Cannibal Dwarf Detective: An Ephemeral Beardening (7 page)

“The light from earlier.” Mu
responds. “While you and your father were blinded I came down behind you and
sabotaged your weapons. I know your father well. I know his short temper often
leads him to make rash decisions. He surprised me this time. I hadn’t thought
he’d be the first of the two of you to stand down.”

Mu gestures towards a set of the
couches.

“Shall we sit and discuss this like
the noble tower rulers I know us all to be?”

“It would appear that we have little
choice in the matter,” Alfonzo grumbles as he walks over to the nearest couch
and struggles to find a way to comfortably seat his awkwardly shaped body.
Because he’s a banana. Do you get it yet? It’s funny. He’s a banana and he
can’t sit on the couch because fruit don’t got no waist or ass for sitting
with.

His son cautiously joins him. They
both stare across the oddly angled furniture at their host, who is sitting with
his elbows resting on his knees.

“So, you believe information is being
leaked,” he says. “I don’t understand what oddly shaped green onions have to do
with anything.”

Crickets.

“And you’re in a position where you
can’t really prove to me that it actually is being leaked,” Mu continues. “We
both have problems then. Your problem is obvious. My problem, then, would be
that if one of my men is stealing and leaking information, they’re doing it
without my consent. Nothing slips past me in this city. Nothing. Transparency
and honesty go hand in hand with honor. If those values are being ignored then
we have a rogue Ronin.”

“A… Ronin… Ronin?” asks Alfonzo.

“You don’t get to not laugh at the
onion joke and then make an even worse joke.”

“See, this is why I proposed you guys
change the name of your department at the last division meeting,” Armando says.
“You could avoid title conflicts like this one if only you’d listen to me.”

“I believe that is beside the point,
young one. The point is that dishonesty has brought about issues like this in
the past and continues to do so. I’ve maintained that belief since my arrival
on this planet and still the majority of you find it more beneficial to lie and
keep secrets. Beneficial to whom, I ask? None but yourselves. Lying benefits
the greater good for a time, but then you get into situations such as this and
everything gets muddled and truth and lie become nearly one and the same.”

“We’re not just the police, Mu. You
know that,” says Armando. “We’re the government. The government lies. There are
some things that most people are too weak minded and too weak hearted to
comprehend. That’s why we keep secrets. That’s why we lie.”

“But aren’t most of the problems you
lie to cover up generated and perpetuated by the secrets you’ve kept? Perhaps
giving the people the opportunity to view the truth would strengthen their
minds. In this world, there is no reason to keep the minds of your flock weak.”

“There is a lot that even you don’t
know, Mu,” Alfonzo says. “If the people of this tower had any idea of what it
is that we do to maintain this world… Well, even you would wish to be kept in
the dark.”

“Hm,” Mu says and moves around behind
the duo. He begins massaging their necks. “Perhaps we can make a deal. If you
tell me everything-“

“We all know that if we tell you our
plans, you’ll tell every one of your men and who knows where the information
will go from there,” Alfonzo interrupts. “You said it yourself, Mu.
Transparency and honesty go hand in hand with honor. Well, it’s beginning to
seem obvious to me that this isn’t a situation we can deal with you on. Honor
is a dated concept. Secrecy and privacy are crucial to maintaining
civilization. I think we’ll be taking our leave now.”

“If that is your wish I will not stop
you,” Mu says. He stands and points them to a door in the rear of the room.
“I’m certain I’ll find out whatever secrets the two of you are keeping from the
people of this tower someday.”

“And I’m certain you won’t, Mu,”
Alfonzo says as he passes through the door behind his son. “One last thing,
Mu…”

“Yes?”

“If you happen to see a velociraptor,
give us a call.”

“Kay thanks bye.”

Chapter 16

“One day a hamster exploded in a
hallway and I had naught to clean that shit up but a bottle of ammonia and my
tongue,” the Janitor grumbles to no one in particular. In fact he grumbles to
no one at all because he’s alone on the highest point of the highest
sky-scraper at the top of the C.D.P.D tower. He’s the only janitor in the
entire tower. Under funded and underappreciated. Stuck on window washing duty.

“So after I ate the hamster and drank
the ammonia I puked my guts out for like four hours straight and fell down two
flights of stairs. I shit myself. And not because of the ammonia or the impact
wounds. I mean regularly. Hell, I’m doing it right now. It’s cold at night.
They turn the heat off. It keeps my ass warm. You know what else keeps me warm?
Me neither.”

The old Janitor continues spouting
nonsense as he sprays water onto a window and then punches it. Glass shatters
all over.

“No one ever said a broken window
wasn’t a clean window. Har.”

