In this world it is a well known fact that high school guys love watching shit explode. It doesn't matter what explodes, just that it gets wasted. High school guys have been blowing shit up from the day the Black-Cat was invented. We laugh in dark rooms about strapping M-80 to frogs' backs… bottle rockets up a cat's ass… good times. As a result, responsible adults everywhere have gone out of their way to make sure that serious explosives don't end up in the hands of mischievous people who would put them to spectacular use… bastards. I only bring up this point because I had a cannon and a plan… but plans can't fire things out of cannons.

I needed something that would provide the necessary power to unleash the most unholy ammunition this side of hell. I knew what I had to do, but I had no idea how this part of the plan would unfold. We have a gravel mine here in Issaquah, and that is where I intended to find my explosives. I knew again that I would need assistance if I was going to successfully "borrow" what I needed for my plans to work. For this part of my plan I enlisted another friend that shall remain nameless… but for the sake of storytelling I'll call him Mark. Again… not a real name, just something I threw together at the last minute.

The mine was a formidable obstacle to my vision of pulling off the greatest prank of all time. The entire facility was fenced in with razor wire, and what I needed was surely down in the pits, and not up on the surface in any of the storage facilities. I figured that had to be true because this story would be very boring if I didn't actually have to go down into the mine. I mean seriously, why bother stealing from a mine if you don't get to go see what horrors lie inside? So Mark and I waited until nighttime when all the workers had gone home, and we made our way past the fence with a little help from my trusty bolt-cutters.

In the interest of fairness, it should be said that Mark announced before our travels into the dark depths that the building marked with the explosive warning on the door was probably a good place to start our search. I told him to stop ruining my story, and we made our way toward the entrance to the mine. It's amazing how mines in reality look nothing like the mines in the movies. I was assuming there would be little railcars, and tracks that we could use to quickly make our way down into the pit… you know, like in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Sadly we were not going to be getting into any railcar chases this particular night. I know, I was as disappointed as you are.

So unfortunately we had to hoof it down into the pits. Thankfully we had remembered to bring a couple of flashlights, and we brought extra batteries because everyone knows that flashlight batteries always die right before the really dangerous part. We were not going to fall victim to that particular cliché. So we proceeded into the tunnel system on our way toward the explosives we needed… and could only assume were waiting for us.

As we continued down into the mine, it occurred to me that mines are really boring places. It was nothing more than rock walls with wooden reinforcements and it went on forever. That's a pretty boring walk my friends, and it took about twenty minutes to get to our destination, so I'll do you a favor and skip to the good part.

There was a door marked "Danger! Do Not Open This Door!" We immediately knew we were in the right place. The door also had a skull and crossbones situation going on, which made us all the more curious about what the big deal was. I figured that if something really terrible was on the other side of the door, there would be a better description of why we shouldn't go charging through. So we did what anybody in our position would do… we lowered our shoulders and charged the door. Unlike Mike and Charlie, Mark and I totally owned that door. We hit that shit so hard we ripped it off the hinges as we charged into the darkness beyond.

The stench in the room hit us like a sledgehammer. I mean it was bad, it was like a rancid case of six month old sardines. The floor of the room looked as if it had been painted white by a psychotic monkey on speed. As we lit up spaces in the room with our flashlights, we saw moving shadows that immediately made us think we had stepped into a bat cave. The creatures flying around the room didn't quite look like bats though… they were far too colorful. They were also pretty small for bats, and that's when it hit us… literally hit us… bird shit. We were dealing with canaries, thousands of canaries.

These were not ordinary canaries either, these little bastards were aggressive and had eyes as red as demons. The well picked-over human bones on the ground also tipped me off that Mark and I might be in a little bit of trouble. Right about then I was wishing that we hadn't managed to knock the door of the hinges. The demon canaries started swarming us, tearing at us with their claws and beaks. It was pretty fucked up. While we had planned on our flashlights dying, we had not managed to foresee an angry swarm of tiny demon birds.

Looking back on it now, I have a theory about how the canaries ended up in the mines. Back in the day, miners used to take them down as an early warning about toxic fumes down in the pits… if the canary dies, everyone leaves the tunnel. I figure somebody just left a few of the birds down one tunnel and forgot about them. Over time, they evolved into ferocious hunters, and then they went after the miners. The miners managed to shut them off in one part of the tunnel system, and there they have remained for years… just becoming angrier. I suspect they wanted to keep the whole thing quite, so the miners that got eaten in the initial rampage were simply listed as casualties of a digging accident.

So anyway, Mark and I were up a certain creek without a certain paddling device. Our only defense was swinging for the benches with the pry bars we brought. Canaries were so thick in the air that we couldn't help but wipe out four or five birds with each swing. As many as we hit, we were losing the fight and we were starting to bleed pretty badly. That was when things went from bad to worse… somehow the stench in the room got worse. It was terrible, but an amazing thing happened… the canaries started dying. I looked over at Mark, who had a guilty look on his face, "Sorry, it's that Taco Bell we had for dinner," he said.

It seems that as vicious as the birds had become, toxic fumes still had a strong effect on them. We knew what we had to do… we had to unleash the Taco Bell beast within us. Suffice it to say, Mark and I had been training for this very moment our entire lives. We had the eye of the tiger, and the gas of the taco. Those poor canaries never stood a chance, we had created a fog of killer fumes in that room faster than they could fly for cover. Bodies were everywhere, legs twitching, wings shaking, they never knew what hit them. We left the birds to their fates, and placed the door back on its hinges. We had had enough adventure for one night.

We made our way back up to the surface and paid a visit to the building marked with explosive warnings… and Mark was right. We grabbed some dynamite and made our way out into the night.

I told you the story wouldn't be interesting if we didn't go down into the mine.

To Be Continued...