Cannibal Dwarf Detective: An Ephemeral Beardening (4 page)

The goat shoves its hoof into Jeac’s
testicular area and lifts him into the air. He throws him in such a way that he
lands on his back.

“Maaa!” laughs the goat, taunting the
courageous dwarf.

Jeac stands and tears stream down his
face. His carefully groomed loins now bruised more than the contents of a bowl
of fruit left out at home during an extended family vacation. That is to say,
his donger turned to mush and fell off.

Jeac picks up the rope that
previously bound him and proceeds to wrap it around the goats’ fat neck.

“You son of a nanny-goat!” Jeac yells
and tightens the rope around his own knuckles. He pulls hard. The two warriors
fall over into the sand and the goat yelps and kicks in every direction. His
kicks slow and finally he breathes his last.

“Ba-aa-aaa…”

Jeac sighs heavily.

You were a worthy opponent, goat,” he
says while patting the goat on the stomach. He pushes it off of himself and
stands up. He sees a building in the near distance. An old shanty-shack.

“Is that where you were taking me?”
He looks down at the lifeless goat. “Well, don’t worry, goat. You will not have
died in vain. Though, I may need a disguise.”

Jeac cuts the rope from his body and
strips naked. He examines where his parts used to be and crafts a replacement
from extra rope. He is generous to himself.

He then takes a large knife and cuts
open the goats’ stomach, pouring out the entrails. He wraps the intestines up
in his clothing and fits the goat skin onto himself almost perfectly.

“Magnificent.”

He re-ties the remainder of the rope
around himself and drapes the intestines over his shoulders. Jeac grabs his gun
and pokes out the dead beady eyes of his former adversary. He cuts the throat
of the goat and hollows it so he can slide his head in and see out of the
eyeholes. It is sticky and it reeks.

“Good Lord! Why didn’t I sun dry this
before putting it on!?”

Jeac, disgusted by the smell and the
blood on his face, vomits into the sand. He lays there soaking in his new
identity and absorbing the wretched stink of it.

After a time the suns set and a
distant moon, probably some home to a person named Ralph or something, aligns
with his eyelids.

“Now. I am ready.”

He makes his way to the shanty. Jeac
approaches the front gate and sees two men guarding it.

He does his best to mimic the goat
warriors call, assuming it will function as some kind of password.

“Ahem. BAAA!” He growls at the men.

“What the dick is that!?” One of the
men screams.

“Holy freaking cheese cake!” The
other follows.

“Baa?” asks Jeac.

The two men rush the dwarf-goat and
proceed to beat him down. Jeac tears off his disguise and shoots one of them in
the head and the other in the leg. He unfastens the rope keeping the costume in
place. Covered in blood, naked, and reeking of rotting goat, Jeac steps toward
the man who is chirping in agonizing pain. He points his pistol at the man’s
head. The man wets himself.

“Where am I!?” growls Jeac, clearly
in need of a lozenge.

“R.B.G.O.A.T’s,” whimpers the man.
“This is one of our outposts.”

Jeac kneels down, pressing his gun
into the goat-man’s face. “Where’s my automobile?”

The man points toward the shanty and
as Jeac looks up he sprays the man’s brains onto the ground.

Jeac makes his way towards the front
door, reloads his gun, and takes a deep breath.

“I’m coming for you, mechano-bro.”

Somewhere, off in the distance, a
flock of waffles spirals through the air like a pack of angry rhinos.

Chapter 8

Jeac kicks in the door to the shanty
and is promptly knocked backwards by a collapsing mountain of severed human
toes. He finds himself waste deep once they’ve settled and wades his way back
toward the doorway.

In the center of the room, being
illuminated by a dim source of light, sits Jeff. Two of his tires have been
torn off and shards of metal body litter the room. His headlights flicker on
and off repeatedly while he sputters exhaust fumes behind him.

“Mini-meat. I didn’t think I’d ever
see you again,” he says as Jeac approaches. “Not that I cared.”

“It’s not that I care about you
either,” says Jeac, still kicking tiny bloody nubs away from himself. “You
stupid metal grease bag. It’s that you provide fast transportation across the
desert and that’s invaluable!”