He reaches down and starts picking up
pieces of glass and putting them into his mouth. His cheeks puffed up like a
squirrel packing nuts, he punches his cheeks together with his bum-gloved fists
in an attempt to spray the glass like one might with water. It doesn’t work.
All manner of jagged edges pierce his skin and blood pours down his face.

“Damn it. You’d think I’d have
learned from the last time. Least this time I used my face.”

He stumbles about and starts waving
his hands in the air. See, this homeless unpaid janitor is also a wizard,
because why the hell not?

Thin blue lines manifest in the air
between his hands as he chants, “Man ram ho so. Man ram ho so.”

He places the tangled blue web over
his face and his wounds vanish.

He attempts to teleport down into
Larston for a crayon, but his molecules restructure around a chair and his
hands and feet are made of wood.

“Dammit.”

He fumbles around at his waist, trying
to open a pouch filled with alchemical solutions and cleaning supplies until he
finds what he’s looking for. He carefully draws his wooden hand from the pouch,
holding a small vial filled with green ooze. He glances around at the patrons
in the crayon bar.

“If any of y’all are vampires, you
might want to leave now,” he says. “This is about to get messy.”

He wraps his short, messy gray beard
around his neck and then uncorks the vial with his teeth and downs the liquid
in a single shot. He winces and everyone in the room can hear a noise not
dissimilar to that of a tea kettle at a boil. His stomach bulges and he holds
it, clearly in pain.

“Last chance vampires,” he says.
“Leave.”

His lips quiver as he says the words.
No one makes for the door.

“He’s just a sick old man,” the
crayon vendor says. “Hey, old dude. Go be sick in a gutter somewhere. We don’t
want you here.”

“I’ve had a long day. I deserve a
smoke.”

Suddenly, the old janitor-wizard is
projectile vomiting bark chips and shards of wood. Several people are impaled.
Three of them are vampires and immediately ash. The fabric in the seating is
shredded, windows are shattered and blood begins pooling up around the bodies
of the dead, non-vamp customers.

“Wh-who the hell are you!?” The
crayon vendor throws his polishing rag down as violently as the weight of the
cloth will allow.

The wizard pulls small chunks of bark
dust from his beard.

“They call me Go,” he says. “I used
to be a member of the Ron-“

But he cuts himself off before he can
finish saying the name of the only group in this book that starts with Ron.

As he turns towards the crayon vendor
another long jet of wooden vomit erupts from his lungs and shreds the man like
cheese through a grater. Everyone in the bar is dead, but at least his limbs are
back to normal.

Go goes over to a barstool and grabs
an emerald green crayon from a container and puts it to his lips. He snaps his
thumb and index finger together and a small blue flame springs forth.

“Worst smoke I’ve ever had.”

The next morning Go wakes up without
pants in a pile of trash bags. This is often the case. He stands, grabs a bag
and empties it of its contents and then wraps it around his waist. Somewhere in
the tower, someone is making a mess. As janitor, it’s his job to clean up.

He walks a while, setting fire to
random people and shooting lightning out of his eyes at piles of trash, which
mostly disintegrate, but often leave a rain of material drifting in the air
behind him. He never looks back.

“Clean enough, meat bags.”

Go ventures to the tippy
top of the tower again. He looks out at the vast desert and starts casting
shadow puppets against the ten suns.

Chapter 17

Jeac’s shark-marine barrels towards
the tower at no speed whatsoever, because, it has no propulsion system, so he
spends nearly a week pushing it across the desert trying to get home. After a
while, he gets tired and climbs inside his vehicle to rest. It looks like he’s
being eaten by a sewn-together shark man.

Teeth keep scraping against his armor
so he busts them all out and puts them in a small bag, made from loose flesh.
Save for eight of the teeth which he mounts over his knuckles.

“Razor-knucks,” he thinks. “Always
wanted some of these.”

Even though he’s just come up with
them on the spot and has never before thought of making them.

He eats the shark corpse.

All it’s doing is taking up space and
when he pushes it, it moves, at most, a foot at a time. Once he’s done feeding
he starts sprinting as fast as his tired noodle legs will allow. It only takes
a few minutes for him to reach one of the many doorways leading into the
under-city of the tower.

Meanwhile, high above, a couple Ronin
sit in chairs and laugh about how they’ve just watched a dwarf run in circles
for three weeks straight.

Jeac kicks in the door and rushes
through Mutant Market, a gloomy place populated by creatures that trade in
organs for cardboard to build shanties. The light beaming through the door
behind him blinds three of the mutants and he ducks behind a poorly constructed
stand with severed feet hanging from it. Mud kicks up behind him as he hardcore
dances his way across the market. Mutants screech and howl in the darkness.

Finally, Jeac reaches an out of
service elevator and starts shimmying up the cable. It seems to go on forever,
but he eventually reaches what is typically referred to as the “ground floor”
and where the A.M.M.D garage is housed. He passes cautiously through the
A.M.M.D department building and to the central stair and starts up it. When he
finally reaches his office he can see that it’s been ransacked.

