Cannibal Dwarf Detective: An Ephemeral Beardening Read online

  A loud growl reverberates on his swollen, waxy ear drum. He spins around to see that the cactus he’s caught on is sentient. It begins punching him like he was some kind of twelve year old kids’ birthday piñata with a poorly implemented physics engine. Each blow rips more and more toilet paper away from Feac’s stumpy body and punctures his skin with hundreds of tiny needles.

  After several hours of excruciating pain, all the toilet paper is gone and Feac finds himself lying on the ground beneath the massive cactus. As he looks up he sees all the other cacti staring down at him with those cartoon googly eyes one might purchase at a craft store. He attempts to sit up, but his shifting weight only causes the needles to jam farther in. He manages to stand despite his discomfort.

  “I gotta do something about this pain.” He says to no one in particular. “Wait. Didn’t I hear somewhere that if you get stung by a cactus you’re supposed to piss on your own wounds?”

  He unlaces his trousers and drops them, but pulls them right back up as he hears a familiar voice shout, “What the hell are you doing, you short bastard!?”

  Ja-La Pe-Pe Ecko Sanders blows the cacti apart with a shotgun and catches their white milk with a cup that he splashes all over Jeac, immediately relieving him of his pain. “You dumb ass dwarf. Urine is for walrus stings!”

  A rope whirls through the air and lands down around Feac’s ankles. Sanders begins pulling the end he holds in his tentacles. Bright pink and incredibly angry, Ja-La is a raiser of cacti as well as a gunsmith and the informant for the C.D.P.D. Right now, with his cacti dead, he rages towards the fallen dwarf and starts wrapping the rope tightly around the girth of his body. Feac starts screaming as the tentacle beast drags him through the mud and cacti shrapnel.

  “Wait you fool! It is I! Your friend Jeac!” yells Feac. The beast stops in his tracks.

  “Jeac is dead. It’s all over the tower. The only fool here is you.”

  The tentacles tentacly tentacle his face, causing Feac’s mustache to explode in all directions. Each individual piece of hair floats gracefully into the mud, save one, which is caught in a sudden gust of wind and propelled into the neck of a nearby sand-bear. It dies instantly. The hair. Not the bear. The bear is fine.

  Sanders, the tentacled beast, drops to his tentacles and weeps, “Oh, Feac! It is Jeac!” He sweeps him up in his tentacles, cradling him like a baby, and carries him back to his shack. Also, he has tentacles.

  Once they’re in the shack and Jeac is unbound he finds himself drinking a cup of hot cactus milk and pondering the heat death of the universe. It is beyond his comprehension and his attempts to understand cause an aneurism to pop. His face slams first into the cup and then into the table, breaking both. During this, Sanders grooms him. He picks small bits of cactus and toilet paper out of Jeac’s ears and nose.

  “It has been days since I have seen you last, Jeac. You must be in danger or else you would have shaved by now,“ says Ja-La Pe-Pe Ecko Sanders in quotations.

  Jeac’s tongue squirms about like a worm above ground. “I am undercover because in my last case I broke jurisdictional rule by entering Sky-Cop territory without a permit. Were I not in disguise, the Sky-Cops would surely see me dead. Chief Armando has me investigating the corruption of all eight police factions within the tower and I cannot do so if I am dead.” Jeac has yet another aneurism burst before voiding his bowels.

  “Hey, you know who is corrupt? Those R.B.G.O.A.T’s. They are the very bottom rung of the tower and I assume they’re planning to blow up the floor above their own to collapse the tower so they will be the only faction left.”

  “Huh-huh.” Says Jeac, uninterested.

  “I remember it like it was twenty-five years ago because it was. When the R.B.G.O.A.T’s were simply umbrella men, when the Tower wasn’t the only building on Chandaka. The umbrella men were sexy men who used their umbrellas to stay dry and fought for the good instead of the not good. Since all the oceans dried up because of over industrialsim-ness and general stupidity, the sexy umbrella men became fat and ugly and lazy and dumb. Or maybe they didn’t.”