Two metal sliders begin to descend
over Jeff’s headlights and a stream of thick black oil spurts out from
underneath him and onto the dirt floor of the shanty. He coughs and says, “I’m
sorry, Jeac. I can’t say that I’ll be of much use to you at this point. All my
systems are shutting down. I can feel the long dark taking me. Just about the
only thing I have left is a very convenient self-destruct feature. There’s a
whole camp outside of this shanty. Let me take some of these tower-haters out
before I go, meat-brother.”

Jeac runs a hand over Jeff’s hood,
pats it, and nods. He stands across from his not-friend and pulls the Sack o’
‘Staches from between his tightly clenched buttocks before sitting down.
Pulling the backs off all the fake mustaches and using the adhesive layers on
their backsides, Jeac crafts for himself an epic beard, worthy of a dwarven
king. Once the beard is finished, he slowly lifts it up over his face and
presses it down.

“I feel, suddenly, very whole,” he
says to the dying A.M.M.D vehicle. “I’m running low on ammo, greaser. You got
any artillery packed in under that hood?”

Jeff blinks his metallic headlight
eyes and his hood shoots open.

“I can’t use it myself,” he says.
“Like I said before, my systems are shutting down. That includes targeting and
weapons. I’m essentially blind. If you can lift it, you can have it.”

Sitting inside his hood sits the
biggest handgun Jeac has ever seen. Easily as big as he is.

“No chance in hell I can fire that on
the move,” he thinks. “I’ll have to come up with something.”

But as he unbolts it he finds it to
be surprisingly light. He has to plant the base on the ground and use his
entire arm as a finger to pull the trigger, but he can make it work.

He fires a test shot. The echo
reverberates out of the shack and across the wasteland.

“That might not have been the best
idea, fleshface,” Jeff says before ejecting exhaust out his rear end. “They’ll
have heard that no doubt. I have an idea though. You see that grind stone across
the room?”

Jeac looks and sees a non-descript
circular wheel in the far corner. “Yes. What about it?” he asks.

“I want you to describe it to me.”

Jeac tries for several minutes to
come up with the words to describe the non-descript circular wheel in the far
corner and finally manages to say, “it’s circular.”

“Okay. Well, drag it over here and
place it against my front-right tire. I’ll spin it for you. You can use the
heat to craft the metal in here into body armor.”

The dwarf, tired of being naked and
cold, does as he is requested. It takes only a matter of minutes for the dwarf
and truck to sauté the metal enough for it to be molded into anything
resembling armor. Even so, sharp jagged edges jut up from all around and make
equipping the suit difficult. The inside they pad with seat liner for warmth.

“And now for something a little extra
on the side,” Jeac says.

He gathers up the sharpest pieces of
scrap metal and melts them down. Then he pours the molten metal into a mold. He
places it, cooling, onto Jeff’s hood and begins smiting the metal with his bare
left hand.

An axe head, glorious to behold and
radiating godliness that even Zeusette would envy, lay before him.

After finding a shaft of wood to
attach it to, he grips it with both hands and began giving it several test
swings.

And then he practiced with his new
axe. Hey-oh.

Deep in the deadwood of the swampy
desert, the waffles gently land. They bear witness to the consumption of a
rabid wombat, by way of a solid chrome snake, gnashing it into a fine pulp with
its metal-gear teeth.

Meanwhile, Jeac is stripping Jeff of
his seatbelts. One belt he uses to tether the comically large handgun to his
back. The other he uses to create a sling for his great-axe. He stands before
his mechanical partner and asks, “How do I look, bae?”

“Like the end of the world, dwarf.
Like the end of the world,” Jeff replies. “Now go. Lead as many of them back
here as you can, but don’t come back into this toe hole. I mean to blow big.”

He nods off and Jeac can’t help but
feel sorry for him. He kisses him on his manufacturer’s logo.  

The afro’d dwarf with an adhesive
beard steps outside of the shack and howls like a mongoose into the wind. A
song that sounds like a sea of dying manatees echoes back in reply. This is the
war cry of the R.B.G.O.A.T.s. Long has it terrified the few free people of the
dunes.

