Cannibal Dwarf Detective: An Ephemeral Beardening Read online

  “Mu,” grumbles Alfonzo. “Pranks? Is this what you’ve been spending department funds on?”

  “Alfonzo, my old friend,” Mu replies. “What you see before you is constructed of scrap. Your corrupt department funds have no place here, where honor or whatever reigns.”

  Mu’s hand rests at the hilt of his katana. Alfonzo’s yellow fingers twitch slowly near the butts of his two guns.

  “Have you tried the cream cheese?” Mu asks.

  “The cream cheese…” says Armando. “Is made of people.”

  “Enough nonsense,” Alfonzo says. “Cream cheese doesn’t reconstruct the fallen towers, nor kill the bastard that felled them in the first place.”

  “Of course it does, you yellow bastard,” Mu says. “Cream cheese is a tool for every occasion, but it isn’t a tool to be used to smite one who might not have truly committed the crime. I’ve told you countless times that I don’t believe Jeac caused the current state of the world. You never listen-“

  “I never listen,” interjects the banana, “because I witnessed the crime firsthand!”

  The Ronin leader paces back and forth atop the balcony, his hand occasionally brushing the lever that would reactivate the treadmill and send the duo backwards at an unknowable speed. He stops, presses a button, and throws the lever. They don’t move backwards away from the sign, however. The treadmill drags them slowly forward as the red symbol flickers and the wall around it shakes. The sign and the wall it rests on are pulled up and back, out of sight. Again, floodlight blinds them.

  “Why have you come, Alfonzo and son?” Mu asks. “I know it is not to berate me about department spending. There is a yearly financial meeting for that.”

  Mu’s hand rests on the rail of a downwardly spiraling stair as he descends. The light grows dim again and Alfonzo and Armando can see that the room they stand in is a waiting room. Red couches rest at ninety degree angles on either side of the conveyer belt entryway and between those couches are fish tanks filled with beta fish skeletons and bloody water and that pair of socks you lost that one time along with all your dreams.

  “We came because we believe one of your men might be leaking information about a certain project to an outside source,” Armando says. “We won’t tolerate that.”

  “Hm. An interesting accusation,” Mu says. “Have you any evidence that this event has occurred?”

  “Well, the file containing information crucial to the overall planning I was keeping on my desk is missing,” says Armando. “Besides, we’re the police. We don’t need evidence.”

  “You see, Alfonzo? Your son has lost the file in his disorganized mess of an office. Nothing more. Should you turn that place over I’m sure you’ll find the file you’re looking for. Don’t you have a button that flips the whole room anyway? Now go. Stop pestering me.”

  Alfonzo’s hands tightly grip Yellow Fury and Gold Justice. He respects Mu, but he’s never been one to tolerate his mind games. Or actual games. Bananas suck at games. He glances at his son who is also reaching for his guns.

  “Don’t pretend like I can’t see you drawing weapons on me,” Mu says. “I’m staring directly at you.”

  The Ronin grasps the hilt of his sword.

  “You would immediately resort to violence as the best possible course of action upon inability to maintain civil discussion?” Mu asks. “So be it. I refuse to be the first to draw, but should you attack me I think you’ll find yourselves rather shorter after this prolonged encounter of physical aggression.”

  Mu smirks and steps into a fighting stance, his hands resting on his sword.

  Alfonzo looks to his son and his grip loosens. His guns don’t feel quite right.

  “Son, maybe we’d be better off trying diplomacy this time.”

  “What? After all that tough talk earlier? After you so aptly demonstrated such a kill-em-all mentality? You’re backing down? No! We can’t let some little man with an over-sized butter knife get in our way, dad! We’re B. Nanas, dammit. We’re the master of this tower!”

  Armando pulls both his shotguns over his shoulder and pulls the triggers. Nothing happens. His rage subsides and confusion takes its place. When he looks at the barrels of his guns an orange line shimmers across both and the weapons slide neatly apart and fall to the floor.

  “W-what the h-hell just h-happened?” He asks. “You never even drew your blade!”

  “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 ci
vilization. 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.”

  Part XII: Janitorial Space Wizard

  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.

  Part XIII: Full Frontal

  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.