Finding nothing, Jeac paws at the ground around him until his hands grasp the edge of a metallic surface. He reaches down and flails his left arm around. He strikes a round object with his fingertips. The obnoxious sound he hears causes him to realize, by way of echolocation, that he’s on a mountain of old rusted cars.
He lowers his chest over the edge and turns his head slightly. He sees a dim light coming from far off in the distance.
“Strange that so many cars are perfectly aligned to from this tunnel,” he thinks.
He takes a deep breath, grasps the edge with his meaty hands, and lowers himself down into the padded seat of the first car. He proceeds cautiously down the ever gently-sloping car tunnel.
All of a sudden the tunnel drops off and Jeac loses (and breaks) his wind. The dwarf flails his arms like spaghetti and drops quickly into the unknown depths of the dark depths of the darkness below. It’s dark and deep down there in the dark depths.
He falls until he slams into a large, meaty-looking angular trough. A pink sphincter sprays red juices onto the slide. Tumbling ass-over-tea kettle, Jeac’s heart jumps through his chest with every thump. Fear overcomes him. His eyes widen and he scrambles for something to hold onto. It is for naught.
Jeac swivels backwards. Now sliding head first he covers his dirt-caked face and shoots out of the end of the trough. He crashes into a large, crunchy mound of something.
The light Jeac saw in the car tunnel seeps in from outside the broken flesh of the Sharkano. His eyes adjust and he sees that he’s crashed into a mountain of bones. Next to him rests his trusty battle axe.
“Food and light!” he exclaims. “And my axe!”
Jeac struggles to his feet as bones shift, fall beneath him, and drop and splash into the pool of pink-red goo from the sphincter trough.
He swings his axe over his shoulder. His feet catch on bones with every step. Looking around he sees nothing but the thick flesh-walls of the Sharkano.
“I should probably follow the light.”
Climbing up the enormous bone pile, he makes his way towards the light. Bones rattle and fall and he trips several times on his way to the hole in the wall. To his surprise, it’s too narrow for him to squeeze through. He thrusts his fists with explosive force into the broken flesh and starts tearing it apart so he can fit through. Chunks of shark meat fly left and right as he works at the wall. He becomes curious as to what it tastes like. He crams some into his face and begins chewing.
Finally, the hole is big enough for him to step inside. Much to his dismay, he sees that the light isn’t from the outside, but from a gas lamp someone has set on the ground on the other side of the hole.
He’s greeted by a scream from above. The echo fractures his ear drum and he jerks his head violently in the direction of the sound. Chewed up shark chunks dribble from his mouth and onto the ground.
He hears the scream again but it sounds extremely far away and the distance it travels to reach his ears make it sound like a whisper.
“Who’s there!?” Jeac yells and nervously hops around. “I mustn’t lose it down here. I need to get back to the surface of Chandaka.”
Jeac’s legs pound heavily into the squishy ground as he sprints towards the sound. The further down the dwarf ventures the more he hears nothing. The screams have stopped and the sound couldn’t have been coming from the Sharkano. Sharks do not make any sound.
As he rounds a meaty corner, he sees the reason the screams have stopped and quickly crouches (he stands) behind a pile of bones. Mini-sharks! Patrolling the stomach of the Sharkano and sporting gray tuxedos. Between them lies the shredded corpse of a rare blue mongeasel (half mongoose, half weasel).
“Sweet falcons of flaming clam land!” Jeac shouts.
The two sharks closest to his position hear him and look over as he rockets his head down (he doesn’t) beneath the bone wall.
The sentries begin slapping their tuxedo-garbed fins together to make the sounds required to draw the attention of their carnivorous sea brethren. Every shark in the vicinity turns to look at the bone pile, but sees nothing because Jeac’s height keeps them just below their line of sight.
“Now is my chance!”
Jeac rushes out from behind the bone pile and throws his fat body against two sentries and knocks them over.
“Knuckle up, fat fins!” he shouts as he jumps to his feet.
