell you, Disney has always had a reputation for being notoriously nonviolent beyond a mischievous sense. Warner Bros., on the other hand, saw things differently. Through the influence of the ACME Organization, a multi-billion dollar prop company with questionable leadership, origins, and necessity, Warner began building an empire solely on the issue of cartoon violence, dropping C4 plastique explosives, dynamite, grenades, and double-barreled shotguns straight into the hands of the Looney Tunes. Naturally, it would seem odd for someone like Donald to hang around with us.

Don't get me wrong, Donald may have been Disney's bitch, but what most people won't tell you is that, in his prime, he was also one of the most dangerous ducks on the planet. He liked to play with fire . . . literally . . . knives too.

But at this point, Donald was not the concern. Memories were flooding back to me, and with them came the faces of the five envious cocksuckers who'd put me there in that bed in the first place—members all of the same Looney Tunes crew that I'd once been a part of myself. Sylvester, Elmer Fudd, Foghorn Leghorn, Lola Bunny, and her estranged husband, the head honcho of the whole shebang, Bugs Bunny. They'd all pay their comeuppance . . . in time.

I slowly pulled myself up into a sitting position. My arms and legs were stiff and rigid, like four big, lifeless, wooden planks poking inertly from my body. I winced as my spine cracked, lifting some of the pressure off my aching bones.

"Better lose that attitude, Daff." Came Donald's slurred voice again, this time from the doorway. "It won't get us anywhere."

I watched him quizzically. He'd cracked the door open a few inches and was peeking out into the hallway, apparently making sure the coast was clear. Every now and then, he'd glance back over his shoulder for a second or two, as if he expected me to suddenly lash out and attack him.

"What do you mean, 'us'?" I asked suspiciously.

"Us . . . you and me." He answered, as if it were the dumbest question he'd ever heard.

"Why us? What the fuck are you doing here?"

"What am I doing here?" He closed the door and turned to face me. "Shit, isn't it obvious? I'm breakin' you out!"

"Thanks, but I don't need any help."

"You might think so, but at the moment, you really don't have the right to form an opinion, now do you? Look, Bugs knows you're still alive. He's got assassins crawlin' all over the place just waitin' to pop out and put three or four in your back. So why don't you just settle down and let me take care of things, okay?"

"Assassins, huh? How do I know you're not one, then?"

He sighed heavily. "You're just gonna have to take my word for it."

I almost burst out laughing. "You're talkin' to the wrong motherfuckin' duck, Donnie. You, of all people, should know . . . I've taken words before, but you can rest assured I won't be takin' 'em again. No, sir! Those days are over."

Dressed in nothing more than a light green, thin fabric, hospital smock, I pushed back the bed sheets and threw my legs over the side, easing my webbed feet onto the ice-cold floor. I ran my fingers through my feathers, smoothing them out wherever they were ruffled as Donald watched in silence, clearly annoyed. He slowly shook his head as if to say, "It's a damn shame . . . " though not a word escaped his beak.

And as I stood there, hand-combing my feathers and eyeing Donald suspiciously, it seemed safe to say that the reality and the suddenness of my awakening and the events leading up to it hadn't quite sunk in yet. I knew what had happened and I knew that it was, indeed, a terrible thing, something I'd never be able to simply let go of, and yet, in a sense, it still seemed somehow unreal, like an impeccably vivid daydream I'd just snapped out of. It was there in the back of my mind, skulking around, ready and prepared to strike at the most opportune moment, but I could never seem to fathom it.

Suddenly, my attention was diverted. Pinned to a bulletin board on the wall behind Donald's impatient face and prying eyes was what appeared to be an X-ray—an X-ray of my head, no less. I pushed Donald to the side with the palm of my hand and took a step forward, frowning curiously. Bone showed up white and everything in between showed up black except for one big, gray streak that ran down the base of my forehead.

Donald approached me from behind and tapped me on the shoulder. I spun around to face him and as I did, he lifted two fingers and drummed them down the front of my skull, tracing the gray area pictured on the X-ray and producing a slight metallic clink as opposed to whatever sound we'd expected to hear.

"Yeah, there's definitely somethin' in there . . . " He said with a sigh. "Probably a lot more of 'em too."

I looked down at myself—at my body and at my hands, slowly beginning to understand. There was a metal plate in my head, surgically grafted to right the bone, right where I'd been shot. But then again, I'd been shot more than once—fifteen or sixteen times at the least, so there had to have been others. Donald was right.

"C'mon," he said, placing a hand on my shoulder, "forget about it. It's not that bad . . . it might even come in handy. But look, you'll have plenty of time to figure shit out later. Right now, we've gotta get outta here, okay?"

I was silent for a few more seconds, letting my thoughts run their course before I finally lifted my head and nodded in agreement. He patted me on the back and motioned towards the door with his thumb. As I'd seen him do just moments earlier, I pushed the door open a few inches and poked my beak out into the hallway, letting my eyes wander up and down the corridor. It was empty. I went to take a step back, to turn around and tell him, but before I could . . .

I crashed right through the door and slammed face-first into the opposite wall with a sickening 'thud.' By the time I'd spun around, Donald was lunging at me with a long, jagged knife gleaming in his hand, aiming straight for my throat. I slid to the side at the last second and watched as the blade embedded itself in the drywall. Donald's eyes went wide, allowing him to get a better view of my fist as it rammed into his skull. He stumbled a little further down the hall, shaking his head to lessen the pain. I reached for the knife he'd left stuck in the wall and pulled it back out with one solid tug.

