Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

(PART ONE: CRUISE BEAST)

Somewhere in the Canadian countryside was a small blue pickup truck. Its rugged tires kicked up pebbles and dry soil as it trundled down the long and infinite roads, carrying its humble payload far, far away. The sky was refreshingly clear for a winter’s afternoon, and the truck sailed on uninterrupted by such disharmonious things as potholes or traffic. Unbeknownst to the driver, the truck also carried a stowaway. It was Crack Bear. Crack didn’t know where the truck was going. He wasn’t interested in finding out. All that mattered now was the the sun in the sky, the January wind in his matted green pelt, and the fact that the Discount Zoo was getting farther away by the second.

“We in Vegas yet?” asked Evil, who was also there.

“You can say that again.” replied Crack, not turning away from the trail receding behind him.

“With sudden clarity comes decisive action.” - Bear Nuts, p. 108.

“Oh, did I say the Leap of Faith? I meant, the Leap of Filth!” - The Amazing World Of Gumball, ‘The Kiss’.

Evil Bear had some unorthodox ideas when it came to having a good time, ranging from the unfathomably stupid to the potentially lethal. But at the end of the day, he knew that hanging out in an enclosed space with Crack was at the bottom of the bottom of the list. They had been in the back of that truck for God knows how long, and all he could do was look outside and watch the road. He hoped for the humble thrill of seeing two raccoons fighting or some guy burying a body like he hoped for on most road trips, but all he got instead was wheat, dirt, grass, wheat, dirt, grass, over and over again. If they drove past some corn maybe things would get a little entertaining. But sadly, that would have more to do with the elephant in the room. He looked at the snot-coloured little nuisance perched on the tailgate. He looked all fun and fancy-free for the time being, but Evil knew him well enough. No amount of patience, compassion, or Good Listening Ears could make time with Crack pleasant, or keep Evil from going postal on him when the time inevitably came. It’s not as if professional phobia collectors made the best company. If he puked, fainted, or ran screaming into the night, Evil would have to be the one cleaning up the mess. And besides, wasn’t Prozac supposed to be the one minding him anyway? You’d think escaping from the zoo would be more exciting, but no - Evil was a babysitter. 

All of these things made his motivation for following Crack into a strange truck in the dead of night ever more elusive. He wasn’t the most introspective of bears, but he had been thinking about it a lot. No matter how much he did think about it, he was certain of one thing: this was exactly where he was supposed to be. It was clear that something much grander than Evil put him in that truck - like fate or destiny or a little gerbil living in his ear. But that answer wasn’t a very satisfying one, so he thought about it some more. He had a lot of time to think. It wasn’t as if he was going anywhere.

Crack, on the other hand, wasn’t asking himself any questions. He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew that he had climbed into that truck while everyone was asleep, simply because he could. That’s right, it was as simple as that. At face value, of course, this answer was just as unsatisfying as the last. But the thing is, this was something that Crack did not have the mental fortitude to do until that night. In fact, it was the first time he wilfully left the bear exhibit in what was surely a decade. It was entirely within the realm of possibility that because this was such an unlikely thing for Crack to do, nobody would even notice that he was gone.

He couldn’t remember much of what happened in that decade. He didn’t even have memories of what happened a week before he left. When he tried to look back - when he wanted to, all he got was white noise and static. He wasn’t trying very hard, mind you. He knew those memories couldn’t have been good.

But none of that was going to matter. He didn’t even care that he was alone with Evil in the middle of nowhere right now. There was no past anymore - only the future, and the future was at the other end of this road.

The road had no end in sight. It had no beginning in sight, either. They were probably going in a big circle, but there was no way to tell when everything looked exactly the damn same. Evil paced the floor. He wondered how long it would take the driver to discover two wild animals in his truck, and what he would do to them if he did. He wondered how close the other bears were to finding them, as Prozac never let a member of the family get left behind. He wondered how hard it would conceivably be to evade Animal Control. It seemed as if all of the worry that left Crack’s body had been passed down to him like the cursed amulet in Granny Edith’s will, but really could you blame him? Evil had been desperately avoiding it, but all avenues of reason continued to bring him to the same horrible conclusion. He knew what he had to do. How else was he going to stay sane? He put on the least favourite in his arsenal of nonthreatening smiles, and began.

“Hey,” he called out to Crack, “How are you?”

“Great!” Crack replied, eyes still fixed on the road.

“Weather’s not bad today.” Evil continued.

“It’s immaculate!” Crack replied. Evil soon stopped smiling. 

“I don’t have the patience for this!” He howled. Crack turned to face him, and it was at that moment Evil noticed his smile. On top of all the other worries that Evil had accumulated in less than 24 hours, there was something truly unnerving about that smile. Evil couldn’t see the rearview mirror from where he stood, but he didn’t need to to be able to tell that that smile was far faker than his own - in fact, it looked more like one of Prozac’s. Is he stealing mood enhancers? Is that why he’s doing this?

Of course, it could be that Evil just wasn’t used to seeing Crack smile.

“There’s just something I gotta ask you.” 

Crack hopped down from the tailgate and the pair sat down next to each other.

“What, exactly, are we doing here? Why’d you climb in this thing anyway? And better yet, why the hell did I follow you?”

“Well, that’s easy!” Crack said with gusto, “You see, if I walked I wouldn’t know which way to go, and they probably wouldn’t let a bear ride the bus. I can’t drive like Lech does either. So I looked around, and I saw this truck, and I got in.”

Evil was nonplussed.

“Not sure why you’re here, though.”

It wasn’t even Day Two, and Evil had to fight the urge to go postal on him. He took a few deep breaths through his nose.

“No, I mean - do you know where we’re going?”

“Far away.” Crack replied, taking no time in doing so. “Very, very far away.” He returned to his former position at the tailgate and kept on gazing at the unremarkable country roads, leaving Evil no more enlightened than before.

Evil left his seat, and climbed up on the truck’s left wheel tub. He looked down, watching the road slip out from under his feet. On a base level, he understood why someone would want to leave the Discount Zoo. He understood why someone like Crack would want to get out of there. Evil had a pretty long list of why he’d want to run off and leave everyone languishing in their own juices too, and he was just about certain that everyone else had their reasons. But of course, all those people were still there. They never acted on them. They were probably watching TV right now. There had to be a catalyst, that one breaking point that pushed them out. Evil had no trouble guessing what Crack’s might have been, and if not that, there would’ve been a million and one other things for him to flee from, because believe it or not, the Discount Zoo is not a very nurturing environment for a professional phobia collector. He could tell that Crack wasn’t nearly as certain as he sounded - he was pretty transparent that way - but it was an assured kind of uncertainty. Was he stupid? Was he admirable? None of that matters when you’re hiding in the back of a truck in the middle of nowhere.

Evil looked down at his navel. He was no stranger to fate.

(AND SO IT ENDS)

Chapter Text

“There’s still a lot more to do, my friend. Humans are everywhere, and it will take quite some time to get at them all.” - Foamy The Squirrel, ‘Nuts to You 2’.

“So,” Evil said loudly and abruptly, which was the way he said most things, “Are we just gonna stare at dirt all day?”

Crack turned around from where he was perched on the tailgate. “What do you mean?”

“I mean this is about as fun as watching paint dry.”

Crack was incredulous. There was that smile again. “How could you be bored? Everything here is entirely new! There’s a surprise at every turn!” 

Great. Now he’s speaking in greeting card like Prozac.

“For a shut-in like you, maybe.” Evil retorted. “I’ve been on the road before. I’ve been to all kinds of places! Don’t you even notice whenever half of us are gone? I might’ve been to this road before. I might not have been to this road before. You know why I don’t know? Because they are all alike and they are all excruciatingly, unfathomably boring.”

Crack’s smile began to grow dim. He fought to maintain it, but Evil knew better. “Of course I notice!” Crack replied, “I’m always thinking about what the keepers are gonna do if they find out, or if you’ll come back safe, or if you’ll come back at all. And then you do come back which is really great and I never even get to find out where you all go!”

Evil leaned in. “Seriously? No one tells you?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t Prozac tell you?”

At this point, Crack was close to abandoning all pretence. “Prozac said it would give me nightmares.”

Evil slammed his paws against the truck’s floor. “What?”

“Well, he’s right. I understand that now.” The flippancy with which Crack said this did nothing to temper Evil’s outrage. Evil didn’t like authority, that was a given, but lately he’d been losing any respect he had for Prozac. Some of Prozac’s decisions were ones he disliked, but would silently admit to understanding. But on Christmas, with the oranges - when Death explained it to him - it made it sound like he did that for fun.

“Well, that doesn’t mean he can decide what’s best for you!” Evil knew what happened the last time Prozac made that decision. Could he tell him? Not yet, Evil decided. It’s best to start with a little truth. “I’ll tell you where I went! I’ll tell you everything that happened! I’ve been on so many adventures that Indiana Jones would be jealous! Like there was that time they released me into the wild, and-”

Crack leaned in, allowing the imagery of all the places he’d never been to fill his head. Evil talked about how he’d met someone named Sloth who he thought Crack would have heard of before, but he didn’t remember him, though the sound of his name evoked an odour Crack couldn’t place. Evil did a very fine job of making him sound like someone worth forgetting. Evil also spoke about the many times he’d manipulated the zoo’s system to get the bears steak - though he emphasised the outrage of the humans and the lions rather than the gratitude of the bears, and Crack didn’t eat red meat, he thought that was very kind of him. Evil told him about a plethora of other places he’d been that Crack didn’t even know about - but sooner or later it occurred to him that Evil might have been lying. But this didn’t concern him. Crack knew exactly how the stories ended, and that was with him being exactly where he was supposed to be.

Night fell on the little truck in the endless Ontario countryside, and the wheat, the dirt, and the grass were getting a little hard to make out. Crack and Evil sat under a tarp they found to shelter themselves from the falling rain.

“So we get to the arena, and the first thing we see is Tanked, right there in the ring, and there’s these clowns charging right at him with folding chairs!”

“Clowns?”

“I know, right? I really should start watching the wrestling. Anyway, next thing you know, Death leaps right up there and he zaps them and he zaps them and he zaps them and then everybody’s in the ring just pummelling these clowns into oblivion. Prozac tried to hold me back, but I got a bat and put a dent in this clown’s head the size of Manhattan.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a party pooper, that’s why. But he came around in the end and bopped one square in the nose!”

“I wish I could’ve been there.”

Evil was confused. “Are you sure? I mean I can’t tell you what you want, but you’d probably have collapsed before we even got to the arena.”

“No way!” Crack was jittering in a way that made him look fit to burst, and that bizarre smile was wide and bright enough to attract moths. “Bring on the clowns! BRING ON THE CLOWNS! BRING ON THE CLOWNS!”

Before Evil could even think about how he would have diffused the situation, the bears felt the truck swerve, almost toppling them over and sending them tumbling. The truck swerved again, less dangerously this time, before finally slowing to a stop. 

“Finally!” Evil groaned aloud. At last, he could move again. He thrust the tarp back, and made his way out of the truck.

Oh, come on!

Before Evil was a humble gas station, sequestered in the middle of nowhere. He couldn’t say for sure, but it looked like it was patronised exclusively by bedbugs. The place was so empty that Evil could just meander there out in the open, and it was illuminated solely by the pitiful neon lights, the moon in the sky, and the convenience store at the other end of the station. Evil wandered towards the window to get a closer look. Much to his surprise, someone actually worked here - some Wayne’s World-looking bum who would probably have to be stapled to his chair to work at a place like this. Astonishingly, this was not the only establishment in the area. Just to the left of the gas station, barely perceptible in the darkness, was a twee little hut with a sign that read ‘GERT’S FLOWERS’. 

Evil stared pathetically into the sky and let the raindrops strike his face. “Who would buy flowers here?” he howled to no-one, “Who would come here at all?!?” He tried to picture the sorts of humans who would find themselves here - unfortunate husbands, hogtied with a pashmina scarf in the back of their wife’s Toyota Prius, left behind and forbidden from rejoining civilisation until they accrue sufficient botanical tributes for their misdeeds.

“Let me guess,” GERT would say, “Say her sister’s name at the altar?”

“Worse,” the Condemned One would reply, “My sister’s.”

“Well isn’t that a dilly of a pickle?” GERT would say, “A bouquet of my finest carnations will do the trick! That’ll be two hundred dollars!”

But all that wasn’t quite as much fun as he thought it would be. Certainly not fun enough to ditch Crack and set up camp here permanently.

Evil cut his losses and dragged himself back to the truck. He’d have had to go check on Crack anyway. That shut-in would probably think this place is Disneyland, he thought, climbing over the side panel. When he saw him beyond the wall, it immediately became clear that the spell was broken. Crack didn’t have that terrible, Prozac-like smile anymore, but he had been stricken with something far more grave. He stood firmly in place like a chess-piece, eyes glazed and out of touch with the world. All that moved were strands of his fur being blown by the wind. Now this was behaviour far more typical of the man who’d been scared out of his wits so many times that he never really found his way back in. It was clear to Evil that whatever awesome force had propelled him towards taking such a risk had packed its trunk and said goodbye to the circus. Figures.

“Hey!” Evil yelled in Crack’s face. “HEY!!!”

Nothing.

Evil tried prodding him between his eyes until he came close to knocking him over, batting him from one paw to the other like a Weeble.

Still nothing. Evil was beginning to suspect a vicious drive-by taxidermy.

Evil slapped him in the face so very hard that even under his thick pelt you could see the redness of his flesh. This worked. Crack came to his senses, and bopped him one right back. Evil didn’t have the patience to be resentful. He gripped Crack firmly by his shoulders.

“What’s going on?” he asked sternly and resolutely. “I need to know, this could be important.”

Crack juddered underneath Evil’s grip, forcing Evil’s arms to judder in turn. “It was me!” he screamed. “I did it! It was me! It was all me!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Evil yelled. Crack yelped and dove under the tarp like a bunny on the business end of a hunting rifle. Evil silently counted to three, and Crack’s head popped out.

“I wasn’t thinking! We don’t have any disguises! The humans are going to find us and throw us into the wild! I can’t survive in there! You can’t save yourself and protect me at the same time! And what about the others? The keepers are gonna notice we’re gone! They’re going to do terrible things to them! Everyone’s going to suffer because of me! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” He retreated back underneath the tarp, and he would have been entirely obscured if not for the crinkle-crinkle sound made by his uncontrollable shaking.

Evil counted five Mississippis, then gave the quivering tarp a firm kick. They both understood how it felt to know that everyone had suffered because of them. Evil wasn’t about to make Crack endure it a second time. The green bear silently crawled out from under the tarp and stood to face him.

“Look, there’s something important that you forgot. You got me! I’ve never let anything beat us before and I’m not gonna do it again! And besides, when’s any human we’ve met been anything other than dirt stupid?”

A faint smile formed on Crack’s muzzle. A real one. He still worried, but he knew Evil’s words to be true. “Do you have a plan?”

Evil peered over the side panel, with Crack following suit. The driver - a wide but strong-looking gentleman - had left the truck to fuel up. Crack and Evil had made themselves scarce in the nick of time, both thanking the stars above neither he nor that slug behind the register heard their caterwauling.

“Look.” Evil said sharply, “That gas station is probably full of raincoats and sunglasses for people who are too lazy to pack for vacation. If I can distract the humans, I can get us some. Just stay put, lay low, and wait for me. Can you do that?”

Crack nodded.

“Good!” Evil leapt from the truck and scampered away.

The farther Evil ran from the truck and into the cover of darkness, the less Crack’s belief in him could sustain the strength of his spirit and the strength of his legs. He would have completely vanished under the tarp, trying desperately to deny that humans exist and gas stations exist and the world exists, if Evil hadn’t told him to stay put. Moments later, Evil’s horned silhouette appeared in front of the convenience store window. There he is! The world spins comfortably on its axis once again, because there he is! Him! Here! Crack allowed his heart to slow, not daring to blink should such a foolhardy act will Evil out of existence. He thought hard, diverting each of his faculties into hoping that the human behind the counter didn’t catch him.

But wait! The other human! The driver! He was on the opposite side of the truck, filling it with petrol. What did he know about petrol? On TV, filling a tank with gas took mere seconds - but lots of things on TV happen faster than in real life because of something Nerd told him about called ‘pacing’, and also trucks are way bigger than cars so surely it would take longer? It had to! Lech knows everything about cars, why couldn’t he have asked him when he had the chance? Thoughts of Evil being left stranded filled his head, lost in Nowhereland for all eternity, never forgiving Crack for abandoning him so callously, Crack never being able to find him and beg for absolution. I’m sorry! I wasn’t fast enough, I wasn’t strong enough! It was all me! Crack kept his eyes fixed on the driver, looking for any hints of him swivelling back towards the truck or raising a foot to leave. It was all that he could do.

Evil scanned the area. A difficult task under the cover of darkness, but thankfully there wasn’t much to see. The guy driving the truck was still pumping gas, and the loser behind the counter wasn’t looking up from his magazine. It was the perfect time to act. He sifted through his Fanny Pack Of Evil (was he really going to chase after Crack without it?) and pulled out his second most favourite weapon. #3 was his shaving razor. He always did get a lot of mileage out of that. #1 was - and always would be - his eyeball scooper. Someday he’d get to use that thing on someone who truly deserved it. But now was the time for #2: A rock. He thrust it as hard as he could into the convenience store’s window, shattering it with a CRASH!. He liked to linger for a second or two just before fleeing - entice the humans a little, a little ‘Meep-meep!’ for the Wile E. Coyotes. It never failed to rile them up into chasing him, and this time was no different. When it came to humans and small, cuddly animals, their curiosity always got the better of them, and Evil knew how to use that to his advantage. He let the beams of their flashlights just barely make out his shape as he sped towards GERT’S. Evil was a resourceful bear. Once he made it inside that shack, he could do just about anything from then on: he could pretend to be a raccoon for a while before scouting a nearby fan to take his place while he got away, or he could pretend to be a human holding the famous GERT hostage, demanding a ransom of whatever a tank of gas cost, or he could cry out for help while making sure the humans never figure out where the sound is coming from. Yes, even in a nothing place like this, it’d take a lot to keep Evil down.

When he reached that twee little hut, looking back now and then to make sure that he and the humans were just the right distance apart, Evil could implement Phase Two of his plan. He used his ursine strength to thrust open the rickety wooden door. Success! Just like that, he was through. The next step was to scan the area. There was a counter and a register, pretty standard store stuff. The place was also full of flowers, that was a given. He heard the sound of a rotating desk fan - he could use this. He scampered up to grab it, only to find that one: GERT’S was by no means abandoned and two: it was currently open for business.

“BEAR!” shrieked GERT.

As GERT swiped a nearby broom, Evil scampered up the highest shelf on the salesfloor, knocking over dozens of flowerpots as he went. The sound of human screaming, the whacking of the broom and shattering ceramics filled the store, but focus kept the noise from entering his mind. Once he had reached the top, perched like a housecat, he scanned the store once again, trying to calculate a route he could take out of there by jumping from surface to surface. But he wasn’t in Walmart or Real Canadian Superstore where shelves lined the place like traintracks, he was in some rinky-dink flower shop that was barely the size of a porta-potty. Ten years ago, he could’ve gotten himself out of this. Then, he wouldn’t have been above trying to eat the humans. It wasn’t as if Prozac was there to stop him. But he also had yet to learn that it was intelligence and creativity that served him best when contending with the bears’ many foes. He could see the other humans’ squinting faces from through the rain-splattered window, flashlights jittering about fruitlessly in search of the creature. At least that’s taken care of. Evil was left to contemplate once again, except this time instead of Crack he had an angry old lady with a broom for company.

Back inside the truck, Crack’s legs finally gave out. Between the joy of seeing Evil popping up outside that window, and the sight of the driver and another human from the store disappearing into the night, this was a level of excitement that Crack’s feeble body couldn’t handle. Just because I’ve fallen over doesn’t mean I didn’t stay put? Right? With what strength he still had in his arms, he hauled his body onto the side panel, leaning himself against it so that he could keep seeing over it. But it was too late. He had failed, and Evil was gone again.

But that can’t have been true. He’d said it himself: Evil and the other bears always come back. There was no way Evil was going to let a nothing place like this get in his way, not when he’d faced Sloth and his minions and the polar bears and entire stadiums full of humans and lived to tell the tale. He was way too cool. So why couldn’t he see him? Crack had no idea how long he’d been waiting. How could he tell? The sun? It’s nighttime. Those gas pumps have numbers on them! But I know that that’s not the time up there. There was still no sight of him, and Crack was beginning to forget what his legs were supposed to feel like again. But he had to stay firm and alert. He had to do it for Evil.

But he’s gone! And he’s never coming back! The humans got him! Vultures stole him! He’s fallen down a bottomless pit! What am I standing around for? Crack checked at all angles to make sure nobody else was around, steeled himself as much as he could, and barrelled to that convenience store while his legs could still carry him there. As he ran, he desperately pushed back thoughts of poachers, black markets and Evil pies that seeped into his head. Any hesitation and any doubt could make him lose his momentum - even a second’s worth would leave him curled up quivering on the asphalt, and a sitting duck for the humans. Crack knew plenty about convenience stores. He’d been to one, and the other bears were there too. It was the last time he’d ever come on an adventure, and the last time he’d ever left the zoo - until now, at least. Between that and chance viewings of Canada’s Stupidest Criminals with Lech back at the zoo, Crack was ready. 

The front door was automatic - this gave him a shock, but thus far it was nothing he couldn’t handle. Crack looked around. This place, much to his relief, wasn’t that different from what he had seen on TV. There was the front desk where the human the Stupid Criminal always threatened would be sitting, but thanks to Evil he was gone, and so the store was empty. But he knew it wouldn’t stay that way for long. What else was there? Shelves? Check. Ribald magazines? Present. Candy bars? Good ‘n plenty. Crack searched the aisles in no particular order, and after the third try he found the vacation stuff - just like Evil said! Before he did anything else, he had to suit up. He chose the first items in his line of sight, with no regard for size, texture, or coordination - if Gay saw him right now, he would surely weep. He ended up with a polka-dotted raincoat three times his height (stuffing the parts he could trip on into his one-size-too-big rain boots), glitzy gold sunglasses in the shape of the number ‘2008’, and a sequinned pink woolly hat, scarf and gloves with built-in textaholic thumbpads from a prepackaged set. He pulled down as many coats, hats, sunglasses, scarves, boots, and gloves as he could possibly fit into his arms, creating a huge pile in the middle of the store before stuffing everything that would fit into a ‘Fun in the Sun!’ tote bag. He grabbed some of the candy bars as well for good measure - they were small and easy to stuff inside. Crack had completed the mission in nothing flat. He sped towards the exit, making sure to run on two legs like a human would, when a deafening sound pierced through his ears. When the shock subsided, Crack soon realised what it was. How could he have been so stupid? Through all the episodes of Canada's Stupidest Criminals he’d sat in on, Crack failed to account for the burglar alarm. His new sunglasses were making it difficult, but Crack was almost certain he saw the beams from three (three?) flashlights blip into view.

On one hand, Evil was grateful that somebody tripped the burglar alarm - as soon as he heard it, the clerk darted back towards the store. The driver and GERT followed him, because humans were known for just how easily they got bored. He was a zoo animal. He would know. On the other hand, he wasn’t one to not look a gift horse in the mouth. It was imperative that he knew who or what tripped the alarm, whether it had come alone, whether it would be making a stop at GERT’S, and whether it happened to be a carjacker as well as a thief. But still - with the situation he was in - this was as good an opportunity as any to count his blessings. He leapt down from the shelf and left the place faster than he could even think about it. He focused his eyes on the figures at the store. He could recognise the shapes of the driver and of the thin and baggy-trousers-wearing clerk. From where Evil was standing, it looked like they had apprehended the thief - a toddler-sized human who by the look of his outfit was probably homeless. The other humans were probably asking if he was all right and calling a shelter or a doctor. Bunch of hippies. Why not scoop out his eyeballs? But - even though he had absolutely no way of proving this, and especially not from so great a distance - animal instinct was telling him that this was another Ursus Moronis. He probably smelled like one too, if Evil got any closer. But of course, this would mean… nope, it wasn’t that hard to believe. When Crack was determined, he was like an asteroid heading towards Earth. He’d seen it firsthand. He still had the rope burns. Crack, you beautiful maniac.

Really, Crack should have been used to this. Didn’t he spend the better part of his life being constantly gawked at by humans? And yet, he found himself unable to move or speak even with just three humans doting on him.

“Buddy, you don’t have to give the clothes back. I can start a tab!” the clerk tried to reassure him, “I just need to be sure you’re safe, alright?”

Crack couldn’t lie. He wasn’t an adept liar. He couldn’t run. The only place to run to was the truck, meaning the driver would surely find them out. As difficult as it was to hold back, he couldn’t scream. He’d watched enough TV to know exactly what happens to frightened, screaming, ‘crazy’ humans, like in the show with the boy who went to school with an alien or the man in the pink shirt or Dave who was more than happy or that movie with the evil nurse.

“Can you hear me? Do you need a place to stay?” asked a sweet-smelling old woman.

“I’m on the way to Hamilton. Can I drop you off at a motel on the way there or something?” asked the driver.

Hamilton. That’s where it’s going. Getting these humans to leave him alone was now more important than ever. Crack remembered how to make his fingers wiggle under his coat. The new incentive was giving him the will, but he still found himself unable to devise a plan. 

Evil could kick himself for being so gullible. How could he have forgotten, in spite of everything, that Crack was still Crack? It seemed as if he had to take matters into his own hands. Evil scampered towards the rear end of the convenience store, and climbed the drainpipe to the roof. It was the perfect vantage point from which Evil could implement one of his more frequently used plans. It was a simple, crude one, but he had used it many times either as a failsafe like now, or to stoke a little chaos when his shaving razor just wasn’t cutting it. He reached into his Fanny Pack Of Evil and pulled out his nice new rock - as if he was going to give up the last one without getting a replacement - and he lobbed it right at the clerk’s head. They needed the driver to get them out of here, and even Evil couldn’t hurt an old lady. The clerk collapsed to the ground, and everyone gasped and screamed. GERT and the driver were frantically asking him questions, but the clerk looked like he was too overwhelmed with shock and pain to answer.

“You can stay in my store! I know first aid, and I’ll call you an ambulance!” Just as Evil had hoped, GERT was taking initiative. She held on to the clerk’s arms, the driver his legs, and all three were well on their way to the sleepy flower shop where an ambulance would probably take hours to reach. Evil’s plan had gone perfectly, and he knew this because in that miasma of panic he caused, they forgot the bum.

“Hey!” he called out from the roof. Crack looked up and waved back at him. Though his muzzle was covered by his new scarf Evil knew he was smiling at him, and he smiled back. “I’m coming down!”

Evil slid down the drainpipe and quickly met Crack again. “I bought us tons of time,” he said, “I’ll tell you what to get.” Everything inside that store was theirs for the taking, and like Black Friday shoppers, the bears scoured it and pillaged it, grabbing shrinkwrapped sandwiches and sticking plasters and water bottles and canned fishes and maps of all the Canadian provinces and anything else they would need that popped into Evil’s head. When they were done, each bear had two stuffed bags on each arm, leaving them to run on their hind legs back to the truck. It was done. They stuffed their bounty under the tarp. 

“I can’t believe we did that!” Crack exclaimed, excitedly jittering in place. “You were awesome!”

“And you did a good job too! You showed great initiative back there! If you hadn’t tripped the burglar alarm I’d still be stuck in that flower shop. How’d you know I was in trouble?” Evil then remembered who he was talking to. “Well, I guess that was a dumb question. But still! You got the clothes, and you saved my ass, and you did great.” After seeing him freeze in front of the humans, Evil thought he’d have to lie just to keep him from going haywire, but the more he went on, the more he found himself believing everything he said.

Soon enough, the driver came back. He must have figured that an hour was too long to wait for an ambulance, and he had work to do. He had a tank full of gas, and he was ready. Crack and Evil had their disguises, and they were ready.

“Hamilton! The truck’s going to Hamilton!” Crack said as the engine started.

“Hamilton? That’s perfect!” Evil replied, checking his new map. Nowhereland was slowly getting smaller and smaller, and the bears stood on the tailgate, side by side, and watched as it finally disappeared.

(AND SO IT ENDS)

Chapter Text

“The world is my oyster. But I can’t seem to get it open.” - Anne D. Bernstein, The Daria Diaries.

After Nowhereland had vanished, the first thing the bears did was sleep. With all that they had withstood in the past nights on the road, they certainly needed it, and they undoubtedly deserved it. The bears lay under a thick blanket of pilfered winter jackets, and the sparse rays of the morning sun behind the horizon allowed Crack just enough light to sleep peacefully. The roads were just as smooth as they had been before, and the gentle hum of the engine punctuated with the chirruping of the dawn chorus ensured that the bears’ passage from the limbo of wakefulness to the Land of Nod happened quickly and smoothly.

