Being Butch Green || ✓

Chapter 29 - Hello World

Hailey squeezed her eyes fearfully shut. Her fingers gripped Henry so tightly from behind, it creased his jacket. I could almost feel the heat coming off the tyres as they burned the asphalt behind us.

There was an unnerving amount of determination in the way the Galgort agents drove after us. It left my gut swimming like a boat in a storm. I twisted around to get a better look, but the vans were already falling like breadcrumbs, slipping away down side streets.

"They're splitting!" I yelled over to Henry as he flicked over the gears. He craned his neck around in time to see the last of the trail break off.

"They're taking the back streets!" he squeaked back through the rush of wind and the sputtering engine. "Butch, there's a baseball bat underneath you."

"What the hell is a baseball bat going to do against their guns?"

"Just trust me."

I rolled my eyes, reaching beneath me with a nauseas groan. This couldn't get any worse. The only thing I wanted to think about right now was my pitiful behaviour towards Hailey and how I could fix it; not some stupid baseball bat. I felt around underneath my legs until my hand reached something hard and smooth. I pulled out the lightly polished wood. This was becoming a familiar scene.

"It fires nails," Henry bellowed, still staring fiercely at the road.

"What?" I yelled back.

"Press the button at their tyres!"

I looked down at the strange weapon resting in my palm. It honestly didn't look like a rocket launching nail device to me. It was toddler sized and would barely knock someone out if you were stuck against a brick wall. I rolled my eyes, examining a button on the handle the size of a five-cent piece and a line around the top that suggested there was a lid to this thing.

"Pop the lid," Henry instructed.

Putting pressure on the top of the baseball bat, the lid eventually flipped open like a tube of shampoo. "Neat," I muttered in approval as I curiously peeked into the hollow opening where the large industrial nails sat like frozen toy soldiers. Who knew Henry could be so inventive?

"Just point and shoot."

"Got it," I reassured him with a nod. Now I had to try it out. Twisting around, I lined up the barrel with the tyre of the van left trailing us and pressed. Nothing. "Henry?"

"Give it a moment."

I waited and still nothing happened. Aggressively, I pressed the button several more times, but the bat still didn't launch any flying nails. I glanced over at Hailey. I couldn't give up on her.

It wasn't fair on her. None of this was. The stupid baseball bat was faulty, and I knew this chaos would only end once we were all dead. I'd caused this mess and she'd been caught in the middle

"This is gonna end so badly," I muttered as I pulled out my phone. It bleeped a solid ten percent at my face. Checking over my shoulder, the black vans were coming on steady, reemerging from the side streets. It was now or never.

What if I recorded myself live on social media? Then the whole world would know, ASIS could intervene, and those dodgy cops that called themselves Buller and Haynes could go fuck themselves...or each other...whichever they preferred.

I smiled, throwing Henry's faulty contraption overboard without a second thought. Swiping my phone open, I searched through the app store until I found the holy grail of social media apps – Instagram. I downloaded it. Eventually the app opened, and I quickly plugged in an account, following all the news channels as I went. This was by far the dumbest idea I've ever had.