Luckily, I didn't break any bones when I fell downstairs, just incurred some serious bruises.
"Kevin!" My mother shouted. "What are you doing up there!"
Honestly, I wasn't sure. I couldn't even believe my own eyes.
It was the largest squadron of ducks I'd ever seen. They poured out the bathroom like Bozos from a clown car. Normal looking, garden variety mallards. The weirdest thing about them, other than their choice of nesting location, were the way they sounded. The noises their feathers made when they flapped their wings, the tinny quacking sounds coming out of their beaks.
"Mom!" I yelled. "We got...birds in the house!" An understatement, but hey, we've had our fair share of crows and pigeons bumbling their way into the house. I figured it best not to stretch it beyond a normal sane person's credibility.
My mother, hair in curlers, came up and stared open mouthed at the ducks, who, bizarrely enough, had the habit of flying in a Z pattern and quacking at every bend. Her narrow face had the sour expression she might have reserved for a drunken hobo urinating on her flower bed. Indignant, but not crazy enough to try to stop them. "I'm... Not sure we can just get rid of all that with a simple blanket...I'm. ..going to call animal control."
As she marched down from the landing, though, an unnaturally colored red duck made a beeline for her head.
With a shriek, mom picked up a broom and gave it a mighty swing.
The broom made contact with the bird's skull, which, adding to the surreal unreality of the situation, caused the creature to fly across the room like a shuttlecock, hit a wall, and spiral to the floor.
When you drop a bag of sugar, there's an expected solid noise associated with the action. You would have thought that this bird would have likewise made some sort of meaty thump sound upon striking the hardwood, but instead I heard a hollow imitation of an object hitting ground, like an electronic version of the stock 'crump' Charlie Brown makes when he misses the football and drops in the dirt.
Mom furrowed her brow, rubbing her forehead like she had a headache. "I must be dreaming all this...I'm going back to bed." Upon her departure from the stairs, I heard her muttering something about "Red and blue ducks with kung fu sound effects." Sure enough, I did spot some birds of both colors.
Neon red and blue ducks, I thought. Some kind of refugees from a genetic research facility?
Mom took her broom with her, but I had a baseball bat in my bedroom. I rushed up the stairs to retrieve it, swatting away dozens of beaked pests as I made my way to the door.
Reality at this point went even more sideways.
When I entered my room, I found Duke growling at another dog, whose head was coming out of the TV screen.
The front half of the canine looked real, down to the whiskers and bad breath. Its rear, though, resembled a cartoon, standing in front of a similarly unrealistic backdrop.
By now, I had come to a few startling realizations. First of all, I wasn't dreaming because the fall down the stairs actually hurt. Secondly, although I had suspicions earlier, it was now obvious that animals from my duck hunt game had somehow come to life and escaped my TV.
Although it felt rather silly, I did the first thing that popped into my head, grabbing the plastic light gun attached to the console and pressing it against the electronic hound's forehead. "Get back! I'm not afraid to use this!"
It was a bloodhound. It didn't comprehend English or the meaning of the white-orange toy pointed at its skull.
I pulled the trigger.
Please understand that I love animals (the real ones, anyway) and would never intentionally harm one. I was only holding what I thought to be a plastic video game peripheral designed to shoot harmless light particles at a TV screen. Also, I tried to fire at the mocking, previously cartoony mutt lots of times during gameplay, and it hadn't done a damn thing.
What happened next, though, wasn't harmless at all. A flash of light, brighter than I thought possible from that little toy, came out the muzzle of the device.
The bloodhound's eyes got real big. It exploded.
I expected the explosion to be rather messy. After all, the duck mom swatted with her broom still lay unmoving downstairs on the wood floor. However, instead of leaving a bloody half carcass in front of the television, the bloodhound sort of shattered into a million tiny cubes that vanished seconds after hitting the ground, like sparks from a Roman candle.
Not exactly heartbroken about the whole exchange. The snotty canine giggled at me every time I missed a duck, or lost a game.
Speaking of which, a moment later, a whole flock of those weirdly flying mallards came bursting through my doorway.
Okay, so not exactly unfamiliar for me to stand next to my set and shoot a light gun at ducks. If anything, doing it in 3D made the interface less counterintuitive.