When they awoke, the position of the sun and the lack of change in their surroundings told them they hadn’t slept for very long, but to them it was just enough. Breakfast - as decided by Evil - would be several handfuls from the stash of purloined candy bars.

“Prozac’s not here. What’s stopping us?” Evil insisted. Crack, in spite of it all, was just as vulnerable to sugar cravings as anyone else, and he hated that Evil knew this.

“If I get a rotten tooth, you’re pulling it out.” Crack grumbled, taking a single red M&M and stuffing it under his scarf. He was probably pretending to eat it, but lamentably Evil couldn’t check his eyes for tells behind those ridiculous sunglasses.

It was hardly worth it. Evil had had enough of playing Sam-I-Am back at home. If we’ve made it this far on nothing but fish heads, then I’ve done my job. He took one of the shrink-wrapped sandwiches, a BLT, but to Evil it didn’t matter much. This was the closest thing he would have to a decent meal in the time he’d spend on the road - however long that might be - and getting more could prove to be even more of a challenge. Not one he couldn’t face, of course. He considered stuffing some Reese’s cups and Oreos in the middle, but figured that without Prozac or Gay to chastise him it would just be a waste of a good sandwich.

Just as Evil was enjoying his second helping, he heard the unmistakable sound of a drum riff. The driver must have decided to listen to the radio with the window open, and it looked like he had a taste for classic rock. Not seconds later, he heard the every-bit-as-unmistakable sound of Crack yowling in shock. He leapt up from his spot and hid behind Evil as if the spirit of rock itself was coming to harvest his soul. 

Evil pivoted round by 180º. Now Crack was in front of him, and thus tragically no longer hidden. “Come on! Surely you’ve heard music before.” Evil protested.

“But it’ll keep playing in my head over and over and over really loud and I’ll never be able to sleep and I’ll never be able to hear my own thoughts again! Where is it coming from?” While Crack frantically scoured the entirety of the truck for the source of that awful noise, he saw Evil wildly rocking his head back and forth through the corner of his eye - is he having a seizure?!? Am I too late?!? Why didn’t I notice sooner?!? Crack pounced onto Evil’s back and clung to it like a mechanical bull, desperately wondering if there was some renegade veterinarian out there travelling the land in search of creatures in need.

“Get off me!” Evil yelled before finally managing to shake him off (the secret was to stand just close enough to the edge). “I’m dancing! This is rock! You dance to it like this!” He continued to thrash his head to the rhythm.

“But it’s dangerous!”

“What are you, a mom from the 80s? Get a grip on yourself and dance!”

Crack watched Evil carefully as he danced, making sure he understood what each part of his body was doing. His head kept on thrashing up and down, which made Crack dizzier the longer he stared. He thought he almost heard Evil’s brain, or what could possibly be left of it, being bashed against his skull as he moved. Sometimes he would jump in the air or stomp his feet, and he was doing this thing with his paws that was a little like pointing with two fingers but not really. How could Crack possibly get it right, when there didn’t seem to be any order to it at all? Evil would surely say ‘There’s not supposed to be any rules, freak!’ but the assertion that there are no rules has always been a bald-faced lie. It means that there are rules, but you can never know you’ve broken one until it’s too late and the damage has already been done.

Evil was probably getting impatient with him. He tried thrashing his head like Evil - a little more gently so he wouldn’t give himself vertigo or dislodge an eyeball - and did his best to copy exactly what Evil was doing, when he was doing it. He stomped when Evil did, pumped his fists when Evil did and tried to mimic that strange gesture he was making with his paw, though he couldn’t always keep up. Evil didn’t seem to care, though. Evil wasn’t even looking at him. He was having way too much fun. Evil was good at that. Crack took a metaphorical step back, and reassessed the situation. He had been following Evil, but what was Evil following? Nobody, of course. Others follow him. But right now, Evil was following the music, and that’s what Crack had to do. But this wasn’t one of those songs that had instructions in it like the Hokey Pokey. He was left to figure that one out on his own.

When disaster was about to strike, and it was imperative that a wrong be righted, Crack could rely on pure momentum to solve it. But for a problem such as this, one so very trivial and so very stupid, Crack ceased to be able to process his own thoughts, much less translate them into courses of action. That was the way it usually happened, and it felt like trying to swim through the resin Nerd would use in his miniatures. Then, right when he was beginning to put the barest threads of the equation together, a soaring guitar solo began to play. The music compelled him to stand to attention like a soldier, and give himself over to the melody, to every note and trill of the guitar and to the pounding of the bass that resonated under his feet. At that point, he found the key. His head thrashed by itself now, the music was taking the lead and he was content to let it. He thrusted his arms about and stomped his feet and pumped his fists and jumped around, not even taking care to notice what Evil was doing.

After the song was done with them, the bears were dizzy, tired, and delirious, but content - and somehow a little hungry for more. Crack reflected on this. What was it that Gay’s yoga videos said back home? Exercise is the key to a happier, more fulfilling life? Why did it have to be so easy for everyone to get inside his head? But with the buzz from the music still pulsing through his bones, it was difficult to be resentful.

“See? What did I tell you?” crowed Evil, still laughing a little. Crack said nothing, hunching over to catch his breath, but his own laughter relayed the message just as well. The rest of the album played, and several more followed. While the music played, the bears went as they pleased, sometimes dancing, sometimes content to sit and listen. The hours passed in a blur, and the bears had found themselves so enthralled by the music that they were surprised to find that the truck had crossed the threshold between country and metropolis. The bears looked over the side panel. When they finally noticed the world outside, the dirt beneath them was replaced with smooth tarmac, and traffic lights punctuated their path. The longer the bears watched, the denser the buildings became and the taller they grew, but cars and pedestrians moved in small clusters, paling in comparison to the bustling miasmas they saw on TV. 

Crack’s head darted left and right so as not to miss a single sight. “Are we in Hamilton?” he asked.

Evil consulted his map. “Not sure. For us to be in Hamilton, we would have to have been driving for hours.” Evil tried to count the number of songs that played and gauged the position of the sun, finding his speculations to be true. This was probably as far from the Discount Zoo as he’d ever been before, and he wasn’t sure whether this was good news or bad. “The people out there probably think we’re cargo,” he told Crack, “Well, that or they just don’t care. But we might be moving into the denser part of the city soon. I’d better suit up.”

Evil rifled through the bags of clothes, and after some thought went with an all-black ensemble of a high-collared raincoat, boots, beanie and reflective sunglasses with John Lennon-style frames - all bear-sized this time - and offset by his red Fanny Pack Of Evil. He looked like a vampire, or perhaps a bit player in a cheaper version of The Matrix.

“You look great!” Crack remarked.

“And you look like a scarecrow.” Evil replied. “Which is super ironic - but people are going to stare and you’re going to trip.”

“I’m not taking this stuff off!” Crack spat, lurching back. 

Given their situation, this was one of the few times when Evil couldn’t blame Crack for being frightened. That seemed to be happening a lot lately. “Well, I’m no sewing genius like Gay, but I’m sure I can figure something out.”

Evil plunged a paw into the Fanny Pack of Evil, and pulled out the knife that Crack recognised as Stabbity. He thrust it into an area of the polka-dotted raincoat that happened to be dangerously close to his ankles, making Crack yelp.

“Get over yourself! You’re going to mess it up!”

Crack tried to keep as still as he could. He was still shaking like he always did, but this wasn’t getting in Evil’s way quite as much. Stabbity sliced through the material until the raincoat hung just above his feet. Evil’s final result was unhemmed, and a little wobbly, but it would take some close attention for anyone to notice. No more than it would take to notice he was a bear.

“Here. No sense watching you make an ass of yourself.”

Crack examined Evil’s work with care, and smiled.

The bears spent their time staring over the side panels, watching the city become denser and denser. There were no signs around to suggest where they were, and Evil had lost his place on the map a long time ago, but their senses insisted that yes - it could only be Hamilton. Hamilton, as Crack and Evil were experiencing it, was a place that teetered on the precipice of being a straight-out-of-Hollywood concrete jungle, but never quite making that payoff. Perhaps they had yet to enter the city’s nucleus, and adventure would soon be on the way. Or, as the bears would think whenever traffic got a little more sparse, this was all there was. There was safety in anticlimax, but there was also boredom. Traffic began to build as they went on, with cars moving back and forth in larger swarms, but thankfully nobody inside took notice of the bears. Whether this was due to pure luck or their superior disguise skills, they preferred not to think about for the time being. Then, after what seemed like the length of a TV commercial, the city became less dense, with supermarkets and restaurants being replaced with human suburban homes interspersed with uniform apartment blocks. Evil would make his consternation about this place very vocal. “What are we going to do in here?” he’d say, “Watch TV? We could’ve done that at the zoo!” Each red light in their path would only frustrate him more, since it meant that it would take a bit more time for the lifeless homes and empty lawns to disappear. Fortunately for him, suburbia too vanished as soon as it was introduced. This time, the bears were riding through the space between the two - a town not unlike the one Evil had been to when everyone was searching for Tanked after he went sober. The memories of pummelling those clowns that it evoked made the whole thing seem a little less pointless. After what felt like an eternity and no time at all, the truck turned a corner to climb up a concrete ramp. Though the bears had never encountered such a situation before, what it meant was unmistakable.

“We’re here.”

The bears counted seven more ramps until the truck had finally parked. After they were certain that the driver had gone, Crack and Evil raised the tarp from over their heads.

“He’s putting a coin in the meter.” Evil said. “Let’s go!”

The first thing Evil did after leaving the truck was herd Crack across the parking lot and shove him into the elevator. The first thing Crack did was hope for the best and try not to trip on his own boots. The metal doors closed behind them, and Evil pushed the button for the farthest possible floor.

“Why did you do that?!?” Crack yelped, desperately trying to prise open the doors. “He could leave without us! We’ll be marooned! How are we going to get out of here?!?”

“Get over yourself and breathe!” Evil groaned, cradling his skull. “May I remind you that there is a finite amount of space here for you to puke in.”

“But-“

“Can you chill out for one second? This is good news! Listen. Do you realise where we are?”

“Hamilton? Maybe? Is there a wrong answer?” Crack tugged on his hat hard enough for it to moult a row of sequins.

“Well right now, we are in a hotel, a hotel in one of this country’s fine cultural centres that happens to be this close to the United States border. Did you see the size of that car park? At least one of these people has to have come from the States, and they’ll want to go back soon enough.”

“America?” Most of the things that happened in movies were in America, and Crack didn’t need that level of chaos in his life.

“Just think of it - The USA. Where it all happens. Bright lights, big cities - think of all the fun we could have! And better yet, Prozac’s never gonna look for us over there, though it would be funny to see him climb the Empire State like King Kong. You said you wanted to go far away from home? Well, this is where ‘far away’ begins, and there’ll be no turning back. Wasn’t this why you started this whole adventure in the first place?”

Crack couldn’t remember why he chose to climb in that truck. He wasn’t even certain he knew what he was doing in the moment. It was beginning to occur to him just how far away they already were. He didn’t even know where he’d brought them to, and he would only come close to finding out when or if the elevator ever opened its doors. But thinking of this only made that strange rush set in again. The one that told him to forget anything else, that made the world start to vanish leaving only the endless horizon to chase. Even through the elevator’s metal walls he could see it waiting for him, and it was growing impatient.

“Let’s go!” he said with a bounce.

Evil studied the elevator’s console, and pushed the button he thought would let them out soonest. Perhaps he’d make it to Vegas after all.

“So which signs am I looking for?” asked Crack, trying hard to match Evil’s gait.

Evil continued to scan the car park as he paced across the concrete. “Well, the tourists here aren’t exactly going to come wearing sunscreen on their noses and flower garlands like in the brochures.” he explained. “For people, we’re talking things like bigger suitcases and tacky T-shirts for things like museums or corporate team building events. Also, look out for flags on license plates. That’s a big one.”

Crack kept his eyes peeled. To him, every human looked alike, which made searching difficult, especially when they all kept going back and forth like that. Adults were so tall he could barely make out their faces, and children seemed to be in an even bigger hurry. He also had the problem of shaking the belief that if he looked at a human for long enough - especially if he tried to make eye contact - they would throw fruit at him. This was, after all, the order of things back at the zoo. He felt that precious momentum begin to wane, and he was ashamed that this was how little it took to break his spirit. Instead, he chose to look towards Evil. Evil looked like he was having a far easier time focusing on the task at hand.

“This place looks dry to me.” he finally said. Crack wondered how Evil knew that. “How’s it looking on your end?”

Crack was not at all prepared to admit he didn’t know, and it was beginning to occur to him just how little he really did know. He was sheltered. Everyone said it. Even in spite of what Evil said after their adventure in Nowhereland, he doubted whether his foolhardiness had truly paid off. It was Evil who accomplished everything, and Evil who had to bail him out of trouble. No matter what spin he put on it, he didn’t think that what he did helped at all. Crack had never been to a hotel or a car park. He couldn’t even remember seeing the rest of the zoo beyond the bear exhibit. Everything he ever knew came from television. Star Trek, Sex and the City, Jungle Girl Meets Elephantman - all simplified, repackaged facsimiles of the real world. Even supposed ‘reality shows’ were “totally scripted,” as Gay would often say during episodes of Rock of Love Bus. Who knows how deep the conspiracy went? Perhaps even the contestants on Wheel of Fortune were a product of someone’s imagination. In spite of all his cautiousness, he was naïve, down to the core, and it was only a matter of time before Evil would see through his ruse.

“I agree.” the words let out faster than he could catch them. “Do we go down a floor?” he suggested, hoping to distract Evil from his failure.

Evil looked up. Crack was badly concealing the fact that he was utterly lost, but Evil was forced to admit to himself that so was he. This plan he had now was hardly a plan at all. It might have been at that gas station, or in the elevator, or right now, but Evil had realised what it truly meant not to be in the Discount Zoo anymore. That place would just hire whatever drooling simpleton they could peel off the pavement, so outsmarting the keepers was easy. He’d had the privilege of living there long enough to know how the place operated, all the secret passages between exhibits, and just what made everyone tick. Even in situations like that wrestling match, he had the support of the ‘family’, as Prozac used to call it, and it was only because of Crack’s idiocy that he’d made it out of a pitiful flower shop. When he’d usurped Sloth in the wild, Evil had come close to having the world at his mercy. But the world was vast, unfamiliar, and had so many people that it would take forever to gauge each of their weaknesses at all, let alone exploit them later. Crack never did tell him where ‘far away’ was. Perhaps this was it.

After an incalculably frustrating two minutes, Evil looked back down again.

“I have a better idea.” he said. Everyone thanked the heavens above.

The hotel’s pool area was lively and buzzing with humans. The bears’ dense clothes would surely have made them stick out, but this didn’t seem to concern the freewheeling children causing miniature tsunamis, or the adults who tried to wrangle them between pages of the murder-mystery bestseller du jour. Crack was unsurprised. The joys of swimming, when he got the chance, often overpowered any inhibitions he had - of which there were many. Blending in didn’t seem to concern Evil, either, as he clearly had other things on his mind. Sure enough, he pounced from Crack’s side and began scampering all over the poolside, zipping from deckchair to deckchair like a mosquito. Crack hovered around him at the relative distance of Pluto from the Sun, unsure of whether or not to follow him, all the while trying to piece together just what Evil’s ‘better idea’ was. He’d allowed himself to be so relieved at the outset that he’d forgotten just what one of Evil’s plans entailed. 

“Ha! I found one!” Evil called. Thankfully, his voice was dwarfed by the usual miasma of human clamouring. He rushed across the poolside, prize in hand, until he was finally close enough for Crack to see what he had. Crack took a good look. Evil had gotten his paws on what could only be a human smartphone. “Someone was dumb enough to just dump it there. Hurry! Before it locks us out!”

Usually, technology was no hurdle for the bears. They’d disarmed cameras, committed credit card fraud and constructed a fully functioning cloning machine. Or rather, it was everyone but Crack and Evil who did all that.

“We should try Facebook, humans always put where they’ve been on Facebook.”

“No! I can’t go there! They’ll steal my data, and use it for their nefarious misdeeds!”

“You have no data, Crack, nothing you have could possibly be useful to anyone. Just admit you don’t know what Facebook looks like.”

“Well why would you need my help if you didn’t know what it looked like either? Take that!”

“Scroll right”

“No, scroll left!”

“Let go!”

“You let go!”

In the midst of their struggle, the phone buzzed in their paws and emitted a loud chime. Crack ducked for cover at the sound.

“Get up!” Evil said. “It’s not going to detonate, moron. Look at this.”

The phone’s owner had received a text message, which was displayed in plain sight across the top of the screen. It read:

Missed you so so sooo much the wait is KILLING me! See you at the Falls! 😘🫶😘

“The falls?” Crack wondered.

“Niagara Falls.” Evil spoke after a long interval. That message was so gooey that he felt his arteries clog just thinking about it. “On one side, Canada. On the other, New York. We could hit Broadway, Phantom of the Opera style! How about that?”

Crack hated musicals. Anything that could move him so easily had to be some kind of psychological weapon. “How do you know that’s what they’re talking about?”

“I’m going to be up front: I don’t know. This phone could very well belong to a family of lemmings on their ritual lemming pilgrimage. But since this is our only chance of getting into the States, it is also the best chance.”

The call of the horizon was getting louder. The noise permeated the inside of his skull. It had no regard for logistical difficulties, but Crack certainly did. “We have to find another phone!” he let out. It was only Evil grabbing the hood of his raincoat that kept him from running away.

“I’m telling you, this is the only chance we have.” he said bitterly. “We’re not going to get another phone.”

Crack was incredulous. “You mean you’re not even going to try?!?”

“I’m just facing facts here!” Evil protested. He stayed resolute as any leader should, but his frustration was becoming apparent. “That we got our paws on even one was pure chance! If there’s anything you should know about humans, it’s how closely they guard their stuff! This is all we have! So shut up and listen!”

Crack went quiet, and stood to attention.

“I’m going to put this back where I found it. Now here comes Step Two: we follow whichever human claims it until they lead us out of here. Maybe we’ll end up at the States. Maybe we won’t. But this is a chance we cannot afford to pass up. Am I clear?”

Crack didn’t move.

“Thattaboy!” Evil happily growled, barrelling towards a faraway deckchair and taking his position. Crack crept down Evil’s path, bodiless as a ghost, and kept watch over the phone at a safe distance. After a brief time, the phone’s rightful owner emerged from the pool and dried himself off. He put a T-shirt on, not bothering to change out of his board shorts, and made his way out of the pool area. Crack and Evil thanked the stars for this mercy. Each looked sheepishly towards the other. They dreaded to think what would become of them if everything had played out the least bit different.

Perhaps the greatest relief of all was the fact that the phone’s owner drove a minivan. Maybe the spacious rear of the vehicle would usually have held a drum kit, or a pack of large dogs. Whatever it was, the driver was travelling without it, leaving plenty of space for the bears’ supplies and making their journey all the more comfortable. After all, they would have hated for anything to force them apart following their precarious success. The only drawback, however, was that unlike the truck, the rear of the minivan didn’t have any windows. The only way for the bears to see where they were was the sliver of road they could see through the front window between the seats, and the nondescript instructions offered by the GPS. Crack and Evil were no more certain about their arrival at Niagara Falls as they were before they left. Each was hesitant to ask the other if they could tell where they were, or how long they’d been travelling for, or whether they still had hope. They just had to be secure in the knowledge that the plan was working, and that they successfully made it out of that hotel. Harmonious thoughts that would lead to harmonious actions once they got out.

Of course, all that waiting and all that silence led to inaction, and Evil couldn’t tolerate inaction. He rose from his seat, plodded to the van’s doors and thrust them open. That the van didn’t happen to be moving when he did this was down to fortune alone. Evil left the van and tried to gauge where they were, to find that he’d opened the doors at just the right time. Crack trailed behind once he was sure it was what he was supposed to be doing, and once he’d leapt the fence to the pedestrian track to meet Evil, he found himself just as awed. The bears found themselves in the middle of a bridge. When they looked across, they could see the Falls the humans so greatly anticipated. The water cascaded down in a brilliant turquoise, culminating in a great white mist whose expanse rivalled the Falls themselves. Even the tranquil blue river below, dotted with its riverboats and marbled with white foam, green forests at its margins, was a wonder in and of itself. Everything looked as lush and idyllic as a postcard, as if the illustrations on cans of golden syrup had come alive. Even at their distance, the sound of the Falls formed an impenetrable wall around them, noise shutting out all else. Perhaps, Crack wondered, this was what horizons sounded like.

As he scoured through the Fanny Pack of Evil for whatever units of human currency he could find, Evil was hit with a grave epiphany. “We can’t get back inside that van.” he said, taking his eyes off the Falls and looking directly at Crack.

“What? What do you mean? It’s right there!” Crack yelped in response, beginning to wonder if the van was some kind of hologram, or if he was finally starting to hallucinate.

“I know it’s there,” Evil said, “but think about what’s going to happen once we reach the end of that bridge. We have no passports. We have no ID. They aren’t going to just let us across Customs.”

Just when he’d gotten that hit of relief, Crack’s mind was running circles once again. He tried to remember all the Canada’s Stupidest Criminals: Disorder At The Border episodes he could, but not even they were stupid enough to smuggle two wild animals across in plain sight. He looked to Evil, who was very deep in thought. He wasn’t looking as determined as he was when he usually formulated a plan, which made it even harder for Crack to get his thoughts aligned. He was an invertebrate. That was the first thing anyone knew about him. Invertebrates are only really good for so many things: projecting, blame-shifting, and overcompensating, stagnating, attention-whoring, dragging everyone down and causing disharmony to name a few, but none of those could help anyone with anything. He’d probably been doing this for God knows how long. He couldn’t remember if he’d ever thought to say sorry. That was what made Crack so very surprised to find that in the midst of all that spiralling, he’d managed to dredge up a plan. A real plan! A plan that, strangely, drew on that most endemic of invertebrate talents. He took Evil by the shoulders.

“We have to run!” he cried. “We have to hide!”

“No! Not this again! Not here! I should have known this was going to happen if I followed you! Why did I even bother -“

“Get in the van!” Crack vociferated, and that was just what Evil did.

“So what are we going to do? Hide out in here until the Sun consumes us?”

Crack was unmoved. “Take off your clothes!”

“You know, in these situations, people usually get candy first.”

“Hurry up! We have to be bears again!” Crack insisted, emancipating himself from his coat and boots.

Evil soon caught on, and removed his own disguise.

“Let’s go!” Crack yelled the moment he’d finished disrobing.

With the time Evil had, he stuffed the winterwear into the pockets of each raincoat, quickly folding them up into their collapsible forms. He stuffed them inside the Fanny Pack of Evil, tying it around his ankle so it looked like he’d gotten himself tangled in it. Years of hiding contraband from Prozac would soon pay off. He then motioned towards the bags of convenience store loot.

“We have to leave them!” Crack insisted. “They’ll think we’re smugglers or drug mules! Now go before it starts moving again!”

With everything ready, the bears burst from the van, and barrelled across the bridge as fast as they could, so quickly that they couldn’t even tell when they crossed the border at all until they finally got to look back and see that the bridge was gone. The Customs clerks and the traffic on the bridge had to rethink their perception of the New York bear population, but there was nothing for the humans to do beyond that. After all, bears weren’t beholden to Canadian or American laws. Neither of them would admit this, but the bears’ relief was immeasurable.

“We made it!” Evil wrung out between breaths, “Thank the stars!”

“Finally!” Crack resounded.

“Canada can suck it!”

The bears had made it across. Perhaps by chance, but nobody could deny it, no matter how much they tried.

“Wait!” Crack yelped. “Animal Control!”

The bears ducked into a nearby car park and put their human clothes on again as fast as they could.

“So, we’re in the States.” Evil affirmed. “Now what?”

The sight of the realisation hitting Crack was palpable.

“What are we going to do?” he cried. This was a problem that demanded some difficult reflection.

“I think the real question is, what aren’t we going to do?”

(AND SO IT ENDS)

Chapter Text

“What an interesting feeling it was! To be in motion! But I wasn’t in motion, I was static, I was stationary! That was my position!” - Not Stanley, ‘When The World Stops’

New York was a big place. That was one thing movies and real life seemed to agree on. If the bears looked hard enough, they’d probably find some pretzels, too, with sesame seeds and hot mustard. Crack, for one, hoped there weren’t as many rats in the streets as there were in that movie they all saw about that wandering princess. But one thing they knew for sure was that New York’s famous subway was all the way in New York City, which was eight hours east. The laughter of the convenience store owner they asked made that clear.

“Sadists!” Evil kicked up some gravel. “Why would they call it Central Park when it’s not even at the centre?” he groaned at Crack as if he was expecting an answer.

“I don’t know.” would be the wisest thing that Crack could say, for it was the sincerest answer he had. He couldn’t claim to know what went on in the minds of New Yorkers. But Crack didn’t say that. Frustration had won out for him too. “Forget that!” he grimaced. “Where the hell are we gonna go?”

“Let! Me! Think! I am just as lost as you are right now, so just give me time! Time! Ever heard of it?” Despite both of them being outdoors, Crack felt he had to take a few steps back. Just to allow Evil some air. Soon after, and without warning, Evil began to take to his feet and walk away. 

“Let’s go,” he stated curtly, as if he’d already told Crack exactly what was going on but simply forgot to do it in an audible manner.

“Where are we going?” Crack asked, trying to catch up to his gait.

“Just - this way.” Evil chidingly replied, unwilling to explain himself.

Crack hoped to the stars that Evil knew what he was doing. This was hardly a novelty, since hoping that one of Evil’s schemes wouldn’t get out of hand was the activity that took up the most of Crack’s time (other than hoping that Evil would forget what he was doing and take up a hobby that didn’t involve as many pointy things). But at the same time, he understood that Evil was very, very good at what he did. Otherwise, their journey would have ended at Nowhereland as a pair of stylish rugs for GERT’s living room. And how could he forget that time back at the zoo, when he and Evil snuck out of the bear exhibit and played that prank on the polars while they were asleep? That time when he got to have genuine honest-to-god fun? Now that they were as far away from the zoo as they could get, they were sure to capture that feeling once again.

But of course, there was the time Evil and Lech spiked the zoo’s ice cream truck and Tanked had to go cold turkey. If Tanked didn’t seriously injure or even kill them before running away, they would have gotten into a car crash on the highway or exposed at the wrestling match and sent back into the wilderness. Or the sight of Sara, a bear that by all accounts he should be hating, with her ribs cracked and nose broken because Evil wanted to play another trick on the polars. From what he’d heard, the polars could have killed her! That he was able to make a clean getaway during the stencil-and-shaving-razor escapade could only have been a fluke. What was the thing that Prozac had on his wall above the meditation candles? ‘Nobody’s Perfect’? He came from the Discount Zoo bear exhibit, no kidding nobody’s perfect. And when it came to Evil’s imperfections everyone else had to suffer for it. Does he even know what he’s doing? Or is he just following one of those whims of his again? For better or for worse, Evil truly was the luckiest bear alive.

“Hey!” Crack awoke from his stupor to find Evil clicking his digits in his face. “Under here!”

Evil had better know where he’s going with this. Or know more than me, at least.

Crack had lived with Evil long enough to know that he didn’t quite communicate the same as everyone else. For example, when he says ‘Fun’, it means ‘Filling the otters’ pool with lime Jell-O in the dead of winter.’ ‘Nothing, I swear!’ means ‘The otters have a death warrant against us.’ ‘Light mischief’ can be taken to mean ‘Pulling all the eyes out of Crack’s stuffed animals just to see what sound he makes when he finds out.’ ‘Here’ in this context referred to the inside of a human woman’s long coat, followed by a bus ride. He was sure Evil didn’t plan on bringing them there when he set off like that, but then again, he did have this enigmatic way about him. Crack appeared to have been unconscious for what to him felt like most of the journey, though at this point there was no way for him to be certain. He woke up in the seat next to Evil - something that at the zoo would have been a grave portent, but today made him feel immeasurably grateful. Evil was still awake and gazing impatiently out of the bus window. By Crack’s judgement, either Evil was looking out for a fun and exciting thing that they were driving towards, or a very scary and dangerous thing that they were driving away from.

Crack placed a gentle paw on Evil’s shoulder, cautious that any noise would rouse the humans on the bus.

“Where are we?” he whispered. “Where are we going?”