The sharks, still lying on the ground, start flailing their fins around in a circular motion. Jeac dodges every attempt made by the sharks.
“You’ll have to do better than that!”
One of the sharks grabs Jeac from behind and puts him in a full nelson while the other sharks lay mean hooks into his gut.
“Bastardos!” Jeac yells. Spit flies from his bloody lips.
Jeac manages to kick his metallic kicks up into the sharks face. He breaks loose from the hold of his other attacker. He kicks the fin-feet out from underneath his former tormentor and quickly reaches down and twists the sharks head off of his body. He holds the head aloft and lets the blood drain down his gullet before slamming the head down over his own dome. A mighty new helm it makes.
He turns, wipes blood from his lips with his dirty beard and smiles.
“I’m getting hungry, friends.”
He pulls his axe from his back and prepares to fight for his life.
The twenty remaining sharks stare at him with their soulless, beady eyes and then flex their fins. As they do, razor sharp blades sprout out along the edges. The sharks swing their fins like drunken madmen swinging foreign weapons and with about as much accuracy. As they rush Jeac’s position, most of them horribly disfigure themselves or their fellows.
“They’ve done all the work for me!” Jeac laughs.
As the last shark standing swims furiously towards him, Jeac brings his razor dull axe down into the sharks head. After hours of hacking through bone and flesh, he finally separates the shark into two ready to eat pieces. Jeac’s blood is at a boil. He devours the shark in minutes. His vision a red blur, he sprints his way through the Sharkano’s digestive tract, slaughtering every fish in his way.
Upon reaching the ass end of the great beast, Jeac hacks a hole in the wall and begins worming his way out onto the surface.
The Sharkano punches at his own ass to get the dwarf out, but Jeac isn’t having any of the Sharkano’s shit.
His body halfway out of his axe-made escape hole, he begins punching hand holds into the side of the shark beasts’ massive buttock. He climbs towards its back. Every step the Sharkano takes threatens to throw Jeac off to his death.
As Jeac mauls his way up, Sharkano spews tiny sharks from his mouth that shred their way down his surface towards the dwarf. The great beast cries out in pain and it slams itself into the sand.
“Agh. Damn it all!” Jeac yells.
Jeac loses his grip for a moment and starts falling away from the now accelerating Sharkano. Like a flash of lightning he pulls his axe from the strap at his back and catches it on the beasts’ flesh.
The mini-sharks, unable to hold on with anything but their mouths, drop off of their master and into the sands of the desert below. Their attack continues as they leap from the sand like dolphins or that guy you know named Wade. Whenever they draw near and jump within range, Jeac punches them in the nose. They explode into red mist that paints the side of the Sharkano.
Speed steadily increasing, the Sharkano begins crashing through the ruins of long destroyed cities. Jeac tilts his head and feels debris that would otherwise knock him off ricocheting from atop his cartilage-based helm.
“At least the smaller sharks can’t keep up anymore,” he thinks.
In all actuality, Jeac has punched every last shark into oblivion and both he and the Sharkano are completely red. A long trail of blood stains the desert behind them and stretches far off into the distance where it blends in color with one of the twelve setting suns.
Turbulence subsiding, Jeac carefully stands and finds his balance. H
e pulls his axe from the blue flesh and cautiously moves towards the giant fin that’s acting as a stabilizer. He reaches it and starts hacking like a lumberjack. He hacks until it’s felled like a tree and watches as it tumbles down the side of the shark and sticks, point first into the sand.
The sand, blurring from speed only moments before, begins to retake a granular texture. The Sharkano slows to a stop. The blood spurting and trickling from the massive wound where its fin once stood is weakening it. Once it stops completely, Jeac begins the trek towards the head of the great monster. It takes a full forty minutes.
Once he’s there he uses his axe to dig away the top of the sharks head in what can only be described as the largest scalping imaginable. Jeac stands for a moment and considers sewing the shark flesh into his beard but dismisses the idea when he imagines the weight of the meat pulling him off the side of the C.D.P.D tower to his death.