“No, that’s how it always looks,”
Jeac says to me for some reason.

He walks down the hall to Armando’s
office. Armando and Alfonzo are inside drinking and looking rather distraught.
Jeac decides it’ll be a good idea to enter with a laugh so he goes a little
ways up the stairway adjacent to the office and jumps from the handrail to a
nearby chandelier. He swings through the office window and rolls over his shoulder.

They don’t laugh. Instead they
quickly pull their weapons and aim them at the unrecognizable dwarf.

“Who the hell are you and why are you
breaking windows in my station?” Armando asks. He pulls back the hammer on the
pistol in his hand. “Answer quickly, dwarf.”

“You mean you don’t recognize me?”
Jeac asks.

“Of course not,” Armando says. “The
paragraph above this described you as unrecognizable.”

“It’s me. Jeac!” He glances between
the two of them and flashes a smile.

“You can’t be Jeac,” Armando says.
“Jeac died out in the desert two months ago.”

“Eaten by a giant shark volcano
thing, is the tale I often hear,” Alfonzo pipes in. “Besides, if you really are
him, you have a whole lot of Wednesday to catch up on. And I have enough anger
to make those Wednesdays feel like an eternity.”

“Well, I can prove that I’m Jeac
right now by telling you that Wednesday is the day of my weekly beatings. Proof
enough?”

Alfonzo brings his banana-peel hand
across Jeac’s face.

“No!” screams the banana man. “I’m
just kidding, it does but that’s just the start of what’s to come, you fool.”

“We can get to all that later, can’t
we?” Jeac asks. “I’ve been out there in those wastes for a long while and not
once did I release bladder.”

Fun fact: Dwarfs, like camels, have
multiple bladders and don’t have to go to the bathroom for weeks at a time.
This of course is why they smell so bad.

“But of course you sexy bastard. Take
your break,” replies Armando, interrupting Alfonzo.

Jeac turns out the door and toward
the bathroom down the hall. He can’t help but shake the feeling that someone is
following him.

“Why can I not shake this feeling
that someone is following me?” he whispers to himself.

Jeac jumps around in a full 180
degree motion to see that no one is there. He can’t help but think that it must
have simply been his imagination.

“It must have simply been my
imagination,” he says to no one in particular.

Armando follows Jeac into the nearby
restroom. He sees Jeac leaning up against a wall and makes his way towards the
only urinals in the bathroom. Jeac watches suspiciously as Armando relieves
himself. He waddles over to the urinal beside him. However, Jeac – being a
dwarf, is unable to reach the wall-mounted urinal. Jeac tears his shirt off,
drops trout (like literally, he drops a fish on the ground), leans back and
aims with the fiercest arch. The two men glance around the room, avoiding eye
contact at all costs when suddenly Jeac sees it.

“Jumbo banana frits!” he shouts.

Jeac loses all control and fills the
room with months of stored up dwarven waste. Armando’s face turns bright red as
he bunches up. He shakes it and looks sternly at the gaping dwarf.

“What? You didn’t think I was
completely human, did you?”

Jeac turns to face the camera of the
book that is your mind and shrugs.

Armando’s penis is a
banana.

Chapter 18

Ranch Dressing and Water Baby stand
together, appalled by the new found knowledge that the planet is no longer
whole. Chandaka hasn’t been whole for a very long time.

“How could no one know about this?”
Water Baby asks.

“I guess the tower has just kept it a
secret,” Ranch replies. “Typical.”

Water Baby shimmies closer to the
edge.

“This is remarkable. How is this
planet still in orbit?” she asks.

Ranch stands, eyes wide, jaw
clenched.

A muggy shadowy mist floats around
the two and stops them in their tracks.

“Why are you building a railroad out
here?” it asks.

The shadow figure rests on a nearby
rock, looking very lethargic. It speaks in many voices. Water Baby and Ranch
are frozen stiff.

“We were expecting the one who came
from the sky,” the shadow growls. “Where is he?”

“Who are you?” Ranch asks.

“We are not to be named,” the shadow
responds. “Though we no longer remain, we are a mere reflection of those people
whose lives were lost when the man pierced the sky and skinned our planet of
life.”

The voice of the shadow echoes around
them.

“We were expecting the one who came
from the sky,” the shadow repeats.

Water Baby spurts a question from her
face. “Who are you talking about?”

“We mean him no judgment, nor you,
simply a warning.”

“Tell us what you’re talking about,
strange beast!” Water Baby and Ranch Dressing both say in unison. They lock
eyes with one another and nod with sexy appreciation.