“We’re on a tour bus right now,” Evil said. He negated to turn and face Crack, thereby increasing the probability of Option 2. “And if the pamphlet I found is to be believed, we are about to embark on ‘New York’s Greatest Adventure’.” His words were tense, but he was clearly trying to make himself sound breezy. “There are three exclamation points after ‘adventure’, so, of course, it can only be good.”

“How long have we - “

“About ten hours.”

“And we didn’t - “

“Get caught? Nope. The driver’s busy driving, and everyone else here is too lazy and too self-absorbed to give a crap about what we do.”

Crack peered out from his seat. The humans on the bus, young and old, were all perfectly docile. A number of them were on their phones or staring out of the windows, others quietly chattering amongst themselves, and a few were sleeping. He was fairly certain that, other than going to the bathroom, none of them had looked up for the entire duration of the trip. Crack often took for granted just how much Evil knew about humans, and he hated being reminded of that fact. Though the last time Crack asked Evil what humans talk about, he said, “Your potential weak points. With the cumulative power of human knowledge, they’re sure to figure it out soon. Have fun with that!” and that oddly lessened the blow just a touch. During both bears’ vigilant observation, the bus slowed to a stop, and it was time for everyone to disembark.

When Crack and Evil left the bus, it was easy to see where they were and why they were there - The Statue of Liberty was, of course, synonymous with New York itself, no matter who you were or where you came from. The other tourists from the bus waited, taking the time to stare at the monument before deciding to board the Liberty Island ferry, and so Crack and Evil did the same. They stared. They waited. They stared. They waited. They used the seemingly unending time they had to study each fold in Lady Liberty’s gown, make sure the sculptor added the correct number of fingers, and speculate on how many pigeons poop on her per day. Neither said a word to the other. They continued to stare, and they continued to wait.

As everyone boarded the ferry, Evil, for one, looked forward to wringing something exciting out of this visit. The United States flag on the ferry’s mast thrashed in the wind. Tourists oohed and aahed and took pictures amongst themselves, surely eager to brag to their friends back in their respective parts of the world, while Crack stuck close to him and tried not to get lost in the crowd. This thing had better be worth it - for both of their sakes - because from when the ferry left Battery Park to when it arrived at Liberty Island neither he nor Crack seemed to enjoy the novelty of riding a boat for the first time. Evil remembered how gleefully enraptured Crack was at something so boring as a dirt road. It was sickening. He would give anything to have it back. Evil wouldn’t have to wait long. If he’d chosen the place, it could only ever be good.

Arriving at Liberty Island made the size and detail of the statue even more apparent to the bears. As everyone trekked along the pathway and entered the museum, the sounds of the tourists’ awe only increased in intensity. Evil couldn’t imagine why. Nothing at the museum could hold his attention for more than a second. It was all a bunch of random, worthless nonsense that could only embarrass itself riding on the coattails of the main event. By his prediction, at least. The place was filled with smaller, cutesier versions of the statue including a guest appearance by the green M&M, a bunch of drivel about the whatshisface sculptor who made the thing, and a bunch of cheap old postcards that led him to think the curator spent the grant money on hookers and desperately needed something else to fill that cabinet. Banners with Prozac-isms like ‘Independence’, ‘Equality’ and ‘Rule of Law’ hung over his head. There was one that gave him a slight promise of something fun - only for him to find that what the banner actually said was ‘Suffrage’. As such, Evil would find himself watching what the humans were doing instead. They didn’t appear to feel the same way about the museum as him, which was concerning because his way was clearly correct. Instead, they were just as giddy about it all as they’d been back at the pier, all pointing and cooing and smiling and taking pictures and giving everything the same level of unyielding attention you’d give a movie, or two moms fighting over a cookie jar at HomeSense. Evil considered doing the same - for Crack’s sake - in case there was a chicken-and-egg effect at play here, but he wasn’t willing to debase himself like that. Even if his lying skills were to atrophy - for one reason or another - Crack was suspicious by nature. What would be the point?

When he wasn’t watching the humans in all their banality, Evil was keeping a close eye on Crack. As usual, he looked flighty. He trembled beneath the raincoat Evil had trimmed for him, and Evil could tell his eyes were darting around even beneath his ludicrous so-nine-years-ago glasses. Crack was spending a great deal of time at each exhibit he looked at. To anyone that didn’t know him, it would look like he was studying them well, but Evil could see that he was doing this to try and distract himself from the humans and New York and the uncertainty of it all. Surely that porcelain ear can’t be that enthralling.

“So, well…” he opened, utilising his second-least-favourite nonthreatening smile. “This certainly is something, wouldn’t you say?”

Crack did not lower his scarf to flash Evil a smile in return, leaving him to wonder what he could do to gain back his respect. He mentally kicked himself for wanting Crack’s respect in the first place. He deliberated some more, and hastily came to the conclusion that Crack was obviously just trying to maintain his cover - very smart thinking, and really, Evil should be proud. After a moment, it quickly occurred to Evil that his own face had been covered as well, so what was there for Crack to smile at? How ridiculous he’d surely been.

“You can say that again.” Crack finally spoke, turning his attention toward the green M&M before it was finally time to leave the museum.

Mercifully, Crack was able to hold his own inside that cramped staircase up to the pedestal. Evil was making sure of that one. He would march up all 215 of those stairs with a determination and vigour that others could only envy, taking Crack by his gloved paw so that he could come at least a little close to matching his pace. He was a leader, and at a time like this, they needed a leader more than anything. And who else was going to step up than the one who’d been pretty much carrying the whole family on his back since his paws first touched down on Discount soil? “Come on! What are you waiting for? New York awaits!” 

Crack tensed up like Evil was mad at him or something, like he was calling him some kind of ogre, and for what? But Evil couldn’t expect Crack to get it: when he climbed into the truck that night, he’d made a promise. He didn’t remember making one. Yet, he still couldn’t shake the feeling that he had. It was his impenetrable confidence that had been holding the family together for so very long, and he wasn’t about to lose it. There would be nothing left of them then. So, if Crack were to let out so much as a whimper, then - well, he wouldn’t. He’d know better. Besides, once they got to the top of the statue, none of this would even matter.

At the zoo, Evil was a creature both reviled and feared - an organism fuelled entirely by chaos and malevolence, with flesh-serrating teeth and claws and the strength of creatures twice his size. He was the leering ghost that haunts the dreams of lesser creatures. In New York City, however, he was a toddler-sized man being made to climb 215 stairs. He wanted to spit on every single one of those perky little signs reminding him how many more steps he’d have to scale - how he hated being dragged down to the same level as one of them. But bear or bum, Evil still had his superior wit. Theoretically. And at least the payoff would be worth it. Ideally. After a climb that was entirely too long, sunlight hit Crack and Evil’s faces once more. No longer would they march along in the world’s dopiest parade. The bears emerged through the door. Finally, two sets of paws planted themselves on the pedestal and the bears were ready to take in the magnificent view below.

Don’t you say it. Don’t you dare say it.

“So, this place.” Evil smiled. He kept on smiling, even if he was going to catch a bug in his teeth from how high up they were. He could see why Prozac needed mood enhancers to do this every day. “Isn’t it just… something else?”

Crack recoiled. Evil wondered if his ruse was already getting thin, but then he remembered who it was he was trying to fool. It was probably nothing. “Look. You can see the city from here.” Crack sounded halfhearted, but perhaps it was only the scarf he was wearing muffling his words.

Without a word, Evil joined Crack in looking across at the city. The place oozed with opportunity. Yes, there was plenty of fun and excitement to be wrung out of this place. Conceivably. That was why he’d jumped into that truck, wasn’t it? To have 100% no-holds-barred high-octane FUN, with no walls to hold him and no gross fish heads for dinner and no Prozac to stand in his way? Wasn’t this what he dreamed of? And now they’d found it! So why should he be mad at Crack for supposedly dragging them both on this looney adventure? He’s not supposed to be angry at all, silly creature. Loosen up that face! Look at that majestic concrete jungle. It clearly paid off. He should be ECSTATIC. He would be. It was going to happen.

“You see that? All that running around was worth it!”

Don’t you say it. Don’t you dare say it.

Crack stared down at the city, in all its colourless concrete splendour. Where was all that awe and amazement he had now, when there was actually something to see? Thinking back to that moment when the truck first left the zoo and passed the threshold into the rest of the world was getting harder and harder. The most likely explanation was that the great height they were at was frightening him to such an extent that the city’s obvious wonders were lost on him. He’d spent his whole life distracted, that could only have been it. But though the (relative) absence of fear was a wholly new sensation to him, he could tell that it wasn’t the height that was the problem.

Even the memory of that glittering sense of accomplishment from escaping Nowhereland was fading fast.

But that didn’t matter. He wouldn’t let it, because he was going to make all new ones. Better ones. Evil had been working so very hard to get them both here, to keep them hidden for so long. All for him. And look at that statue! Look at the city! Surely it all amounted to something beautiful, so it doesn’t matter anymore that Evil had to work so hard! It might not be making him feel anything now, but tomorrow is another day.

Because of course, Crack was nothing if not an optimist.

Evil turned to him. Crack looked about as affectless as any of them ought to be - even a little angry - but he could have just been projecting. It was only recently that Evil recognised he had a habit of that, and he counted himself lucky that Nerd wasn’t there to bask in the validation. “You see?” he said. “All that running around was worth it!”

“I suppose I have no choice but to believe you,” Crack replied. Evil was lying. He always lies. But just look at that view! He wouldn’t lie about that. Who could?

“It’s nice when we can both agree.” What’s he trying to imply? How is he expecting me to have a plan when he’s the one who dragged us out here in the first place?

“This place must have that effect on people.” I was in over my head! Can’t you see that? But you didn’t have to follow me, so quit trying to deflect the blame!

“What can I say? It is a wonder of the world, after all!” Evil chuckled. That’s not a real laugh. You’re not fooling anybody. You’re lost in the city and everything sucks and you’re probably gonna snap before Crack does! Talk about a new low!

“SHUT UP!” At the sound of Evil’s roar, Crack leapt back as if the floor beneath him were burning. Evil saw that his noise caught the attention of some tourists, too - but fortunately, human self-absorption meant their curiosity only took them so far. “…and let’s allow this place to speak for itself.”

And so they did.

Crack began to consider going back to the museum. The tourists were sure to come through there when they were done, and they could follow them back to the bus so it doesn’t leave off without them. And besides, understanding how everything came to be would give him a much more well-rounded view of the statue - not that it wasn’t magnificent already, of course. “Do you think we should go -”

“Leave? That’s a great idea!” Evil crowed. “But - only because there’s so much more to see! Why, if all they had was the Statue of Liberty, then New York would be a boring place indeed!”

“But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t worth it.”

“Not at all!”

“We definitely made the right choice.”

“Absolutely!”

“Why did we come here?”

“It’s not my fault this was the next stop!”

“If I tell you it’s raining, would that be an attack on your character?”

The bus deposited the bears outside of the Empire State Building. Going inside seemed like a good idea, but only after a thorough and exhaustive process of elimination told them so.

Evil didn’t know how Crack was feeling about the place. He didn’t want to find out. It didn’t matter, because he could pretty much already guess how he was feeling about it - he was feeling about the same way as Evil. How could he not? Between that lame fakey King Kong and the fact that their tour group was spending an extended amount of time wandering the Celebrity Corridor, Evil walked through that place with nothing but pure derision. It seemed like every tourist attraction was just there to get stood upon to look at something else. It was all just one giant joke. The entire city was trying to make him look bad.

But the fact is, Evil did know how to make his own fun. He did it all the time! Back at the zoo, it wasn’t even a challenge! But this place? Conceivably, it should be an absolute smorgasbord of potential mayhem. 102 floors’ worth of distractions! People who could never hold a grudge because they’d never know he was a bear in disguise! And if he dropped something from up there? Well, it would really really hurt. And - and this is a big one - PROZAC IS GONE! He’s a free spirit who answers to no-one and can play all the pranks in the world! And he had plenty of ideas, too. He could easily picture himself fooling people into believing Kong could talk or drawing moustaches on all the celebrity photos or gathering tourist hair for voodoo dolls. But for one reason or another, when he did see himself doing those things, it all turned dull and rotten. This sucks, that sucks, that’ll only be funny for 30 seconds, there’s too many people and I’ll be caught, there’s not enough people and something about a tree falling in the forest. 

That wasn’t necessarily true. Those ideas did seem cool. He did still have it. And when was the last time he cared about risk? But those pranks were being played by a version of himself that just didn’t want to be here right now. Not that this version was so certain about it. Evil looked down at his navel. Even though it was covered up right now, he’d be hard-pressed to forget what it looked like. When he got done saving both their skins, where would he even go from there? Would he still be able to do the things he’d always done, and was that even what he wanted? Evil did not enjoy having to reflect on such things. He looked up at the ceiling instead. He briefly contemplated telling Crack there was gullible on it, then squirmed at the fact that could have such pathetic thoughts.

Finally, Evil spoke. “We’ve been here long enough, Crack. This place doing it for you?” And Crack was going to be sorry. He had that look on his face - sure, he might have been covering it up with a scarf and those dumb glasses, but he knew that look. Acting like Evil was beneath him all of a sudden as if he hadn’t been carrying him his entire life. It wasn’t his fault they were stuck! Crack’s the wiseguy who didn’t plan beyond ‘far away.’ Evil was just going to subtly remind him whose madcap idea this all was. He should be getting the message right about now.

Crack stared listlessly at the wall of celebrities. “Well, I’m sure you chose this place for a reason,” he replied, in a way that was just nonchalant enough to open the door to plausible deniability. There he goes again! He knew that Evil didn’t technically choose this place. It was just another stop on that tour, and even if it was Evil who chose to follow that brochure in the first place, then - then - just shut up. Evil was an intelligent bear. He wasn’t going to get all defensive just to have Crack turn it around on him.

“Fine. Have it your way.” Evil tried to march out of earshot as fast as possible. But not fast enough.

“And just what is that supposed to mean?” Crack started to follow him, but both bears stopped a few paces later.

“It means exactly what I tell you it means. Are you stupid?”

“Are you doing this on purpose?” Derision leaked through Crack’s teeth, and Evil could see his scarf grow damp with the oily blackness.

“I don’t have to explain anything to you!” Evil was sure people were staring again, even though he was no louder than anyone else in there. But perhaps they weren’t. Perhaps he was just on edge. He still had the upper hand. Unlike some people, he knew how to maintain his composure.

“You were going somewhere,” Crack said plainly, trying so hard not to sound passive-aggressive, trying so hard to pretend he was the bigger man. “Where were you going?”

And in any other situation, a question like that could have opened up a world of possibility! The ball was in his court now, and with all the right lies in all the right places, he could finagle himself out of this. But what would he say? He still didn’t know a thing about this city beyond what was in the movies, and he was certainly above sounding like one of those faith-trust-and-pixie-dust losers like Cara. The tour bus. The tour bus. The words were pounding in his head. The most practical solution would be to look at that brochure. Yes! Get some ideas from there, maybe even let Crack collaborate! Have him think he’s taking the lead and put him on his toes. But his paws refused his demands to pull it out from the Fanny Pack of Evil. The tour bus. Go to the tour bus. No, stay here and live it down. No way was he letting him have the last word. He was not about to be suckered into taking the fall by Crack of all people.

“I was looking for the way up,” Evil said, demure as can be. Beneath that girly scarf Crack’s jaw was probably dropping. That’s right. You can’t outsmart the most diabolical mastermind there is.

“Are you-”

“Sure? 100%!”

“But-”

“I’m a real Negative Nancy. Surely you can attest to that?” Evil tried to get himself excited, but imagining everyone around him missing their eyeballs and in a screaming panic seemed to have lost its spark. Hopefully, Nonthreatening Smile No. 7 would have his back. “But this place doesn’t deserve my negativity!” He forced a laugh. Luckily, he was still an absolute genius at unsettling laughs. “It doesn’t deserve anybody’s negativity.” And so, Evil sauntered on his way back to the tour group, Crack dutifully at his heel, and that was that.

Broadway. Noon. A street lined with theatres and all of them empty. NYC was swarming with morons (well, it was full of humans, and that was pretty much the same thing) yet the city saw fit to punish Evil. He would not be surprised if the next stop was an empty field with a single lime Jell-O cube. ‘This Jell-O cube has been a part of American history since precolonial times!’ The guide would warble, ‘It fought on the side of the Union in the Civil War, and cut the ribbon at the opening of the very first Denny’s!’ And all the vacant people from that bus would oooh and ahhh like it was the greatest thing they ever saw and tell all their friends how jealous they must be for missing it, and Crack would scream until he fainted at the sight of the thing because he can’t eat Jell-O and Evil would have to take the fall once again. Or worse - absolutely nothing would happen. Just like now. At least if Crack were unconscious he wouldn’t have to concern himself with his judgement. But here they both were. The tourists, as was typical, spun round and looked at everything with their jaws agape, probably jabbering about the same stuff Gay and Cara would back at the zoo, all that ‘OMG-Lloyd-Webber-is-a-genius,’ and ‘OMG-they-should-make-a-The-Fault-in-Our-Stars-musical!,’ and ‘OMG-Hamilton-and-Jefferson-should-totally-smooch!’ Evil wasn’t interested in listening to any of it. Romance makes you weak and politicians make you weaker. Instead, he was doing his best to make a berth around the humans and search for a concession stand. He was looking for some popcorn. He needed to remind Crack of his place in the world.

The culprit, meanwhile, was sticking close to the tour group. Usually, he’d be stuck to Evil’s hip, but it looked like now he had some harsh truths he thought Evil would be better off not hearing as if he’s the noble one here, even though Evil already knew full well he’d wasted everyone’s time at the Empire State out of spite and nothing more. Maybe those other times were flukes, sure, but this time he was certain! He could see it in his face! But, Crack seemed to be keeping his mouth shut. And why wouldn’t he? He wasn’t the talk-to-strangers sort, let alone the talk-to-strangers-about-musical-theatre sort. He was much too quiet. Even if he did have a cover to maintain and everything. It was like in all those movies about quaint little neighbourhoods with whitewashed fences and happy people, but they’re never as happy as they seemed and the housewives there are all evil or everyone’s an alien or the whole thing is a set for a reality show or some kid will turn you into a jack-in-the-box. Evil remembered being at the zoo, laughing over how stupid the people in those movies were. He was a sucker for nobody. He was not going to live in a world where Jim Carrey was smarter than him.

“I don’t have to take this!”

This time, Evil was certain they were all staring. And why wouldn’t they, with how loudly he was yelling? It seemed Evil would cause a scene wherever they went. He never anticipated there’d be a time when the guy that screams at produce had more dignity than him.

Crack swiftly turned back to face Evil. If he hadn’t been wearing a hat, his ears would surely be standing on end. Evil had been restless this entire time, and the Empire State seemed to make things worse. There, he’d been thoroughly preoccupied with how easy it would be to die if a fire broke out on the top floor, and Evil could probably tell. “I didn’t say anything!” he shot back, briefly wondering if he had said something and just blacked out for it. Knowing what he knew now, he wouldn’t put it past himself.

“Don’t start getting cute with me!” Evil insisted, moving closer to Crack in the crowd and gesturing wildly. He didn’t care if the humans were disturbed by him. They’d had it too good for too long. “You might not have said it now, but I know you will! I just know you will.”

Crack was cruelly reminded of his own behaviour stalking Evil after the big fight with his clone. He could have used his new self-awareness to be compassionate - but this was Evil we’re talking about. He didn’t deserve it, and Crack was fed up with him silently scrutinising him this entire time. “I’m going to say WHAT?” The THWUMP! of a Wellington boot stomping on the floor reverberated across the theatre.

“I know you will!” Evil kept on. Even with his face covered with the sunglasses and the high collar, to Crack he looked as threatening as he always did. “I can see it in your eyes!”

Crack wondered what in heaven’s name Evil was expecting him to say, though there was one idea he was forced to linger on. ‘I made a mistake. I give up. I take all the blame for getting us marooned in New York City. You’re a better man than me, and I am an irresponsible burden.’ It would be a long time coming before he’d ‘confess’ to any of that. And even if it was true, it was Evil’s own fault for following him! Mental manipulation was his thing, remember? “You can’t even see my eyes!”

Evil appeared to have been taken aback for a brief second, or perhaps Crack was just projecting what he wanted to see. He recently found out that he had a habit of that, though he couldn’t place how or when he’d come to that realisation. 

“I don’t need this!” Evil yelled, trying and failing to sound stoic, immediately turning and marching away before he could see how Crack might react.

Crack was insulted by this petty mind game. He wasn’t going to capitulate. He wasn’t going to be the one to apologise. What did he even have to apologise for? And even if he did, Evil was way worse and he always has been. “What? Aren’t you going to keep us wandering around here to sate your twisted ego?” He called out. But Evil didn’t listen, and simply kept on walking.

“Fine. Have it your way.”

“What do you mean, my way?”

“I said what I said. We’re leaving. Everyone wants me to be cooperative, so here we go. You’re the big hero that finally gets to tame me. Aren’t you the lucky one?”

He was really doing this! He was really going there! And now Evil was making Crack chase after him, twisting things to make him look like the immature one. Well, this time, he wasn’t going to let him inside his head. “Leaving?” Crack teased, “Whatever happened to ‘take it all in and don’t be negative?’”

“You just have to use everything I say as leverage!” Evil’s voice and demeanour were clearly wrathful, but at the same time, it felt as if he was laughing. Or at least trying to. It was so un-Evil-like, and so unnatural, like the C-lister from one of those divorced-dad-comes-home-for-the-holidays movies had briefly possessed his body, and the fact that Crack couldn’t see Evil’s face at all made it all the more unnerving. “You really can’t help it!” Evil continued on, the cracks in his voice making him whoop like a coyote. “Just because you think we’re in some kind of competition doesn’t mean I have to be forced to play along!”

Crack could only let out a single ‘but,’ keeping a safe distance behind as Evil stormed through the foyer.

“Don’t make me reconsider bringing you with me.” Evil threatened. He’d quickly regained his capacity for stoicism, and in the nick of time, too. As Evil ceremoniously broke away from the tour group for good, Crack dutifully at his heel, that was the last thing anybody said to each other for a long time.

(AND SO IT ENDS)

Chapter Text

“This meeting of The Shunnery is now called to order!”

Evil had kept his room deliberately dark for the occasion. There was only the dim light of the candles dotted about that, as far as Crack could tell, were meditation candles he had stolen from Prozac’s room. The texture under his feet told him that Evil had thought to sweep away the layer of straw that typically coated the floor, thus removing a potential fire hazard. Whether Evil had done it out of courtesy or not, it made Crack feel that much safer. The Host with the Most himself waited placidly at the centre of the room with a stoic but satisfied smile. He was dressed in a nice new cloak, long enough to cover his feet and yet posing no danger of tripping. In that faint glow of the candlelight Crack could see some kind of embroidery, leaving him to wonder what kind of blackmail he’d put Gay through to have such a cloak made for him and if there was, indeed, a matching one for himself. Evil stood before a circle of folding chairs even though it was just the two of them, and he raised his arms, allowing the sleeves of his new cloak to billow in the nonexistent wind. Even in spite of how sneaky and conniving he was, Evil always did have a proclivity towards bombast. For one reason or another, Crack didn’t feel the need to be wary of boobytraps as he came in. It was nice of Evil not to set any. Crack decided to return the favour by not bringing it up.

“Welcome, brethren, to this inaugural meeting of The Shunnery. We were going to have a sacrifice, but. You know. Given the politics of the situation.”

Crack stared over at a candle to Evil’s left, focusing and unfocusing his eyes. “You still haven’t told me what I’m doing here.”

Evil’s face lost its typical smirk. He turned on the lights to reveal a flip chart (probably also stolen). On the flip chart was a family photo that Evil had defaced with his signature purple marker. Crack noticed that there was a diluted purple smudge where his face would have been, as if Evil had tried and failed to rub the marker off.

“These people,” Evil pointed sternly at the photo, “Are our enemies.”

Crack did not want to be reminded of that fact. He still felt the sting of knowing that even the peaceful Tanked he had managed to chase away. He knew that he had done something truly awful, something that would make the other bears entirely justified in their decision not to forgive him - but no matter how he tried, his mind kept on drawing a blank on what that unforgivable deed was. Perhaps he might be better off not knowing. The others seemed to think so, as they were certainly being stingy with details. But on the other hand, this rendered any possible apology empty and insincere. How could he mean it if he never knew what he did? The only thing he remembered was that geese were flying over the zoo.

“For years, we have lived under their yoke. We have seen them consistently fail to put their personal pride behind them, and we’ve had to suffer for it! We are not going to accept Prozac’s phoney forgiveness. If he truly forgave us, he wouldn’t be pretending that nothing has changed while he holds us at arm’s length, and everyone else wouldn’t be going along with it. They might claim that they have learned from their mistakes, but I think we both know better. This is why we must show them that their scorn means nothing to us!”

Crack squirmed in his seat. “So, what does that mean? That we just don’t listen? If we don’t lie low and perform at our designated times, the keepers are gonna notice! We’ll get released into the wild, and Prozac’s not going to cover your ass this time!”

Evil scoffed at him, his mischievous grin renewed. “In the middle of a breeding program? Please. They need all the bear sperm they can get.”

Crack found himself gritting his teeth, both at Evil’s facetiousness and at the thought of a litter of Sara-Evil babies running around. “You’re not gonna be able to coast forever, Evil! I know they’re selfish and dumb and all of those things, but where else could we go? Who else is gonna protect us? And besides, you’re not so different! You’re proud and you’re selfish and you never learn! We’re the only ones who’ll clean up after your whims and still call you our friend!”

Evil’s expression dropped once again. Of course Crack would be loyal. Of course he’d want his family back. Even Evil had succumbed to loyalty more times than he’d like to admit. He was the one who’d fought tooth and nail to protect them all from the witch doctor’s mistakes when he should have simply let Crack slaughter them, and there he was again honouring Prozac’s promise to stay quiet and ‘put the whole ugly business behind them and look at the bright side’. “I know you are, but what am I?” He replied.

“Screw you.”

“…Let’s get back to business.” Evil’s cheerfully sinister vigour returned once more. He turned the page of his flip chart to reveal a calendar (definitely stolen). “As you know, Christmas is approaching fast - the most ooey-gooey family time of the year. To them, it’s a celebration of togetherness, joy, and love for your fellow man. To us, it is the perfect time to strike.”

“So what’s your plan? Steal everyone’s presents and have them exchanged for lawn gnomes? Fill everyone’s stockings with bees? Set the TV to the shopping channel and throw the remote into the polar exhibit? You do all that stuff anyway! What’s that going to solve?” At this point, Crack wasn’t much interested in being diplomatic, but dignity and poise had somehow found him anyway. Usually at this point he’d have swallowed his entire arm before collapsing to the floor.

“Okay, first of all, those sound hilarious. Where has this side of you been? And second - ordinarily I would go in that direction, but The Shunnery is a brotherhood. A unit. What this family could be without everyone else’s stupid stinking up the place. And so, in that spirit - Brother Crack, the floor is yours.”

Crack looked down at his feet. Then the ceiling, and then at Evil’s calendar. “Well, what I might do is decorate gingerbread men. This year might just be the year I actually eat one. I could also help decorate the tree, so long as I don’t have to climb up anything. If everyone’s watching one of those cheesy Christmas movies I might watch it too. As a gift, I’d like my inner sanctum back but given that everyone hates me I think I’ll ask for something small.”

Evil silently grimaced at Crack. He was hardly a bear of diplomacy either, but much like Crack, decorum seemed to find him anyway. He didn’t have a ghost of an idea how, especially not when he thought of everyone with their treacly smiles, hanging up stockings and fairy lights and laughing over hot cocoa in front of Home Alone as if nothing ever happened. In theory, he should be screaming. Then he remembered that Crack didn’t even know what they did to him or what he did to them. If he did, then Evil wouldn’t have to fight so hard to get him to see reason. So why was he still honouring Prozac’s stupid vow of silence? And why should it matter what Crack did? It was all that witch doctor’s fault, and they were the ones whose idea it was to bring him there. Crack would never do something as bad as that, and certainly not because he wanted to. He thought back to what Crack had said. It always took him by surprise just how much Crack really knew.  And he thought about what Nerd said about him, ever so snidely, just before everyone got poisoned: ‘Enjoy your sullen isolationism.’ Crack could never have burned down the circus, no matter how much he had to endure from the barbarous trainers and jeering children, all the neglect, the derision, and the prospect of dying every time the big top came to town - because Crack was the one who withstood everything Evil had, without ending up like him.  

“Very well,” Evil said.

Crack squirmed.

“We will give them one final chance. But that’s it! No more! You and I will join in the festivities. Placate Prozac and the rest for the time being. If they are good to us, then everything will return to normal.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then you can rest assured that they will pay,” Evil answered with an uncharacteristic austerity. “The Shunnery takes no prisoners, and shows no mercy.”