  Ja-La finishes using his suction cups to remove all the cactus needles from Jeac’s thick skin. A siren sounds suddenly and a large yellow banana-shaped car peels up and smashes through the side of the house and pins Ja-La to the far wall. His tentacles flailing up and around the squished front end of the fruit-mobile, he begins foaming at the mouth and spraying ink all over the inside of his hovel.

  “Noooo! Banana!” screeches Jeac like a banshee in a hall of mirrors filled with shit and spiders and some guy named Dave.

  Alfonzo exits his vehicular banana and peels back his banana, shooting Ja-La Pe-Pe in his face hole. Potassium paste splatters all over and blinds Jeac. Alfonzo’s slick banana shoes peel and allow him to slide across the linoleum towards Jeac. He starts slapping the shit out of him with the side panel of his banana car.

  “Happy Wednesday, slag sucker!” Alfonzo yells before getting back in his car and driving away. Not ten seconds later the banana car is back and Alfonzo is pulling Jeac into the passenger seat. “I forgot. Armando wants you back at the station. You’ve been gone a week. Something about getting really drunk in chapter four. Here, draw a mustache on your finger and hold it under your nose until we can get you a replacement.”

  Back at the station while Feac was away, the janitorial wizard cleaned his office of all the toilet paper.

  “Feac, come to my office now! I need you!” screams Armando.

  Feac skips over to Armando’s office and yelps,” Yeah boss?”

  “I need you to light my pipe.”

  “First I need you to get me a mustache or else my cover will be blown.”

  Armando reaches down and pulls open the top drawer of his desk. It is completely filled to the brim with randomly assorted styles of fake mustaches. He takes a small brown bag and fists a handful of ‘staches into it.

  “There you go dingbat. These should last you a while. Or… Or I don’t know. You’ll have to scalp people and sew their hair onto your face! Ha-ha! I’m kidding of course. That’d be really messed up. Please don’t do that.”

  “Thanks boss, “Feac says, accepting the sack-o-’staches while a seed of malice takes root in his mind. He walks across the room and pulls out a dwarf-sized lighter (it’s actually just normal sized), lights the pipe and then takes his place on the overturned laundry basket in front of Armando’s desk. Reaching into his sack-o-’staches, he pulls out a large red-colored handlebar mustache, licks the back and slaps it above his lips. Armando takes a thirty minute inhalation and then releases all the smoke at once, flooding the office with noxious fumes. It takes all of Feac’s strength to crawl across the floor and open the window.

  “Now,” says Armando. “Can you explain this to me?” He reaches inside his desk once more and pulls out a small, grainy-looking photo. A clearly naked figure stands center frame, but beyond that it is impossible to determine who or what it is.

  “No, I really can’t, sir,” says Feac.

  “Well, how about this then?”

  Armando turns and presses a large green play button residing on the left-hand side of his desk. The entire back wall of his office starts making creaking noises as hydraulic pumps lift it up and away like a garage door. Jeac finds himself staring out into the wastes of Chandaka.

  “I couldn’t afford a TV,” says Armando, “but I was able to afford the ruins of an old movie theater in the wastes. I bought it for the price of all your alcohol.”

  He presses another button and two telescopes rise from beneath the wood paneling. Jeac and Armando each take a place behind one of the rusted old tubes and focus their view down on the distant theater projector screen.

  The screen has a far less grainy and more graphic depiction of the content displayed in the photograph. A naked dwarf stands wind-milling his penis in front of a hot dog stand, yelling, “I got your wieners right here, ladies!”

  Armando turns and hits the button on his desk once more
. The hydraulics fail and his wall shuts so violently that both he and the dwarf are thrown across the room. Coughing up blood from internal bruising, they stand in agony and head back to Armando’s desk.

  “That’s all security got of your escapades in chapter four, Jeac. Do you have any recollection of what you did a week ago? This offense is punishable by suspension. But we can’t do that because you’re already undercover. It wouldn’t make sense for a cop, portraying a fake cop, to have to go undercover as another fake cop.”

  Jeac flaps his arms in a panic, attempting to fly like a chicken. After realizing it has no effect, he throws up. Seeing Jeac vomit causes Armando to vomit as well. A real mess has been made of Armando’s desk. Armando stands up, presses the button that lifts the hydraulic wall and proceeds to shove the puke-covered desk out, where it falls five thousand feet below, crushing the hot dog vendor they previously viewed in the film.

