Super Winter Snow Ball Fights in Goodwin

Victor was the leader of the Blues, a group of misfits, who had become well-known in Goodwin for their antics with snow ball fighting.

In the small town of Goodwin (population: 500), a rivalry between the Reds and the Blues erupted every year around the valentine's time zone. Usually, the Blues and Reds fought each other in the center of town, where a small pond froze and became the popular skating ring for local kids. At the time of the snow ball fights, it was cricket-quiet with little to no people around. One time an old man had stayed, eating popcorn on a bench (which had consequently floated into a fire department window after the lake unfroze) and got the better end of three pounds of snow dumped on his head. It wasn't a pretty sight. Some kids had put a fake carrot on his snow face.

Signs of winter shook people where they stood and it wasn't because of the cold. The translucent blue-green shine of the lake made Victor sigh because he knew that by tomorrow, it would all be gone. Last year, dozens of b.b. shot holes (b.b. shots made of snow) had un-frozen part of the lake and made Jerry, one of Victor's minions, drift away from them during the competition. The yellow leaves under his feet were the only sign of peace in the town.

It wasn't friendly anymore. Tension build up for too long and Victor knew it. The Reds weren't going to play fair, he knew that. They were richer than Victor, Jerry, and Jason (all the members of the Blues). And they were from Ebelos, a neighboring town separated by railroad tracks. Ebelos and Goodwin competed in everything, especially if it was during the winter. Stupid old people from both towns went in the middle of the town and made holes in the ice to try and fish in the dead of winter. It was so cold that often they'd bring home more ice than fish.

Victor tried to remember when it hadn't been such a rivalry but he couldn't. It was too long ago. Yearly, it had once been a competition involving young kids, throwing snow balls at each other from behind two huge oak wood trees that had fallen sideways on opposite ends of the lake. Kids would even skate through the bombarding teams, chasing the snow that fell or daring each other to go through without getting hit.

Part of that had changed. The cops no longer allowed anyone out after ten o'clock on February 12. However, Victor and his friends, a couple of local drug dealers called Jerry and Jason, had been forced to join the local "safety" officer neighborhood watch. On February 12, the watch consisted of Victor, Jerry and Jason. It was going to be a bad day.

They hid in the local fire department. It was a building close to the lake, about a walking distance away from it. The fire department was a two-floor building with a garage on top of which was a room where fire-fighting trainees slept in bunks. Victor was inside a large room with glass window displays. Jason and Jerry were in the empty garage, looking out of a curtain, waiting for the Reds to show up.

It was midnight already. Victor was thinking of calling it quits with a smile. They wouldn't show up that year.

"Should we go, boss?" asked Jason, the shier of the weed-addicts.

"They'll come," Victor said, confident, "The bad part about today is that they always come." All three of them were wearing baseball gloves for protections and cups. They had to dress up for the watch, so Victor went and bought a fifty-cent purple clip-on tie from the local thrift store. The pants and shirt were borrowed. It was a pair of dark-brown slacks and a dark green long-sleeve which his mom had insisted he iron.

Suddenly, the faint sound of a tap on the door brought their attention back to the outside.

Jerry looked through a pair of vernaculars on the top floor. "Ow," he cried, "Ow, ow, ow!"

"Shit," Victor said, running down the stairs. "Get out of the way, they got Jerry with a b.b.!"
Then, somehow, the door flew in on itself. A huge snow-ball about four feet in diameter followed the door which flew straight back to the other side of the wall where it crashed into an extinguisher. "Catapult!" Jerry yelled.

Then, our view of the outside was tainted by three people in Jet Ski's flying through the streets. They were clad in black leather outfits and ski masks and behind them they carried multi-shooting snow-ball guns.

Victor ducked for cover.

The real police had confiscated all of their safety police gear and weapons, which had included five or six fancy guns that shot snow-balls, consecutively. It was now a battle of technologies versus an enemy with a whole lot more advantages.

By that time Jason and Jerry were huddled in a corner holding each other for comfort and Victor had run out of the fire department into a side alleyway where mountains of snow had been piled by other members of the safety police.