Crack remained eerily still, save for his standard nervous tremble. Though he knew he’d won, it certainly didn’t feel that way to him. He knew Evil all too well.

“Ah. I almost forgot.” Evil chirped, suddenly buoyant in mood. “Your cloak.”

Crack caught the fabric Evil had thrown him, but not because he was especially eager to have it.

“I asked Gimp to do all the disinfecty stuff. He still hates you, naturally, but Prozac’s got him under his thumb.”

Crack was silent, inattentively turning the fabric about in his paws. Somehow, he didn’t feel the need to check the garment for pocket spiders or ‘KICK ME’ scrawlings. And he was okay with that.

“I know it fits, because I measured you in your sleep. Meeting adjourned!”

Chapter Text

"Perhaps I'm becoming too predictable." - Bear Nuts, p. 39.

Evil sat perched on one hippopotamus. Crack sat perched on the other. Slides, swings and climbing frames stood unencumbered by the usual throngs of running, screaming, drooling children - fortunately for Crack and Evil, Winter Break had ended and the kids of New York had returned to the confines of school. However, neither of them could take joy in this small mercy. They had seen all that there was to see and found nothing. They looked straight on at each other, but neither of them spoke. They wouldn’t dare.

Several tourist traps preceding the bears’ arrival at the Central Park Safari Playground, Evil thought it would be a good idea for them to split off from the tour group and go their own way. And Crack followed him, because what other option did he have? What other option did any of them have? Was he really, truly, in any position to dissent, even if he was well and truly correct? And besides, recklessness was Evil’s middle name and he’d already come this far in life.

But instead, the bears found themselves on a crowded subway train, with no clue as to where they were going - no doubt thanks to the incomprehensible tannoy and the fact that being the size of toddlers meant that literally everything was in your way. The tensions between them were past the point of denial - as if they hadn’t been before - and so when Crack insisted that they get off without even knowing where they were, Evil had no choice but to capitulate, because what other option did he have? What other option did any of them have? Was he really, truly, in any position to dissent, even if he was well and truly correct? And besides, recklessness was Evil’s middle name and he’d already come this far in life. And so, there they were: two vagabonds in a children’s playground with no plan at all, neither having spoken a word to each other since saddling up, still filled with resentment but too bored to argue.

Really, there were two ways this could go. One of them could come up with an answer - an answer to what they’d do next, an answer to what in heaven’s name they were trying to accomplish in the first place, an answer to how they’d let go of this stupid grudge so they could finally think straight. Or one of them could say ‘What do we do?’ Then the other one could really tear into him for being so stupid. The park was silent but for the birds in the sky. Truly, it was anyone’s game.

Evil lay on his back, one arm lying limply at his side like a stirrup on the hippo’s spiffy new ursine saddle, the other idly tracing the pentagram shape on his navel. He raised his sunglasses. In spite of how cloudy it was up there, the light forced him to squint anyway. He allowed his head to roll ever so slightly over the hippo’s upper back, shifting his field of vision just enough to see Crack on his own hippo, motionless, back straight like a soldier standing to attention and looking nowhere in particular. That was the Crack he knew, back where the hippos in their general vicinity were more gullible and easier to annoy. And as Evil looked at Crack, he knew that now was not the time to be idle. He didn’t know what it was, but he found that he didn’t care enough to be angry at him. Perhaps it was the fact that Crack always had this pitiful way about him that yet again managed to coerce its way into Evil’s brain. Perhaps he had simply grown bored of arguing. Yes, Evil was simply too intelligent to be taken in by this kind of pettiness (he much preferred the fun kind of pettiness, anyway). He was out here transcending the tired old habits he used to have and evolving in ways that surprised even him. That had to be it. Make no mistake, Evil was still mad that he’d been the one carrying them both this entire time and all Crack could do was send weird passive-aggressive signals about it. Maybe. But the Crack he knew was liable to screaming and puking. Can’t risk that. Evil stopped playing with his fur and sat up. He had better things to do than instigate for the sake of it.

“This place sucks.” Evil finally allowed himself to admit, and at the sound of these words, Crack awoke from his trance. It made him jump, but not in the usual way, more like a cat when it’s gotten sight of you turning the corner into the street.

“No kidding.” Crack agreed, and the two thanked fate that they had at least been granted this concession. “So, do you have any ideas?” Crack decided to ask.

He finally forgave him. Not that he’d done anything wrong. Either way, it was nice for Evil to get some recognition as the Idea Man - even though in circumstances like these he couldn’t quite enjoy it. “I can’t say I do.” One of those new skills Evil evolved was diplomacy, and by God, he was going to diplomacy the pants off of some suckers. But he wasn’t going to say ‘sorry.’ Balance is the key to diplomacy-ing.

“Me either,” Crack replied, still stiff as a nutcracker. Evil hauled himself up and saddled up on his hippo like a proper equestrian.

“It can’t be that hard! We just have to figure out where we went wrong.” Evil grumbled, making handy use of his diplomacy-ing once again.

“Well,” Crack confessed, “we did arrive in New York without a plan.”

“I just don’t get it!” Evil’s frustration was starting to build once again. “This is N-Y-freakin’-C! This is supposed to be the centre of the world, the place where all of life happens! They can’t hide all the fun stuff from us forever!”

Crack unfocused his eyes, running his claw up and down his hippo’s fibreglass back. Fun requires the ability to let loose and be spontaneous, to live completely in the moment without a care in the world, to let your guard down entirely and give yourself over to whatever mad whim your sense of joy decided to take you on. Most of the time, this sounded to Crack like a very dangerous drug. Of course, that was an easy thing to believe when you can count the times you’ve truly had it on one paw. Sure, he could take in a game of volleyball whenever the zoo was closed each Monday, but was he truly having fun? He would spend the entire game agonising over whether the ball would hit and concuss him or whether the polars would come to terrorise everyone again or whether today was the day that the ground would finally open up and swallow the American continent up into the Earth’s core. He couldn’t say that he had any hobbies either. He’d tell himself that it was impossible to unwind when there was always a disaster going on at the zoo, but in his heart of hearts he knew that even outside of times of crisis, he would spend his downtime hiding in his room or the inner sanctum, or listlessly following what everyone else was doing with no thought to whether he himself enjoyed it.

What was he even planning on doing after he’d run off? If Evil had never been there? If he’d stayed on the truck after its pitstop at the hotel? Crack looked down at his navel. Who was he to expect anything more from himself?

“You were right about me,” Crack said.

Evil looked pensive. “You’ll have to be more specific than that,” he replied. “I mean, is this something I said to your face? Behind your back? And even then, there’s your appearance, your personality, the way your eyes do that thing where - ”

“I said, you were right about me! Right about me living a boring, shut-in life, and not knowing how to have fun! I mean, I know I played games and watched movies with you guys back at the zoo but that doesn’t mean I really even had a good time! And do you know what the kicker is? I don’t know why I got into that truck. I’m sure you figured that one out already. But I didn’t even think about what I was gonna do when I got to… wherever! 

“You know what? I shouldn’t have said I didn’t know why I climbed in there, because I do know. I climbed in there because I could. I couldn’t before, but on that day, I could. I don’t know what caused it - maybe it was just fate or destiny, but I was a whole new person then. One that was still afraid, sure, but one that had all these new possibilities in front of him that he could never see before! I got in there because I knew I wasn’t going to run away anymore! But now I think that I was running away the whole time…” As he said this, Crack’s claws scraped away at the fibreglass of his hippo’s back, in a way that would surely leave him digging right through it within the next ten minutes.

Evil was forced to reflect on this. Evil did not like to be forced to reflect, but it seemed the gerbil living in his ear was calling the shots once again. He had never heard Crack speak so badly of himself before. Even with how much fun he used to have picking on him, and even with how determined he had been to make him give in, the sound of it produced a tell-tale squeeze in his chest. Evil knew exactly why he got in that truck. There would be little ideas fluttering in and out of his head - how delectable it would have been to see the look on Prozac’s face, what he would have written in a hypothetical ‘GOODBYE FOREVER!’ note, setting off a flour bomb before going on his merry way, even one or two of sailing the high seas as a pirate - but he knew that those hadn’t been the truth. The sensation of the Real Reason and all that it implied disgusted him with its saccharine Hershey bar aftertaste, and he would never say it aloud, but Evil wasn’t one to deny what was in front of him. In circumstances like these, marooned in a New York kiddie playground with no possible way back and no sign of a way forward, he couldn’t afford to.

“And why wouldn’t you?”

Crack looked up with a shot, before staring at Evil in wary confusion.

“And why wouldn’t you?” Evil repeated, dismounting his hippo. “Why wouldn’t you run? Why wouldn’t you wanna get out of there? I mean, come on, just think about that place! When you’re not being gawked at by dumb children and being fed slop by the keepers, you’re being walked all over by those two-faced jerks who call themselves your family! So why don’t you tell me which one you think is braver: taking the crap everyone dishes out so long as the dishentaking happens where it’s safe and familiar, or actually getting out there and doing something about it?” Crack’s shoulders began to relax beneath the raincoat, and a grin formed on Evil’s face. “Yeah. That’s right. You know what I’m talking about. You made the right choice, Crack.” And for a moment, all that there was was the winter chill blowing through their fur, the soft, bumpy surface of Crack’s hippo, and each other.

“Did you?” Crack asked.

“What?”

“Did you make the right choice?”

Evil felt poised to retort, but something was preventing him. He too had acted on impulse. Evil didn’t get into that truck because he was running from anything. He knew this. But still, he struggled to fully convince himself.

“I did,” Evil replied, his words tasting hollow and sour as they left him. Then, there was silence - not so oppressive and heavy this time, but as ugly as the silence between them always was.

“So, what’s our next choice gonna be?” Asked Crack.

“You mean to tell me this isn’t the most fun you’ve ever had? It’s got slides, swings, Astroturf coated in dried blood and congealed snot from every toddler that ever fell off the jungle gym…”

Crack pulled his knees into his body. “Evil.”

“Alright, fine. Let’s take a step back here.” Evil said calmly. “So far, you got nothing and I got nothing.”

“Illuminating.”

“I know, I know.” As Evil got to thinking, he felt a sense of duty come over him, like how he imagined the lesser creatures felt when they gathered their seeds and breadcrumbs. He imagined that this was what came over Prozac as he shuttled the bears back and forth, making sure they all performed at their designated times and that each day passed without incident (not that it ever did). The idea that he could be anything like Prozac disgusted Evil, but that would have to be put to rest until the job was done. He thought about this park. People travel from far and wide to come here. Surely it was brimming with opportunity? Then, he had it:

“What do you say we talk to a third party?”

Crack looked perplexed. “Are you nuts?” He exclaimed. “Who would we even talk to? They’ll find out we’re bears, and they’ll test makeup on us or send us to the middle of nowhere! And do you even know what the crime statistics are in New York?”

“Calm down, Crack. I never said we’d be talking to people.”

“Grumf?”

Central Park Zoo was a lot like the Discount Zoo, inasmuch as all zoos were alike. The fact that it was a school day left the grounds relatively empty, allowing Crack and Evil to speak to any potential new allies freely.

“Cut the crap,” Evil said to the grizzly on the other side of the fence. “Can’t you smell me? I’m one of you.”

Crack removed his scarf just briefly enough for the grizzly to get a glimpse, giving him a polite yet uneasy smile. This seemed to do the trick. 

“One of us, my ass. What kind of bears are you supposed to be?”

“Ursus Moronis.” Evil made a hissing sigh from the back of his throat, knowing just enough Latin to know what that meant and little else.

The grizzly appeared nonplussed. Then, shocked. Then, curious. “Didn’t you guys go extinct from eating each other?”

Crack let out a whimper. Evil rested a paw on his shoulder.

“Old wives’ tale,” Evil said with a confident smirk. “There’s elev- nine of us over at the Discount Zoo in Toronto, and one’s an Ailuropoda Moronis brought over from China. Even got a breeding program going.”

“Lord have mercy.”

“Anyway, I’m Evil and he’s Crack.”

Crack offered a feeble wave hello.

“Stupid names.” The grizzly grunted. “So, Jackass and Ibuprofen, what do you want with me?”

“A meagre request, really.” Evil clasped his paws together. “Crack and I are awfully far from home and we’d like to know what there is to do for fun in these parts.”

The grizzly wrinkled his nose. “I don’t know how they do things in your Discount, but in here we don’t exactly get free run of the place. Top-notch security. Round here it’s five cameras per anus.”

“You mean you don’t even have television?” Was the first thing Crack said to this man.

The grizzly let out a deep, derisive sigh. “That explains a lot.” 

“Well then, what do you get up to around here? Surely you do something!” implored Evil.

“We like to roughhouse. Swimming when the weather’s nice. The keepers even gave us a big log about a week ago. That was neat.”

Evil rammed his forehead against the railing.

“We also like to listen. Eavesdrop. Humans always seem to have places to be. People who come here like to go for the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State, take in a performance at the theatre.”

“We did all that and it sucked donkey boner!” Crack groaned in frustration.

“There’s gotta be something fun around here!” Evil added.

“You know, I don’t understand you two,” said the grizzly, “Nobody at our zoo can even dream of getting out. And yet here you are, somehow having made a clean getaway, the whole world at your feet, and neither of you are happy. I’ve only known you two for all of five minutes, and yet I feel drained at a… spiritual level. Seriously, what is you guys’ problem? What did you even get up to back in Discount? Other than watching the 3 a.m. regular showings of Evan Almighty?”

Crack and Evil looked at each other in silence. Then they looked down. Then back at each other. Then back at the grizzly.

“Where are your polars?” Evil asked.

Sometimes, no matter how far it is that you travel and no matter how many places you see, you find that some things truly don’t change. This was something Crack and Evil took great satisfaction in after a deliciously successful prank on Central Park’s polars. Their Man On The Inside - a crab-eating macaque who called himself Ignatius - informed them that the grizzly’s assessment of the state of affairs was not entirely accurate, and though there were indeed ‘five cameras per anus’, the animals were not only expected but encouraged to do as they pleased. 

“The keepers call it ‘empiricism’,” Iggy told them. “It means that the more we act like ourselves, the more ‘scientific’ it is.” And so, the bears saw their chance and went ham. Evil took a cursory glance into the Fanny Pack Of Evil. It appeared to contain nothing more than the second rock, a Cadbury Starbar, and a few loose pennies (Canadian). For Evil, this was more than enough. He used Rock No. 2 to cut the Starbar open. Then, Crack gave it a lick for stickiness (while Evil congratulated himself for accomplishing something that Prozac had been trying to do for years) and Evil crammed the pennies into the bar's centre for extra weight. He then took aim and rocketed it into the polar enclosure. Squelch. The Starbar landed on the largest polar bear's back and stayed firmly stuck.

"I don't think he noticed,” Crack observed.

"Just watch,” Evil replied with a sneer.

Just as Evil had spoken, a smaller polar bear plodded over to the larger polar, noticing the treat, and proceeded to lick it off his back. The larger polar's head whipped around.

"So you think you're a tough guy, do you?" He roared. "Huh? Think you're a tough guy?"

The smaller polar cowered, but before he could act, the larger polar had already pounced and a fight had erupted. Just like their Discount Zoo peers, the remainder of the polars could not resist joining in on the action, and soon enough, the polars’ enclosure had become a miasma of growling, grunting, clawing, scraping, biting pandemonium. It was just as Evil had planned. He and Crack marched off, knowing that far or near, man or beast, everyone is a sucker.

“That was badass!” Crack chirped with glee, jostling Evil by the shoulders. Evil gave him a gentle shove in return, and smiled. He was back. 

“So, Dipshit,” Evil said to the grizzly with a showmanly twirl, “How’s that big log looking now?”

“Grumf.” The grizzly ignored them, having returned to his dumb animal facade.

“You know you don’t actually have to do that,” Evil jeered. “Ignoble told us everything.”

The grizzly silently turned away. Knowing that they had the last word, Crack and Evil continued to march off in jubilation.

“What do we do now?” Crack asked, jittering and abuzz with self-righteous glee.

“Anything in the whole world, my friend!” Evil grabbed on to Crack’s shoulders, making it clear to him that for all his coolness he was just as giddy. “To think, all it took was a dose of good ol’ nostalgia.”

Though he knew he had little to be nostalgic for, Crack couldn’t help but agree. There were diamonds in the rough, mired as they were in all the fear and all the hiding, and they had precisely one thing in common. He smiled.

“Let’s go!” Evil roared with cheer, grabbing Crack’s gloved paw and marching on in determination.

“Where are we going?” Crack asked, having no trouble at all catching up to his gait.

“Just - this way!” Evil replied, propelled on with optimistic spirit, “You’ll see!”

It seemed that the bears’ recent victory had also shown them the bright side of being toddler-sized. For one, this made it easy to hide in plain sight by sticking close to a mother and her two-year-old already entering the library. Crack and Evil took their seats on the foam puzzle-piece mat in the children’s section, listened to The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and waited. Just as the caterpillar ate his five oranges on Friday, Evil noticed a human rise from one of the computer chairs.

“Now’s our chance!” Evil whispered. He and Crack leapt up from the mat and made a mad dash for the now-vacant computer. Evil gave the keyboard a mighty wallop as if his life depended on it. The screen responded by adjusting to full brightness. Team Cracked Evil: 2, Technology: 0. 

Crack’s swivel chair squeaked as he shook, both with anticipation of whatever plan Evil had in store and trepidation for what prolonged exposure might do to his eyeballs. The sudden gesture Evil made would have sent him into the wall.

“Yes! Yes! Our luck has finally turned!” Evil crowed in a whisper-yell, almost heralding the machine. “Do you know what this is?”

Crack scrutinised the monitor. He typically kept his distance from electronics of all kinds - even more so since his battery acid injury - so he couldn’t begin to understand what he was looking at.

“It’s that dumb game Nerd likes! With all the dragons and pixies and shit!”

Crack looked closer, and he soon found himself able to identify the shapes of people in armour shuffling from one side of the screen to the other.

Evil performatively cracked his knuckles. “I’ve seen Nerd play this enough times to figure out how to do it. It’s practically all he ever does besides whine.”

“Are we going to learn how to play so we can beat him at it?” Asked Crack.

“We could do that,” Evil replied, “But bugging him is way more fun!”

Crack watched eagerly as Evil searched for Nerd’s username in the game. He explained to Crack that this information had no place in his mind, but it was lodged there anyway because Nerd turns into a sports commentator when he really gets in the zone. Crack immediately knew what he was talking about. To him, there was nothing more humiliating than flinching at the words ‘OpinionatedTribble is in the house!’

“He’s online!” Evil announced. “No surprises there. Wait. Who’s that next to him?” Evil squinted, trying to make out the username hovering over the witch-or-whatever Nerd’s barbarian-or-whatever was hanging out with. “xXTheSherlockedGirlAnachronismXx.” Evil’s muzzle wrinkled as he deliberated briefly on what he’d read. “Man, how’d he rope Cara into playing? Pigs are flying! Hell has frozen over!”

“They are friends, Evil.” Crack informed him. He remembered hearing her tell him at length about her favourite songs in Steven Universe, leading to a vigorous debate over what decade of Cartoon Network was best, leading to the pair putting their differences aside to marathon Teen Titans.

“Yeah, yeah. Less talk, more action!” Evil thrust the mouse into Crack’s side of the desk. Crack understood his mission. He hovered the cursor over Nerd and Cara’s characters and began to click furiously, his other paw pushing every button on the keyboard with reckless abandon. He couldn’t quite tell what was happening on the screen; what all those lights and sounds were and what those numbers were adding up to. However, by the look on Evil’s face, he could see that he was doing his job correctly, and the excitement emanating from him was infectious.

Crack smiled. Bottles of coloured elixir, coins and weapons spilled from the characters, and Crack dutifully made sure to grab it all.

“Great! Now give it here!” Evil snatched the mouse back from him. He opened up a window on the screen to write OpinionatedTribble a message.

SHINGLE CREAM

Evil laughed uninhibitedly. It was a wonder no librarian asked them to quiet down.

SHINGLE CREAM
SHINGLE CREAM
SHINGLE CREAM

It took a few seconds for Crack to catch on, and he soon found himself smirking. Then beaming. Then laughing just as fiercely. Shingle cream was what Nerd said instead of ‘single cream’ about 6-8 months ago when asking Gay how he made his chocolate ganache. Crack remembered that day. Gay looked like he was close to weeping. ‘It’s because I was chewing gum!’ Nerd protested (though he would later change his story to Butch, Hulk and/or Steven knocking out one of his teeth). Not that it meant anything to the others, as they called Nerd ‘Shingle Cream’ for weeks after that just to see how defensive he would get.

CREAM
SHINGLE
SHINGLE
SINGLE
SH

It was nothing less than pure genius. It was simple, it was subtle, it was so benign and yet so cutting, and it was something that could signal to Nerd that it was Evil in the most precise and maddening way possible. The pair had a clear image of what he was up to. First, he’d run around the cave trying to look for anyone with a stolen laptop. Then, he’d tattle to Prozac, who would tell him that there’s no sense getting all worked up over a game and what’s so offensive about shingle cream when you don’t even have shingles? Then Nerd, channelling the action movie renegade and the loose-cannon cop, would steel himself and think No. Not this time. The time has come for me to fight my own battles! before spending about an hour trying to formulate the perfect comeback. Nerd was very predictable that way. The dormancy of the other side of the screen told Crack and Evil that Nerd was taking his sorry time to respond. Soon enough, a new message blinked on:

HOW???

S

Blocked and reported. Have a nice day!

Any further attempts to contact OpinionatedTribble told them that they had been blocked, exactly as promised.

“Coward.” Evil sneered.

“Give me that!” Crack snatched away the mouse and keyboard with a determined grin on his face. He composed a message to xXTheSherlockedGirlAnachronismXx:

THE MY MELODY PLUSH YOU GOT ME IS A HOLLYWOOD DIVA WHO STARES DOWN HER NOSE AT ME

Crack?

[USER HAS BEEN BANNED FOR PROFANITY]

“Oh-ho! Nicely done!” Evil raised his paw for a high-five. Crack didn’t have any idea what he had just done, but he was pleased with himself nonetheless and raised his paw in turn.

“Hey! You two!”  

The bears looked back. A teenage boy in an Avenged Sevenfold T-shirt stared angrily at them.

“It would seem as if BarneyExtinction2003 is no longer AFK.” Evil observed. “Run!”

The bears fled, bursting through the library’s exit doors with nothing less than pure delight.

Back at the park, Crack and Evil remained in ebullient spirits. Their disguises felt softer and more comfortable than gas station raincoats had any right to be. They weren’t running from anything this time around. They simply sat side by side and chattered the afternoon away. Life was sweet.

“Get off the slide!”
“Get off the slide!”
“Go away!”

It was good to be back.

“I’m glad we’ve managed to put this pettiness behind us,” said Crack, and in this statement was no mere platitude but all the sincerity in the world. Finally, he remembered what he was here for. The sun set over Central Park, the horizon giving Crack a wry wink. Crack winked back.

“I know I am,” Evil agreed, any and all measures of defensiveness having evaporated away a long time ago and replaced with that familiar, comfortable arrogance. He had often prided himself on being a diabolical genius (it wasn’t hard, given who he used to cohabit with) which was why it blindsided him that the solution had been going back to the basics all along. And though that dumb game Nerd and Cara liked was only make-believe, Evil couldn’t help feeling like he had taken on a barbarian horde and won. He took in the shouts of the angry children and relaxed.

Crack, on the other hand, had stopped relaxing and was beginning to judder about like a bag of microwave popcorn. “We. Are. UNSTOPPABLE!” He cried, giving Evil a sportsmanlike shove. 
“BELIEVE IT!” Evil shoved Crack back twice as hard. The snot-coloured nuisance’s joy was just as contagious as his fear, and for this, Evil was grateful. Their diabolical laughter filled the air. New York was theirs.

Then, in the loudest declaration of ‘Carpe Diem’ ever heard, the bears were pushed from the slide by an army of indignant 8-year-olds.

“Well, well, well, well, well!” Remarked Evil, “It’s true what they say about New Yorkers and rudeness!”

“We’ll fit right in,” replied Crack, and the pair left Central Park optimistic and buoyant.

Technicolour lights, blaring sounds and unwelcome odours battled for dominance, all with the common goal of making Crack and Evil’s next adventure as bothersome as possible. If they focused hard, the bears could quite literally feel their nerves fray. Blinking, whirring gizmos for sale in shop windows came at them with the support of glaring ceiling lights and shop signs, the bears’ sunglasses only doing so much to help them weather it. Cupcakes, aftershave samples and cruelty-free soaps formed an unholy trifecta of olfactory assault. The Descendants soundtrack emitting from the Toys’R’Us and The Chainsmokers spilling out from Bath and Bodyworks altogether made the worst mashup known to man, and the fact that the bears’ boots clomped and squeaked against the mall floor didn’t help. It was no wonder, then, that the humans absent-mindedly blocking their path all wore headphones.

Evil jammed his claws into the calf of a woman in pastel-coloured jeans. She yelped and moved from his path. “Well, Crack,” he groaned, “I hope you’re happy.”

Crack didn't need to say anything. The way he flitted about and gawked at everything, eagerly trying to parse whatever he could through the sea of people told Evil all he needed to. Evil smiled. A mall was a mall, but Crack’s newly restored sense of wonder was clearly making a mark on him. Evil took hold of Crack’s paw and let him lead the way. Despite everything, Crack was very adept at weaving through gaps in the onslaught of legs with remarkable speed. When Crack set his mind to something, it was as if every other mental faculty he had muted themselves to keep his eyes on the prize. This journey had been nothing but proof of that.

“Over here!” Crack called out, followed by an abrupt jerk to Evil’s arm. Crack led them into one of the shops, handily dodging trampling feet, swaying shopping bags and the wheels of baby carriages until they made their escape from the crowds. The music that played was faint and tranquil, and the bears had plenty of space to remember which way up was. It didn’t even matter where they were. Being away from all those people was relief enough. It was very thoughtful of Crack to take them somewhere more peaceful, even if he was probably just looking for a nice hidey-hole to cower in. 

Evil looked around. His eyes were met with an aisle of screwdrivers as far as the eye could see. The further along he went, the bigger they got, until he was certain he saw one that could surely skewer two men at once. Turning the corner, Evil encountered rows and rows of hammers, including a sledgehammer twice his height that nearly had him drooling. He zipped to the other side of the shop, where he found a sight that filled him with awe. Chainsaws. Chainsaws! Chainsaws as far as the eye could see! Evil had always wanted to have a chainsaw, but that tightass Nerd was too ‘concerned for life and limb’ to teach him how to use Amazon. His relaxed smile transformed into one of childlike delight.

When Crack was able to meet him again, Evil lunged at him and cupped his face in his gloved paws. “This. Is. AWESOME!” Evil cried out. “We hit the jackpot! Crack, you’re a genius!”

Crack didn’t like physical touch that he wasn’t prepared for. In truth, he was just looking for a nice hidey-hole to cower in. But he wasn’t one to turn down Evil’s respect, especially considering how miserable it was when they didn’t get along. He rubbed his cheeks where Evil’s paws had been.

“We obviously can’t take everything.” The pragmatist in Crack said aloud; his subconscious way of atonement for impersonating a genius.

“Well, duh,” Evil replied. “We just need to find the best possible tool. The creme de la creme of hardware-based weaponry.” Evil licked his lips. “But what?”

As Evil paced down the aisles, his question was answered in just the amount of time it took to ask it. He didn’t need to say anything for Crack to know just which specimen he had his eyes on. What the bears saw was a power drill. Now, Evil had a power drill hanging just under his mantle back at the zoo, but this made it look about as dangerous as one of Gimp’s pathetic toy cat-o-nines. It was robust and beefy with a rubber grip for support, but still just the right size for his paw and the Fanny Pack of Evil. There was a selection of different drillbits and settings (though the only setting he needed was ’11’), and the packaging was covered with big numbers and badass words like ‘torque’.

It was a match made in heaven. All he needed to do was reach out, grab it, and take the final step.

The alarm shrieked. The bears’ skeletons nearly jumped out of their chests. Before they could run, Crack felt a large hand on his shoulder, causing him to shiver beneath it. The bears looked up. It was a security guard. 

The guard glared down at Crack and Evil in a manner that was unmistakably stern, but patient, with a few flickers of a half-smile. It was a demeanour that told them that patience could disappear with a single wrong move, and they would know whose fault that would be.

“Care to explain yourselves?” He asked.