  “Shit! That desk had the only button to operate the wall!”

  Brandishing his extremely long pipe, he takes the curved end and reaches up through the window of the wall and pulls it down. His pipe snaps in half like a twig.

  Armando sighs. “…Second pipe this month.”

  “Recollection, you said? No,” says Jeac, a dwarf who thinks recollection means to re-collect things. “Look, boss… I can see that you’re stressed. At first I thought being undercover just meant I could party all the time because no one knew it was me! But now I know better. I’m a man with responsibilities, so I’ll start the investigation as soon as possible.”

  “You haven’t started investigating yet!? It’s been a week! Have you found nothing?”

  “Well, Sanders said something about something or other in regards to one of the groups doing something with a thing, but I wasn’t really paying attention.”

  “When did you see Sanders?”

  “Just this morning when I-”

  “You should have cuffed that slimy bastard when you had the chance, Jeac!”

  “But Sanders is our informant…”

  “Is he?” asks Alfonzo. “Ja-La Pe-Pe Ecko Sanders is wanted for selling military grade weapons to seven year olds. Get back out there and haul his tentacled ass in.”

  Jeac leaves the office and shuts the door behind him. Armando lights up a regular sized pipe, dims the lights and focuses a telescope back out the window towards the theater screen, where he watches the part of the footage that he didn’t show Jeac. The final moments of the film show his beloved Peruvian raptor grabbing Jeac by the afro and swinging him up onto his saddle. Where they went from there is anyone’s guess.

  Part VIII: Breaking Faces, Breaking Barriers

  Chapter 6

  After leaving Armando’s office, Jeac makes his way down the central stairwell to the massive door that opens onto the Chandakan wastes. Every so often, as he walks the burning sands of the outside world, he thinks about what might have happened to the people before they moved from their now destroyed cities into the central C.D.P.D tower.

  Sander’s cacti farm is three miles east of the door, so Jeac has to walk through all sorts of abandoned sand-covered ruins. Occasionally, he sees skeletons, rusted and destroyed cars, and scavengers, who for some reason like to eat the bone marrow they find in the desert. He’s never had any trouble with them though because, while he has a gun, they carry only sticks.

  Jeac closes his fat eyes, sucks in the air around him, and continues to venture towards the East. However, forty minutes later when he opens his eyes he realizes that he has walked way past the cacti farm.

  Jeac hears chanting nearby so he scales the sand dune and looks down to see the R.B.G.O.A.T.s standing around a large bomb-like contraption. One of the Goats stands atop the bomb and is shouting, “We are the goats! We have built this bomb and we shall explode the C.D.P.D!”

  His comrades cheer. The sand beneath Jeac’s feet shift and he slides down the sand dune, slamming his head on a jaggedly janky rock, causing him to black out. He awakens several hours later in a daze.

  “Crap, the farm!”

  After walking the distance back to where the farm actually is, he finds the place a mess. All of the cacti have been exploded into green chunks, their white milk spilling out onto the ground. He pulls his pistol out as a precautionary measure and inches his way to the front of the small octo-hovel. He peers in through the large banana-shaped opening that Alfonzo’s car had left earlier. All the furniture has been toppled over or smashed. The walls are covered in thick black ink. Papers are spread everywhere. Hanging from the ceiling, where the chandelier would have been, is a single tentacle.

  “Oh no,” says Jeac as he steps over the broken wall and into the building.

  Black ink trails across the house, into the kitchen, and out the back door. Jeac finds yet another tentacle in the kitchen and glances out the window over the sink to see another of his friends’ limbs sitting in a bucket.

  The small, normally dried-yellow sand in the back yard has been stained black. Jeac, seeing a figure in the distance, kicks open the rear door and fires three warning shots. He steps out the door and sprints to where the figure now lies. A wheezing breath still comes from the figure. Jeac rolls it over and stares into the eyes of Sanders.