He kicks the large circular head-chunk off the Sharkano with such force that it leaves the atmosphere and flies into space where it explodes. He jumps down into the craterous hole the flesh previously occupied and stands atop the skull. He raises his axe high into the air.
“For the tower,” he whispers.
He brings the axe down with such a mighty force that the entire head splits in two and the skull shatters. Brains spill out like a wave and take him with them. As he rides the parietal lobe, he punches downward and laughs as he sees the body of his great foe twitch.
After gorging himself on most of the remains of the Sharkano, Jeac gathers the left-overs and starts sewing together a makeshift vehicle. He dubs it the ‘Shark-marine’ on account of how it resembles both shark and submarine and travels below the sand. The bearded one climbs inside his meatship and heads straight back to the tower to report to Armando about his findings, still unsure of what exactly he has found.
Also, one of the twelve suns explodes for some reason.
Part XI: Echo
Chapter 14
Ranch Dressing is crouched on the other side of a sand dune as the giant mass of shark careens by. He is flexing his toe-claws when Water Baby, having just saved Jeac’s life, arrives next to him and moistens the sand.
“That’s about all we can do for him now,” the liquid apparition gurgles softly.
Ranch growls and stands. He walks in quick strides away from the dune. Water Baby follows him, her puddle pushed by some unseen force as she streams her way around the feet of the velociraptor.
“Where are you going, Ranch?” she asks. “Don’t you want to see Jeac succeed?”
“I don’t need to witness the act to know what will become of that great beast. There are few creatures of that magnitude left on this planet. I won’t watch another become extinct.”
He doesn’t hate Jeac, but he resents him. Ranch remembers, by way of sepia tone flashback, when he was Alfonzo’s mount and how that yellow bastard would tell him that Jeac was the beginning of the end. He’d served both Jeac and Alfonzo faithfully for as long as he could maintain the façade.
Ranch is more than just a simple mount. Sure, he was forced to retire when Alfonzo bio-engineered that stupid banana mobile, but it was different with Jeac. Ranch left because he’d learned of the horrible truth. Both horrible truths.
He didn’t know how to act when he found out about A&A’s plan at first. He considered confronting them about it, but backed away from that decision when he remembered that both father and son share a passion for pointless violence.
So he waited. He waited a fort night until finally a Ronin delivered file was passed onto Jeac’s desk. Jeac can’t read for shit unless the text is written in ancient hieroglyphics, so the task of deciphering the files contents was given to Ranch.
He tilted his head at an angle over the paper and scanned the words, excitedly, with one yellow cat-like eye. The file was filled with incriminating evidence. Armando and Alfonzo were maintaining a great lie. What he read in that file caused him to hate Jeac and the masters who’d written it. But in addition to that, information about a case the two were unsure of was tucked away. A translucent blue infant had been kidnapped and taken from the fifth city by a rogue A.M.M.D member and a pack of wild lizard men from beyond the dunes.
Ranch was glad at that moment that no one knew just what that blue infant was. There were no races on Chandaka that fit that particular description, save one. And that one race had been destroyed over a century ago. It was the ocean. It had to be.
He thought a while about what the A.M.M.D might want with the last drop of the ocean on the planet and why a machine would think to hire gross green barbarians to aid it, so he took his leave of Jeac’s office and headed to the only library in the entire tower. Small, about the size of a broom closet, it contained three large books that chronicled the history of the planet.
He grabbed one, flipped to the index, and jabbed his sharp claw into the page. He scrapped down the words until he found what he was looking for. Lizard rituals. They planned on sacrificing the ocean to the suns to create the ultimate precipitation; one that would flood the world and re-invigorate all of Chandaka’s life. But what were the chances of that ever working? What if the water didn’t evaporate and form a rain cloud? What if it simply ceased to exist?