“Years ago, the streets of Chandaka
flourished,” the shadow info-dumped. “Everything was extravagant and beautiful.
The planet was healthy and living well, as were its people. One day however
there was a roar from the black of space. We as one turned to find ourselves
face to face with a blindingly bright light in the distant skies. The umbrella
men were unable to stop the force of this oncoming threat. Chandaka screamed
and panicked, but fought fiercely. We did our best to steer the unknown force
way, alas cows were a poor countermeasure. Everything we did was to no avail.
The man, he was a giant. Nothing like Chandaka had seen before. This man cut
through one of our suns causing an acid like rain. He then slammed directly
into the planet and plummeted further down until reaching the core. He
destroyed the planet from within. Many died that day and the rest of the planet
followed in death. But your people now keep Chandaka breathing. We warn you
today of the lives that have gone to waste. The people of this broken Chandaka
are false. We do not know why."

Ranch and Water, clearly baffled by
the words of the shadow, blink rapidly again in unison. Water finally breaks
the silence.

“You still haven’t told us who this
giant is and where or why he came here in the first place!” she exclaims.

“The impact of the crash caused the
giant to compact in size. Though, we know not of who or where he is now. We are
done lathering you with letters to form words in request of your questions. We
must vanish. Goodbye.”

“But wait!” calls out Ranch Dressing.
The shadow evaporates in all directions. “Frickin’ dangit!”

A frustrated Ranch Dressing kicks
sand up in the air.

“That was completely confusing.”

“At least now we have a new lead,
friend,” Water says. “We should ruminate on the words of the shadow.”

“Where the hell could that lead lead
though?” asks uhh… the raptor, angrily.

“We are to go down,”
Water Baby replies. “We must see for ourselves if the planet is truly broken as
the shadow being says.”

Chapter 19

Back at the tower, Alfonzo has had
his fifteenth bathroom break and all the substitute beaters have already laid
into Jeac.

“Happy Wednesday, jerk,” he says.
“You’re free to leave. Armando says he needs to speak with you about something.
So once you’re done sulking get the hell outta my office.”

Jeac lays on the floor motionless.

“Crap,” says Alfonzo, foaming at the
mouth. He slowly approaches Jeac and flips him over. Jeac punches him right in
the center of his noggin and sends him sprawling to the floor. Jeac jumps to
his feet.

“Success!” he yells and then walks
out of Alfonzo’s office.

He heads to Armando’s office but can
barely open the door. It is blocked by debris.

“There seems to be a lot more shit in
here than usual, boss,” Jeac says as he squeezes through the gap. He sits on
his old laundry bin as Armando’s assistant lights his pipe. The pipe stretches
the length of the room. The assistant leaves so he isn’t murdered because let’s
face it that would happen.

Armando inhales hard and coughs up
all the smoke.

“Forget everything you saw in the
bathroom yesterday,” he says.

“Forgotten,” Jeac says. “So what’s
up?”

“You were gone for a long time,”
Armando replies. “You have to start all over again with the investigation.
Square one. Forget everything you think you know. You’re still Feac as far as
the Tower is concerned, but you’re an Ephemeral Peacekeeper now. Everyone is
getting suspicious of your true identity. There have been way too many
coincidences.”

Armando takes another puff from his
pipe.

“We’re running out of time. No more
distractions, you hear me?”

Jeac stares blankly out the window.

“Huh? Oh… Yes. You can count on me,”
he says.

Armando seems uncertain of whether
Jeac is listening or not, but continues to talk anyway.

“We’re actually very surprised that
you made it out of that Sharkano alive, my dad and I. No one has ever done
that, Jeac. Anyway, I need you to go up to the Graevelay Mountains. There has
been some strange activity and we need someone to check it out. So do that and
report back to me as soon as possible.”

“I have a quick question before I go.”

Jeac hops off the laundry basket and
looks sternly toward Armando as he backs up towards the door.

“Go ahead,” Armando says. He keeps
smoking his pipe and speaks between inhalations.

“I know you said not to talk about it
but-“

“Jeac,” Armando says. “Don’t.”

“Do you peel it back like a banana or
is it just like-“

Armando throws his pipe at Jeac who
ducks out the door before it hits him. He stands there giggling while he hears
lots of smashing and cursing and then silence followed by a heavy sigh.

The dwarf is now on his way down the
tower and on his way to the Graevelay Mountains. Chandakas suns rise and set.
Jeac gallops gracefully through the desert for a long while and sees no sign of
any mountains. He grows weary and sits down to rest, he watches the suns set in
the distance.

As nightfall engulfs Chandaka, the
setting sun bleeds around what appear to be mountains.

“The Graevelays!” shouts an uplifted
Jeac.

Half the night goes by because Jeac
is slowly walking and has a general fear that he might lose the mountains. As
he grows nearer, much commotion can be heard from within. Very faint, but to
the sharp ears of a dwarf it is like being stung by wasps.