The Grateful Fred may have been one of the best rock-and-roll bands in the world. They may have sold more records than U2, Me3, and Us4 combined. But that didn’t mean everyone in the world loved them.
In fact, there was one guy who hated them. This was Joe the Bad Guy. He used to be Joe the Okay Guy. Before that he was Joe the Semi-Nice Guy. But now he was just plain Bad. And he was rapidly heading toward Dreadful.
He hated The Grateful Fred. And now he hated Melvin Beederman.
“Darn you, Melvin Beederman,” Joe the Bad Guy said. He had placed the bomb beneath the stage at the concert and was now pacing back and forth in his lair. Not hideout—lair.
Actually, it wasn’t his lair. He had only recently made the jump from Okay Guy to Bad Guy and so he was just renting. He went to Big Al’s Rent-a-Lair and got a deal on a used one. Still, a lair was a lair. And it was a good place to come up with more devious and sinister plans.
Should he be sinister today or should he be devious? It was a toss-up, really. Joe the Bad Guy couldn’t decide. He had been devious on Monday and Wednesday, and sinister on Tuesday and Thursday. It seemed he could go either way, since now it was Friday.
All he knew was that he just had to get The Grateful Fred. And if Melvin Beederman got in the way, Joe would get him, too.
Joe sat down in his lair (it came furnished) and thought about the days when he had been in The Grateful Fred. He had been kicked out by Fred himself, the band’s leader. And now all Joe could think about was getting revenge.
Fred had kicked him out for one big reason: Joe was a terrible musician. But it wasn’t entirely his fault. He came from a long line of terrible musicians. His dad was terrible. So was his mother. Even his goldfish had no rhythm at all. Joe had once put a tiny drum set in the bottom of the aquarium, and that fish could not keep a beat if his life depended on it. Of course, he couldn’t hold the drumsticks either.
The more successful The Grateful Fred became, the more Joe hated them. One way or another he’d get his revenge.
Joe looked out the window of his lair. “One way or another,” he said.