"Hold on! Hold on! I can explain! I can explain!" Donald sputtered, clutching the side of his face and struggling to maintain his footing.

"Explain?" I retorted, tightening my grip on the knife. "You're a little beyond explanations here, Donnie. In fact, you're about a step away from makin' my list."

"Your—your list?"

"There's only five names on it at the moment, but I could make it six if you want."

"Wh—no, no, look . . . I admit—I'll admit it . . . " he stammered, "Bugs sent me to kill you."

"I figured as much. Although, it seemed a bit odd that you should just mindlessly follow all his orders."

"Well, I—I—I don't . . . but for three cars and a new house . . . "

"How did you know when I was gonna wake up?"

"I, uh . . . I didn't . . . that's just how it happened."

My eyes narrowed. "Oh, I see how it is. So, instead of facing me like a man, you were just gonna come in and kill me in my sleep, right? How fuckin' heroic."

"Wh—what are you saying?"

"I'm saying I want you to march your little white-feathered, fuck ass right back to that scum-sucking rabbit and tell him that it's over. I want you tell him that I'm coming and I want you tell him that I'm coming to kill him, okay?"

"Okay, yeah, sure." He said, just an octave above whispering.

And with that, I turned on my heel and began my long walk down the glowing, fluorescent, off-white, hospital hallway, headed, presumably towards the exit. Little did I know that it wasn't quite over yet.

"Oh, wait, Daff, just one more thing." Came Donald's voice again from behind me. "Take it easy."

I could picture it in my head even before it'd happened—another knife, a smaller one, speeding towards me with my back turned. I could picture it soaring through the air like the Grim Reaper's sickle and I could picture it piercing my flesh and taking me down, but what I couldn't picture was the knife simply clattering to the floor. No, Donald hadn't missed. In fact, he was dead-on with one hundred percent accuracy. Not only that, but he'd also furthered his point and proved himself totally correct. There was, indeed, more than one metal plate buried beneath my skin. How did I know? Because he'd found one, and he'd hit it.

With a half-determined, half-confused, all-angry expression smeared across my face, I slowly turned back around and met Donald's gaze for the last time. He was trembling, visibly terrified, yet awestruck at what seemed like an ongoing stroke of bad luck. Even worse was the fact that it didn't end there. The knife in my hand, the one that used to belong to him, somehow made its way from my fingers to his face, at which point it proceeded to bury itself between his eyes.

And that's all he wrote . . .

Back at the desert . . .

It turns out Foghorn Leghorn and Donald Duck had a lot more in common than just a bunch of white feathers. They were both extraordinary marksmen with the ability to hit invisible bull's-eyes from a considerable distance. In a way, it was almost too perfect how everything worked out, but what can I say? That's how it happened, and that's how it always will be.

So there I was, lying facedown on the pavement, letting my mind wander all the way back to that empty hospital ward with Donald Duck and his blind treachery. It would seem that history had repeated itself. Foghorn was standing there, off in the distance, grinning like a maniac from ear-to-ear, slowly lowering the gun to his side, and chuckling stupidly.

A gust of wind rolled by and swept through my feathers, taking a few of them with it as it passed. They rose into the air like a barrage of obsidian arrows, and then fell back to Earth as if made of stone. My eyes slipped open and shoveled in a lovely view of the scalding hot pavement. I'd tried to ignore it up until then, but as the seconds ticked by, it began to grow more and more difficult to pay it no mind. The side of my face was starting to sizzle, trapping me in an unwanted and unwelcome test of endurance, like seeing how long you can hold your hand on the stovetop without screeching in pain.

Suddenly I could hear him approaching, his footsteps rippling through the tarmac as if it were made of liquid, sending a wave of chills slithering up my spine. I tried to play dead and tried not to move—to make sure I was still, hoping he didn't notice the steaming bullet lying just inches from my fingertips, right where it'd fallen.

Finally, after a minute or so, everything was silent. He'd stopped moving—stopped closing in on me. I held my breath.

"Y'know, Daff," he said, "ya' might've been creative, but you was never 'dat smart."

The blood boiled in my veins.

"Yer' 'bout as sharp as a bowlin' ball and half as bright . . . I mean, didja' really—I say—really just expect me to play by yer' rules? This ain't a fuckin' cartoon, this is real life and I intend to hang onto it. I know what happened to the last two 'dat crossed ya', so I took extra special care makin' sure it wasn't gon' happen ta' me."

He paused for a few seconds and wiped a bead of sweat from his brow.

"Shit . . . vultures'll have a hey-day t'night."

He giggled to himself at his own lackluster joke, then turned on his heel and began striding back towards the storefront, too arrogant to make sure I was dead, too stupid to spot the flattened bullet lying at my side, and too oblivious to notice my black-feathered hand slowly creep up and wrap itself around the handle of a nearly empty revolver. He didn't see it coming, he didn't hear it coming, he didn't smell it coming, and he didn't feel it coming . . .

Well . . . maybe he felt it.

Right when he'd least expected it, the back of his skull exploded in a misty cloud of gore, dousing me in red from head to toe, staining my clothes, and filling my mouth with that bittersweet, all too familiar taste. I spat it out the instant it crossed my tongue and wiped some more away from my eyes so I could watch with better clarity as the six-foot rooster tumbled to the ground, as dead as dead could be, another name scratched off the list.

End of Chapter Three.