The bears blanched. Back in Nowhereland, the humans were dumb. They only had to outsmart a truck driver, GERT, and Jay and/or Silent Bob. This guy, on the other hand, was probably trained, and it looked like he’d handled far worse situations than two bozos trying to make off with a drill. Maybe it was because it never happened. Maybe it was because it simply wasn’t Hollywood enough to document. But there is no way that anyone on Canada’s Stupidest Criminals had a fraction of the idiocy required to just walk through the door with the world’s most badass power drill, in plain sight, in a mall with thousands of witnesses. Evil heard faint whimpers emanate from Crack. Either the ol’ ‘freeze’ response was doing a number on him, or he really was doing his best to keep a cool head. Ordinarily, Evil would be relieved. Maybe even proud. But right now, that was the opposite of what he wanted Crack to do, because Evil was about to set his plan into motion.

Evil looked straight up at the security guard’s face. “Oh, no!” Evil cried out, voice high and with the cadence and inflection of a Thomas the Tank Engine narrator. “It’s the king!”

“The king!” Crack followed suit, not quite knowing what to do, “The king!”

“The king of the Tool Kingdom won’t let us pillage his treasure! He’s going to feed us to the dragon!”

“Not the dragon!” Now, both bears were hamming it up. Crack even let out a giggle. The worse their acting was, the more convincing children they’d make.

“We have to claim sanctuary at the Toy Kingdom!”

Crack and Evil both let out their most childish battle cries, miming sword fighting between laughs. Now that they had set the scene, they could lean into the cute angle. It wasn’t unlike being at the zoo. Crack and Evil chased each other around in small circles, ‘forgetting’ that the security guard was part of their ‘game’. Crack decided to trip over Evil, knocking them both down like the harmless children they were. They took their chance to look up at the guard. He looked placid. Maybe even a little entertained.

Silently, the guard leaned over. He picked up the drill from the ground where Evil had dropped it. 

“You shouldn’t take things without paying, you know.”

The bears nodded.

“Very good. Do you know where your parents are?”

The bears nodded. “Next door,” Crack squeaked out.

“Aha. The Gift Kingdom of King Spencer,” the guard chuckled, ushering the bears through the door. “Make sure you stay safe, little bandits, and behave yourselves!”

And with that, the guard was gone and the bears were home free.

Hope flurried inside Crack like the Discount Zoo butterfly tent. Today was tantalising. Today was magnificent. Narrowly eluding that security guard, plus trolling Nerd and Cara, plus pranking the Central Park polars, plus the relief of he and Evil being a team again gave him a very welcome excitement. It was the same rush he felt when they pulled off that first scheme in Nowhereland. This rush was a lot like being afraid, with the way the force of it overcame his entire body, but it somehow made him feel good. Like the taste of the horizon was on his lips. The journey had made him more and more acquainted with this wonderful sensation. He and Evil were going to chase that horizon together, and nothing would stand in their way.

“That kicked ass!” Crack cheered. “Your idea? Genius! And I didn’t even know I was an actor!”

Evil didn’t look like he shared Crack’s enthusiasm. Even with all the fabric covering his face, it was plain to see. Crack twinged.

“What’s going on? Is it about the drill? We’ll just find a way to come back stronger, especially now that we’re a team again! Maybe, we can commandeer a wrecking ball, or pretend we work here to establish his trust, or…” 

“No!” Evil let out, making Crack spring back. “We have… other stuff to do! Come on!”

Evil dragged Crack through the corridors of that mall at a tremendous pace. He ploughed through humans rather than dodging them, which - fuck ‘em, no thanks for all the fish - but Crack had to worry about getting caught between two of them or in the straps of a handbag. Crack took whatever care he could not to lose his footing and fall over. Would Evil notice if his arm were torn from his socket? Or if he lost his grip and got trampled to death?

When Evil finally came to a halt, Crack felt like an Olympic throwing hammer. Evil darted about frantically to the left and to the right. That, or everything around Crack was still spinning from the journey. All he could really do was watch Evil darting about, ducking behind benches and potted plants and craning his neck every so often, and hope that he could reorient himself before Evil needed his help with whatever this mission was. Crack had only just been able to process that they were in front of a supermarket when Evil dragged him away again. This time, a clothes shop. More darting about. Nothing. Olympic throwing hammer. A bakery. More darting about, more nothing, more throwing hammer. A McDonalds. A sushi restaurant. A mattress shop. A Subway. Even when they were in the middle of hallways, Evil would stop briefly, scrutinise vacant benches, purses, or plastic shopping bags, and return to dragging Crack across the mall. Whatever Evil was looking for, he clearly wasn’t finding it, and it only ended with Crack getting jerked around like a ragdoll and remaining as ignorant as ever. Evil looked up at the skylight. This only made him ever more frantic, which was odd. Crack was sure Evil wasn’t afraid of the dark.

Then, the movement stopped entirely. Crack curled himself into a ball. He didn’t care where he was, how many humans were watching, or how it would sabotage Evil’s big plan. It didn’t even matter to him if Evil had noticed. Crack did not choose to do this. He knew it couldn’t be helped. However, he knew that even if he had never once known fear and panic, if he had been given the choice, he would have done the exact same thing. His eyelids were clamped shut, his chest tight and heart pounding, his mind and body partitioned over whether he was spinning or not. When he could adequately filter out the noise around him, he could distinctly hear the words, “QUIT GAWKING!” “GET A LIFE!” and, “CALL THE COPS AND IT’LL BE THE LAST THING YOU EVER DO!” Then, he felt a small rubber boot jab him repeatedly in the spine.

When Crack could finally manipulate his arms and legs, he rose. He planted his foot on the bottom of Evil’s raincoat. Evil could easily have fought him off and gotten away. At least, he would have if he tried, but Evil only seemed to entertain the notion of struggling before resigning himself to Crack’s boot. Crack decided to take this as a sign.

“You’d better tell me what’s going on here, Evil!” He spat. “We’re supposed to be a team now! You know that I’m capable enough. I’m the one who got us across the border! I’m the one who found our clothes! I know you know all that, so if you wanna prove it you’d better put your money where your mouth is! If you don’t want me to help, don’t ask me to help. I just want to know what we’re trying to accomplish here! If not having that drill bruised your ego that much, then…”

“It’s not about the drill,” Evil rebuked, trying and failing to snap at Crack. “I mean, it is about the drill, but…” 

Crack recoiled back. There was something more to Evil’s secrecy than he thought. It wasn’t that he wasn’t used to Evil lying to everyone’s faces. Far from it. Except when Evil was trying to pin a prank on the giraffes, he would act bashful or nonchalant. But it was apparent in the strain on Evil’s voice and the jerkiness of his movements that this was not a pleasant truth. Evil wasn’t going to hide the truth for long. He had forgotten who he was dealing with.

“You’re not gonna be able to beat this back forever! Don’t act like I can’t tell! The sooner you tell me, the easier this’ll be for both of us. Surely you understand?”

Evil’s face was unreadable under his disguise. His head was down, and his body was still. Crack watched him, neither smiling nor frowning, standing to attention like a good soldier ready to receive his orders.

“I DON’T KNOW WHAT WE’RE GOING TO EAT!” 

The statement burst out of Evil in a flurry of limbs and a terrible cry. Though the noise couldn’t overpower the miasma of the mall, each syllable reverberated beneath Crack’s hide like the crawling of larvae.

“AND I DON’T KNOW WHERE WE’RE GOING TO SLEEP!”

Crack and Evil stood in the middle of a crowded mall, in an entirely different country, hundreds of miles from the place they used to call home. Everyone that knew them had no idea where they were, and everyone that didn’t know them never could. How long did they even plan to keep running? The bears didn’t know how they would face the next week. They didn’t know how they would face the next fifteen minutes. The sounds of the mall got duller. The shops and the people became meaningless shapes. Fun is fleeting. Survival is forever.

Then, for the first time in a long time, Crack passed out.

A rank odour filled the air. It smelled like the mouldy fruit and fish heads everyone hated back at the zoo, interspersed with spoiled milk, rotten eggs, and familiar human B.O. Crack woke up to the sensation of vomit threatening to burst through his throat. Like every other time this happened, this was not the place or the time, so he forced it back and tried to ignore the aggravated churning in his stomach. He clamped his paws over his nose and tried to orient himself.

“What the fuck?”

Not seconds before he’d just about risen from the ground, what used to be a takeout pizza was shoved in his face. This was, at least, what he could infer in the seconds before his eyes filled with enough water to put the thing safely out of sight, turning it into a haze of blue and green fuzz. Too late. His stomach abandoned all pretence, and in defiance of the laws and constraints of reality, the pizza became more disgusting - and soggier - than before.

“Thanks a lot!” Said a voice that was unmistakably Evil’s, “That was meant to be our dinner!”

Dinner. Crack had cultivated the skill of ignoring his hunger over years of shrewdly avoiding all potentially dangerous foods (which was most of them). He wondered how long the persistent ache in his stomach had been there. Now that the superbug metropolis that had once been a pizza had gone, Crack could see again. He found that he was lying on a vacant road, with sparse tufts of grass growing through fractures in the gravel. Evil’s coat, hat, glasses, boots, and Fanny Pack of Evil lay in an untidy lump on the ground. If Crack hadn’t heard his voice a few seconds ago, he would have been entirely convinced that Evil had spontaneously combusted and his clothes were being worn by a mound of ash. His heart still quickened at the very idea. Rivalling Crack’s heartbeat was the juddering and clanging of a dumpster at the road’s side. The dumpster sounded empty as a drum, but behaved as if it were full to bursting, each resonant clang a 99% sure sign that it would erupt and douse the city in filth. But that was farcical. It was more likely to be filthy, parasite-hosting, bacteria-carrying, rabies-spreading wild city animals. He’d seen enough episodes of Why Does My Kitty Want To Kill Me? to know what’s what. He drew a breath, assumed a boxer’s stance and hoped the spirit of Cesar Milan was especially generous this day.

With a deafening metal WHANG!, the lid of the dumpster thrust open. Inside it was none other than Evil, buck-naked, grey fur stained with patches of filth and grot, and exposed face grinning as if he’d just found a plum in his Christmas pie. ‘Wild animal’ was right.

“Whew!” Evil made a show of wiping the sweat from his forehead, “Might’ve jumped the gun a little bit there!”

Crack said nothing, trying to preserve his feet’s tenuous connection with the ground. What the fuck is he so giddy about? Was I out for that long? Do we have a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park and he just didn’t tell me?

“Here! These are still wrapped!” Evil lobbed a bundle of supermarket sandwiches Crack’s way. He gave them a sniff. It didn’t tell him much. All food smelled questionable, and though he was the only one intelligent enough to know that, it wasn’t going to help him out in this scenario. He fumbled with a tuna and cucumber sandwich in search of the sell-by date. It occurred to Crack that he couldn’t remember what day it was. He set the sandwich ever-so-neatly back down on the gravel and waited for life to move on.

“Why are you naked?” Crack called out, unsure whether he was trying to divert Evil’s attention or his own.

“Simple!” Evil laughed, “A human digging for his next meal in a dumpster? A thief. Cops will catch us, find out we don’t have any papers, and lock us up. An animal digging for his next meal in a dumpster? Par for the course!” 

Crack nodded.

“I mean… I’m not stupid, Crack. I know you don’t naturally get bears in New York City! But! But. This is our best option! And if anyone gives us any trouble, I’ll throw a rock at ‘em! I got another one back at that gas station, remember? Come on! Are they really gonna put an arrest warrant on a bear? It was your idea, Crack! It’s how we made it across the border, Crack! So come on! Take your clothes off and get in here!”

Crack took a few uneasy steps back. Evil was grinning as if there was a colony of bats trapped behind his teeth that he was trying to keep from escaping. He was cruelly reminded of Evil’s defensive behaviour when they were on New York’s Dumbest Adventure, not to mention his own. He looked at the sandwiches. He looked back at Evil. Then, he looked at the scene before him. He couldn’t begin to figure out how Evil had found such a place. Certainly, humans had been here - they disposed of their rubbish and laid down asphalt and set up their chain link fences - but the place looked as if those humans took one look and immediately regretted it. Nowhereland at least had GERT. It was flat, and it was empty, and it made Crack suddenly understand what that thing with the tree falling in the forest was all about. He looked back, and saw more of the same.

Crack removed his clothes and climbed into the dumpster.

“Hey! Crack! Buddy! Glad you finally came around!” Evil greeted him with arms outstretched and another phoney smile. Crack did not smile back. Evil then placed an exposed, filth-ridden paw on Crack’s shoulder. He felt the juices leak out of it into his fur, soaking it up more and more. Crack did not flinch, whimper, or yelp. He didn’t have the patience to be afraid. He joined Evil in trawling through all the rot-covered potential treasures of the dumpster.

After a lengthy amount of time, the bears managed to find all the prepackaged foods in the dumpster. Expired foods. Some already had flecks of mould growing on them. Others didn’t seem affected. Evil told Crack that the sell-by-date was usually blown out of proportion, even though he couldn’t remember where he’d heard it, and the information was useless if they still didn’t know what today was. They still knew that they couldn’t take a chance on things like yoghurt or cheese regardless of how good they looked, and that a single Twinkie could probably survive a nuclear war. 

Evil wanted to keep everything. If they’d gotten through years of rotting fish heads at the zoo, they probably had iron stomachs by now. Crack wanted to get rid of most of it. They could get poisoned and die! The zoo had an on-duty veterinary team. If they got sick out here, who would help them? 

They had to eat, but they also had to survive. They had to survive, but they also had to eat.

The resulting find left them with little more than what they already had. It was also nothing compared to the smorgasbord’s worth of convenience store treats they were forced to leave behind. It had probably rotted itself into compost by now, miles and miles away from the Discount Zoo, from Nowhereland, from the hotel in Hamilton, from the Statue of Liberty, and from where they stood now, even this trace of them vanishing from Canada and everything they ever knew.

The bears looked down at their hoard.

“How’s it looking?” Evil asked.

Silence filled the air but for the distant sounds of traffic. Evil turned towards Crack. His face was unconcealed, but what he saw in Evil’s before and after he registered Crack’s own made him wish for the ambiguity of the disguises. Crack attempted a smile, hoping he would not have to see such a thing for much longer, but his lips and jaws refused him. Their eyes gradually trailed away.

“Well…” Evil said uneasily, “We’ll just have to make do with what we’ve got. Yeah?”

Nobody moved. Crack looked down at the food, certainly crawling with pathogens. He looked back up at Evil, and a far worse sense of dread shot through him. Evil trembled in a way that Crack couldn’t blame on the wind. His eyes were constricted. His face went blank, and the parts of his body that weren’t rigid gripped him tight. In other words, Evil looked exactly like him. 

Crack had no choice but to step up. He tightened and loosened each of his muscles, tightened and loosened, tightened and loosened. Without the rigidity of fear, he could walk over to the sandwiches, breezy as if nothing had happened at all, and cannily ignoring the cloud of suspicion that came with the ease. He bent down and gripped one of the sandwiches as if ursine digits and No. 4 plastic were never intended to make contact. He didn’t take the time to see what flavour it was before cramming it in his mouth. He tried not to think about the texture of it as he chewed and held his breath to block out any smells. He swallowed.

Then, Crack did something else for the first time in a long time. He vomited. He kept on vomiting. He puked up everything his small frame held within it. He was still doubled over when he was done, mouth wide open, waiting for the residual slivers of vomit still dangling from it to fall to the ground. He wanted to try again, quickly, with a new sandwich, chew faster, swallow harder - but as usual, his legs refused him. He continued to look down at his puddle of vomit staining the gravel. The fact that he had run dry was the only thing stopping the shameful thing from making him puke even more. Still, his head and eyes faced directly down. He would not look at Evil. He would not look to see if Evil was angry. He would not look to see if he was disappointed. He would not look to see Evil’s hopelessness compound his own, knowing he had thrown away their chances of having something to eat, knowing that he had led them both into the jaws of disaster in the first place. He would not look at Evil. He would not look at Evil.

He looked at Evil, and collapsed once more.

When Crack woke up, it was of his own accord. His weary mind processed that the sounds he was hearing were heavy traffic and the chattering of humans. He found that he was fully clothed, sunglasses and all, and that he was on the side of a busy street. Evil, also fully dressed, was sitting next to him. 

“Ah! You’re awake!” Evil chirped. His face was fully covered. Who was he trying to fool? “Shame, really. You being unconscious like that made you look more pitiful.”

Crack didn’t have the energy to get offended. “Wha’s goin’ on…?” He asked, wearily trying to sit himself up.

“Call it what you want. Begging, busking, panhandling, soliciting…” 

Crack saw Evil’s body tense up under his coat, his knees moving inward.

“You can be negative all you want. And I’d agree with you! Sure, there aren’t any immolations or eyeball scoopings or mad feats of derring-do, but this truly is the best I’ve got. I mean, surely it’ll help at least a little, right?”

Crack said nothing. He watched the humans’ moving feet and the cars inching across the road. There was a small sense of relief at not being part of the fray, before he beat back the notion that any good could possibly have come of this. Crack looked down, finding that Evil had set an empty paper coffee cup at their feet. That cup was what set the distinction between lying down in defeat and lying down in a fight for victory most valiant.

Crack didn’t say yes to Evil. He didn’t say no, either. He simply continued to lie there next to Evil on the ground. In the end, however, it didn’t matter whether he agreed or he didn’t. After all, it wasn’t as if he was going anywhere.

All the pair of them could do was sit and wait. Nobody dared speak to one another, but for different reasons this time. Not because they were afraid of the other’s judgment or of their pride being wounded, but because they didn’t dare upset the universe for allowing the two bears this precarious place within it. So they sat. And they waited. The stream of legs and cars continued to pass by. It was as if Crack and Evil were on the outside of a tank, and the humans were tropical fish - gliding about aimlessly, unaware of the bears’ existence but a few feet away.

Back at the zoo, not being noticed by humans was a lucky thing. It meant the bears could get up to whatever mischief they wanted and sneak around with ease. Nerd could read his Star Wars novelisations in broad daylight, Gay could continue his futile attempts to get a suntan, and Evil could make the other animals’ lives a little less peaceful. The bears had all sorts of ways to do things without humans noticing, to the point that the skill of keeping their dual lives secret had become second nature. Crack certainly knew a few things about hiding and second nature. Now, however, all Crack could hope for was that a human would take notice of them. No matter how scary they happened to be. Crack tried to visualise it hard enough for it to happen. He imagined two legs breaking from the current and stopping in their tracks. He imagined going nose-to-nose with a human as it bent down to deposit its change - his plan for this eventuality was to focus squarely on the human’s hand ferreting around in its wallet for coins. He wondered if Evil might be doing the same thing. Of course he would. Because in a position like this, what else was there to do?

The bears had no means of telling how much time had passed. The density of the humans and traffic would go up and down, though that didn’t tell the bears anything. It wasn’t until the sky began to darken that Crack and Evil realised just how much time they had spent sitting and waiting. Crack rubbed his eyes. Noticing it was like stepping out of a dream. Not because the situation was so unbelievable that he had to snap back to reality, but because the non-action of waiting had been no different from being asleep. He leaned over to take a peek into the cup. Just in case he really had been asleep. But the cup was empty - save for some leftover coins (Canadian) Evil left in as an incentive. Crack turned towards Evil. Evil looked exactly as despondent as Crack felt. He was slumped against the wall as if his clothes had no bear occupying them. Crack’s stomach started to swirl. Whether this was out of fear or hunger made no difference.

“Evil!” Crack jostled Evil’s forlorn body. “We need to work harder!” Crack mentally combed through years’ worth of television in less than a second. “We have to… write something on cardboard! Or sing and play guitar! Or mug people! Anything!”

Evil said nothing. He only let his head loll away from Crack’s gaze. Crack scrambled across to catch up to it, practically crawling all over him. Evil lacked the resolve to fight him off.

“No! Not again! Come on! We’re not gonna fight this time! You’ve had great ideas before, and you’re gonna have one again! You have to!”

Evil stayed perfectly still. His body was so still that the notion that it could emit sounds at all, let alone speak, was beyond Crack’s comprehension. This meant that it took a great deal of time for Crack to register what Evil had said.

“I don’t know how much longer we can hold out,” the corpse in all but name confessed. 

Crack so badly wanted to protest. He could feel himself draw breath, about to yell, but no words could find him. Instead, he found himself being dragged back down to the pavement in resignation. What would he even have tried to do? It was irrefutable.

He tried to look back on what was in the nature documentaries they all watched back at the zoo - in between all the raunchy bits. They said that bears could conserve enough fat to last them through the entire winter, which is why they could hibernate through the whole thing. Then, he found himself looking back on E! Entertainment, which pondered whether ‘heroin chic’ was coming back into fashion. It took months of rhetorical strategy to convince both Gay and Lech that they were never going to have Taylor Lautner and Robert Pattinson’s stringy bodies with chiselled abs.

He looked back on Lech, telling him how attractive skinny, hairless things with inflated chests were. He looked back on their time in the truck where Evil told him the story of the time he was released into the wild, and how Sloth had to rely on an army of squirrels to do his foraging for him and Evil couldn’t get any food at all until he found him. He looked back on how pitiful everyone had been at fighting. And then he looked back on that fucking television.

“Get up, Evil!” Crack barked loud enough for everyone on the street to hear, “I know what we have to do!”

Evil dragged himself upright, scratching his scalp under his hat.

“You are a terrible, godawful bear!”

“I know, Crack, but compliments aren’t going to get us out of this.”

“What? No! I found out why we’re in this mess! Foraging? Eating scraps? Breaking into places? We’ve been doing everything the bear way! But we suck at being bears! We can’t do any of that crap!”

Evil lowered his sunglasses ever so slightly. That, or they slipped down his muzzle.

“The only way out of this is to stop doing things the bear way and start doing them the human way!”

“The human way?” Evil soon sat bolt upright, his incredulity giving him the burst of energy he needed, “What are you talking about?”

“We’re going to have to get jobs.”

(END OF PART ONE)

Chapter Text

(PART TWO: JOB NOTHING HOME NOTHING CASH NOTHING)

“I’m Satan’s secretary
I’ve covered my pen in chilli
I am gonna jam it up your colon.” - Angelspit, ‘Grind’

Anthony Brenner scrolled through the day’s emails. Spam. Spam. Merriam-Webster‘s Word of the Day (it was bulwark). Bank statement. 20% off gardening supplies on eBay. Spam. Spam. 

Then, he checked yesterday’s emails again. Then, he went to the very bottom of his inbox just in case something interesting happened ten years ago. There wasn’t much to see, but Ant’s mind simply refused to do anything conducive to working.

It wasn’t that Ant worked a bad job. Far from it. He liked being in a position where he knew more than other people, so he could freely tell them how dumb he thought they were. He liked living in relative comfort in Nevada. He had a place with a garden and a garage, and the HOA had agreed to let him build his own patio. All of that notwithstanding, though, this wasn’t the job he would have planned on getting. Actually, that wasn’t entirely correct. Working at Spencer’s Gifts would be any child’s dream come true - Ant couldn’t remember what he wanted to be when he grew up, but surely that had to have been in there somewhere. But Ant’s information governance position meant that he would never have to step foot inside a Spencer’s shop or touch a single fake plastic dog turd. Instead, information governance was mostly about paperwork, sometimes digital if the other departments were feeling frisky. But that wasn’t important. Those documents made sure the Nevada office, and by extension the entire company, could look responsible in the eyes of the law. Thus, Ant saw his job as a type of sophisticated blackmail. 

Ant took the time to fantasise about misfiling the payslip of the guy who refused to hold the lift open for him. Not that he wanted to do that. But it was neat knowing he could.

Ant’s office computer chimed. Finally, his email inbox was giving him a show.

REMINDER: NATIONWIDE CONFERENCE IN EGG HARBOR

The conference. The taste of blood welled up in Ant’s mouth. This conference was the perfect opportunity. Plenty of people were itching to go on this trip, but it certainly wasn’t to hear the keynote or see the wondrous sights of fucking Jersey. He had his sights on something far bigger - Promotion. 

Head of Information Governance. Not exactly a title that commanded respect. About 60% of it was convincing senior management you’re worth keeping around. But for one reason or another, Ant couldn’t stand the idea of there being people more important than him. It was true that having superiors could be useful. If the press found out that records were being mysteriously shredded, it was going to be the CEO who took the fall for it when the story broke, not Pencil-Pusher No. 43 Anthony Brenner. Still, the idea that there was anyone out there who could tell him what to do, where to go, and bend him to their sadistic whims if they so chose made him positively ill.

“Ant! Hey!”

It didn’t help that they were also fucking annoying.

“Hey Ant!” Dale wedged himself nicely into Ant’s desk while Ant clung to his swivel chair for dear life. “You gotta check out this video I saw!”

Ant decided to humour Dale. He immediately regretted it. “Super Mario Bros’ Top 10 Darkest Secrets?”

“Yeah. Those powerup mushrooms? Turns out they’re not so innocent after all,” Dale said with 100% sincerity. He looked like he had been betrayed by this on a personal level, leading Ant to wonder if Dale needed a teddy bear and a cup of chamomile tea just to read the news.

“Scandalous.”

“It makes you think. Makes you wonder why the world has to… be so ugly, y’know?”

“It’s a good thing you’re here to keep everybody honest, huh Dale?”

“You betcha!”

“So, Dale, is that all you came to tell me?”

“Well, I’ve been doing the 60% of my job that’s convincing senior management we’re worth keeping around, and…” he said coyly, “Which do you wanna hear first? The good news, or the better news?”

“Just cut to the chase, Dale.”

“Ooh! Ok! The good news is that it worked! This little Information Governance Department that could is going to Egg Harbor!”

The idea that Dale could have anything resembling charisma was well beyond Ant’s comprehension. But, if it was good enough for senior management - and if it benefitted him - then Ant saw no reason to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“Who else but you, Dale?”

“And the better news is that as my Plus One, I’m bringing none other than the most dedicated guy in the department! You! Who else could’ve gotten all that information out of the other departments for that functional analysis? And teaching the stray cat behind the office continuum theory, too? Hello!”

“The cat thing was a joke, Dale.”

“But you might as well have done it, Ant! Anyway, I’ll email you later to discuss carpooling!”

Dale almost offered Ant the privilege of seeing him leave, before popping his head back around the corner. “Oh, and good luck on that patio!”

Dale shot Ant finger guns before finally disappearing, and as soon as he did, the biggest grin blossomed on Ant’s face. It was in the bag. He knew that by cosying up to Dale, he was sure to pick his ‘best friend’ to join him at the conference. He might have to hang one of Dale’s niece’s peanut butter pinecones over that new patio, but it would be worth it once he usurps Dale on the corporate ladder. This time, if Dale refused to leave Ant alone, he could leave him penniless and hungry for it. Not that he wanted to do that. But it was neat knowing he could.

The process was gruelling. Ant could handle endless paperwork because he knew he could create a second Enron scandal at the flick of his wrist. But dealing with Dale was a waking nightmare. It was like being trapped inside a singing Christmas card. 

Ant would never forget the events of the company picnic. He'd easily managed to pawn Dale off on some other loser for the sack race, the three-legged race and the egg-and-spoon race. The problem was that during those races, Dale would not stop feeding every one of his teammates scintillating little anecdotes about Ant’s life. It was dirty play. Ant told him those things under duress (the duress being that he wouldn’t go away) to the point where Dale knew enough about the life and times of Anthony Brenner to be able to play him in the inevitable movie. 

And after the picnic, so did everyone else in the office. 

It wasn’t that Ant was some kind of loser. Any memories of his life before starting this job were hard to pin down, but he knew he wasn’t the type of kid who asked Teacher the difference between an organism and an orgasm. The trouble was that once everyone got that sneak peek into Ant’s little world, they saw it as a bonding opportunity. And they just wouldn’t stop. ‘Hey Ant, I had no idea you tried the all-meat diet!’ ‘Hey Ant, we should totally watch the wrestling together sometime!’ ‘Hey Ant, even though it was six years ago, I’m sorry you lost your ficus.’ Only Dale could set this torrent of logorrhoea upon him. And he would most certainly pay.

If getting promotion - and revenge - meant having to endure Dale for a little bit longer, then so be it. One less ass he had to kiss. One step closer to power. To freedom. The seeds had been planted, and all he had to do was sit back and wait until Conference Day. Ant poured himself some coffee, signed Dale up to twelve different wrestling-related mailing lists to make their travel conversations more pleasant, and watched the hours march by. Life is easy when you’re a genius.

Mitch Fremont was currently being gnawed alive by stress. They just had to pick today to dig up a sewage pipe on the third-longest highway in Illinois, right when every store statewide had to be stocked. Trucks don’t get to the stores. Managers get no product. Shelves don’t get filled. More work for the warehouse. Mitch leases the trucks. Mitch supervises the warehouse. More work for Mitch.

It’s not like the American public is clamouring for plastic dog turds.

