The aftermath of my nighttime zoo excursion with Buddy, my 12-foot-tall sentient naked purple 3D-printed purple plastic statue of Buddy Hield, that had the stated goal of petting the cute goats but ended with Buddy killing five different dudes, was overall easy to deal with. That’s because I adopted an “I did nothing wrong” mantra, which was true; the only mildly illegal thing I did was to break into a closed zoo after hours in order for my statue friend to pet the cute goats. Buddy was the one that really waded deep into the waters of illegality by killing five guys armed with guns with his bare hands. Not that I blame him. Those guys were mean and honestly deserved to die.
The hardest thing to deal with was what to do with my blood-streaked, damaged moving van. I couldn’t just not return it to the moving van company because then they would send collections after me or something. And the last thing I wanted was to attract the attention of any kind of authorities.
The problem was, everybody in the state was on the lookout for a box truck with a damaged front end, because they had a blurry image of our van on security footage and they had obviously found the spot where we drove through the fence that separated the zoo parking lot from the street. In the daylight, I took a look at the van, and while I did a really good job of cleaning off all the blood that was inside it, you could easily tell that the front was a bit dinged up. One of the headlights was broken (luckily we didn’t get pulled over for that on the way back – if I got arrested and Buddy had to fend for himself, I don’t know what would happen) and the fender was bent up to hell.
So I did the only thing I could think of: I called the moving van company, told them I needed the van for two more days, then drove it in the middle of the night to the next state over. I took it to a 24-hour body shop and paid generous amounts of cash for them to fix all the problems right away. The guy working there was probably a bit suspicious but he didn’t say anything once he had a bunch of hundreds in his hand. The whole time I tried to act normal and not nervous. I was just hoping the news of the “zoo massacre”, as the national media had dubbed it, hadn’t gone into specifics about how the police were on the lookout for a damaged van.
Then I drove the fixed-up van all the way back and returned it to the van company. When their inspector was walking around it looking for dents and bumps that I maybe hadn’t told them about, I had to resist the very strong urge to just tackle the guy and run. But that would be ultra suspicious so I didn’t. In the end, the guy took the van back, noting with a laugh that it was almost in better condition than when I had gotten it. I just laughed with him. I bet my laugh sounded weird but I was just so relieved.
So now I’m back home, and Buddy doesn’t seem to even care at all that he killed a bunch of people and that the national news is still talking about how he ripped a guy in half. They don’t know he did it, obviously. Nobody knows about my twelve-foot-tall statue of Buddy Hield and I intend for it to stay that way. He’s my best friend.