CYOA: Thomas Asby and the Minimal Mastermind (Volume 1, Chapter 6)

Last Week’s Winning Choice:

Jump from the plane

Chapter 6

     Asby staggered to his feet, spit a wad of blood from his mouth, and hurled himself like a jackrabbit through the plane’s open door.
     What was he doing? That was the first thing to cross his mind as he was whipped away from the aircraft, his whole world spinning violently around him. He settled on the notion that he had gone insane, his mind warped from more than a decade of cat-and-mouse games with nefarious criminals. Was there any other way he could justify jumping out of an airplane? Well, people do it for fun all the time, he reassured himself. But six miles above the ground? Of course! Without a parachute? Nope, he had gone insane. The only comforting thought was that he would die in the line of duty, and in his mind there was no finer way to go.
     He eventually righted himself the best he could, and looked in the direction of his terminus to find fellow fallee Fitzgerald. He spotted the falling mass only a couple hundred feet beneath him. It was this man Asby could blame for his skydiving shenanigans, with his tuft of orange hair, dastardly desire to kill, and four-foot tall stature. Asby streamlined his body, focused on the shiny dome of the crook, and shot down toward his target.
     His attempts to catch up were almost for naught, as Fitzgerald was a very tiny man without having to fold himself into the shape of a pencil. The dwarf did not look to have a parachute either, not having put one on the plane, yet Asby figured that a man of such intelligence would probably figure out some way to survive a six-mile freefall.
     As Asby drew within fifty feet he reached for the gun strapped into his shoulder holster, only to find the space it usually occupied. He slapped himself on the forehead as he remembered Fitzgerald kicking it away during the in-flight struggle.
     It’s quite amazing how much time a man has to think about things during a six-mile drop, when your only objective is to fall faster than the man you are chasing. It was because of this that Asby’s mind flitted to all sorts of miscellaneous subjects at the moment of head-slapping, such as why he had signed up for the typically bungling and inept Basic Intelligence Agency, how he ended up in a doomed breakneck skydiving chase of a yard-high man, and if the Red Sox would start Josh Beckett on three days rest tonight against the Indians.
     When he refocused his thoughts on his current predicament, he found himself in amazingly close proximity to Fitzgerald, though Asby in all seriousness cared more about the remaining mile between him and the ground. Asby reached out with both hands and for the second time in five minutes throttled the midget about the neck, easily wrapping his fingers around its entire circumference. Fitzgerald’s head twisted in agony, the small mouth snarling at the sight of the secret agent he had probably figured he’d seen the last of when he was whipped parachuteless from an airplane at cruising altitude.
     PFFFFOOOT.
     The simultaneous discharges of parachutes wrenched the two enemies apart, and in that millisecond Asby saw that Fitzgerald looked as surprised to find himself with a parachute as Asby did to find that he had one. Their progress through the sky impeded, though sadly not entirely, Asby closed his eyes as the ground rushed up to him with horrible speed.
     WHAM!
     He was in extraordinary pain, feeling as if he were smashed into millions of agonizing pieces. Even if he could he dared not open his eyes lest he see a large pool of blood flooding the expanse around him. Many minutes may have passed, possibly even hours, before he felt the impulse to draw his eyelids apart.
     The light, even though there was not much, was at once blinding and Asby shielded his eyes as he lifted his battered head off the ground. He rotated his head painfully on his neck, able to only see blurry green and brown shapes in his immediate area. Shaking his head painfully, it wasn’t long before he rightly deduced that he had landed in the middle of a Kansas cornfield.
     He staggered to his feet, stabs of pain shooting through his spindly legs, and emerged up into the vastness of his parachute. He collected the parachute around him and dropped it onto the ground in a huddled heap. All the while he was visibly seething; no one had ever told him that his tuxedo had contained a self-deploying parachute, though in all fairness he realized it was just like the B.I.A. to forget to do so.
     His eyes roved the top of the cornfield and he soon spotted the small chute that was sure to hold Fitzgerald. Pain continued to shoot through his maligned body as he stumbled down the rows of unpicked corn, all the while his common sense trying to convince him that this would be a great time to give up and move to Zimbabwe. When he reached the edge of the chute, he collapsed, lifted the flap, and began to crawl underneath.
     Fitzgerald was indeed there, lying unconscious near the center of the shadowy area, one small arm hooked around a stalk of corn. He’s not that bad, Asby had to admit. He really looked like a cuddly little toddler holding his teddy bear. Sympathy for the little man flooded over the throbbing pain he felt, and Asby even managed a weak smile. But hard reality beat back the tide of empathy and he realized he had to complete his mission, and now was the perfect time. Fitzgerald was there for him to kill. Should he spare Fitzgerald, or kill him?

What should Thomas Asby do next?

- Spare Fitzgerald

- Kill him

Vote for your choice in the poll on the right, and check in next Monday for the next installment of Thomas Asby and the Minimal Mastermind!