“What? Do you think I caused the roadworks? What do you mean, I ‘sound awfully defensive?’ How do you think I would have done that? No, I’m asking you a sincere question now, how do you think I would have done that? I’d have to fill in, like, a jillion forms about it! If I had been planning on it, it wouldn’t be happening as soon as today! And why would I be doing it, huh? What would I gain?”

Mitch knew the problem couldn’t possibly be coming from his end. He surveyed the warehouse from his office, and everything looked as it should. The packers packed and the pickers picked. When the holidays rolled around, upper management liked to compare them to the elves in Santa’s reindeer stable. Mitch wasn’t quite so twee, but he believed there was something magical about everything being in order, especially when he had the power to make it happen. Every truck set to leave had gone, and the log told him that it happened precisely on schedule. If Mitch needed to convince anyone that none of this was his fault, then the proof was in the pudding. The only way he could have done anything about it was if the suppliers delivered everything about a week sooner. Mitch didn’t blame them. They weren’t clairvoyant. Then again, neither was he, yet he was the one taking the fall for it.

“I can promise you precisely one thing. I did not cause these roadworks. Neither I, nor anyone at Spencer’s Gifts is capable of causing roadworks. And if I were, I would not be doing it to UNDERMINE KYLE FROM STORE MANAGEMENT GETTING DRINKS WITH EL-FEATO, YOU IMBECILE! Yeah, that’s right. I called you an imbecile. ‘Cause you are one. I don’t care if Kyle got drinks with the fuckin’ Underclown. I’d like to see him work this job! And there’s an idea, El-Feato can drive the truck, and The Blue Burrito can do the roadworks! It’s like one happy family! Hello? Hello?! Coward.”

Mitch wasn't necessarily proud of his performance, but what did it matter? Both of their lives would have stayed the same either way. Even if what he said wasn't all true. And besides, he was gone. A job well done. Mitch decided to go count the blank packing slips. It was pointless, it was dull, and it was unconducive to making the business run, but it made him feel busy. Busier than he would be feeling if he went to the restroom. And best of all - no phones. He strode across the hallway with purpose before being unfortunately ambushed by the Warehouse Manager. He was embarrassed to find that this shocked him more than it should have, especially given the sort of person Sue was.

“Good morning, Mitch. I hope everything’s going alright on your end. Crying shame about those works, huh?”

“Good morning, Sue.” Mitch tried to appear calm and jovial. “It’s getting pretty hectic, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.”

“Good, good. Many people take this for granted, but it takes somebody strong to handle a situation like this.”

Someone was skipping stones on Mitch’s digestive fluid. “No, no, it’s nothing really, I’ve been at this long enough to get used to it.”

“Someone strong like, I don’t know, The Underclown?”

Shit.

“And also, Mitch, it’s not nice to talk about Kyle like that. You know his dog just died.”

Sue was calm, patient, and lenient on her subordinates’ mistakes because she understood the frustrations of getting the job done. She was perfectly nice with no underlying motives. And because she was perfectly nice with no underlying motives, it never failed to make Mitch’s skin crawl. Mitch had been on Earth long enough to have dealt with his fair share of assholes, creeps, maniacs and bullies, but they didn’t frighten him quite so much. He knew what to expect. But the nice people? He just didn’t know how to deal with them. There was no telling when the other shoe might drop.

Anything can be scary. Ice cream scoops can be scary if you’re canny enough.

Mitch stood quietly and tried to maintain eye contact with Sue as she spoke. “Listen, Mitch, I know how frustrating the job gets, and I know that some people are downright stupid. But you should know there’s other, smarter ways to solve a conflict. Ones that don’t lead to the store managers and their friends calling us a bunch of killjoys. Proper communication is what makes the company run smoothly, especially when crap like this is happening. Okay?” Sue smiled warmly and placed a gentle hand on Mitch’s back. He tried not to recoil under it.

“Look, Sue, I’m a grown man. I’m pretty sure I can handle criticism.” Mitch tried to ape Sue’s smile, but he worried that he was coming off as arrogant and that she would take it as a challenge. Competition and the need to protect one’s pride would make a monster out of anyone.

“I could be tearing you a new one for your lack of phone etiquette, but I really do think you’re a good employee. You’re never late. You know how to keep the packers and pickers on their toes. The job you do is stressful. You get stressed a lot. A whole lot. Sometimes I look at you and wonder how in God’s name you’re still alive. But!” Sue clapped, “You push through it every time! Now that’s inspiring!”

Mitch fought to keep his expression the exact same, knowing the ‘compliment sandwich’ format when he heard it.

“You’re a great investment, Mitch. If you could just loosen up, you could probably run a statewide 3PL. Good thing the company bought this warehouse before you came along, huh?”

Mitch caught himself rubbing the back of his neck. “Oh, I couldn’t -”

“That’s what I told upper management when I convinced them to send you to the big conference!”

What.

“Mitch, you have an assertiveness that sometimes I envy. But you’re also part of a team. Everyone’s not out to get you. Upper management and I believe that some team spirit is all you need, and this conference is the perfect opportunity to get some. So? What do you think? Will you take it?”

Mitch hesitated, firmly rubbing his forehead and hoping it made him look deep in thought. He said the only thing that made sense, which also happened to be the only thing he could say and still save his hide. “Sounds great, Sue. I could stand to take in the company spirit.”

“Wonderful! Now, make sure you take everything in. You’ll be hearing from the best and brightest.” Sue dealt him some firm pats on the back before leaving. “Good luck dealing with store management!”

Mitch waited five Mississippis after Sue was out of his field of vision before robbing the area on his back where Sue hit him. This was a big deal. A big deal not because of seeing the sights of New Jersey and not because of that stupid keynote. This conference was for upper-level managers and their sycophants up in their offices, and would surely be of no use to people like him who actually had their boots on the ground. It was like having to read To Kill A Mockingbird in high school. When was he ever going to apply it? At least, that’s what he imagined happened. Mitch didn’t remember high school.

No, it was a big deal for other, more pertinent reasons. What was it that Sue mentioned? His stress? The notion that he could be so stressed, he may die from it? Sue knew he was weak. His better judgement told him to trust that Sue was a nice person who could only be pointing this out for 100% altruistic reasons, but it was minuscule in the face of the parts that insisted that a cruel person is just a kind person with a motive. And that dig about not everyone being out to get him? What was she telling the packers and pickers? She told him point-blank that she was talking to Upper Management behind his back.

It was imperative, of course, that he stay on her good side. Isn’t that the sensible thing to do? Get along with your boss? It doesn’t make you crazy. Unless you call having a case of The Mondays insanity, am I right? If she was so convinced he would stress himself into an early grave, then he would show her just how composed he could be. He’d be Little Lord Fauntleroy straight out of Finishing School, balancing those books on his head. He’d be one of those new-age hippie guys who only eat air and meditate so hard they reach the third dimension. Then, when he made it to the conference and Sue saw just how calm and normal he was - it would divert her from his scent and throw a ginormous wrench into whatever nefarious plan she had for him. No one would suspect a thing. She’d have to throw in the towel completely, or at the very least find someone weaker to pick on. Why, she might even be led to believe that she’s the crazy one. 

As soon as work let out, Mitch would go to the bookshop to find out what in the name of all that is holy ‘mindfulness’ is. Then, he would see who gets the last laugh.

(AND SO IT ENDS)

Chapter Text

"Monkey byte, rage against nothing,

This is the end, Hell starts now!"

- Angelspit, 'Monkey Byte'

The flight from Nevada to New Jersey had been nightmarish. Anybody could tell you how awful flying is: the long lines, the exorbitantly-priced airport food, the uncomfortable seats, having to give up half your stuff for no apparent reason, and the unending boredom. There was something about being trapped in the same spot for hours and hours that perturbed Ant more than most.

But as infinitely bad as all those things were, their torturous effects were doubled - no, tripled - by having to spend it all with Dale.

The thing with Dale was that he adored flying. He thanks the security officers for their service when they confiscate his Dr. Pepper. He gapes open-mouthed at the great deals at the Duty-Free. He thinks the in-flight movie hasn’t had 80% of it gutted due to censorship and loudly praises it for its avant-garde approach to storytelling. He takes every chance he can get to say, ‘What’s the deal with airline food?’ and won’t stop until someone pretends to laugh. 

In any other situation, Ant might have admired his raw, unblemished curiosity. It was what any one of us might be like if we only knew how to jettison our personal hangups. But Dale’s Dale-ness had to ruin it all. Ant didn’t think there could be anyone so thoroughly obnoxious in all of creation. But that wasn’t important. It would be a matter of pure days before none of it would matter at all.

“Look at that thing spin, Ant! Remember wishing you could climb on and ride it when you were a kid? Between you and me, I still wanna do it! But I’m older and more mature now. Unless…” Dale brayed, elbowing Ant in the ribs.

“I don’t care, Dale. I just want my suitcase back.” Ant was astounded that Dale could not see how tired he was. It had been a while since he’d caught himself in a mirror, but Ant was probably sporting eyebags the size of oxen. Dale, of course, looked spotless, even though he probably hadn’t so much as blinked since they boarded the plane. Life really is more bearable for the stupid.

After the interminable amount of time it took to retrieve their suitcases (and convince Dale that it would be impossible for Congress to sign a law mandating that anyone waiting for more than half an hour be given a free cupcake) the drive could begin.

“Wait for it!” Dale squealed, biting his lip in anticipation.

“Wait for what?” Replied Ant, nonplussed.

“You’ll see!”

Dale continued to repeat the phrase, ‘Wait for it!’ until the car the pair hired departed the car park.

“Starting route to Egg Harbor Township. Though staying on the couch is an option too.”

A heavy buoy of dread floated in Ant’s stomach. He knew whose voice this was.

“It’s a Garfield satnav!” Cooed Dale, “Isn’t it just priceless?”

“Turn left. That’s the side that makes me purr when you scratch it.”

“Turn right. Scratch me there and I ‘forget’ how to use the litterbox, if you catch my drift.”

It was going to be a long journey.

“Now, I want you to think about which parts of the body those difficult feelings are in. Are they big? Are they small? Do they have a shape? Are they moving?”

The self-compassion guide narrator simpered on. Of course, Mitch couldn’t see her, but he could tell she was leaning down at him and grinning like he was a kitty-cat. It didn’t help that he was shorter than most people. And what was with these cutie-pies and lush green meadows? People let their dogs crap in those.

No matter what he did, he couldn’t get comfortable. He wasn’t used to the hotel room yet. The cutie-pie in his phone wouldn’t stop reading him crappy poetry, and he had positively no way of knowing what Sue - or anyone else out there - was up to. A good employee is proactive. They like that word over there: proactive. Well, how’s anyone supposed to be proactive when they’re being left in the dark?

Mitch had been lost in thought for so long that the narrator was now telling him to ease himself out of the immersion. Whatever. The whole thing was bullshit anyway.

Mitch liked himself plenty. He knew how to stand up for himself. He knew how to fight for what he knew he deserved, and he wasn’t afraid to tell people how dumb they were to their faces. These were the qualities of a leader. He knew what he was good at and didn’t lose sleep over what he was bad at. That’s how he knew that in this scenario, he wasn’t the fucking problem.

He was getting ahead of himself. He had a habit of doing that, and people were starting to catch on. They would often say to him, ‘It’s not the end of the world.’ As far as he was concerned, they were just looking for excuses to be lazy or convince themselves that they were smarter. And if he were that much of a drama queen, the warehouse wouldn’t be running nearly as well as it did. They just didn’t know anything about leadership. But he couldn’t lose sight of what he came here for. 

Mitch’s goal wasn’t to achieve emotional stability. Looking at the world around him, he was pretty sure only five or six people could pull that one off, so there was no sense in even trying. No, Mitch’s goal was to prove everybody wrong.

Mercy knows how much time had passed since Ant and Dale got in the car. Hours? It probably wasn’t hours. It couldn’t be that far from the airport to Egg Harbour - there was an airport 20 minutes away - but it stood to reason that Dale would pick the ‘scenic route,’ as if anything in this blighted place could be called ‘scenic.’ 

The car rumbled on. As did Garfield. As did Dale. Ant had made a game of being completely silent and seeing how long it would take before he would notice. The game wasn’t much fun, but he sure as shit wasn’t going to make himself carsick playing Sudoku. He had no idea what Dale was yapping about. It could’ve been the exact date and time of Armageddon for all he cared. Ant was adept at filtering out things that annoyed him. He had to work very hard because there were just so many annoying things in the world, which made him the very best.

The car stopped. To Ant, this meant that it had reached the end of time itself. Ant looked up to find that it was a rest area, replete with two (count ‘em) fast food drive-thrus and shops bearing supplies for lazy and forgetful holidaymakers. Truly, an easy mistake to make.

Dale stepped out of the car and stretched. The breeze hitting Ant’s face felt like a distant memory.

“Welp, I gotta use the little boys’ room!” Dale seemed almost proud when he said this, like he was the first and only person to call it that. He could only have heard it in some trite sitcom, noticed that a laugh track played when it was said, and now hoped to replicate the results. In a better time in history, people like him would be dead for being so stupid.

“Aren’t you gonna say ‘good luck’?” Dale smirked, expecting a laugh.

“No.”

“Aha, because saying that jinxes it! Very clever! Just as shrewd here as you are in the office! Senior management is going to love you!” With that, Dale sauntered off to look for the toilets.

Little did Dale know, charming senior management was only the first step.

As for the second step, Ant didn’t have a concrete plan in mind, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t need one. Most of the time, the secret weapon just dropped into his lap, and for a victim as stupid as Dale it would probably take him less than a minute to engineer a foolproof revenge plot.

Ant didn’t know how he knew so much about plotting revenge. Probably a movie. Either way, there’s a saying about looking a gift horse in the mouth and plenty more about not getting distracted.

From his trouser pocket, Ant pulled out a phone—Dale’s. Even if Dale were the type to play Candy Crush on the john, he would likely just presume he left his phone in the car. Which was true. In a way. First, he unlocked the phone with Dale’s password (everybody makes it their birthday). Then, he silently ran a YouTube playlist: Caillou Gets Grounded Sparta Remix Compilation #71. It was unhelpful to the mission, but man, would Dale have a tough time getting it out of his YouTube recommendations.

Ant searched the phone. Dale, ever the responsible citizen, used social media very sparingly. His LinkedIn presence was strictly business. His Facebook, judging by the French flag filter on his profile picture, had not been used in more than a decade. His YouTube history reflected that of someone who allowed Autoplay to run for hours on end like it was cable, but it also reflected that of someone who thought the ‘finger Prince’ joke in Animaniacs was the most scandalous thing in the world. Whatever. That was all insubstantial. The real meat was going to be in his emails. Dale was taking his sorry time, probably deciding what magazine to buy the way a bride picks out a dress.

Ant scrolled through Dale’s inbox. He didn’t know why he expected to be surprised. Spam. Spam. Merriam-Webster‘s Word of the Day (it was forestall). Bank statement. 20% off gardening supplies on eBay. The wrestling-related mailing list he subscribed him to the other day. Spam. Spam. Ant combed through PayPal receipts, Recently Deleted folders and letters from his pen pal in Kiribati. Zilch. Dale was utterly clean.

For a records manager, Dale sure wasn’t making the retrieval process easy.

Ant mounted Dale’s phone back up onto the dashboard, doing everything within his power not to throw it out of the window. So Dale didn’t have any skeletons. Fine. Ant was entirely capable of earning his promotion through things like merit and experience. That was how he made it this far in his career, and that was the path that he would stick to.

That is, if he didn’t have that restlessness squirming in his head. It nagged him for being too lazy, too unambitious, too straight-laced and boring to finish his task. It was a sensation that felt familiar to him, and yet he could not recall it. Ant was a bored child. A bored child who wanted to find any source of fun and bleed it dry. He was fed up with sitting about in this car while the adults went about their adult business and left him with nothing to do. His hands fidgeted about, desperate for tools to take hold of. 

Then he remembered what the both of them did for a living.

Ant snatched the phone up again moments before it could lock him out. He knew just the thing.

Disposal - the process of removing something from records management custody - was a whole rigamarole. There was a good reason for this. For an organisation to be transparent and accountable to the public, records had to be kept, and so if a record did go, there had to be a very good reason for it. There is a record for everything an organisation does: every executive decision, every corporate meeting, and every time any amount of money changes hands. Records are evidence. That’s Lesson One of information management. Not that Ant remembered going to college.

There were many things to be taken into consideration when approaching disposal. It had to be done according to a detailed disposal policy as well as your collections development policy - both of which require constant review. There were different requirements for different types of records. Top management had to get involved, and there had to be exhaustive documentation.

Ant was going to disregard all of it.

Now, Ant’s plan was held back by a few key factors: he was currently in a car thousands of miles away from the office. Dale, good egg that he was, kept his work safely on the company hardware. Making copies was another, different rigamarole that neither of them had the time, patience or authorisation for right now. And there was only a matter of time before Dale would come back.

Not like that was going to stop him. Ant went to his e-mail app and started writing.

Dear Mr. Brenner, Ant wrote, I cannot thank you enough for your hard work on that functional analysis!

As you know, it’s not easy to prove that records management is really necessary, even in a post-Sarbanes-Oxley world. So, I’ve been thinking hard about how to make this department the best that it can be and really give our all to the company.

I was considering ‘misplacing’ our expense records so that we could reduce taxes, or keep our hands clean, but then I decided, “No! That’s silly! Those ideas won’t do any good for anyone!” so I decided we might as well leak our future product designs to Brookstone since we clearly don’t deserve them. Thoughts?

Yours faithfully,
Dale Clivesden

Ant surveyed his work. It sounded like Dale, or at least, enough like him for those who already had misgivings about him to accept. But the convincingness of the message was only part of the equation. Even if what he wrote were perfect, it would be nothing without priming the audience before the ‘evidence’ was even presented, and leading them to believe their own moral fortitude was at stake. A plastic dog turd was only an effective prank if your family had a dog to begin with. What mattered was that the company was already in hot water: they decided that the problem with their Halloween costumes was that they weren’t ‘historically accurate’ enough, which pissed off just about every human rights organisation in the country. Natrually, everyone there was scrambling for someone to take the fall for this blunder. People would go to tremendous lengths to avoid personal responsibility. Mix that with the general suspicion around ‘out-of-touch academics,’ and Ant’s victory was all but handed to him. That, and he could tell his grandkids the legend of the Historically Accurate Anne Frank Costume For Cats.

Ant abandoned all pretence. He gave in to the part of him that daydreamed about creating a new Enron scandal. He gave in to the part that grinned when imagining people he hated dying horribly. He gave in to the part that didn’t emote on cue when a colleague said an aunt died or a dog was in hospital. He finally allowed that part to be fed, and it was so, so hungry. It would not be sated until his revenge on Dale was complete, even if it took levels of brainpower he didn’t know he had.

He sent the email to himself. The seed was planted.

Then, as if on cue, Dale reappeared and climbed back into the driver’s seat.

“There it is!” Dale remarked with a smile, “I knew I’d left it in the car! What are you doing with my phone, anyway?”

Ant elected to tell the truth for this one. “Just taking care of the road trip playlist, Dale.”

“Awesome! Let me see that!” Dale grabbed his phone back from Ant and flicked through it. Ant noticed that Dale had an odd expression on his face. His brow was low and tight, the corners of his mouth had lowered and were pushed closer together, making his lower lip jut outwards. Of course, Ant knew this was a perfectly normal face to make when concentrating on something. It was just that it was difficult to comprehend any face on Dale that wasn’t a smile. 

It didn’t last long, and Dale was quickly himself again. 

“It’s not my idea of humour, Ant, but that’s what’s so great about art! Anything can speak to somebody.” Dale hit play. Obnoxious, repetitive, and poorly-mixed songs about ‘Behaviour Card Day’ flooded the vehicle.

“C’mon, Dale, do we have to abandon Garfield so soon?” Ant groaned.

“Don’t give in so easily, Ant. You deserve to raise your voice, too. You can’t let me walk all over you just because you work for me!”

Dale didn’t know how right he was.

The music was, of course, terrible, but Ant was not in the frame of mind to care. He didn’t have to. In fact, he didn’t have to care about anything that happened between here and Egg Harbour. He didn’t even know why they bothered to shove a bunch of unnecessary time between now and then. The conference was what mattered. The promotion was what mattered. Proving he was the best was what mattered. His plan was set into motion, Dale none the wiser, and all that was left to do was wait for that magical moment to arrive.

The people in the hotel were uninterested in what Mitch was up to. At least, not on his watch. As long as he didn’t say ‘hello’ to them, they had no reason to say ‘hello’ back, thus opening the door to further probing. And the possibility of them saying ‘hello’ first was, as always, too insignificant to consider. It was just as he'd said: this conference was only for upper-level managers and their sycophants up in their offices. The people who dreamed, but didn't do, and yet were convinced that they knew how the world ought to work. Those that did know him were not thinking about him. Why would they? His life was inconsequential to theirs, and vice versa.

Sue was likely down there hobnobbing with the rest. The only matter more pertinent than treating Mitch like a little pet could only be kissing up to those more important. He could hardly begrudge her for it. In fact, he was thankful. Nobody to come knocking on his door and breaking his flow.

In his hotel room. Mitch pounded away at his keyboard. The hours until the conference trickled away little by little, but he paid that no heed. He was certain he would be finished by then. It's pressure that makes a diamond, after all.

It just didn't make any sense. Everyone above him would bleat over and over that their jobs were so difficult, and that's why they deserved so much more. But he knew they didn't really believe that. If they did, they wouldn't be smiling all day, every day. If they did, they wouldn't be cooing over him with dewy eyes and pouty lips over him being so stressed. If they just understood how much danger there was, they'd be stressed all the same, and then they'd stop looking at him like a shelter dog.

And Mitch had the perfect solution.

The first step was research. That came easy to Mitch. He knew this subject like the back of his hand. Impressive as that may sound, it shouldn’t have to be. This knowledge was the difference between triumph and ruin - life and death, even. He gathered information from the United States Law, news reports, official statistics, and a little theory (but not too much theory; Mitch was no Disney Princess).

Then, there was construction. Mitch had to think hard, but not too hard. There is a beautiful elegance in simplicity, after all, and overcomplication can lead to aimless wild goose chases. He was going to focus on his goal. No bells and whistles - only precision.

After hours of single-minded dedication, the plan was complete.

Mitch took a moment to behold his creation. 30 glorious slides, right there before him. He had appendices. He had a bibliography. He had an engaging yet subdued colour scheme with accents to minimise negative space. This was everything that college had prepared him for. That is, if Mitch could remember going to college. He’d gathered all the evidence he could need, made it simple and concise enough for even the dumbest guy with the most pointless job-in-name-only to understand, and he had it all backed up on three different thumb drives. He would have printed it, too, but he didn’t want to risk a security breach. Any man could do it, yes, but no man was brave enough, smart enough or creative enough to try. Not until today. 

Everyone at that pitiful conference would sit still and watch, antsy for more rip-roaring action after the keynote. Then, they would all see. This would be the day of their reckoning. They would have no choice but to listen to him and, from there, finally see things for what they are. Once they knew the full depth and breadth of warehouse safety, they would realise who was crazy and who was sane. And they would crumble under the weight of their sins, knowing that they only had themselves to blame.

And they would be sorry. Naturally, people would come to beg him for forgiveness, and once that day came, Mitch would have to be one step ahead. He was a merciful and benevolent man, but he could not afford to be too generous. He still had to prove that he and the warehouse were not to be messed with. Besides, guilt is such a tremendously powerful thing. Was Mitch really going to let it slip out of his fingers so easily?

He’d made that. Him. For the first time, Mitch knew what it felt like to be an artist. He wondered briefly if he could win the Pulitzer for a PowerPoint presentation. But, he pushed that thought out of his mind. He couldn’t let himself be distracted by lofty dreams when he hadn’t even completed the final step. And this was going to be the toughest step of all: finding a way to swap out whatever schmaltzy bullshit Sue had planned for the conference with his own bombshell. 

Fortunately, Mitch had laboured under Sue long enough to understand her habits. Not that it was difficult when she was so damn friendly. For example, he knew that she would carve out space each week to watch her favourite reality TV show, Spindly Barely-Legals Hopping Around in Foam. Even though New Jersey was an hour ahead of Illinois, the show would start and end before the conference, so Sue would have no reason to break tradition. Mitch also knew that Sue liked to brew herself coffee in her favourite mug (the one with a champagne flute painted on so that she could entertain guests by pretending it was one) before the show. This meant that by the first commercial break, she was sure to make a beeline for the toilet. At that time, Mitch would knock on the door to be greeted by Sue's roommate for the night, Mandy from the Indianapolis division. He would proceed to distract Mandy by talking about how funny Sue's mug was and goad her into pretending to drink champagne out of it. Once he did that, Mitch could switch out the thumb drives in the nick of time. And the show was due to start right about…

“Mitch!”

That did not sound like Mitch's roommate, Pete from the Hartford division. He looked up to find Sue and Mandy, looking unsuitably giddy for what was about to unfold.

“What are you doing stewing about in your room? Come join everyone in the lounge! How are you ever going to loosen up if you don't come out and meet people?”

Just because something unexpected happened didn’t mean the plan was bust. That was a self-sabotaging fallacy that any leader should avoid. Mitch did his best to look as nonchalant as possible. “Hey, Sue, did you forget about the time zone change? Because your show should be on in just a minute.” 

“Aw, Mitch, thanks for thinking of me, but SBHAIF is on hiatus right now.”

For the first (and only) time, Mitch was ashamed to have good taste in television.

“Hey, where’s your roomie?” Mandy asked.

Mitch briefly forgot he had a roommate. He might have said where he was going, but he hadn’t been paying attention. He almost wished he lived in a world where he could afford distractions, but instead, even when they weren’t trying, people were punishing him for his drive and tenacity.

“Pete from the Hartford division is out enjoying the sights of New Jersey,” Mitch replied. He hoped they didn’t see through his tactic of using the most vague-but-not-technically-a-lie explanation possible.

“Oh, well,” Mandy smiled, “I hope this doesn’t make him late.”

“I didn’t even get to pack ‘the good china’. I’ll explain what that is when we get there,” Sue giggled into Mandy’s ear, “This way, guys!”

Ant was not ‘priming his audience.’

He wasn’t in the lounge either. Nor was he in his room, taking advantage of the room service. He wasn’t lamenting the state of mankind in front of Spindly Barely-Legals Hopping Around In Foam (he was above some things, but not everything).

Instead, he was standing next to Dale. And if that didn’t sound bad enough, Dale was committed to taking Ant to see the sights of Egg Harbor, insistent that Ant ‘wouldn’t want to hang around all those stuffed shirts.’ The ‘sights of Egg Harbor’, as it turned out, was the only place to go in Egg Harbor: the nature reserve. 

People love to harp on about the beauty of nature, how great hiking is for the metabolism, how every snowflake is different, and yada yada yada. Ant was far from one of them. It wasn’t a question of morals. It wasn’t that he wanted the polar bears to go extinct. It was just that, as far as Ant was concerned, once you saw one forest, you saw them all.

“Dale, do you really think we have the time to go hiking?” Ant groaned, trudging up the dirt path behind him. Dale was buoyant as ever, eager to point out every brightly-coloured leaf and potential animal sighting he found along the way. Even though he knew it was not that big a place, the reserve seemed to go on for eternity, and Ant was sure that the further Dale dragged him, the likelier it was that the way out would disappear from reality, leaving him and Dale to wander for the rest of their lives.

“Well, you said no to Storybook Village,” Dale replied, clearly more focused on the way ahead.

Why wouldn’t Ant say no to Storybook Village? First, it could only ever be fun for babies. Ant was not a baby. Dale’s case was still wide open. Second, the mere thought of tourist attractions dredged up tremendous amounts of bile. He hated being forced to see the phoniest parts of everyone and everything when he could do that at home for free. He hated seeing people in uniform pretend they were happy to see him. He hated being surrounded by artifice at every turn. Most of all, he hated being obligated to smile and be wowed by whatever they set in front of him. The only thing worse than having other people perform in front of you was being forced to perform yourself, and tourist attractions successfully melded the two into an unholy marriage.

He was just glad that Dale respected his tastes. For once. He almost didn’t believe it, but there was a saying about looking gift horses in the mouth.

“I suppose I did, didn’t I?” Ant replied. In the absence of any other sensible option, he kept on following Dale. The trail remained underwhelming. He didn’t believe in the trail. For all he knew, this might be as close to nature as he was to being a real ant. Not that it mattered. He had important business to attend to in orchestrating Dale’s downfall.

