A/N: Thank you, thank you, thank you, Dawnie. You are the best reviewer on You should be paid or something… yup, paid in cookie dough. That would be nice… Ah! I'm wandering, here's chapter three…

Roll scene.

A CLOSE SHOT of ROWE'S face. Sweat is pouring down her forehead… the stolen BUSH HAT is slipping… her eyes are wide and fearful. Her knuckles are white as they grip the check-in counter of a hotel lobby.

"Duke!" I chirped. "Duke! DUKE!"

There was a sound like a church bell sounding early mass. It took me a long time to realize that the noise was coming from the bell on the counter in front of me. Duke was hitting it mercilessly, completely ignoring me.

"You filthy bastard!" I screamed at him. The tension was snapping me in two. I couldn't stand, couldn't think, couldn't even ignore the blinding pressure in my every being. "You sick, twisted fiend! What have you done to me? I'm dying!"

"Quiet you!" He growled at me, and then turned to the man behind the desk with a big smile. "Don't worry about my assistant. She's been having muscle spasms… gingivitis… among… other things… for days! Weeks!"

"Right," said the man slowly, nodding all the while.

"Uh, yeah. Okay, bucko. We have reservations…"

I was lost after these last few words. Whatever elevator music was playing, whatever the people around me were saying, whatever heart pattern a healthy me would have all of it was in the past. Duke's aviators turned purple and the man's nose swelled and morphed inhumanly. The tacky carpet floor below me slid a few feet to the right. It threw me completely off balance. At the same time, the cold sweat dripping off my hands made me slip. In a moment, I was on the floor, looking up.

Up only to see that the catfish were back from my hours in High-Ville. Only, they weren't the sane, normal, God-given marine animals I'd seen earlier on the road. They were black, leathery, yellow-eyed demons with huge bat-like wings and foot-long whiskers. And each controlled a mouth big enough to swallow a dog in one smiley gulp. The terror I felt was indescribable.

I was trying desperately to scream when a hand pulled me to my feet. I looked wildly around for its owner. Duke's eyes found mine, and I let out a shrill scream of glee. He was human, if not oddly slanted and discolored.

"Come on, Greenhorn," he was saying to me in a strange distorted accent. "Got to get you to the bar before they send us away because of your goddamn whacky antics. Or worse, man, take us to their vault for a beating."

"Beating?" I yelped weakly.

"Hell yes," Duke replied, barely understandable though that thick Turkish accent. "You don't want to know what freak shows they've got in places like these… I've seen frightening things, Greenhorn…"

"You have?" I asked, thinking of the catfish. "Oh my God, get me away from these things. They're everywhere!"

But Duke was only leading me into what must have been their central gathering place. He steered me around their wings, whiskers, tentacles, and God knows what else, right into the heart of their ominous society.

God help us, I thought as we entered a hellish cave filled with shadows and countless crawling beasts.

"What are you doing?" I strained to ask, talking fast to save time. "We'll be killed! They'll swallow us whole like sea bass. SEA BASS!"

"Quiet down, you swine!" Was all I managed to hear from him as answer. All else was lost in the terrible noise these creatures were making.

My God, it was like watching some unholy lovechild spawned from the Discovery Channel and the Twilight Zone. The mutant catfish all seemed to be celebrating together: dancing and looting the bar's booze; flying around the bar stools flinging olives and bar nuts; smoking in the corner; shooting heroin in the shadows; trying to play pool with their wings; having perverted catfish orgies and destroying all viewable hotel furniture all of it accompanied by whooping, growling, roars, laughing, and the strange love calls of these wretched monsters, and strangely, a blaring, echoing rendition of "Stuck in the Middle with You," by Stealers Wheel.

I might have cried if I thought I was capable of it by that point. But my mind was so twisted so bursting with a kind of deep-sea pressure and nausea—that I'm sure I'd forgotten how.

"BACK!" I screamed, when one of them snarled and tried to grab me. "Back, you colossal demon! I'm not going today! I'm not ready, you hear me? You stay back or I'll kill you!"