The people on jet ski's approached them. Victor hid behind the snow. They got off their ski's in front of the fire department. All three of them walked into the fire department. Seconds later, they came back out, with weapons drawn. Jason and Jerry were escorted by two of them toward the alleyway. "Come out, come out wherever you are," the voice of their leader teased. At around an interval of every minute, a huge crash announced the arrival of another flying four-foot snow ball. It translated to Victor that they had probably left the catapult on automatic, meaning that it was probably not a catapult but an electronic device of some sort.

Two of them had already took their masks off.

The one on the right was a red-haired woman in her early twenties. She had lipstick on and had done her hair straight with a curling iron. It had probably taken a big part of the day. She was pretty from what Victor could see behind the mound of ice. The one on the left was a black-haired girl with pretty brown eyes and a small nose. It meant that the girl in the middle was the leader because she hadn't removed her mask.

Victor's snow ball hit her on the face. She fell.

The other girls dove to the side, forgetting their captives.

Jason and Jerry ran, helplessly.

The girls chased after them.

Again snow balls left Victor's hands but he missed them.

They left their leader on the floor, stunned by the snow in her face. It probably went through the mask and hit her hard. Victor walked around the mound and stood over her. She tripped him.

He fell back first on the ground and then she was on top of him. She took of her mask, revealing blonde hair and green eyes. "You lost," she said. "Again."

Suddenly, a fire truck's siren blasted throughout the streets.

"We have to go!" Victor snapped.

"What is it?" asked the girl curiously.

"They take it seriously now. We could get arrested. If they knew we were doing it to date each other, the cops would take us to jail."

"I was wondering what the NO Snow-balling sign meant. I thought you guys were just being funny." The girl said, playing with her eyebrows.

"Oh?" Victor asked, tickling her belly with a hand, "There'll be plenty of time for playing, I think."

A young boy in a bike passed by the lake waving a blue cloth wrapped around a mop handle screaming, "The Reds are coming! The Reds are coming!"

Alicia, who was Victor's girl, grabbed his hand and helped him up. A snow storm was coming. The snow ball fight wasn't over yet.

"We pissed off the snow plow man," Alicia said.

"Shit, where are these stupids?" Victor asked, when he saw that the girls and his crew had left.

The jet ski's were still parked on the side of the building. They looked across the way to the lake and in the middle they saw four people being arrested by the police, except when the police was about to open the door to their car, the door flew off, when a plow driver on his truck ran over it. The policeman jumped on his hood and avoided an accident. Jerry and Jason took the girls in handcuffs and led split up in different directions.

"You take one jet ski and I'll take the other," Victor said.

The winter clouds in the sky loomed ever closer. A real storm was coming.

Snow flakes fell from the sky and the wind became cold. Victor was starting to shiver in his dress clothes.

The plowman was coming at them with what looked like a snow-ball-swinging grenade launcher.

BOOOM!

Flying ice barely missed Victor as he got on one of the black jet ski's and took off in the direction of the running Jerry and the red-haired girl.

Alicia chased after the other two who were going toward the railroad tracks.

Suddenly, the wind shifted and a cold blizzard hit Victor's face. Was it the speed of the jet ski?

The plowman had a leaf-blower on the back of his truck and it was casting tiny snow-balls across the street into the lake. It was like being in the middle of the biggest snow-ball fight ever.

Then, what seemed like a hundred people came out of onto the lake all at once and they all had snow balls in their hands.

Victor slowed down after catching up to Jerry who was scared but relaxed a little when he saw Victor. He pulled on the girls hand and they both stopped running. "What the hell is going on?"

"The town," said Jerry, "Somehow, it's decided on having a snow day for itself."

"But the whole town?" Victor asked.

The scene was covered in a blanket of white. Loud helicopters is what was making the wind pick up. They dropped bunches of snow on the square near the lake, where dozens of people dug themselves out of it and began to throw snow balls at each other. Kids and adults screamed. A kid ran into a tree attempting to run for shelter.

Everyone was so distracted by the town's antics that the Reds and the Blues gathered, walking, in the fire department. Victor found keys to un-cuff his friends and the girls.

"Oh, great,"Alicia said, "They did it to us again."

"First your town," said Victor, "And then ours."

"Seriously," said Jason, who never spoke, "What do three couples have to do for a quiet day of snow ball fighting!"

Victor shook his head, "I hate the winter."

A snow ball hit him on the face as he said it.

Then, the whole town chased them for a while. And that's how Victor and his friends spent their fifth year of snow ball fighting.