Prices and employee benefits weren’t the only things falling at the Kinston Walmart on Wednesday.
“I’d stopped at Walmart to pick up a few things,” said Amy French of La Grange. “I hadn’t been there in at least three hours, so supplies were running low.”
As French approached the store’s entrance, she was shocked by what she thought was a fast moving storm cloud.
“It was as if someone had erected a tent over half of the parking lot,” French said. “The sun just disappeared for a moment.”
Within seconds, the sun reappeared and the sound of metal scraping across several parked vehicles alarmed several Walmart shoppers.
“We hit the deck,” said Mike Torello, who was visiting Kinston with his wife Julie. “I was a cop in Chicago for 18 years, and my first thought was a plane had crashed in the parking lot — which ticked me off because I’d just waxed the car that morning.”
As it turns out, what landed in the Walmart parking lot wasn’t a plane.
“It was an unmanned United States government drone,” said U.S. Press Secretary Art Carney. “Due to budget cuts, the drones sometimes run low on fuel. The intern in charge of keeping the drone on course was trying to land it at the Murphy Express gas station just across the street from Walmart.”
Cell phone photos taken of the drone show what appear to be several bumper stickers on each wing. One wing featured a sticker rendition of the trucker mudflap girl, while the other wing sported a “Hillary 2016” sticker and a “Biden 2017” sticker.
When informed of the drone crash, U.S. House Speaker John Boehner reportedly burst into tears. When Boehner was told there were no injuries, the crying escalated into joyful blubbering. Eventually Boehner collapsed from dehydration and several staffers jumped into action.
“A couple of juice boxes and he’ll be fine,” a senior aide told the Associated Press. “We learned our lesson during a screening of the last ‘Twilight’ movie.”
When asked why the drone was allowed to run out of gas during flight, Carney again blamed budget cuts.
“This sequester has forced us to turn over the drone program to a staff of unpaid interns,” Carney said. “The interns came highly recommended. One of them was employee of the month at a Virginia Kinko’s three months in a row before joining the team.”
As for the intern in charge of the drone that forcibly added a sunroof to 12 cars on Wednesday, Carney wasn’t as complimentary.
“The intern in charge of the drone that suffered a petroleum deficiency has been tough to track down, although his recent postings on social media sights are being investigated,” Carney said. “He’s been re-Tweeting crowd pictures from the Reggae Sunsplash 2013 Festival in Jamaica but is not answering his phone.”
Most of the photos released to the press depict women in various stages of undress, Jimmy Cliff signing autographs, concert-goers smoking large, misshapen cigarettes and eating several bags of Cheetos and Doritos. When asked why the government was flying a drone in Lenoir County airspace, Carney said it was linked to the War on Terror.
“Although Osama Bin Laden is dead, there are many people in the world who are trying to further his efforts,” Carney said. “One of those people is his cousin — Leroy Bin Laden — a man known to have ties to the Kinston area. The last time Leroy Bin Laden was on our radar, he threatened to detonate a collard bomb at a Larry The Cable Guy show in Duplin County. We spotted him entering the Kinston Walmart on Wednesday and sent a drone to collect information on his whereabouts.”
While in Walmart, Leroy Bin Laden reportedly purchased six heads of cabbage, a container of black pepper, a case of aerosol cheese, a Gerald LeVert CD and a bag of Miracle-Gro.
“Based on these purchases, Bin Laden is either inviting people over for dinner and wants to tidy up his yard,” Carney said, “or he’s planning a natural gas attack that could singe the nose hairs of every citizen withing a 10-foot radius of the epicenter.”
Leroy Bin Laden was last seen walking out of Walmart wearing jeans and a “Jihad-er Done!” T-shirt.
Jon Dawson’s columns appear every Tuesday and Thursday in The Free Press. Contact Jon at 252-559-1092 or jon.dawson@kinston.com. Purchase music, books and Beano at jondawson.com.