The beast let out a roar and reared it's ugly yellow-eyed head, wings beating and massive mouth gulping open and closed. I could see it's gills fluttering in the open air…

I turned around and saw Duke. It was questionably the happiest moment in my life. I seized his shoulders.

"Quick man," I said with passion. "We need fishing gear, a harpoon and a net.! Lots of the fuckers! CAN YOU HEAR ME?"

"Of course I can, you crazy cocksucker!" Duke bellowed back. "Just sit down. They say the room will be ready soon enough. And that the fight is tomorrow. At 7 pm. Got that?"

"That's if we make it out of here alive," I whispered, eyeing the monstrosities all around me. "Holy shit, Doctor! Would you look at that once over there? It's spotted us!"

Duke took a seat on a bar stool and dragged me onto one beside him. Luckily, Duke's arrival seemed to somehow fend off these mutant catfish. At least for the moment. I turned my attention to the Doctor while I had the chance. I tried my best to look at him while he spoke, but the man was becoming increasingly blurry, surrounded by multi-colored smoke and orange polka dots, as well as…

Sweet Jesus, I thought, is that a bat?

It was. One of the wild, flying rats itself was perched atop Duke's bush hat, looking heavily sedated. How it got there didn't seem important.

My eyes –wide and bulging, I'm guessing—found Duke's black ones again.

"DON'T MOVE," I said calmly. "THERE'S A BAT ON YOUR HEAD –BUT DON'T WORRY, DOCTOR, I'LL TAKE CARE OF IT."

"Bat?" Duke repeated, face full of confusion and the beginnings of fear. "What bat? Christ, I hate those things..."

"ON YOUR HEAD," I said in a whisper. "NOW, DOCTOR, DO YOU HAVE A FEW OF THOSE NETS I ASKED FOR?"

"A what-?"

"A NET, GODDAMN IT! A NET!"

The bat fluttered. I cursed myself for the change in volume.

"What? Oh yeah, man, here," Duke said, clearly frightened by the mortal peril he was in. He thrust a flyswatter into my hand. "Holy shit, Greenhorn, you're pretty fucked up. Maybe you'll try mescaline or something next time, eh? Hee hee…"

"HOLD STILL!" I screamed suddenly.

And before Duke had a chance to react, I was beating that bat out of it's life with the flyswatter.

The upside of this act was that I killed the fucker and danced like an Irishman in celebration on St. Patrick's Day.

The downside was that this also seemed to attract those mutant catfish like a steaming pile of crawfish never could. And soon, they were closing in. Whatever treaty Duke had organized seemed to have been thrown to the wind.

And what a terrifying escapade we'd been flung into. One of the catfish swallowed a lounge chair in it's rage, and each and every one of them kept letting out shrill roars of fury. Some took flight and began swooping dangerously close to our heads, while others moved closer to Duke and made to grab him. I bellowed my disapproval and leapt from my chair, only to be thrown back by some unknown force and the carpet crumbled again. A distant moaning could be heard in the distance amongst these terrific colors. I feared for the Doctor's life.

"DOCTOR! They've gotten hold of you! We need those nets pronto! And the harpoons! Good God, will somebody get rid of this smoke! It's blocking my vision! I can't see where the bat it! It could still be moving! SOMEBODY KILL IT…!"

But Duke couldn't hear me anymore, or at least that's what I guessed. I felt dozens of slimy, wet tentacles wrap themselves around my arms and pull me away from my friendly kidnapper. My only chance at survival. Everything was so terribly covered in multi-colored smoke and catfish kept jumping at me from far across the room. I feared the worst, and fought against this terrible massacre with all my physical power.

Cut to wider shot – ROWE is sitting on the floor, desperately hugging a bar stool and

shouting obscene remarks. The room has returned to normality.

She's holding a FLY SWATTER, which she's using to hit anyone who comes into swinging range.

DUKE is trying not to notice ROWE'S nearly constant shouting.

He begins WHISTLING, "Row, row, row your boat."

Black screen.