Greegs & Ladders - By Zack Mitchell and Danny Mendlow

by Zack Mitchell

CHAPTER 37

  How to Barely Succeed on the Worst World Ever

  When I reached the Lake of Liquids I understood why Wendell warned me not to touch the surface. The tar-like thickness of the black substance would envelop and devour any who came into contact, immortal or not. Once you go over your head there is no possible chance of resurfacing. The lake was even more threatening to someone of immortal status, for to remain forever alive while trapped in the lake is a far worse fate than drowning. This is something I would see first-hand.

  I was made nervous when I spotted the apparently sea-worthy canoe. It was a haggard bird's nest of a boat, crudely thrown together with whatever random pieces of garbage had been lingering about. Much rusted twine and wire (care of the defunct Balahog Twine and Wire corporation who'd had their entire derelict factory jettisoned to Garbotron) was what held all the bits of debris together.

  I slowly paddled across the gloppy monstrosity of a lake. This evil stuff made schmold seem like fresh-squeezed, ice-cold lemonade served on a hot summer day by a waitress who shows just the right amount of cleavage to garner a decent tip without coming across as desperate or slutty.

  Suddenly there was a halting thud as if the canoe had bumped into a rock.

  “Hey, watch it!” shouted a voice.

  “Who's there?” I asked.

  “Bob.”

  “Who's Bob?”

  “Me.”

  I looked over the side of the canoe and saw just a person's head sticking up from the lake's surface.

  “What are you doing in there?” I asked.

  “Obviously I fell in and got stuck. What kind of stupid question is that? One just doesn't go for a swim and lounge about in probably the worst substance imaginable.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You're lucky I can't use my arms or I'd tip your canoe over.”

  I paddled a few feet away from Bob just to make sure.

  “You'd be dead as soon as the lake began its assimilation of your bloodstream!” he raved. “A fate infinitely tamer than my own. As an immortal I've been living like this in the lake for countless years.”

  “Why has no one rescued you?”

  “They tried. You may not think it when you look at my hideously tar-infected, mutated face, but I was a very important person in my pre-lake life. There were exhaustively expensive rescue attempts involving every known type of pulley, crane, winch or rope system in the near galaxies. It proved impossible to remove me from the living hook-like grips of the tar, so everyone gave up. My story fell into obscurity after I outlived all the people who cared. So now I am one with the lake.”

  “You know, I'm also immortal,” I said. “Even before I saw you I was worried about getting stuck in the lake forever, but now that I've seen how agonizing your existence is I think I should get to shore as soon as possible before something happens.”

  “You're immortal?” asked Bob excitedly. “That's great news!”

  “It is?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Why?”

  “You can join me! Jump into the lake!”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “So I have a friend to talk to for the rest of eternity! It's the ultimate good deed.”

  “I'm not jumping into the lake.”

  “You must!”

  “Don't you think we'd get sick of each other?” I asked. “How many hundreds of years can you converse with the same person? It's only been 5 minutes and I'm already sick of you. Five Minutes.”

  “You're just like all the rest.”

  “The rest?” I asked. “How many people come here? I thought it was supposed to be impossible.”

  “Very little of what appears to be impossible is actually impossible,” stated Bob.

  “Right.”

  “Except, of course, for the simple act of rescuing someone who fell into a lake of tar,” he added with a whiny grumble.

  “Who comes here? Immortals?”

  “Mostly.”

  I wanted to learn more, but getting away from the lake was priority one.

  “Well, see ya later,” I said. “Chin up.”

  “I won't let you go!”

  “What will you do?”

  “I'll capsize your canoe with ripples!” he shouted as he began to thrash his head around like one of the many metal-headbangers taking in a Lincran parking lot festival. The neck-breaking motion caused no ripples. The dense anti-ripple consistency of the lake consumed all energy before it had a chance to escape.

  It was a sad display. I turned around and continued my mission.

  Even before I got to shore I could hear the call of the Garbage-Demons. Every few minutes I heard the drifting, ecstatic shrieks of the mysterious feeders.

  I had to spend several nights in the swamp. I was not able to make good time because of the absurd amount of falling and rolling and backtracking involved with crossing a shifting landscape. There was also only a short window of time in which I could move, for the garbage-demons emitted their shrieking calls for only a few hours a day. The rest of the time I had no bearing of direction and had to sit down and wait until I heard the sound again, or until the land shook me off my perch. The latter usually occurred first.

  The first thing I saw upon exiting the swamp was a sign reading This Way to Bin #897432 – GLPOA357%&11.FFF, aka The Bin Where the Beard of Broog Has Been Stashed.

  All those letters had been painstakingly carved by Wendell. I could see faded blood drops where the dull knife had slipped.

  While following the sign, it was clear I was headed directly into the main nesting ground of the Garbage-Demons. Hearing their shrieks over the last few days had given me plenty of time to nervously imagine what they were like. Demons are never good. Considering they feed on garbage, I had also been left to wonder what the area was like where they had chosen to nest. It could only be the area with the most rank concentration of junk.

  My expectations couldn't have been more wrong. There were no demons at all. Instead there was a mildly tolerable bunch of tame mammal creatures, a sort of hybrid cross between a dog, a cat and a Quigg. All these creatures did was eat garbage, so they were actually a vital part of cleaning up the planet's destroyed ecosystem. Milt would have been overjoyed to learn about all the help that was going on.

  Between the gushing fan, the obsessive mosquito and the hungry animals, there seemed to be a lot of life on this apparently uninhabitable dump.

  I went to the bin. The beard was conveniently placed right on top, as if on display. I shook off the filth that had grown on the beard, even though I was already growing accustomed to the grimy dark-gray color of everything on Garbotron, including my own skin color which had grown a layer of caked-on mouldy dust within minutes of our arrival.

  Beside the bin I discovered a sound-system rigged to loop the recordings of shrieking demons. There was enough battery power and Investment Banker-fuelled generators to ensure the recordings would loop for thousands of years. I broke the system and funnelled what fuel I could into some empty bottles. The animals were noticeably pleased by the sudden cessation of the shrieking demons. It was a sound they had heard perpetually for all of their lives, since the beginning of the evolutionary path of their species. These animals, like the Grollers, have no memory. Until I intervened with the smashing of the stereo, their lives were a perpetual cycle of these stages:

  1) Hearing the shrieks.

  2) Feeling a paralysing fear towards whatever the shrieks might belong to.

  3) Joyous relief at discovering the shrieks belong to a harmless stereo

  4) The complete forgetting of everything.

  The hybrids could now relax and eat garbage. Their average lifespan tripled.

  I wondered who had gone through the effort of setting up the sound-system. I thought maybe it was this Fralgoth character.