  “Oh, shit,” says Jeac. “I didn’t know it was you, Sanders! I wouldn’t have shot if I had known. I saw your limbs laying everywhere and thought for certain you were your killer.”

  “You always were a fool, Jeac. Octopi limbs regenerate. Had you not shot me, I’d have been fine.”

  Ink drips from the tentacled informant’s beaked mouth. As he releases his final breath, all the ink in his body sprays with uncontrollable fervor. The pressure is enough to completely destroy what remains of the house. The desert consumes the ruins of Sander’s home, making it seem like it was never there to begin with. Jeac falls a very short distance to his knees as he watches his once good friends’ corpse, riddled with bullets, get picked up by the wind and carried away into the great unknown like a deflating balloon. Jeac mourns momentarily and then immediately forgets that Ja-La Pe-Pe Ecko Sanders ever existed and proceeds to gather up the severed tentacles and says, “Why waste a good meal?”

  Back in his apartment, he has put water to boil and is placing two of the three tentacles into the pot when the sound of knocking comes from his door.

  “Come in!”

  Alfonzo and Armando open the door. Alfonzo shoots a banana gun in every direction, covering various things around the room in goop.

  “It’s still Wednesday you little dwarf!”

  The remaining tentacle sits on the counter next to a large knife and catches Armando’s eye.

  “Where’d you get the tentacles, Jeac?” He asks.

  “Oh, you know. Some place out in the wastes.”

  “Well we dropped by because you didn’t file a report. Nor did you bring in the perp I assigned to you. I’m getting a bit concerned with letting you operate on your own. The department wants to partner you up with a member of the A.M.M.D. Jeff ‘Low Rider’ Stevens.”

  Jeac dumps the pot of boiling water all over the kitchen floor and leans down to pick up the now cooked tentacles. He grips the chewy flesh in his teeth and pulls until it stretches and snaps like a rubber band.

  “I ain’t workin’ with no cog-bender,” he says between bites. “It’s not that I’m racist. I just hate machines.”

  “Well, Jeac. Your partner is outside. You’re working with him no matter what. Public opinion of the department is faltering. You’re making us look bad. You’re a terrible detective; you’re drinking all the time and that whole situation with the hot dog stand and your penis in chapter four? Don’t even get me started. You’re working with the machine or you’re not working at all.”

  “Then I quit.”

  “If you quit you’re no longer protected with false identification by the-“

  Jeac belches and spits entire chunks of cat out onto the floor.

  “As I was saying,” Armando continues. “If
you quit we can’t protect you. We’d not only confiscate your badge and gun, but we’d also take your stilts and Sack o’ ‘Staches.”

  Jeac grumbles and slips in the now cooled water and hits his head on the linoleum. Suddenly, he recalls figures in the desert. Figures standing atop a strange device while chanting. He ignores it and takes another bite of the tentacle.

  “Jeac wait. Where did you say you got your dinner?”

  “In the… Oh no,” Jeac replies, suddenly aware of the horrible act of almost cannibalism he’s committed. “… Sanders.”

  “That explains why you never brought the perp in for processing at the station. You were too busy bringing him in… for uh… for lunch,” Armando says. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t think of a bad octopus-man cannibalism pun. But never mind all of that. Did you see anything else out there?”

  Again, Jeac thinks about the strange people chanting just over the dune and of the device they had with them.

  “No. I can’t say I saw anything at all.”

  Alfonzo and Armando stay a while longer before leaving. Jeac stays up late watching his new partner blow smoke all night from his window.

  “Great, just what I need,” he thinks. “Damn steel freak following me around.”

  Chapter 7

  Jeac wakes up and puts on his stilts and adorns a new fu man chu. He finishes his breakfast of sautéed tentacle jerky and heads out the door.

  “What a splendid day today!” he says. He struts down the hall like a rooster with a mouthful of yogurt that is drowning but doesn’t realize it because he’s both too stupid and too proud. Then he sees it. The pile of junk waiting for him.

  “Hey, Mini-meat!” it says. “You kept me out here all night. It’ll take a while for my engine to warm up now.”

  “So you must be Seth Low Rider?” Jeac asks while rolling his eyes. Jeff rolls towards Jeac.