In Which The Story Of The Kankabourley Coonipede Is Told

Most people don’t think twice when looking at a centipede. Some people are frightened by them; others, not so much. Some people go out of their way to kill centipedes because they are creepy—like bigger, quicker spiders. What most people do not know is that when you kill a centipede it sends out a distress signal that can only be heard by its other family members and friends that are still alive. This distress signal basically broadcasts that the living family members need to mobilize and round up the pieces of their fallen centipede comrade and start creating an über-centipede called a “coonipede.” A coonipede is a collection of deceased centipede parts that, when it comes to life, it is roughly the size of a raccoon. It’s kind of like RoboCop, except that it is a cross between a raccoon and a centipede instead of a man and a robot.

In any event, like all things in nature the phenomenon of centipedes working together to create a hybrid known as a coonipede whose sole purpose is to seek out the person(s) responsible for centipede killings did not exist as of a few centuries ago. Evolution and survival caused this phenomenon to occur. Here now is the story of how the Kankabourley Coonipede left the sphere of myth and rumor and became a blood-thirsty and vengeful reality.

Many generations ago in a small rural fiefdom in central Spain a centipede was gallivanting across an open road, unaware that it was heading towards a shipyard. It must have seemed like an eternity to the centipede from the time when it unintentionally boarded a ship bound for the Americas until the time that it arrived at a North Carolina port (many scientists dispute whether it arrived in Morehead City or Harkers Island). When the centipede arrived in what would become known as North Carolina it was minding its own business and ultimately found a home in a nearby ditch. This, however, is when Fate intervened.

Two kids, playing in their backyard mindlessly, started drifting over by the ditch where the centipede lay and they started to get bored.

“Look! A centipede! They belong to Phylum Anthropoda!” said one of the boys breathlessly.
“I don’t care. Let’s kill it” said the other.
If the two had merely left the centipede alone the course of history would have been forever altered. And for a moment it seemed that this incomprehensible disaster would be averted when the other boy (not the one who said, “I don’t care. Let’s kill it” but the other kid—sorry, there’s no formal record of their names) said, “Wait! Let’s look at it first. What if this is how Charles Darwin got his start?”
The other kid thought for a second and then said, “Who is Charles Darwin?”
“The guy who wrote The Origin Of Species, you tosser!” Kid Number 1 declared angrily.

(Reader, do forgive me, because from now on I will simply refer to these two kids as “Kid Number 1″ and “Kid Number 2″. If you would like to give them their own names in your mind please feel free to do so. Perhaps you would like to think of this conversation as being taken place by two kids named Jamaal and Cleo or Thomas and Bruce or whatever.)

In any case, Kid Number 2 (who did not even know who Darwin was—I mean, how uneducated was this kid? Where were the parents? They say characters who do not exude much intelligence typically die first in fictional novels. Oh, anyway…) disregarded the pleadings of Kid Number 1 and killed the centipede. What Kid Number 2 further disregarded was the reddish-colored, velvety sac on the centipede’s undercarriage which, just before its demise, initiated an alert signal to all other centipedes in the area that it was about to die. This alert signal can only be detected by other centipedes, though Science has been working eight days a week trying to pick up on its cadence and its meaning. One scientist—a gentleman by the name of Dr. Gordon Westminster—in 1994 had claimed to have successfully intercepted this signal in his lab at the University of Edinburgh. “It sounded a bit like the first five seconds of “Baby Baby” by Amy Grant, if you ask me,” Westminster reported in his memo to the Queen on Anthropoda Affairs.

Anyway, moving on… Later that night, the other centipedes heard the distress signal of their poor and ill-fated comrade, Daryl. (Gentle reader, I should point out that, while I do not mind adding the Number 1 and 2 suffixes to the kids in this story, it would be crazy to assign that to the centipedes. It could get confusing. Thus, I have named the dead centipede Daryl. Feel free to refer to him as Tito or Jefferson if you’d like though.) You see where I am going here: before Daryl died a veritable army of living centipedes took his remains to a centralized location, presumably to bury him in a typical centipede ceremony—again, we turn to the aforementioned Dr. Westminster: “Centipede burial ceremonies usually consists of the male centipedes digging ‘graves’ underneath rocks and soil, which makes sense since they enjoy living underneath rocks and soil while they are alive.”

What happened next was totally unforeseen. For whatever reason, Kid Number 2 simply would not stop killing centipedes so the living centipedes were constantly having to pick up the remains of their comrades. The slaughter was at such a rate that they never had a chance to properly bury them. I think you know where this is going; you probably think that all of the dead body parts somehow formed together until a coonipede was born but you would only be half correct.

In order for the dead body parts to be properly reanimated and function as a whole living entity, the blood of another animal is necessary. And guess who had become bored with killing centipedes and moved on to larger animals? That’s right, that blasted wanker Kid Number 2. Having just killed a raccoon for dinner, some of its blood near now touched the centipede burial ground and, thus, the coonipede was born.

For the last few hundred years, this coonipede and its relatives (you do not want to know how they procreate as Dr. Westminster once said, “It would be like seeing Audrey Hepburn wear a Gap sweater”) have been wreaking havoc on the United States. Whenever there is a seemingly unsolvable and random murder? Coonipedes. An unexplainable mound of dirt in a small town shockingly close to a playground? Coonipedes.

The two towns near Kankakee, Illinois are Bourbonnais and Bradley but the locals refer to this troika of towns as Kankabourley. (Actually, they don’t, but whatever.) In any case, the Kankabourley Coonipede wreaked so much havoc in 1957 that the town elected it mayor of Bradley as a means to appease it. This plan worked until 1964 when the Coonipede was unable to balance the county’s budget and decided once and for all that bloody carnage was the way to go. “The county would’ve literally been spared a hundred lives if up-and-comer George Ryan hadn’t tried to play a shell game with the finances,” lamented former mayor Donatello Tuscany in a phone interview before his death in 2001. Anyway…

To this day the Kankabourley Coonipede makes his home at the southwest corner of the intersection at Route 50 and North Avenue (this explains why a business has never been successful there). Everything has been tried in vain as a means to kill the Kankabourley Coonipede. In 1995, ATF officials used tear gas and machine guns but to no avail. The Coonipede is so old and powerful that many locals believe that it pre-dates the Devil himself. For now, the Coonipede has signed a peace treaty with the Kankabourley area in which it states that no more blood shall be shed in exchange for the promise that the next-door Long John Silver’s is never shut down. Coonipedes apparently love faux seafood. “Overprocessed and repeatedly minced cod is like catnip to the coonipede” remarked Dr. Westminster in a recent “Again, What Exactly Is A Coonipede?” seminar (at the Matteson Holiday Inn, registration is free and seats still open for his March 24th seminar).

While everyone tries to figure ways to kill a coonipede it is all ultimately fruitless because the only way you can kill a coonipede is by not killing centipedes. So, listen up and listen good: if we stop killing centipedes the coonipede will no longer have any dead body parts to reanimate and will thus only get weaker. This is the only sure way to kill the Kankabourley Coonipede. And it is the only way we can get rid of that damn Long John Silver! Honestly, every time I drive by that part of town it smells like rotten fish, dirty socks, and a baby’s diaper that has been set on fire. Oh, Jesus Christ it’s awful…