Ranch Dressing wasn’t willing to take that chance. He grasped the book in his teeth and flung it across the room, destroying it. Both the book and the room. Just to be clear.
Of course when he relayed the information to Jeac it sounded a lot different. He looked up and growled at his master. Something along the lines of “some machine and a tribe of lizards have kidnapped an infant!”
They ascended to the top of the tower, without jurisdictional permits, and rescued the last of the water. Well, Ranch did anyway. As he glided out into the desert from the towers peak, he felt a sloshing in the canteen on the side of his saddle. Upon landing, he pulled the saddle off with his mouth and unscrewed the cap. Water Baby had made its way into the container during the battle.
“And that’s how we made it here,” Ranch thinks.
Of course, lots of other shit happened after they left the battle (see chapter 4), but that’s irrelevant.
Ranch and Water Baby walk in the opposite direction of the tower for hours, even as Jeac is making his way back towards the lone standing pillar of civilization on the planet. Their mission is perilous, but Ranch has decided he needs to see for certain whether or not the contents of that file are completely accurate. He needs to see if the edges of the world are gone.
After several hours, the duo stops and makes camp. It’s not a difficult affair. Ranch sweeps mounds of sand into a circle and Water Baby sprays a girthy froth all over the place. The moist sand shapes easily into a large castle, complete with bed chambers and dungeon. They re-create this palace numerous times on their way to the edge.
The journey is long, but Ranch never lacks hydration. Though, he often remarks about how wrong it feels to be drinking from a sentient life form.
“Not long ago,” Water Baby reminds him, “all life swam and drank from my froth.”
It’s a line that never ceases to cease the raptors lapping tongue.
One day, as the eleven suns are simultaneously rising and setting, they cross the final dune. There is a lemonade stand there for some reason. A man in a suit with a red tie offers them empty glasses and transcends our mortal realm.
Dry, cracked rock, stretches out before them. Then there is nothing. No light, no warmth. Only the cold black endlessness of space. Ranch and Water have reached the edge of the world. They watch as what grains of sand remain on the surface float gently off into space. The file is correct.
Chapter 15
Alfonzo and Armando walk casually up the crowded street from the elevator. Street vendors are everywhere. Though they’d usually stop random citizens in an attempt to sell their wares, they don’t even look at the police duo as they pass.
Litter drifts around the black concrete street and neon lights illuminate the windows of m
ost of the nearby buildings. There is a surprising amount of shadow for a place with so much light.
Father and son round a corner onto a street lined with strung-up street lights and stare down at the multi-level city. All seven levels as well lit as the most dingy restaurant conceived. Maybe a pizza place with a cast of characters and arcade games that caters to children, but has food that tastes like cardboard. Nowhere specific. You might have been there.
“I’m going to be honest, dad,” Armando says to his father. “For as long as I’ve been chief… I’ve never been up here. Never been to the Ronin offices. Have you? How will I know where this place is?”
Alfonzo blinks, still trying to adjust to the low light of the city.
“Follow the silence,” he says. “That’s what I was told by Mu when he and his people first came to Chandaka. Street vendors are loud. So are most citizens. The Ronin don’t make any more noise than necessary… So follow the silence and you’ll find them.”
They stand in the street and try to discern noise from not. Alfonzo gives up after a moment because he has no actual ears and because it’s scientifically impossible to explain how a banana would hear anyway. I’m just going to say nano-machines and cybernetic augmentations.
His son has better luck and begins walking toward an alleyway with hardly any light at all. The only source of light is an ominous deep red neon sign that says “Not At All A Hideout.”
As they step into the alley and walk towards it, the sign appears to drift away from them. They give chase but it continues to move away. After several moments they hear laughter and are blinded by flood lights that quickly fade to reveal that they’ve been chasing the sign on a treadmill. A shirtless Ronin, covered in tattoos and drinking a synthetic waffle shake, stands on a balcony above them.
Cannibal Dwarf Detective: An Ephemeral Beardening Page 5
