R.W.C. #1: 'Lunch Date with Death'

"Cheesesticks & Poon: The Adventures of Robot Winston Churchill Across the Ages"

Part One

"Lunch Date with Death"


The school day was going as well as could be expected for principal Herb Shackelfelter’s first day after his promotion.

He entered the teacher’s lounge after the second bell sounded in the highest of spirits, only to quickly notice, most dismally, the deafening silence that was engulfing the room. He walked amongst the seated and brooding teachers, none returning his eager glances. A thick sense of despair smothered Herb, only to have the knot in his stomach fearfully clenched as a frantic scream rose from the cafeteria.

Twenty years experience teaching in the city’s toughest inner-city schools could not have prepared the rookie principal for what he witnessed next. For there, surrounded by the strewn, bloodied, and broken bodies of the school children left in Herb’s care was every public school administrator’s greatest fear, live and in person. For there, gazing back through a haze of both smoke and strangled screams, stood Robot Winston Churchill.

In the split second their eyes met across the lunch room, Herb learned of the true nature of terror; a horror so unspeakable that the deepest, darkest corners of man’s mind would be wordless in describing it. Robot Winston Churchill’s rectangular lips, glistening in the light from the shattered ceiling bulbs, twisted into a sinister, metallic smile as he read the fear written across Herb’s face.

All too aware of his nemesis’ eternal quest for cheesesticks and poon across time, Herb knew Robot Winston Churchill’s next move just as well as the suited, cigar chomping android did.

Both men broken into a dead sprint towards the lunch line, the superhuman speed of the non-carbon based runner easily toying with that of his opponent. The entree on this very day just so happened to be the ill-fated concoction of dairy and flour, and it seems that our cook, Mistress Fate herself, had planned for second helpings of pain.

The mechanized former Prime Minister of Great Britain, upon arriving at the line with an appetite mere cheesesticks could not satisfy, made one fell swoop, picked up the cowering lunch lady and, snapping her neck like a decaying wishbone, tossed her aside like a neglected rag doll.

But Herb was quickly on top of Robot Winston Churchill, clutching desperately to his massive shoulders. It was never a contest. Thrown immediately to the ground, the bruised and beaten rookie principal could do nothing but look on in horror as his mechanical nemesis swiped at the cheesesticks, inhaling rack after rack in the blink of an eye.

Throwing the empty trays to the floor, Robot Winston Churchill threw back his head, letting out a primal howl of victory that echoed through the halls and shook the very souls of those still allowed the privilege of living. Robot Winston Churchill then, moving with a speed barely distinguished from a blur, darted out the school’s doors, stopping but once to break the door’s handles, just to show he could.

Herb lay, in a puddle of both blood and shocked disbelief, gasping at the carnage left behind. The cafeteria and cheesesticks, he knew, could be replaced. But with the vast majority of his school children’s tiny bodies smashed into the blood soaked linoleum, Herb knew the next round of parent-teacher conferences was going to be a bitch.

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