There was nothing, physically at least, stopping him from leaving. He could just walk away and go wherever he wanted. He was sure there was frozen custard nearby. And what was Dale going to do? Punish him? He’s too committed to the whole ‘unfalteringly happy’ thing to even complain. But he couldn’t. Instant gratification was one thing, but Ant needed maximum satisfaction. Dale couldn’t be chasing butterflies before slipping in at the last minute. ‘No prob, I’ll just watch it at home on SharePoint!’ No. He had to be at that conference when it happened. Ant needed to see his face when his soul departed his body. Ant would answer to no one, and Dale would never smile again.

“Have you been on any nature trails before, Ant?” Dale asked.

“Possibly? Not that I remember,” Ant replied. It didn’t matter now if Dale thought he was stupid or lazy for forgetting things. It wouldn’t matter what Dale thought of him ever again.

“Well, that’s not so bad,” Dale replied. He was trying so hard to be nonchalant, barely concealing his contempt for Ant for not saying what he wanted him to say, for not following the script. He was so going to pay. “It’ll be like experiencing it for the first time all over again. It’s easy looking on the bright side of things when you know how to do it.”

Ant continued to follow Dale through the trail. It actually wasn’t that bad. There were no tacky plastic decorations, no suffocating crowds, no smiling people in lanyards and polo shirts desperate for you to believe they’ve pledged their lives to the world’s largest ball of twine like they sold their souls to Satan. There was still a familiar stink of phoniness - just like everywhere else - but it wasn’t as aggressive this time. He might actually enjoy it if the circumstances were different.

Ant came back. Where he had gone, he never knew. He was still on the nature trail. He had always been. It was just that he forgot that he had a presence, or even a consciousness, at all. This place got screwier by the minute. 

The first thing he noticed was that Dale had vanished. This would have been a relief, if he didn’t need to keep a close eye on him for the plan to work.

“You’re an eager beaver, aren’t you, Ant?”

Ant turned around. He had no idea why Dale being behind him was more disturbing than him vanishing into thin air.

“See, this place was worth it,” Dale teased, “I'm having trouble catching up to you. We can’t see everything if I’m lying unconscious in the dirt!”

Ant couldn’t help but ruminate on this. He was expecting Dale to be the one marching, prancing about like a kid trying to find the end of the rainbow. And even then, he would hardly have expected to overtake him with how much longer Dale’s legs were. He looked at him. He was smiling, like usual, but there was something a little unreal about it. He looked… composed.

“That’s the last thing I’d want, Dale.” Ant used his best chipper voice. He couldn’t waste time on this when there was important work to be done. “You need to look your best for the conference!”

“That’s right,” Dale agreed, “We need to pace ourselves. No sweating, just a healthy post-nature walk glow.”

And so Ant agreed to keep on moving. Slow down and take in the sights and sounds of nature, just like Dale said. But not enough to stop him from keeping a close eye on him. He would never have described Dale as ‘unpredictable’ before. He thought for sure the man was bred in a vat and even tried to catch a glimpse of his belly button as proof that he was born from a human. Ant’s instincts told him you could learn a lot about a man from his navel. But now, he wasn’t quite sure what he’d do. Had Ant forgotten to delete his message from Dale’s Sent folder? No, he’d never be this careless. He just had to wrap his head around what was putting him so on edge.

Dale and Ant soon reached the top of the hill and were about to descend to the other side. As far as he could tell, the wooden frames around the earthen steps that led the pair down were the only forms of artifice Ant could see. In front of them was a shimmering blue lake. Ant was sure that the lake wasn’t that clean, with children pissing and Egg Harborite slobs tossing soda cans and cigarette butts in there - but the scenes in his head were too dim to see and too faint to hear, the present sight overtaking his senses. It didn’t matter that, from an objective standpoint, the lake wasn’t all that impressive. There were lakes in Nevada, too, after all. It was what the lake did. Ant was pulled firmly into the present moment. A moment where all he could think about was what was right in front of him: the minutest ripples in the water as the wind disturbed it, the tufts of green grass poking from the sandy banks, the healthy and robust evergreens dotting the landscape.

“Isn’t it beautiful, Ant? It reminds you of how small your problems really are, doesn’t it?”

Shit. He’s onto me.

Ant’s face contorted, and his guts turned inside out. Time moved slowly at the lake. Time moved so slowly there that you’d be forgiven for thinking it had stopped and wouldn’t ever move again. Time was the hours leading up to the conference. Dale’s downfall would never come. Ant had to act now.

“Dale, would you please bend over and take a really good look at the lake?”

Dale did just that. The sun hung in the sky just behind him, and Dale could see his reflection.

“Look how crisp that is!” Dale remarked, “That’s amazing! Thanks for showing me that.”

“It’s you!” Ant gawked.

“Sure is,” Dale responded. He stuck out his neck and tried to look at himself from as many angles as possible. All except, at least to Ant, the most important one.

“No, Dale, I’m not talking about that mirror image,” Ant continued, unblemished and exact, “I’m talking about this lake. A small thing with delusions of grandeur. Something that can only be admired by the dull, sheltered and ignorant. Something that carries a veneer of sincerity that might fool a few stupid people but is built on and surrounded by artifice. A pretty blue sheen hiding layers and layers of muck. Egg Harbor’s hollow non-apology to the world for its existence, complete with a basin of crocodile tears. All it needs is a tie covered in tiny pictures of Yoda, and the likeness would be perfect.”

The thing about Dale that was both his worst quality and his best quality was his inability to take a hint. It was the worst because it meant that Dale kept locking Ant into conversations he didn’t want to be in and refused to go away. But the good part of it - the only good part - was that Ant could say whatever he wanted, including the most devastating insults he could think of, and Dale would remain utterly clueless. He was sure Dale would keep on wearing that goony smile until the End Of Days, surviving like a cockroach after the sun engulfs the Earth. He’d be glad that the sun engulfed the Earth, too, because there’s nothing quite like a disaster to bring us all together!

Dale looked up from the lake, and Ant’s anger at this hypothetical nightmare disappeared, replaced by a morbid and bone-deep confusion. 

Dale was not smiling. The lake was gone, and so was the entirety of Egg Harbor Township. All that Ant could do was prepare himself for this lapse from reality.

“I try to be a good boss, you know.”

Ant had a lot to say about this. Things like, ‘A good boss? You’re barely a good person,’ and, ‘The only thing you’ve ever tried to be is a nuisance.’ Yet, he didn’t.

“I try to lead by example. Stay positive, so that it imprints on everyone else. And even if people don’t like it, they’ll at least know that there’s a positive presence at work. And in their lives.

“I’m not gonna pretend I don’t know that you don’t like me. I’m not dumb. I do important work for important people. I just couldn’t help noticing how angry and negative and antisocial you were, and I thought to myself that you needed that kind of influence more than anyone. I mean what I say about how talented you are. Someone like you doesn’t deserve to be walking around all bitter. So I wanted to make sure that, even if you didn’t like me, you would at least know that I was there. Because even that makes a difference.

“But I don’t know, Ant. It gets difficult, having to stand by and listen to you talk to me like that. Not wanting to be friends is one thing, but respect is another. You can find me annoying, cheesy, or anything else you want - I can handle people not liking me, I’m a big boy! But is a little professional courtesy too much to ask?”

Ant couldn’t help but be taken aback by this. For the first time, possibly since the man’s birth, here was Dale, displaying genuine human emotion and not talking like he just got done teaching Corey Matthews an important life lesson. All he could do was stand completely still and stare at Dale in utter incredulity. It wasn’t as if he could move his head. The more he looked at Dale, waiting for whatever Ant might say, the more human he appeared to be. 

It filled Ant with an emotion he could not name. Though the memories eluded him, he was entirely certain he’d felt it before: the sensation that someone who was not him, but also was him, had taken over. The certainty that a chunk of his little world had broken off. 

Dale was telling the truth. Ant knew this. But, that was no excuse.

“You know what? Maybe I haven’t been so thoughtful. Maybe I’ve done some things wrong.” If Ant weren’t the size of a small child (or large dog), he’d be so gently, ever so sweetly, kneeling over Dale as if he were a small child (or large dog).

“You were right, Dale. You were never trying to make me want to drive my head into an incinerator on a daily basis. You only wanted to make me happy. So maybe, instead of pushing you away, I should have communicated better and actually told you what I wanted. I’m going to start right now.”

Dale melted with relief, clasping a hand over his chest. “Oh! I’m so glad you understand! Thank you! Yes, anything you could ask for.”

“If I were a petty, vengeance-minded man, this would be playing out very differently,” Ant said, “But I am not that man. All I will ask you for is for us to go back to the hotel and get to that conference as soon as we can. I know how important it is for the both of us.”

Dale snapped his fingers. “Done! Let’s turn around and head back right this minute! Get excited, Ant! Big things are happening!”

Even with all this success coming his way, Ant couldn’t help but think something to himself: maybe, after he thoroughly destroys Dale’s career, he could become the horse race psychic for a local paper.

The lounge was noisy and stank of a hideous amalgamation of the year’s hippest fragrances. Mitch looked up at everyone. The people were an endless mush of black and tan and navy blue, their idle chatter blending into a thick auditory treacle.

And some people considered this aspirational. Idiots. All of them. But they would all learn soon enough, thanks to his innovation.

“Is he okay?” Mandy failed at whispering to Sue. 

“That’s just what he’s like,” Sue whispered back. 

Mitch paid this little mind. They could go ahead and call him mad, but history would vindicate him.

Make no mistake, there would be controversy. That was inevitable. If people upped and threw away their belief systems at the drop of a hat, humanity would not have lasted past the Stone Age. Not everyone offered people this level of understanding, but he did. He was a reasonable man. He had to stay reasonable when people got stubborn and fought back. But he would also have his devotees. People who understood the burden of proper warehouse maintenance and the burden he had to carry. They would fight for him, capture hearts and minds, take his side. Then, the whispers would stop for good.

“Hey, haven’t met you before.” 

A man approached Mitch. He had a suit that looked like it had lasted him since prom; the pimple-faced teen’s first adventure in looking fancy, and a juvenile smile to match. This man reached an age when carving dicks into tables was neither fun nor charming anymore, and he had been resentful of this fact ever since. “Real interesting what happened to Kyle, huh?”

Mitch glared at him. “His dog just died. Show some respect.”

The man immediately shrank back, but caught himself, desperate to restore his manliness in the eyes of this stranger from another state he’d only ever meet once. “You don’t have to be such a hardass, man,” he complained, marching to the assemblage of people he liked more. Not that his opinion of him meant anything right now. What mattered was that he was gone. One down, whatever’s left of Conference Room Maximum Capacity to go.

People said ‘hello’ to Mitch, but would always be gone by the time he said ‘hello’ back. It was one of many of the bizarre things these people did. Even when they found the clusters they would impenetrably stick to for the rest of the event, they never settled, instead moving here, there and everywhere like flies trapped in mason jars and getting in his way. How did Sue expect him to meet people in this climate? Better yet, how the hell did anyone do it, anywhere, ever?

This was obviously a ploy. He was being set up to fail so that he could be belittled and denigrated for this supposed ‘weakness’.

But, still. If the game was rigged - and he had to be dragged to the playing field kicking and screaming - why did he still feel like he had to win?

But that didn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter. If Sue wanted to discombobulate him by setting him up in an unwinnable game, then it was going to be her loss. He didn’t have to perform like an animal for people’s approval when he had the facts on his side. 

Through the masses and masses of suits and limbs, Mitch spied a man. He wasn’t making a fool of himself by chasing after one of those clusters. But unlike the other wallflowers, he wasn’t shutting everyone out on his phone either. Instead, he wandered about the lounge, regarding every facet of the room as he went, reading and rereading the bar menus, brushing back the carpet fibres with his feet, stroking the leaves of the houseplants and admiring each canvas print of the New Jersey shoreline. He was undoubtedly here for the conference because he looked and dressed just like everyone else. At this point in time, however, he was, for all intents and purposes, here to observe.

Right now, he was observing Mitch, regarding him with a soft but eager smile. Maybe he was trying to guess if he remembered Mitch from somewhere. Mitch would remember if he’d met someone like this guy. He would have remembered how he looked so different from everyone else and yet exactly the same, like a secret only he knew. At a time like this, Mitch would conclude that he was a creature from another world pretending to be human, but his body did not respond with the appropriate level of fear. The opposite happened. It made him feel safer. Then again, his view on humanity wasn’t that rosy to begin with.

The man approached Mitch, and Mitch could not help but do the same.

“Hi. Haven’t seen you before.” His voice sounded the way Mitch imagined the ancient Greek philosophers spoke. “What’s your name?”

“Mitch Fremont. I’m a warehouse supervisor from Illinois.”

“Nate Clemens, and I’m here from Iowa. Being a warehouse supervisor sounds pretty interesting. Better than sitting around in quote-unquote ‘important’ meetings all day.”

From that humblebrag, Mitch could pinpoint this guy’s type right away: higher-up who took Sociology 101 and suddenly became aware that other people don’t have it as easy as him (because Heaven knows his parents wouldn’t expose their child to something so sad) and now to assuage his guilty conscience he’s decided to get into spiritualism and safely circle back to the notion that the world is far too beautiful and full of wonder for someone like him to have dirtied up. But that didn’t matter to Mitch. An open mind and an introspective spirit were terribly important things for Nate to have.

They made him pliant.

A smile emerged on Mitch’s face. “It certainly is, Nate. How would you like to see something really interesting?”

“Always.”

“Well then, we’d better find ourselves some good seats!” Mitch led Nate into the conference room. He took a glance at Sue, who was looking at him with a level of pride to which the sight of her daughter’s first steps surely paled in comparison.

“Of course. Seeing all these people here from so many different places really shows you how much it takes to make this whole thing run, you know?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe, Nate,” Mitch searched for a way to distract Nate while he looked for the AV equipment, “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Aren’t you glad we got good seats early?” Dale commented. 

Both men watched as everybody filed into the conference room. Some took seats of their own in preparation, while others congregated by the hot water tank for tea and coffee and yet more lined up to put a coin in a crudely painted tin box in memoriam of some jerk named Kyle who, as far as Ant had heard, wasn’t even dead. Either way, every square inch of the conference floor was quickly being enveloped by people.

Enveloped by witnesses.

“I couldn’t agree more,” Ant replied, giving Dale his warmest smile.

The moment he was done trying to maintain eye contact with Dale, Ant’s heart leapt. There was something in the crowds. A man was sneaking around. He tried to act nonchalant, but Ant knew ‘sneaking around’ when he saw it. In spite of the nametag on his chest and the lanyard around his neck, this man was, by all accounts, an intruder. The whole room stank of it. The man was heading towards the front of the room. Where the AV apparatus was kept. Ordinarily, Ant would welcome a little excitement, but this was his fucking night, and nobody was going to ruin it but him.

“Hey!” Ant leapt from his seat and pushed through the crowd, “The fuck are you doing?” This act of heroic vigilantism was drawing plenty of eyeballs. Maybe Ant was getting to prime his audience after all.

The gormless creature froze. Ant swore he could see the chill running down the man’s spine. He gripped him by the dress shirt before he could get any further.

“Alright, mister, you’ve got some nerve!” Ant growled.

The man looked up.

Ant was overtaken by a thousand sensations at once. His body was being flooded and bombarded with information - both entirely new and long forgotten - and he expected to be left writhing on the ground from this insurmountable attack. But what he felt was not a bad pain, or even a pain at all. He could feel parts of his brain being chipped and eroded at like the faces of cliffs, yet he was given a certainty that these were the parts that deserved it. These parts were being replaced. Impossible as it was, Ant could almost feel the brain matter grow and shift. But the parts he got weren’t new. He was being assured of that in the mass of information. All that needed to go was gone. All that needed to stay was renewed.

And then, Ant knew exactly what went wrong. 

And he could tell that this other man, this man who was strange and yet not strange at all, felt precisely the same way.

“Crack?”

“Evil?”

Without another word, the bears threw off their clothes. They didn’t know what they were wearing them for. They got on all fours and bounded straight through the door without giving any of these humans a second glance. Crack and Evil had an inkling of what this place was and who all these people watching them with mouths agape were, but they didn’t care. None of it mattered. Not anymore. And it never would again. Anthony Brenner and Mitch Fremont were no more - if it could be argued that they even existed at all. All that was left were the suits that once contained them, the empty space they once occupied, and the lingering sense of chaos in the air.

(AND SO IT ENDS)

Chapter Text

“As much fun as a zoo can be,
Life on the other side of the bars is a different story.
Is it possible to stay sane when you’re locked behind bars all day so an endless parade of people can stare at you?
In the case of the Discount Zoo bear population…
…It may already be too late.”

- Bear Nuts, pp. 2-3.

There was nothing outside of this hotel room.

Crack tried to think back, but all that was there were minute flashes of documents and emails and trucks and timesheets and patios and office hallways and conference rooms with nothing to tie them together. Faces and voices that were once familiar and even the passage of time itself became nothing but a mixed-up smear, fading further and further the more Crack provoked it. No conference. No job. No self-righteous, overcompassionate bosses, nosy packers or gossipy pickers. All wiped away like dust motes between the fibres of the fabric of time.

Even the room before them looked like a mystery. It was normal in every sense of the word: Four walls, a carpet, a bed, a wardrobe, the aggressive scent of Yankee Candles over detergent. He found the chemical odour reassuring. He didn’t know why. Crack was aware that he had chosen to hide in this room, and yet, it felt as if he had woken up there on what may as well be the first day of his life. 

His eyes darted about the room. He scrutinised each corner over and over, and each time, nothing changed. He didn’t know what he was expecting. To him, this was the most telling sign of all that he had to keep looking.

All he had to do was open the door. Then, he’d find an ordinary hallway in an ordinary hotel. What else would there be? Yet, he found himself unable to move from his position next to Evil.

Crack knew that he was a bear, and his name was Crack. The bear in front of him was named Evil, and Evil was his best friend. Those were the only things he was certain of.

Evil, like him, was exhausted, and his grey fur was damp with sweat. Crack did not stop focusing on Evil. It was the only way to keep the world from spinning, and the only way to keep his head from exploding. Evil looked like he had aged one thousand years. He looked exactly the same as he had always known him. When Crack looked at him, he knew that he was home.

“…You think I should open that door?” Asked Evil, breaking their silence. He looked like he wanted it exactly as much as Crack did. Thank the Mother.

“Yes. I think you should.” Crack replied. 

“Alright,” Evil stood up, limbs frail and joints stiff, “Let’s get on with it.” Evil pushed down on the handle and tossed open the door. What they saw was nothing more than a bland, empty hallway, likely joined to more just like it. The spinning slowed to a halt.

Evil closed the door. Step one, complete.

Crack was a bear. He had always been a bear.

Tension continued to mount within Crack as memories of his old life returned. There was nothing he could do but wait, without even moving, certain that a single provocation would tear it all apart. He kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling above him; featureless, static and consistent.

Crack was a bear. He had always been a bear. He lived in a zoo with eleven other bears in Discount, Ontario. They were his friends and his family, and even though things got tough and they didn’t always get along, they always worked out in the end.

So then, why was he here and not there?

Crack heard the scuffling of the carpet as Evil began to fidget, curling his toes between the carpet fibres and pulling on the long tuft of fur between his horns. It was simultaneously reassuring and horrifying that he was having just as bad a time as he was. The only thing Crack could think to do was look away, knowing that staring would only make things worse.

And so, he looked down at his navel.

Crack was a bear. He had always been a bear. But before that, he was a cub.

Crack’s heart pumped fast, tension gripping his body as if an invisible force was pinning it down. The memories that came did not gradually trickle in like before, like the grains of sand in an hourglass. These memories came in short, piercingly bright flares, giving Crack seconds at a time of terrible clarity. Memories of the dead wood under his feet as he followed his brothers across the deep river into the farthest parts of the forest. Memories of skinny branches striking his face as they raced each other up the tallest trees. Memories of Mom bringing home an enormous deer for them to eat, leaving them thankful that they got to play instead of having to hunt like she did.

Crack’s brothers were bears. They had always been bears.

It was disgusting how stupid he had been. How careless. They all were. Stupid enough to think that they could take every risk in the world and come home each time unscathed and smiling, as if the universe favoured them enough to spare them from its natural processes. The Mother had always made Her rules clear. His brothers paid the price for being selfish enough to play where the alligators dwelt. But, Crack was the most careless of them all, for continuing to flout Her rules by reaping the benefits of living. It was only after Mom never returned home that a worthy punishment finally arrived.

Crack’s mother was a bear. She had always been a bear.

Crack remembered the day he arrived at the zoo. The clinic was filled with lights that stars couldn’t produce and sounds that the forest never made. The bedding under him, however soft, was also strange and foreign, as if it knew his body was never supposed to touch it. These things were not meant to exist. They were unholy. Whichever way he looked, everything was bigger, louder and brighter than it was supposed to be.

Everything only stayed that way in the years that followed. His memories became filled with refusing food that everyone else could eat just fine, trying and only marginally succeeding at falling asleep at night, trying his hardest not to explode into panic at any provocation, implicating the other bears in paranoid wild goose chases, screaming, fainting, vomiting, and trying much too hard to keep his heart slow and his legs steady. His life then had been an endless succession of running, hiding, and being generally useless.

Then, mercifully, the memories stopped, and he was next to Evil in a small, blue pickup truck. 

And after that, he was here.

How the hell did someone like me end up here?

Was it even him at all? Crack found it difficult to believe. Sure, he was terrified, but wouldn’t anyone else be in this situation? No matter how many angles he tried to look at it from and how many contrived excuses he heaped on, there was no way he could picture the same person who wore knee pads and a helmet to play volleyball sharing a hotel room in parts unknown with the most fearsome creature in the Discount Zoo.

He could feel the phantom sensation of January wind rushing through his fur.

Crack was a bear. He had always been a bear. A bear who was beginning to question how much time he’d spent awake because visions of syringes danced in his eyeball goo like dolphins at his own personal SeaWorld.

Crack was unable to keep still, his arms and legs in a scramble, his instincts at war and locked in a stalemate. He felt like he was about to choke on his own heart as it threatened to leap through his throat. The only thing that kept him from passing out in that precise second was Evil, who had splashed him with water from the en-suite bathroom.

Evil was a bear. He had always been a bear.

“Evil… if that was toilet water… I swear I’ll bite you,” Crack tried to utter with the feeble control he had over his voice.

When he looked up at Evil, Crack saw that his face was also wet. It looked like sweat at first glance, but it couldn’t be, because his face was damp and dripping, the water pressing his fur flat. His lack of a smile told Crack that this was no act of mischief. Maybe he understood the gravity of the situation. Or maybe, it would be a while still before his memories of his old self returned.

Though Evil held the honour of being the first on his feet, his limbs juddered, and Crack was almost sure he could see his chest rise and fall. Evil tensed his brow, clinging to the last vestiges of seriousness.

“Did that just happen to you, too?” Evil roared.

Crack could only nod as he tried to suppress the urge to scream.

“How much do you remember?”

Crack wrenched his eyes shut. Anything to avoid the sight of his navel. “W… W… We lived in a zoo! You were there, and so were Prozac and Gay and Lech and all the rest! They were our family! We had a family!”

Crack kept his eyes shut, but he could feel the stillness in the air.

“Is there anything else? I mean, stuff you probably didn’t remember before?”

Crack’s breath became shorter, and his eyes clamped down far enough to turn his whole face inward. “I… I was a cub! I mean, I remember being a cub! And I… the… No, what happened was… I did…” 

Crack began to stumble over his words, certain that his jaw itself was refusing him. Crack quickly learned that he didn’t have to say anything, for between his stammerings, he could hear the deathly silence that filled the room.

“You don’t need to say anything!” Evil barked, sputtering in a way that left Crack certain he was going to explode, “I just need you to know that none of that was your fault! You hear me? None! I know that I’m the last person to start talking about innocence, but I’m the only one left, so listen to me when I say that you didn’t kill your brothers, and you didn’t kill your mom!”

Crack stopped quivering and sat still and limp, like a rag doll that had been thrown against the wall. He had no choice now but to open his eyes and face Evil again.

“How do you know?!?” He blurted, not a scream, but loud in a different sense.

It was now Evil’s turn to hesitate, for his jaw to stiffen up in disobedience. What he said was impulsive, but it was no mistake. He could no longer drag this out.

“What’s the last thing you remember before you left the zoo?”

“I remember that there were geese coming, and I was freaking out and everyone was fed up with it.”

“Do you know what happened after that?”

Crack waited for a brief moment. “No, not at all. Is that bad?”

Evil did not wait. He was past the point of hesitation.

“Right after the geese came and we thought we had you calmed down, you caught a goose and ate it, in the garden, in front of all the humans. Everyone was pretty sure you ate that thing alive. There was blood everywhere, and all the humans were watching, and you didn’t even care. It was like you were in some kind of trance. I mean, it had to be. The moment Pro woke you up, you started puking up goose feathers and passed out flat on your face. And me?” Evil sighed, “I was just giddy to tell Prozac it wasn’t my fuck-up this time.”

“So while you’re out cold in the bathtub, everyone’s wondering what to do about all this, and so Death gets the bright idea to take you to the aviary to see that crank, The Owl. Everyone’s all gung-ho about this because he helped them with kiddie shit like meditating and smelly candles, and so off we all go to see him. You’re still unconscious while this is going on, mind you. He does that weird shit he does with his plants and stuff, and next thing you know, we’re inside your head.”

“INSIDE MY—” Crack interrupted, before being swiftly cut off by Evil’s paw wrapped around his muzzle. Crack drove his claws into them, but he wasn’t interested in fighting back. Instead, he panted and panted, drawing in all the air he could get. Evil couldn’t help noticing he was looking greener than usual. His claws ripped up the hotel carpet as he anchored himself to the ground, desperate to keep from shaking or fainting or flying about the hotel room like a mid-inflation balloon. In response, Evil silently rose, fetched an empty bucket from the en-suite bathroom, and placed it in front of Crack.

“Don’t you act all coy about this,” Even though Crack had found his voice, it sounded as if he had ran halfway across the world, “I only just found out about these people who I’m supposed to have loved and they’re supposed to have loved me, and then you tell me that they chose to violate the sanctity of MY MIND, and for WHAT? How the fuck do you WANT me to feel about this? And you, Evil, you were there too! Don’t convince me that you’re above it all, because you’re not!”

Evil didn’t care. He was past the point of needing to save face. “I’m sorry. It’s going to get worse, but you’ll know why I had to tell you.”

“So in your head, The Owl does this ritual that’s a whole bunch of esoteric nonsense, but what’s important is that we all saw your cubhood. We saw all the awful things that happened to cause all this. The alligators… all of it. Prozac, Death, me, The Owl, you—we all saw it. I think you were supposed to ‘make peace’ with those memories or something and give them to another you that lives in your head? Not that any of it made any fucking sense.

“And then, after it was over, you seemed really happy. We all got up the next day and there you were, making blueberry pancakes, with raw eggs and the stove and everything. Everyone was really shocked. But not so shocked that they didn’t eat them. You were acting so… helpful and chipper. Cara and Sara were into it! Like, in a horny way! It was super creepy, and I seriously don’t get how it wasn’t creepy to everyone else. They just caught a glimpse of the world they wanted to live in and dove headlong into there without a parachute. I could see it on Prozac’s smarmy little face. Like, repression is the guy’s middle name, but this was a new level.”

“It turns out that you drugged up the pancakes. Everyone was out cold in what used to be your inner sanctum, except for Prozac, Death and me.” 

Evil hesitated. Crack came close to swallowing his arms whole.

“We were the ones you wanted to make watch as you picked off everyone else. Including The Owl. When I went looking for him, he had already been scooped and eaten. You knew that we all fucked you up, and you wanted revenge. If I hadn’t dream-herb’d everyone back into the mindscape, it would have been a complete bloodbath.”

The room began to spin, and Crack felt as if he was falling. It felt like his skin wanted to melt off of him, repulsed by the filth. He got onto all fours as he tried even harder to fix himself in place with his claws. His head hovered over the bucket, both bears certain that he was going to vomit. But instead, he sobbed.

This could easily have been another Evil trick. It would be just like Evil to infest his head with happy thoughts of family and home, only to pull it all out from under him. Wouldn’t Evil have found that so funny? The look on his stupid face after he told him that he killed every family he ever had? Crack would have been so certain of yet another paranoid theory, if it wasn’t for the fact that he’d had those memories even before Evil could step in. If it wasn’t for the smell of their fur. The cadences in their voices. The taste of rotting fish heads. The jeering laughter of human children. The sensation of the dressings on his right arm after his battery acid accident. Reassuring himself that it was only the others watching late-night reruns on the TV when he heard odd sounds from his room at night. Wincing at the sound of someone shouting, only to find that it was Gay and Lech arguing over an empty jar of peanut butter in the cupboard. And if it wasn’t for the fact that Evil was not laughing at another prank well played. In fact, Evil’s face had taken on a subduedness that Crack had never seen. For once, Crack wished for the Evil who took joy in his suffering, because then, he would not have to think about the implications of a truly remorseful Evil. Because then, he might stand a chance at denying all this was happening.

