Cannibal Dwarf Detective: An Ephemeral Beardening (2 page)

Chapter 3
            Jeac and Armando
are walking through the back hallway that resides behind a large auditorium
used for police meetings and boring presentations. Jeac says, “I still can’t
believe you’re making me pay for your pipe.”

           
“I think you’re missing the point, Jeac. Jeac Fernando owes me pipe money. In a
few minutes you’re going to be Colonel Feac Jearnando. Feac doesn’t owe me any
money at all. The debt dies with you, “his boss replies. “Nice touch with the
afro, by the way.”

           
Jeac reaches up and strokes his hand over his head before saying, “Shit. I knew
I forgot to shave before I left my apartment this morning.”

           
They continue to walk until they reach a large blue door next to a curtain. On
the door someone has written, “Slag all cops!” An old cop in-joke. Only cops
ever wrote that on anything. Regardless, the city’s one police tower has been
divided into eight warring factions: the Sky-Cops; the NYPD, which stands for
Networked Yodeling Professionals Department; the Mafia; the Ronin (they prefer
swords to guns and have a penchant for tsujigiri); the Picassi (huge fans of
artist Pablo Picasso who traded in their guns for spray cans filled with
toxic-aerosol sludge); the A.M.M.D (Auto-Mobile Murder Division); the Banana
Brigade (of which Alfonzo is the leader and sole/peel member); and the
R.B.G.O.A.T.R.O.T.C.I.T.D.W.D.C.E.T.W.T.S.O.I.F (Really Big Group of all the
Rest of the Cops in the Department Who Didn’t Care Enough to Want to Split off
into Factions). R.B.G.O.A.T’s for short.

           
Armando places his hand on the blue door and looks up at the now stilt-equipped
dwarf with the fake mustache and epic fro and asks, “You ready for this? That
room is going to be filled with cops from every level of the tower.”

           
“I think I’m ready, chief. It’s about time Jeac died.”

           
“I try as hard as I can to control all the groups and get them to work
together, but they still vie for control of the tower. Your goof up is just one
more political scramble for the Sky Cops to gain a foothold in the lower
levels. They want your blood. Don’t let that fake mustache drop off your face.”

           
Jeac nods one last time, indicating he’s ready for the press conference, and
they head through the door. They walk on stage together and look out at the
crowd of cops before them. The Sky Cops with their gold-plated helmets,
jetpacks, and short shorts sit in the front row yelling obscenities about Jeac
and asking where he is. The Ronin sit silently in the back with their katanas at
their sides and the Banana Brigade, or rather, Alfonzo, sits facing the wrong
way. The Picassi are vandalizing the backs of all the chairs in the room but
stop as soon as they see Armando approach the center-stage pedestal.

Meanwhile, the few attending Mafiosi
are extorting members of the R.B.G.O.A.T.R.O.T.C.I.T.D.W.W.C.E.T.W.T.S.O.I.F (I
am so done with this acronym) who are standing by the food and snack services
table, gorging themselves on all manner of donuts and coffee with excessive
amounts of creamer.

One large member of the A.M.M.D sits
parked in the far left back corner of the auditorium, crushing two thirds of
the N.Y.P.D under its still rotating, chainsaw-like tank treads. One member
both yodels and defecates as he passes into oblivion, solidifying the name of
their faction beyond any reasonable doubt.
            “Attention,
everyone!” Armando taps the microphone on the pedestal and it makes an
annoying, high-pitched static sound. An A.M.M.D member seems offended by the
noise and, rearing up, smashes through the brick wall and drives away. “Well,
almost everyone. I see the only people paying attention here are the Sky-Cops.”

           
Still facing the wrong way, Alfonzo shouts, “yep!”

           
“Where the hell is Jeac, Armando?” A Sky-Cop so overweight his armor has had to
be re-fitted four hundred times asks. “He came up into our jurisdiction. He’s
ours. Punishment for illegal cross-jurisdictional violence without the proper
permits is death by repeated kicking from all members of the Sky-Cops.”

           
“And I know that, Sky-Cop 010234. But I have some bad news. Grave news in fact.
Jeac died! Eaten by his own Peruvian raptor, which then flew off, never to be
seen again. So, as you can see, you and your Sky-Cop Brethren can’t have Jeac.
Because he’s dead.”

           
“That all sounds rather convenient, chief. Are you sure he’s dead? I mean,
who’s that tall guy with the ‘stache and sexy fro standing next to you? Looks a
lot like a taller, harrier version of Jeac if you ask me.”

           
“You’re fired!” Armando shouts as he pulls the trigger on his massive .45,
blowing a hole through the head of the Sky-Cop. “One. Don’t ask stupid
questions! Two. A harrier is a jet. This man is more hairy. Sky-Cop 010235,
you’re now leader of the Sky-Cops. This guy standing next to me is not
Jeac-Fernando. His name is Colonel Feac-Jernando. See? He’s different because
he’s not only taller and
more hairy
, but also a colonel. So let’s all
just welcome him to the force and then promptly leave the room and head back to
our respective floors.”

Sky-Cop 010235 looks at
his compatriots before flicking a comically large red switch on the side of his
jetpack and standing up. The power of the blast from the packs causes a
shockwave that knocks over their seats and sends them ricocheting around the
room. The cops crash through the ceiling and debris falls everywhere. They
continue upwards, smashing through additional floors of the city-building.
Artificial light from the cities above shines down. At the farthest point, a
pin-prick of white light like a solitary star closes into darkness as the
Sky-Cops vanish. The remaining police factions leave in far less asshole-ish
fashion.

Chapter 4

 Chapter 5
            Feac wakes
up with the most intense hangover a dwarf can possibly have. He’s surrounded by
literally all the toilet paper from the bathrooms and personnel lockers in
B-sec. The room is so thick with it he can’t see out of his window, which he
couldn’t see out of anyway because the brick wall of the adjacent building was
blocking it. Instead of calling the janitorial precinct he decides to take
matters into his own, hotdog-like hands, and he wraps himself in as much of the
toilet paper as possible.

           
Looking like a mummy, he waddles towards a second, un-blocked window and opens
it. He pulls himself up onto the sill and then dives headlong into the darkened
city below. The toilet paper he’s wearing begins to unravel but he’s wrapped it
around his arms in such a way that it opens like a parachute. He gently touches
down… on a cactus patch.

           
The toilet paper catches on the tallest of the cacti and he begins furiously
swinging his arms in an attempt to escape the paper holding his body. As he
writhes in pain, the paper grows tighter like the muscle-laden coils of a boa
constrictor tightening around a baby or a kitten or something equally cute that
people care about.
             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.