VIP

Eat my many bullets, quickly., he said as he strolled casually away.

You see, he was carrying a high-powered, high-rate-of-fire machine gun which could produce many bullets from its muzzle in a short period of time. Many of those bullets had just entered the body of another human being.

The problem was, the other human being shouldn’t have eaten those bullets. This was a shooting range and human beings are not usually the intended targets. This time they were and that’s because Jesus Mendoza had suddenly decided they would be. He was now holding his big firearm over the previously living human body before him. He was wondering what to to next. He decided rather quickly that he would like to go swimming. Yes, a nice dip would cool him down.

At the pool’s front desk, Jesus noticed the odd way the pool’s employee was looking at him. He decided it was because he was still holding his rather large firearm. He also decided that he might as well use it to do what it did best.

Eat my many bullets, quickly, Jesus said once again, although he really wasn’t sure why he kept saying that.

The pool was the perfect temperature and there were almost no other people. Jesus preferred the pool to be mostly empty, since too many people meant he couldn’t do laps and it also meant it would be very loud. He didn’t like loud things, which is why he usually wore ear plugs. In the pool, you couldn’t wear ear plugs though, so he usually had to suffer through the screaming and yelling of the pool patrons. Today, it was much better.

He did some laps, then decided to dive a few times.

On the diving board, he looked up. He noticed the structure of the swimming pool building. It was triangular. The two sides of the roof sloped at a steep angle. He noticed something else. A bird. Way up at the top of the roof, at the very apex of the triangle, was a bird. There was, in fact, a nest up there. There were many birds. The employees had no way of getting rid of these birds, so they were left alone. Once, a child decided to try and kill one with a BB gun, but he was never seen again.

Jesus thought these birds were very interesting but he didn’t think about them too much. He dove off the diving board and realised why there were so few people at the pool. There were actually no people at all. He also realised why the employee at the front desk had stared at him so oddly. It wasn’t because he had been carrying a large firearm. Although he had been. It wasn’t because he had been pointing the firearm at the employee, although he had been. It wasn’t because he had held the firearm menacingly, although he had. It was because the pool was closed and the employee just couldn’t understand why Jesus apparently wanted to get in anyway. All of these things went through Jesus’ mind as he dove and then it hit him. The bottom of the pool. Also, he remembered where he had left his library book. Surprisingly to Jesus, after he hit the bottom, he was still awake. He felt something soft under his body and noticed he wasn’t actually injured at all.

You see, Jesus had done this before, so the pool employees had installed special cushions at the bottom of the pool so he wouldn’t hurt himself again. Last time he was in the hospital with a coma for a week. His skull had been cracked and the doctors weren’t very optimisitic. But now Jesus was lying at the bottom of the pool again which means he had woken up and was back in shape. Jesus didn’t know any of that though so he was a little perplexed about the soft bottom of this pool. He thought it was a good idea though. It had saved his life. It meant he could return the library book and he wouldn’t keep accumulating more and more late fees while he was dead, or in a coma, until the library could repossess his car or house to pay for the damages incurred due to the absence of that particular book from the shelves. The library would actually be happy that Jesus didn’t die right there even though he would have owed them his house and that was because they couldn’t actually take anyone’s house. They would just want the book back since that was what they were all about. Also, it was because Jesus knew something. Jesus had to stay alive because everyone knew he knew something, except Jesus. The something he knew was very important even though no one knew what it was. They just knew it was important and that Jesus knew it. Jesus was a very important person, a VIP if you want, and everyone wanted him to stay alive so they could find out what he knew.

He was a VIP because someone realised he had something in his mind that no one else did. He was actually the latest in a long line of VIPs. Each VIP names his successor before he dies. Except he doesn’t name him, he actually just identifies him. These VIPs go back as far as anyone can remember, and a lot further than that since the oldest person alive has only seen two of them, including Jesus. The someone who recognised that Jesus’ mind had something special in it was the last VIP. He died in a fire after he doused himself in gasoline and lit himself a cigarette. Everyone knew these VIPs knew something no one else did since the previous VIP always said who the next VIP would be and the first VIP was Jesus. Not Mendoza, but Christ. None of them had ever revealed what they knew because they didn’t know they knew it, but everyone knew they knew it and everyone hoped it would be the next VIP who would tell them.

Maybe Jesus Mendoza would be the one to tell.