Ferallon took a completely different tack with this month’s challenge, and produced an entire 10-page comic script!  Anybody want to draw it?  ZPG by ferallon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. See CC license at the end of the story.

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It was several seconds before Thomas realized that the baby in the sky was headed straight for him.  This caused Thomas to forget his current endeavor, being getting lunch at the corner deli.  The tempting allure of roast beef on wheat was put aside as the infant plummeted towards him.  

Thomas pondered briefly where the baby had come from.  He did not see any aircraft in the area that it could have dropped from.  He also knew that the city currently frowned upon the launching of babies, small children and various household pets from catapults, ballista and enormous slingshots since the trailer park in the suburbs received national recognition after video footage from there ended up on one of those television programs that featured footage of animals doing things that wasn’t really funny but people laughed at anyways and grown men receiving painful looking blows to their testicles.

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It was several seconds before Thomas realized that the baby in the sky was headed straight for him.  Not an ideal start to the day, he had to admit.  A large part of this was down to his dislike of children and babies.

But he had to admit that mostly is was because he wasn’t that enamoured of the idea that something that weighed as much as ten pounds was hurtling towards his skull.  It must have come from pretty high up to be going at that speed.  It must have possessed quite a set of lungs, as it managed to wail as the air pressure must have been pushing down its windpipe.  By all reckoning the baby should have suffocated.

There wasn’t a lot of time to analyse the situation though.  What would be do?  What would Jesus do?  What would Stalin do?  None of the answers to those three questions were quite as helpful as he had hoped.  The question posed about his own reaction was a little redundant; he knew the answer and he was standing there gawping at the screaming child plummeting out of the cloud deck.

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27 hours previously Thomas had enjoyed a 25 year old Highland single Malt in an air conditioned executive lounge, now he was in a room constructed of rusted corrugated plates and adobe bricks sewn together by old razor wire, sipping some beer as flat and stale as the sweat that ran down the arms of the Chokwe bartender who looked younger than the whisky he was recalling.

12 hours ago he had been suffering from nausea as he was been driven around the ruined roads of Lunda Norte in the glaring morning sun, now he was struggling to stay conscious, half enjoying the Cornish Mercenary’s tales which were, like the walls, blood splattered.

The Cornish Mercenary had introduced himself as Ivor and was one of seven dangerous individuals that was currently in Keme’s Bar but being in his sixties, bald, obese and wearing a sports jacket and purple corduroys, he was the only one that did not look like a serious threat. The others, unlike Ivor, had been desperate to aspire to the Hollywood stereotype and carefully clothed themselves in the greasy Bandanna, the filthy khakis, had the right sleeve tattoos and ammo belts and practically pranced around the makeshift bar with their faux thousand yard stares and cigarettes hung from lips at just the right angle as if they imagined themselves Willard going up river to find Kurtz. Still, even though they were ridiculous, their array of armaments made Thomas nervous and he found himself glancing over at them in the anticipation of violence. Ivor noticed this and turned to look. “Wankers” he chuckled and turned back to Thomas. “They’re the kind of fuckers who did a tour in Damascus and are convinced they’re Rambo.These kids end up dead or if they are real lucky ransoming everything to get a flight back out of this shithole, don’t let them fool you boy, you’ve got more balls than them. You’ve made it up here alone, with nothing but your mobile phone and credit card. Good for you.” He raised the dirty pint glass in toast at Thomas’ achievement.

“I’m not that kind of fortune hunter.” Thomas replied.

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Based on the sentence below, write a story of anywhere between 500-5000 words. As before, genre, etc. are wide open. This time I’ll choose the five best stories to post–though I reserve the right to add to that number for thoroughly awesome entries–and I will link to whatever blogs, etc. the author would like me to as well. Stories remain the property of the contributor. (These challenges are becoming more and more popular, so in the event that I ever decide to publish a collection of said stories, I will contact contributors for permission and discuss compensation at that time.) Using the sentence in the story itself is a plus, but not necessary. Meaningless bonus points are added if it’s the first sentence:

Submissions should be emailed to me via emmy (izzat) elepent.com. Format doesn’t matter; I can accept email enclosures or attached Word documents. The deadline for entries is March 1, 2010.