McDougal Saves Christmas (Part 2)

As I began to regain consciousness I expected that whistling to fade, but if anything it grew louder. I soon realized that I was hearing the wind shrieking through the shattered windshield of McDougal's Landrover. In the glow of the headlights I could see the hindquarters of eight reindeer the size of clydesdales, and beyond that only darkness. I turned my head slowly to the right, fearing a flashback from whatever was in those awful capsules. McDougal sat in the driver's seat holding not onto the steering wheel, but onto a pair of reins that snaked out through the hole in the windshield. He was wearing Santa's red coat and hat, and for a minute I would have sworn that he had somehow managed to grow a white beard while I was out cold, but as my head cleared I realized that he was merely foaming at the mouth. He seemed to be in unusually high spirits.

"Where are we?" I mumbled.

"Over East Berlin, I think," McDougal shouted out with glee. "Either that or Detroit. It's hard to tell the difference at this altitude!"

I was fairly certain this was a joke, but to this day I'm still not sure. McDougal's sense of humor is nearly as warped as his sense of direction. A surface-to-air missile arced toward us out of the darkness below, which did not entirely rule out Detroit, but seemed to point more heavily to somewhere in the Eastern Bloc. McDougal rolled down his window and tossed out an empty whiskey bottle. It struck one of the missile's stabilizer fins, sending it spiraling off in a safe direction.

"We're going to need to stop soon so I can refuel those reindeer," McDougal yelled over the howling wind.

"Refuel?" I asked.

"Yeah, the pills didn't really seem to agree with them. Completely uncontrollable! So I gave the ones on the right some mescaline and the ones on the left got absinthe. That seemed to level them off."

"Reindeer will drink absinthe?"

"They didn't go for it at first," McDougal explained, "but I mixed it in with a little egg nog and they really seemed to love that!"

He snapped the reins and the Landrover began to descend. As I began to get my bearings I realized that the roof of the Landrover was partially collapsed. The damage from our earlier accident was confined to the front of the vehicle. I wondered what McDougal had gotten into while I was out. The answer was immediately clear when, after a rough landing on the roof of a Bulgarian orphanage, I stepped out of the truck. Balanced precariously on the Landrover's roof was an oversized burlap sack. McDougal climbed up and began tossing toys down to me.

"We aren't seriously doing what I think we're doing?" I asked. McDougal laughed.

"Why the hell did you think I took the reindeer?"

"I don't know," I replied. "Just for shits and grins?"

"Oh come on," McDougal said, sounding hurt. "Does that really sound like something I would do?"

I remained silent and carried an armload of toys toward the roof's service access. When I returned McDougal was digging around in the back of the Landrover. Dozens of long crates were stacked inside.

"What are those?"

"Daisy air rifles," McDougal replied, pulling a roll of parchment out of his pocket. "Check this out."

He held the parchment out toward me and it unrolled down to his feet. Scratched upon it in tiny archaic script were thousands of names. As I looked at it the script snaked around, weaving itself into a new set of names. The letters held their positions for about a minute and then went through their transformation again, forming a third set of names.

"Naughty list," McDougal said, by way of explanation. "Do you believe that fat fuck was going to give all of these kids coal? Anyway, I dropped all of that coal off in Newcastle then made a beeline for the Daisy factory. There are more rifles in the sack."

"Where is the fa... Er, Santa, anyway?" I asked, still trying to absorb McDougal's BB gun distribution plan.

"Ah, I dropped him off at a safehouse in Cape Town. Come on, we've got a lot of work to do tonight if we're gonna pull this off." And with that, McDougal descended the stairs into the orphanage, dragging a bag of toys behind him. "Grab a couple cases of vodka too," he barked. "These little Ivans love that shit."