ADVERB KILLER part 2

Copyright (c) 2019 by Randall R. Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This is a work of fiction. All persons, locations and actions are from the author's imagination or have been used in a fictitious manner.

ADVERB KILLER

Part 2

By R. Peterson

“Run!” Verb screamed.

Menacingly, the monstrous adverb whom the grammar police had pursued into the first chapter of A Ripple in Time by Julia Hughes, stalked toward Noun brandishing a dripping brush from a bottle of White Out.

Noun dodged just as Menacingly lunged with the brush. White splatters covered the bottom half of the page. Dragon fell three lines becoming drag and the pronoun her … became he.

            “If you know what’s good for you …you’ll turn around and go back where you came from,” Menacingly sneered. Then he flung the brush into a crowd of onlookers and then vanished just as an explosion of white occurred. At least twenty words were obliterated many more were crippled … some terminally. Most of the uninjured ran.

            “He set off a bomb!” Carrie screamed and pointed toward an adverb running with white-out covering her hands.

Verb pushed past Carrie just as she helped Shuddered and Moaned apprehend Miserably. “You know Menacingly don’t you?” Verb shook the distraught adverb. “We’ve dated each other for years,” Miserably confessed. “People called us the M & M’s … it’s not easy loving a stalker like him.”

            “So he came in here to see you?”

            “No,” Carrie said. “He set off the bomb and just likes to scare her. Hundreds of adverbs have been called into this story … something big is going on.”

            “And you weren’t called?” Noun released the distraught adverb,

            “Only the most brutal and dangerous were summoned for this job,” Miserably confessed. “I’ve always just been a victim.”

            “Do you know where Menacingly was going?”

            “A taxi stopped on this page for a moment and someone named Wren talked to him,” Carrie said. “But the taxi was full of quotation-marked words. At least a whole line I think. I bet he chased after them.”

Noun and Verb stayed to help the injured until book restorers arrived and secured the area with correction tape.

            “Can you help Them?” Noun asked a restorer trying to type over a pronoun Them who was now just The.

            “I can help The become Them,” the restorer said. “Although there’s apt to be some scaring.  Some of the others will have to wait for a second edition!”

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            “Quotation marks?” Verb mused. They had been walking for several hours and were on the bottom of page twenty six. It was dark in the library and they followed a trail of white splotches in the bottom margin that glowed under Verb’s highlighter. She looked at Noun. “Do you think this is gang related?”

            “Words that think they have to be marked to give their lives meaning usually always belong to gangs,” Noun told her.

            “Usually?”

            “Dang!” Noun tried to shake off the clinging adverb. Didn’t I tell you they would breed?”

            “You think Wren is the leader of this gang?”

            “Carrie said something big is going on,” Noun said. “A Wren is a small bird.”

            “Speaking of birds!” Verb pointed just as Wren used the conjunction and to jump onto a packing trunk.

It was the bottom of page twenty eight before they found another and conjunction they could use then headed for something called the door.

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Conjunctions will move you to places in a story faster than anything else and Verb’s hair was blown back when they arrived on page 174. It was the biggest group of unwanted adverbs either of the grammar police had ever seen. Enough opened bottles of White Out were stacked on the edge of the top line behind Ruthlessly, Dangerously, Wickedly, Deceitfully and Cruelly to wipe out half a chapter.

Menacingly pulled them off the conjunction and pushed them toward the gathered criminals. “What are you doing?” Noun demanded.

            “Preventing a terrible accident!” Titanic stepped out of the crowd smiling. Wren stood behind him smiling. “Did you really think I’d allow them to let me sink the second time around?”

            “You can’t mess with fate,” Verb warned.

            “But I can,” Titanic boasted. “I’ve got enough adverbs in my employ to insure that Rhyllann never clamps his hand over Carina’s mouth and stops her from warning the ship’s crew about the iceberg.

Noun glanced around. “You’ve got enough White Out stacked up there to wipe out the rest of the novel!”

            “Who cares?” Titanic sneered.  “I’ll go steaming into New York City harbor ahead of schedule and that’s what counts!”

            “You would live in a world dominated by Nazis?” Verb gasped.

            “Better than the bottom of the North Atlantic,” Titanic whispered. “Better than a cold and watery grave!”

            “Look out!” Verb screamed.

Noun looked up just as Recklessly and Dangerously pushed the first open-bottle of White Out off the top line.

TO BE CONTINUED ….