As their silhouettes rise up over the
dunes in the distance, Jeac swings his pistol over his shoulder and digs back
into the sand to compensate for recoil. He flexes and one of the shadows
becomes mist. Again and again he fires and again and again his enemies cease to
exist. But the clip only has six massive rounds and he soon finds himself
pulling his axe into a ready position and charging with the speed of a
narcoleptic dolphin.

He is met with a foaming tide of
obese men on muscular mountain goats that struggle under their weight. They are
armed only with police batons and most of them hold a box of donuts in their
non-favored hand.

Jeac’s height does him great favors here.

Unable to reach him with their
batons, the R.B.G.O.A.T.s either miss or fall off from the momentum of their
attempted attacks.

“No time to strike back just yet,”
Jeac thinks. “I need to lure them towards the shack!”

His heart beats faster as fat men crash
down around him. The roof of the shack appears in the distance.

“I’m almost there,” he thinks. “I can
make it!”

He dives down the sandy hill and
sprints as fast as his tiny legs will take him… Right past the shack. Once he’s
a good twenty yards away, Jeac howls once again and the R.B.G.O.A.T.s who had
fallen off their mounts make their way toward the shack and are consumed in a
ball of fire. Shrapnel shreds their balloon bodies and sand is stained red in
all directions.

“Rest in peaches, Seth,” Jeac says,
forgetting both a common phrase and the name of his friend. “I will never
forget you.”

He stands his ground as four
incredibly angry fat men ride up on their goats and start throwing donuts at
him. A largely ineffective, but certainly annoying tactic.

Jeac hacks the legs out from
underneath all of the goats. As the cops are rolling around in the pain they
suffered from falling such a short distance, Jeac cuts off their limbs and
scalps them.

He hangs the fleshy clumps of hair
from his belt and looks out at the red mangled mass of destruction. Some still
writhe in pain and soil and vomit on themselves. As he witnesses this, a pair
of boxer briefs caught in the explosion drifts through the air and gently
settles on his right shoulder.

His eyes a cold glassy marble, he
takes his time doubling back and finishing off his foes. All the while
thinking, “Why waste a good meal?”

Chapter 9

The waffles stare with wobbling
cartoon eyes at the engorged metal snake and the corpse of the dead wombat. Its
skeletal head still foams at the mouth. They emit a subsonic drone that only
those born of a waffle iron and some guy named Steve from Kentucky can hear.

“So, it is true my brothers. The
prophecy is to be fulfilled,” rumbles one rather burnt looking waffle. “The
small one has embraced his inner hunger and doomed the world.”

“Doomed? Or saved? The fate of this
world has long been sealed and the awakening of the last world-eater will not
alter what has been done,” dub-steps another. “We can only hope he finds truth
and the ability to control his urges.”

A third waffle, the kind with syrup
already inside, chimes in with a record scratching sound.

“A trial!” he says. “A trial. He’ll
need to be tested. We should summon our champion. The Sharkano must rise
again!”

“Agreed,” they speak in unison. Burnt
waffle begins spinning to prepare himself for flight and as he lifts off he
sings back to his fellows. “See you all at syrup lake!”

It takes them all of forty minutes to
cross the waste and not even the plume of orange on the horizon can deter them
from what they must do. Each waffle lands on a toadstool in a swamp of rich
brown syrup.

They drone long and loud until the
syrup starts to bubble and boil. Up it rises from the depths. The head of a
massive beast appears, dripping syrup. It blinks its large, beady black eyes
and opens and closes its maw. Many rows of razor sharp teeth line what the
waffles refer to as the Hell-mouth.

For miles, the ground cracks and then
crumbles inward as the colossal body of the ancient beast rises from the depths
below. Its skin is made of hardened lava rock.  

With all of the syrup drained down
the throat of the Sharkano, sand begins to creep back in to where the lake used
to be. The waffles spin into ready positions to leave, but it’s too late.

The mouth of the Sharkano opens and
spews thousands of sharks that begin to menace the surrounding dunes. Burnt
waffle and his brothers rise into the air, only to be devoured by one of the many
great whites of the sand.

Blood, distant on the
sand but fresh from slaughter, creeps into the dune-sharks nostrils. They swim
at full speed in that direction.