The ducks made a mess of my room, broke a lamp, smashed a picture frame, and left droppings and feathers everywhere, but I downed five if them.
Duke, excited at the prospect of eating fresh game, rushed to a dead bird and sank his teeth into it. My dog uttered a noise that sounded a lot like a human "Huuhh?" The verdict seemed to be that the ducks were inedible, but he still liked to chew on them like a rawhide bone.
Unfortunately, their avian friends weren't happy about the turn of events. Dozens more of the unnatural waterfowl flew into my face.
For a brief second, I could see nothing but feathery wings and angrily pecking beaks. The light gun flew from my hands as I desperately fought to keep them at bay.
I dove for my weapon, fired blindly in every direction. Four more birds dropped to the carpet, the others scattering away from me, to regroup.
It was only then that I noticed my gun had become unplugged from the console. Like a character in the Tommyknockers, I had operated an appliance without the power being connected.
Although that kinda scared me, I still found the idea of having a sort of superpower exciting, so I went cowboy on the whole flock.
It turns out that, despite how the weapon worked unplugged, it had limited ammunition. After knocking down six more of the feathery nuisances, the weapon ceased to work.
It seemed only logical to plug it back in, see if it could recharge, or at least work while attached to the box.
According to the rules of the game, your bullet supply only replenishes by clearing a round or losing and starting over from the beginning. The readout at the bottom of the screen said my gun had used its last bullet, but eight targets still remained.
For all intents and purposes, the game should have been over, but instead I only saw the same motionless cartoon forest background and player statistics.
If you've played video games for any time at all, you inevitably come to a point where you wish you could just reach into the screen and take matters into your own hands.
I grabbed my aluminum baseball bat and made use of all that practice I'd been doing on weekends. Sure, I may have punched a hole in the wall, broken a window and cracked a mirror, but I was definitely on point.
I swatted every last one I could find, turning my bedroom carpet into a large feathery mound of assorted beaks, legs and wings.
A message flashed across the television screen: ROUND THREE.
My eyes widened in horror as I saw the first digital duck appear in the electronic forest.
I rushed to the set, stabbed the power button on the Nintendo, only to find out it had never been pushed in. The little red light had been on all this time, but the button, until that moment, remained in the off position I'd left it in last night.
I pulled the power supply out of the wall, but the duck continued flying in its weird zigzag pattern on the brightly colored background.
It turned to face me, quacking as it flapped its wings, again moving in a zigzag.
I grabbed the cartridge, yanked it out of the Nintendo.
The bird's head emerged from the television. It quacked.
A second later, the screen went dark, and a severed bird head plopped bloodlessly onto the carpeting.
Trembling, I staggered to my bed, staring in disbelief at the horrible mess...Then the gold cartridge.
Could a person experience pain in a dream? If the answer was no, how was all of this possible? How did that thing work without power? Did anything like this happen to Squeegee?
And how was I going to explain all this damage to mom?
The clay pigeons...Those must have come out of the game too. Could I somehow extract gold coins from Super Mario Bros without goombas coming out of the screen and trying to kill me?
Also, do dead digital birds rot? If so, what will the neighbors or the trash collectors think of me disposing of so many of them?
Was Duke wrong? Could they be defeathered and baked in an oven? And would there be enough room in the freezer to store the ones we didn't eat?
My weary puzzling got interrupted by what felt like a massive earthquake. Glass fell from the window, my mirror cracked further, pictures tumbled from the wall, books, magazines and cartridges nose dived into the bird mounds.
I rushed to the window frame, eyes bugging out at what I saw rolling across my neighbor's yard.
A tank of a weirdly simple design, one that didn't match the shape of anything in the history of tanks.
The machine was gray, devoid of military insignias or markings. Its turret was a plain polygonal box with a huge cigarette-like cannon attachment, a bubble on its roof suggesting how a driver might climb inside the vehicle, but in actuality just a small seamless bump that provided no means of ingress. Its treads, though scalloped on the edges to imply traction, resembled giant rubber bands, and on each of the tank's four sides there stood a sort of big useless looking metal brick, built into the armor plating.
To my dismay, I saw the tank's turret whirl around to face Mr. Pritzel's upstairs bedroom.
The muzzle flashed, an immense projectile, shaped more or less exactly like a quarter smashing through the man's dormer windows.