Longcoat and the Streets of Moscow

Michael Seaholm

Undergraduate/Computer Science

This is a story about Longcoat. A man with a coat so long, legend has it, that whole worlds are woven into its fibers. Or maybe not.

The streets of Bad Kösen were dark and mysterious, like the inside of a purse. Standing on a thin length of clothesline suspended between two poorly-built brick structures, Longcoat looked on. His eyes betrayed no sign of weakness, his brow no sign of worry, his spleen no sign of consternation. With an illustrious flip, Longcoat descended silently into the alleyway below, his landing cushioned by a convenient pair of cats that had happened to get underfoot. Ignoring their pitiful mewling, he made his way to the back door of a seedy alcohol-serving establishment called Die Alkohol Haus Bär und Grille. The only resistance he expected was that of the rusty door hinge. It squeaked feebly as he passed through. Longcoat whisked into the room with the stealth of a vampire’s shadow, closing the door so quickly that a casual observer would have thought he had materialized out of nowhere. The fourteen neo-Marxist Nazi Communists waiting by the bar, however, were not so easily surprised. Ironically armed with uzis, they opened fire at the intruder. His teeth bared, Longcoat fluttered his signature trench coat, producing a concussive wave of air that successfully diverted the oncoming hail of bullets. In an equally improbable display of power, he whipped out his trusty custom 7-shot revolver and immediately destroyed 13 of his assailants. His remaining opponent, overwhelmed by the unspeakable events he had just witnessed, made a noise like a rusty door hinge and fell quivering before Longcoat’s immaculate boots. "Who are you working for?" Longcoat growled, his voice like gravel mixed with Jack Daniels in a sparking blender. He was this close to busting up an international drug ring based in the New Soviet Union that was distributing marijuana, the World’s Most Dangerous Drug, throughout the known world, especially to orphans and unwed teenage mothers. The Communazi babbled incoherently, possibly in some sort of Russo-German cipher. Using his supercomputer-like brain, Longcoat was able to discern three chilling words: Aleksandr the Cossack. Of course! It all made sense now.

"Tell your boss that I’ll do to him what I did to you," Longcoat muttered, blasting off most of what had been the man’s head. He had a feeling that Aleksandr wouldn’t get the message, but he wasn’t too terribly disheartened by this. He would be visiting him soon enough. "Moscow!" exclaimed Longcoat. He was in Moscow. It was a long, arduous, 30-minute trip by train, but he had made it. To blend in with the crowd, Longcoat had to dye his clothing red with the blood of his enemies and stand in line for bread for several hours at a time. Unfortunately, Longcoat had forgotten to take off his American flag lapel pin. "Get himsky!" yelled the crowd, which quickly upgraded itself to a mob. Undaunted, Longcoat swabbed his clothing with a nearby sheep to reveal his true identity. Before the mob could gasp in a combination of surprise and instant regret, Longcoat had pulled out his seven-shooter and fired into the pile of bread at the front of the line. The bread was reduced to a fine powder that quickly got into everyone’s lungs, causing immediate asphyxiation. Hoping that the incident didn’t blow his cover, Longcoat moved on. Around the corner where the old propaganda printing mill and the local Godlessness Centre faced one another, there stood the least sinister building in all of Moscow: the slaughterhouse. With a cool look of indignation at his surroundings, Longcoat pressed on, ceasing to tread forward only when his nose was a hair’s breadth away from the slaughterhouse door. It creaked open with the slow insolence of a disconsolate child at a rival’s birthday party. Once the door was completely ajar, Longcoat could see a muscular Cossack in the middle of the room, practicing his bare-knuckle boxing on a cow carcass that was suspended from one of the rafters by a length of chain. Since he was facing away from Longcoat, our intrepid hero could see the Cyrillic letters for "ALEKSANDR" tattooed on his back. "Hey buddy, have you seen Aleksandr the Cossack hereabouts?" said Longcoat in an attempt to sound like a simple hillperson so as to not startle the boxing figure, who was presumably a local farmhand. His words, however, seemed to have the opposite effect, as the man stopped abruptly in the middle of a devastating flurry of cow-torturing punches. "Who wants to know?" he murmured in dark Soviet tones. Without waiting for an answer, he whipped around and whipped at Longcoat with a hidden chain whip, hoping to reduce him to the consistency of a popular "cool" desert topping. Although this attack was, in terms of sheer speed and fluidity, as beautiful and poignant as Vincent van Gogh’s

The Sower in Longcoat’s eyes, he dodged it with such ridiculous ease that an onlooker uninitiated in the world of such combat titans would have said the fight was over before it had even begun.

Although he felt it a little dishonorable to attack an unarmed opponent when equipped with such bombastic firearm skills, Longcoat brandished his revolver and fired seven extremely vocal bullets at his foe in rapid succession. In response, Aleksandr threw a series of previously unrevealed throwing knives, each one hitting and deflecting a bullet in mid-air with unlikely accuracy. When the dust settled after this assault, both men remained unscathed. It looked like the fight between these two godlike figures would last for an eternity, and it probably would have if not for one of the stray bullets, which broke through a chain in the unseen upper levels of the slaughterhouse. The chain fell to the ground, propelled mainly by the cow carcass that it had previously supported. It landed cow-first onto the wily Cossack, killing him instantly. Longcoat could not help but note the irony that the man had died in an abattoir, a place that is traditionally used to kill animals. After silently confirming to himself the definition of irony, Longcoat made his way back to the States for an important debriefing from six-term President Ronald Reagan.

"Good job, Longcoat," Reagan said in a tone that suggested he was caught in the middle of a daydream. "You’ve saved the world and, more importantly, your country." The president extended his hand to Longcoat for an honorary handshake, his eyes glazed over in apparent semiconsciousness. Longcoat had never been surprised in his life, not even when his almost, but not quite, worthy opponent Aleksandr the Cossack was crushed to death by a falling bovine. But when he took President Reagan’s hand and began the familiar and sacred act of handshakery, he couldn’t help but feel a thrill of unexpected excitement course up his spine. He nodded affirmatively to the president, knowing words would just spoil the moment, and escaped into the streets of Washington D.C. in a single movement so indescribable that I cannot describe it to you.

And so, Longcoat ventured onward into the collective hearts of his countrymen, the people whom he had sworn to protect, unless they were convicted felons or sexual deviants. Even today, he moves through the streets like a shadow, only faster and much less flat. That is the way of Longcoat.