“If you’re telling the truth about all this, Evil, because if not, then… then…”

Crack vomited into the bucket. Crack’s recent adventures—wherever they were—left him better-fed than the Crack in Evil’s memories, yet he was still perturbed at how much billowed out of him. The intensity had made him woozy. He wasn’t quite on the brink of fainting, but he was no longer panicking.

When Crack finally looked up, Evil was there to meet his gaze. His brows were level and his eyes were sharp. Crack’s body tensed, but only slightly, as if it knew something he didn’t.

“Crack, I’m going to tell you now the same thing I told you up in the mindscape.” Evil’s voice was as gentle as his nature allowed, but his face remained serious. “That. Was. Not. You. You don’t do those things. It was The Owl, and his fucked up voodoo magic. It was everyone else, for fucking around with your head in the first place and pretending nothing could possibly go wrong. They’re all the ones who fucked you over. Don’t let them off the hook by taking the blame for this, because you do not deserve to have that. You need to understand that.”

Crack would have been reassured, if he didn’t remember who he was dealing with.

“That’s easy for you to say, Evil!” Crack barked, “You’ll twist anything to make it seem like it wasn’t your fault! You do it all the time, and it was as transparent then as it is now! Since when did you ever give a shit about morality? And don't forget your part in all this, Evil, so if it turns out that I was innocent all along, then—how convenient!—You were innocent too! Why else would you even care?”

Evil always found himself forgetting how audacious Crack could get sometimes. “You want to know how I know that, Crack? Immediately after all this went down and everyone got the puke washed off of them, Prozac’s next move was to give a half-assed apology and have everyone pretend that none of this ever happened. According to them, you’ve done something hideously unforgivable. What, exactly? You’ll never know. Because peace means lying to your face and acting like they don’t know what you’re talking about when you see them acting strange, all the while getting to wash their paws of everything. The best possible solution! That is, unless you prefer to see things for what they are. 

“So I organised a secret meeting between us—I called us The Shunnery, for obvious reasons—to plot our revenge. I wanted to strike hard, to completely shatter the idea of what they called ‘family,’ and for me, there was no better time to do this than on Christmas, which was just around the corner. You, however, were more merciful. How could you not be? You didn’t want to hurt them any more than ‘you’ already had. You just wanted your family back. You were talking about decorating the tree and eating gingerbread men and all kinds of Christmas stuff you couldn’t do before, so sure that you could win their favour now that you didn’t have as much of that annoying mental illness getting in their way. And so we decided to call a truce: if they treat us right over the Christmas season, all will be well. If not, then we make them pay.”

Crack reflected on this. It all sounded like something he’d do. Even though he knew he’d lived through all those memories, there were times when he struggled to recognise the bear he used to be. Suddenly, he felt an excitement to decorate a Christmas tree that was long gone. He could smell the pine and gingerbread baking, and hear the bears’ hubbub as they busied themselves decorating. This excitement was brief. Crack still had questions he needed answered. Things couldn’t have gone so right, because otherwise they’d still be at the zoo. He couldn’t bring himself to understand what kind of madcap revenge plot would find them in a faraway hotel room with no memory of how they got there.

“What happened after that?” Crack asked.

At that, Evil’s muzzle wrinkled, and his brow rose. However, this was not from any sort of relief. 

“Christmas went on. Decorations went up, and gingerbread was made. Everything was… fine… to a point. Pro decides to bring us all Christmas oranges, and we eat them. Everybody’s happy. Then, as it turns out, the oranges were tainted. Prozac somehow managed to fill a load of oranges with Death Touch to knock us all out cold, and why? Just so he could have some peace and quiet. Death told me all about it. So much for putting it all behind us when he was entirely willing to drug you all over again. When everyone eventually came to on Boxing Day, Prozac’s modus operandi was—you guessed it—pretend none of it ever happened. Suffice to say, I had a lot of ideas on how to get revenge, but of course I couldn’t go ahead with any of them without a majority vote from the Shunnery. That’s because you were becoming pretty hard to get alone. At first, I thought you were being dumb enough to hold out for a happy New Year. But then I remembered what you said to me at our inaugural meeting. That those guys were the only ones who would put up with my… our shit and still call themselves our friends. Without that, where would you go? I don’t need to remind you how high-maintenance you are.

“Then one night, after New Year’s—whoosh. You’re gone. You definitely weren’t just hiding somewhere in the cave or in that Inner Sanctum of yours. I could smell it. Of course, I found you soon enough, climbing into that little truck in the car park. Maybe you wanted me to spot you. Maybe you didn’t. But, something tells me you picked the one night a month I scare the otters for a reason. And, I’m sure, as you can probably pick up on, I followed you. I was certain you’d find me hiding there before the truck moved off, but you didn’t care to look. You were just in this weird trance. Maybe that’s not the right way to put it. It was like… every single part of your body was in total agreement and knew exactly what they were about to do. And me? I knew I had to go in there, but I barely knew why. I was the scared one for once. Because the truth is, even though it looked like you were just running away again, what you did was the bravest thing anyone in that cave could’ve done. Including me.”

Crack vaguely remembered Evil saying something similar, a long, long time ago. He wasn’t sure how much he believed it at the time, even if it did make him feel better. But, Crack’s memories of the Discount Zoo were filled with Evil blatantly lying. He was always so obvious. Why wouldn’t he lie? If it wasn’t the ‘real Crack committing these murders, then his part in hauling him off to The Owl would be consequence-free. How lucky. So, he could only be lying again to wash his paws of this clear disaster of an adventure. Of course, Evil would be so brazen.

“How could you possibly call that the bravest thing you could do? You’ve always been too damn confident for your own good, but this really takes it! You get to keep saying stuff you don’t mean all the time, because you think life is just one big practical joke where you’re king of the world and everyone else is just a sucker the Mother created for you to laugh at! But that’s not true at all! Actions have consequences! Really bad, dangerous ones that get everyone hurt! Because if you keep saying stuff like that, Evil, someone might just start believing it! And then where would we end up?”

Hearing this wasn’t news to Evil anymore, not even when it came from Crack’s mouth. He wasn’t going to agonise over it. He knew exactly what he was going to say.

“There was something you said to me during that big rampage. After The Owl got to you. I don’t know if you meant it, but I remembered it. You said, ‘You’re just jealous I can do the psycho asshole thing better than you.’ Well. You were half right.”

Crack was silent. His breathing became less desperate, but his grip on the hotel room floor only tightened.

“I was jealous. Sometimes, I still am. But not about the ‘psycho asshole’ thing. What I saw in the mindscape really made me think. I mean, I could already tell something fucked up must have happened to you to make you end up the way you were, but seeing it for myself changed things. Or maybe it made something that was already there louder? I don’t know. Either way, it made me understand a lot about who you were, but also a lot about who I am. You… you’re decent.”

“Decent?!?” This, Crack was ready to believe.

“Yes. You’re just a decent person. You’re not some Boy Scout like Prozac pretends he is, but you’re not a total asshole either. Only decent. The way any person should be. Normal, insofar as I can use a word like ‘normal’ to describe you. And that’s how I knew all along that the Crack that went on a murderous rampage wasn’t the real you. Because that Crack was behaving just like me. 

“The point I’m trying to make is that we were both kicked down the same garbage chute in life, and so we’re both just trying to survive. In our own ways.” Evil glanced down at his navel, and Crack instinctively knew to follow suit. “Now, when I look at the ways you go about survival, I think to myself, ‘that’s hilarious.’ But sometimes, when the rest of me isn’t looking, suddenly I think, ‘You’re so lucky. You got to stay kind and gentle. You’re not out causing chaos and destruction just ‘cause and dragging everyone else down with you.’ I meant what I said back there in the mindscape. Every last word. I meant it because you managed to go through all of that without ending up like I did.”

Crack finally let go of the carpet. He stared at Evil in incredulity. He pulled his ears tight, leaving Evil sure that he would tear them clean off. Then, his body now without direction, he fell flat on his belly. Evil thought he heard weeping. Crack soon hoisted himself up again, the swiftness of it coming as a surprise. Finally, he spoke.

“Are you INSANE?!?”

Evil did not argue. He already felt as if he had been eaten alive from the inside.

“It was you! It was you, Evil! You’re the one who has everything! You can go where you want and do what you want and not even give a fuck what happens next, to us or to yourself! You can play with fire and beat up clowns and get an army of squirrels to do your bidding and eat red meat and go to sleep in the dark! Me… I don’t know what I can do now because a lot of it is still missing, but the bear I was before couldn’t do any of that! I hate that bear! He couldn’t do anything at all, and the one silver lining is that I was too distracted to see it! And yeah, sometimes, I think you’re a self-destructive idiot, but nine times out of ten? You’re everything I can’t be. And then telling me that you envied me? Me? I’d say this was another one of your lies, Evil, if I wasn’t 100% sure you’d completely lost your mind.”

Evil tightly gripped his right arm, the sensation of its taut scar tissue buzzing through his digits. He did lose his mind. He lost his mind at a lot of crucial points in his life, and in those moments, it was the most important thing he could have done. He’d spilt his guts to convince the most freakishly suspicious bear on Earth that this was all coming directly from the heart. 

Well. Not entirely.

“Do you want to know how I know I’m serious?”

“Oh, I am so ready.” Evil kept forgetting how sarcastic Crack could get. Always finding new ways to keep him on his toes.

There was no hesitation anymore. There was no choice. Evil kept his gaze directly on Crack, refusing to look down, nothing that could be construed as disguising a lie. All that they had was each other, and if they lost that, there’d be nothing left. 

It was time to do the unthinkable.

“When I was a cub,” Evil began, “I was a circus bear.”

Crack was intrigued, giving Evil a gargoyle-like stare.

“The circus was worse than the zoo, if you can believe it. I was made to risk my life doing ridiculous stunts that, if they didn’t end in me getting burned alive and having knives thrown at me, ended in complete humiliation and degradation for the fleeting pleasure of an endless parade of humans. And were any of them grateful? No! The audience threw garbage at me just to hear me scream, and the ringleaders made me do it all again the very next day.”

“What does that have to do with me?” Crack asked, patience wearing thin. Evil couldn’t bring himself to get angry.

“The point is, we both had a breaking point. And when you hit that point, everything becomes clear, and suddenly, you can’t use your brain or hear your thoughts, because the whole rest of your body is screaming, ‘Fuck you! I’m running the show now!’ and gets you to where you need to be. Yours was The Great Christmas Betrayal, when you ran away and jumped into that truck to escape from everyone. Mine was… different. When I had mine, I set the circus on fire and watched as the whole thing burned down.

“I think about what might have happened if that had been you, or if I did what you did. If I had run away, that circus would still be travelling across Canada today. They would’ve found another ‘Fearless Bear Cub’ to torture. You might think that burning it down was for the greater good. But, do I look like someone who ever cared about the greater good?”

Crack’s eyes hovered towards Evil’s navel.

“Exactly. There weren’t any casualties in the fire. No injuries, either. But I wanted there to be. I wanted every human who ever hurt me to roast forever in the hell they sought to create. But now, I’m thinking about you jumping into that truck, and asking myself, ‘What would have happened if you did what I did? What would have happened if I got my way at the Shunnery meeting?’ I saw a Crack who does what I do, and so I already know the answer. The whole zoo in ashes. The family with nowhere to go and dying in the wild, if they hadn’t died in the fire. Sure, we’d have our revenge. But what would be left? Nothing at all.

“But you? What I said back in Central Park was 100% true. You made the right choice. And I’m glad you got me to follow you, because I know I wouldn’t have. I would’ve made everything worse. You didn’t want revenge. You never did. You just wanted to get out of there. And guess what? It worked! We made it! We haven’t seen the zoo in who knows how long? You did it, Crack! And I didn’t. That’s how I know I’m serious.”

Crack was entirely stuck for what to do in that moment. His body trembled as if each part of it were being fought over by different demons trying to possess it, and his jaw juddered and shook as if he were trying to say five things at once. He drove his arms into his mouth, but swiftly pulled them out before he could bite down. Evil had no clue what to think. All he could do was wait.

Once again, Crack lunged for the bucket. Evil took to his feet and swiped a bottle of water from the mini-fridge and placed it at Crack’s side. Sure enough, Crack finally regained something close to composure—shaking, but not fidgeting, and wheezing as if he had just taken a cinder block to the chest. He took a prodigious gulp of the water.

“I can’t believe we did all of this,” Crack panted. Evil had no clue whether he was proud, or disappointed, or horrified. Maybe he was all of those things at once. That was certainly how Evil felt, drenched in sweat in a mysterious room, no clue how far away he was or how long it had been, the stench of Crack’s vomit permeating the air.

“Me either,” replied Evil, “but it happened anyway.”

Evil then felt Crack gently cradling his right arm. It might have been because Crack still wasn’t at a stage where he could hug someone. It might have been out of consideration, knowing that Evil didn’t care for gooey heart stuff. He wasn’t about to ask himself what this uneasy sensation was that took him when he scrutinised this. Regardless, he chose to let it happen.

When Crack looked at Evil, he was sure that all that puking had made him dizzy, because he looked almost joyful.

“Thank you. And… it wasn’t your fault, either.”

The very idea of what he was saying made Evil sick. But, he knew it did not change the truth.

Everything was still. The room no longer spun, and nobody was shaking. Not even the hairs on the carpet shivered as the seconds marched on. The only sign that time hadn’t stopped was the gentle yet persistent hum of the mini fridge.

“Evil?”

“Yes, Crack?”

“Where the fuck are we?”

This visibly alerted Evil as he immediately rose from the floor. “I know about as much as you right now, but I’m gonna find out. We just need to figure out a way out of here without being exposed. Crack! Search the closet for disguises while I—”

There was a knock at the door. Crack and Evil’s ears curled at the sound. Whoever was there couldn’t possibly be looking for them. At least, that was what they hoped.

“Hello? Ant? Ant? Are you in here?”

Evil didn’t know who this man was. Yet, the sound of his voice made him feel ill in a way that felt so familiar. Visions of ISAD(G) cataloguing software and patios revealed themselves to him, unceremoniously, as if they would have slipped by unnoticed if Evil had not already been hit with a flurry of lost memories. He’d had enough of this. Throughout this whole journey, his mind was doing things he did not allow it to do. This would not stand. He could put a stop to it all if only this man would go away.

Crack took note of the look on his face, too pained for this to be mere annoyance. “Evil, who is this man?” Crack whispered.

“Shut up!” Evil whispered back, his mind far too busy to process anything new.

Apparently, not quietly enough. “Ant! Thank goodness!” He cried, voice growing more frenzied, “There you are! It’s me, Dale! I knew you were here somewhere, but when I asked around, nobody else remembered who ‘Anthony Brenner’ even was. I can’t help it! I’m the records guy! Anyway, you have to tell me what’s going on because I'm freaking out here! Just… God… one minute we were at the conference and the next you just disappeared, and then everything went all screwy! And… and… please! I just have to make sense of all this!”

As ‘Dale’ spoke, Evil gradually felt the muscles on his brow loosen up and his heart begin to slow. He felt that same sickness in his belly. But as the seconds went on and Dale continued to yelp, Evil sensed that it was not for the reason he thought it was, and suddenly, having a strange man at his beck and call didn’t seem so glamorous. He could smell papers he’d never read and feel old sores from shoes he'd never worn. Evil felt the hotel room walls press in on him, and nothing about this situation made any sense at all, but what he did know was that the synapses firing away in his head were telling him to do one thing.

“Dale?” Evil called out, trying and failing to sound calm, “I can hear you, can you hear me?”

“Ant! Am I ever glad to hear your voice again! Let me in, I need to see you! Just so I can… Make sure you exist? If that makes sense?”



“No!” Evil cried out, then immediately regretted it, “I can’t let you in, because… I’m… very sick!” Evil grabbed the bucket full of Crack’s vomit and placed it right where the door met the doorframe, wafting the fumes with the bathroom towel, “Yes! Smell that? Very, very sick! I… hope the… conference… went all right without me?” Evil could only assume that this was what he’d be concerned with, not being much of a creative writer or a detective.

“Oh, Ant, it was a disaster! They had to call the whole thing off! They all just went outside and started talking like nothing ever happened, and that there was never supposed to be a conference at all! There’s a lady from the Chicago warehouse who can’t even remember who she came with, and I think some of them don’t even know how they ended up in New Jersey! And most of them don’t even care! It’s madness! I had to find you. You’re gonna know about as much as me right now, but… you’re the only one left! I don’t know what else to do!”

Evil didn’t know who this ‘Ant’ individual was, or what made him so special. But that didn’t stop him from feeling so certain as his mind rushed to fill in the blanks, pulling anything and everything it could out of seemingly thin air. He knew he had no reason to believe any of it. Yet, the holy-shit-are-you-stupid neurons in his brain didn’t want to light up at the moment. Even then, in a situation like this, was there even any room to contemplate the finer details? Especially not when the man's desperate panting continued to reverberate through the door.



“Dale, get a grip on yourself!” Evil bellowed.



A yelp. And then, silence.



“Dale, everything that's happening is very confusing, but if you think I'm worth believing in, then I might as well listen. The conference was meant to be a big deal. I know that. And this was supposed to be the night you dazzled them all. I say, just because everyone forgot about it doesn’t mean that anything’s changed about you. You’re still the guy who deserved a place on that program. They’re still the people who recognised everything you’ve done. That means, if you proved yourself once, you can do it again.”

Evil would have thought that he was the last person to encourage anyone. He could have explained it all away by saying ‘Ant’ was the one doing the talking. Or at least, that’s what he would have done if this adventure hadn’t taught him anything at all. Being naturally above everyone else was one thing. Being a leader was another.

“And if they don’t, then I want you to remember one thing – you know things they don’t. And when you know things that others don’t, you had better take advantage of that however you want. You can even lie.”

“I have the information,” Dale gasped out, steadily approaching his revelation, “I’m a records manager.”

“…You sure are, Dale.” Evil agreed.

“I decide who gets access and who doesn’t!”

“Nobody else!”

“Best pep talk ever! I’m glad I can count on you to tell it like it is. But… about the flight. Do you think you’ll be well enough? You know, with the crowds and the turbulence and all the standing around and waiting?”

“Ah! As it turns out, I got a very interesting email.”

“Oh, God!” Panic began to rise in Dale’s voice, “Ant, I swear to God, I don’t know how this happened, but you have to believe I would never do anything to—”

“What are you talking about? It was from the office right here in… New Jersey,” Evil swiftly remembered, “Who said they heard all about my… work… and wanted me to join them. So you won’t expect to see me again back in… home.”

“Oh. Well, good for you, Ant! I knew your hard work would be recognised, only… how’ll I find someone half as good as you in Nevada?”

“…Have the cat do it?” Evil immediately regretted that statement. Even at a time like this, his impulse to wring a laugh out of anyone and everyone had to kick in. 

Dale laughed riotously. Evil was sure the man’s spleen was about to burst from the force. “Of course… The cat…” Dale said, slow and stilted and hamming it up, “You trained him so well, after all!”

Holy shit… an inside joke… miracles like this only come once in a bullshitter’s lifetime.

“Thanks for everything, Ant! I’m going to miss you. You're a really good friend. With some good advice, too…” Dale snickered. The bears listened as the sound of his footfalls receded through the hallway. Once he had gone, Crack and Evil shared a deep sigh.



Evil’s relief did not last long. This new onset of memories was not like the others, which happened in a barrage of sharp, painful bursts. These ones arrived with no fanfare at all. Maybe it was because all the foundational memories had already been processed. Or maybe it was because his life as a human was so incredibly boring. He blinked once, and there was Dale’s face, as well as the faces of the rest of his colleagues. He blinked twice, and there was his car, the road that he traced between home and work, the traffic light he always tried to beat, the jogging club he would see whenever he ran late. He blinked three times, and there was his patio. Sure, it really belonged to Mark from Human Resources, but with the amount of work he’d contributed on it, it might as well be his patio.

Evil was supposed to have been surprised. He wished he had been surprised; then this all might have made sense. Instead, it was as if he always knew the ins and outs of warehouse management, the differences between archival appraisal systems, the best and worst coffee shop pastries, listings for apartments, spam emails, particularly annoying traffic lights, brass paperclips, and the most effective ways to waste time on the toilet while hiding from everyone else. Going to work, where people are allowed to know your name and your voice and your likes and dislikes, and coming home again. Coarse fabric and blistery shoes. Shaving. Budgeting. Socialising. Being human—and had just been momentarily distracted from it. Regardless, this did not make the revelation pleasant or comfortable. 

Neither Evil nor Crack said a word.



“Hang on…” Evil soon said, not quite a command and not quite a question.



Evil had no clue what he looked like when this was all happening, but he pictured himself with his head tilted, staring off into nowhere. Crack had his arm in his mouth, like usual, but he was only nibbling on it, as if the part of him that wanted to do that wasn’t quite as committed. When he heard Evil speak up, he looked like he had been caught. “I know exactly what happened! I was there and so were you! We needed money, and we couldn’t beg on the streets any more, and so we had to get jobs! I… I remember picking out our suits! I remember applying, answering interviews! But… How did that turn into this?”



“I can’t claim to know how it happened, and even if I did, I would never be able to explain it with words,” Evil replied with care, “To be honest with you, I’m not sure I even want to know. But all that matters is that it’s over.”

Crack was certain that he didn't want to know either. And yet, an uneasiness still nagged at him. “Are you sure? What if I go to sleep tonight and have nightmares about being late for work?”



“That’s just it, Crack,” Evil went on, intensity building in his voice, “You’re not supposed to have nightmares about being late for work. You’re not supposed to have a job! Anthony Brenner and Mitch Fremont are no more, and if they had graves, I would surely piss all over them.”

“But we had responsibilities! And people who depended on us! What’s going to happen to the warehouse and the archive and all of Spencer’s?”

The features of Evil’s face scrunched up and curdled. “I have only lived with these memories for a couple of minutes, but I am certain of one thing: Anthony Brenner sucks. Knowing that there was a version of me who lived in the human world, behaving like all of them, living by their rules because that’s just what you do and never dreaming of more…” the more he spoke, the more it looked like Evil was one provocation away from ripping out chunks of his own flesh, “…fills me with a terrible, bone-dissolving, stomach-inside-out-turning sickness. Being a bear wasn’t much better, but at least at the zoo we had our secret lives away from them all.”

“Our secret lives where we would pretend to be human anyway,” Crack’s impulses forced him to retort.

“Speak for yourself!” Evil scoffed, “You were collecting stuffed dollies like some dumb human with their Hogwarts house tattooed on their butt. And you slept in a bed! How high was the thread count in your sheets, anyway? Meanwhile, I was out hunting and foraging and sleeping in straw!” 

“You were terrible at all that.”

“Bup-bup-bup! You didn’t let me finish. I was gonna say that I might not have been good at foraging or hunting, but I could have been! If it wasn’t for the humans getting to me before I could learn those things like every other bear.”

It was then that Crack’s brow dropped like an anvil. “Evil, how much of our lives back then do you actually remember?” he began to yell, “Every single one of us sucked at being bears! And you can’t even blame the humans for it, because you don’t see the lions acting like us! And what about me? I grew up in the wild, and there I was collecting stuffed dollies like some dumb human with a something something something. Hell, I wish I were a human! Mitch might have been up to his eyeballs in stress, but he was one human in a million. Nobody cared who he was or what he did! Yeah, he had problems. What human doesn’t? But at least they weren’t mine.”



Crack didn't have to say much for Evil to know exactly what he was talking about. The two of them had led so many different lives, and in each one, there was another self to hate. He was sure that if Mitch were around today, he would be just as disgusted with his former self as Evil was with his. Evil knew he was never meant to be a human. But—and maybe it was just the present moment talking, and maybe it was the hard, unfiltered truth—Evil’s view of his bear selves wasn’t much better. And of course Crack wasn’t happy. Because, believe it or not, the Discount Zoo was not a very nurturing environment for a professional phobia collector.

“You know… Now that I think about it, eating a live animal is a perfectly normal thing for a bear to do,” Evil said.



Crack gripped his shoulders so tightly it was as if he was intent on tearing the flesh right off of them. He buried his head into himself. Then, he sat perfectly still, which Evil found the most unnerving of all. Then, his head swivelled straight towards Evil. Evil waited for him to speak, but no words came out. Evil could tell that his words resonated with him, but he would not be satisfied until he got the closure of hearing them from his mouth.



“I didn’t say it at the time. I never could have, because I took it all for granted. Even when I was fighting against them, I was still conforming. Conforming to something bigger than Prozac, bigger than all of them. I don’t even think they know, or… knew. They just wanted to dress up. Read dirty magazines. Paint their nails. Collect Star Wars figurines. Watch TV. Maybe every other bear in every other zoo and even in the wild would do the same thing—that is, if I’m not just trying to feel better about myself by saying it.”

Crack’s silence continued. He seemed to have calmed down, if only because he was so deep in thought.

“…It is a normal thing for a bear to do,” Crack finally said, “And they punished me for it.”

“They did, Crack, and that’s entirely my point. Nobody at that zoo knew how to be a bear. And if their lives were anything like mine, they never had a chance. That’s why we were all so terrified of being thrown into the wild. We knew we didn’t belong there! Do you remember when Tanked got lost? Lech tried to hunt for him based on what he learned from Mantracker, a crappy reality show. He was a bear pretending to be human pretending to be a bear. I certainly didn’t belong in the wild. If Sloth hadn’t been there with an army of squirrel lackeys for me to commandeer, I would have died out there. And no matter how much you can dream about it, you know you were never supposed to be human, either. We had to repress our entire lives for it to work, and all it took for the whole thing to come apart was us just looking at each other. We sucked at being bears, and we sucked at being humans. We’re just… losers, is what we are.”

Crack thought about all that Evil had said, and knew it to be true. It didn’t take much introspection for him to get there. He always knew it. He was a loser in the zoo, and he was a loser outside of it, too. His thoughts forced themselves on a singular path, one that told him that if he had only chosen to stay at the zoo, none of this would have happened, and he would never have had to learn this. He would never have had to question who, or rather, what he was supposed to be, and he would never have had to face the fact that there was just no way out for any of them. There was no way they could possibly return to the zoo, or go back to work, or go anywhere. Bear or human, they would be lying either way.



But at the same time, Crack knew that this had to be the way. He had to confront this. He knew that all those years ago, he climbed into that truck because he could. Because, regardless of how it happened, he was finally ready to take risks for once. This had been the most important choice of his life. He was right about it then, and he was right about it now.

“Evil? Do you remember that bear we met? At the Central Park Zoo?”



“What about him?” Evil replied. It didn’t take long at all for him to respond.



“You and I were so convinced that he was nothing but a wet blanket. He lived in a zoo where the keepers were fully aware of what the animals were really like, but he went around like he was 100% content to be a stupid animal. But now I’m thinking, he’s never done human stuff like we have. He hasn’t had a constant stream of stupid movies and toys and magazines filling his head and telling him what life should be like. That’s why we were bored all the time! We were brainwashed! Bamboozled! Maybe he wanted to play with the big log because he just liked the big log!”

Evil took his time. It was clear that he wanted to say something, but he couldn’t, for all the racing thoughts that pounded down on him like a torrent.

“…What’s your point?” He finally said. 

Of course, Evil already knew what Crack was going to say. He knew it could probably never be done, he knew it was definitely too late for them, and he knew that, despite those things, it was the only path he could take, as unavoidable as time itself. He just needed to hear it for himself, so that he could finally stop denying it. So that he knew he wasn’t going completely insane.

Maybe he believed it all along.

Evil left his seat, and climbed up on the truck’s left wheel tub. He looked down, watching the road slip out from under his feet. On a base level, he understood why someone would want to leave the Discount Zoo. He understood why someone like Crack would want to get out of there. Evil had a pretty long list of why he’d want to run off and leave everyone languishing in their own juices too, and he was just about certain that everyone else had their reasons. But of course, all those people were still there. They never acted on them. There had to be a catalyst, that one breaking point that pushed them out. Evil had no trouble guessing what Crack’s might have been, and if not that, there would’ve been a million and one other things for him to flee from, because believe it or not, the Discount Zoo is not a very nurturing environment for a professional phobia collector. He could tell that Crack wasn’t nearly as certain as he sounded—he was pretty transparent that way—but it was an assured kind of uncertainty. Was he stupid? Was he admirable? None of that matters when you’re hiding in the back of a truck in the middle of nowhere. Evil looked down at his navel. He was no stranger to fate.

(END OF PART TWO)