Chapter Twelve: Can’t You See They’re All Very Horny?

Real MFG's original story by Max Gardner and Travis Taylor

“Eating apple pies when Ma Double’s rockin’ rhymes,

 You know they on my nuts hus, they climb, they climb.”

            --The Goats

            Miles shielded his eyes from the sun as he and Word entered the village of Shaotang, half a day’s walk from the edge of the Sycamore Forest.  The Shitty-shama had split up following their final meeting, most to rally other clans behind theirs, others to deliver threats to those clans who might be less sympathetic to their cause.  Miles couldn’t argue with Sergeant Fran’s logic; his clan was strong enough to take down any other who refused to join him, and with enough strength and soldiers, this chaotic, clan-based system of rule (if it could even be considered a system--Miles had come to view it more as an ongoing territorial dispute over various territories none of the involved parties genuinely cared about) would fall beneath the fist of a stronger and ultimately unified force.  Miles felt a certain degree of pride at his position in what would undoubtedly prove a decisive battle, when all lines had been drawn and the clans clashed in one final confrontation.

            Shaotang was a modest town, its houses ranging from large and fanciful to lower than those Miles had seen in the degenerate town.  A large main street ran down its center, dividing the village in two, and a series of merchants, bakers, and peddlers of stolen goods had set up makeshift shops and tables of their various wares.  The old men here, Miles noticed, looked quite a bit younger than those he had seen in Adirolf, and he concluded that it was something about their eyebrows.

            “Hey.  Piss off--shithead.”

            The man was of average stature, and Miles found his eyebrows somehow disturbing in their angle and color.  The expression on his face resembled that of a malnourished squirrel defending its hoard of nuts.

            “Who’s a shithead?” Miles asked quietly.

            “Yyyyou are!” the white-clad man replied emphatically, pointing at Miles.  Through some odd manner of vocalization, his words came separately from the movements of his mouth, as though he had been saying something entirely different and a skilled magician had switched his words with those of another man.  Perhaps this was a type of ventriloquist, boasting his talents.

            He was about to unharness Bizkicka and let it speak its own language to this impetuous punk when he noticed a familiar figure in red haggling with a poor merchant across the square.  Beside him stood a thin, bony figure who, Miles admitted reluctantly, resembled a chicken in his posture and speech.  He imagined that, out of the six of them (seven, including Fernando’s rock), Bumpy would be the first to open his mouth during a rainstorm and drown.  Miles jogged across the market to meet the two of them while Word sauntered off to seek entertainment elsewhere.  Miles saw that he had discarded his heart-patterned underpants in favor of a pair with a King Elevuhn pattern which matched his shirt.  He shrugged.

            “Yo, home skillet,” Santa nodded.

            “Hey buddy!” Bumpy smiled broadly until it seemed as though his head would fall apart.  “Man, you should’ve seen all these guys when Nasty turned into the demon beast and ripped through this place.  Santa got her the meth just in time.”

            “Oh, perfect,” Miles sighed.

            “Hey Miles,” Nasty said brightly, leaping down from the roof of a nearby wagon where she, Fernando, Bob, and Fernando’s rock had been admiring that curious winter phenomenon of a gray sky accompanied by a painfully bright sun which seemed almost out of place in the face of the approaching cold.  “So what happened with the Shitty-shama?”

            “Long story,” Miles said, and abruptly remembered the scrolls with which he had been entrusted by Fran.  “Got something here for everybody from Sergeant Fran, he sends his best.” He began to read from the first scroll with an increasingly nagging dislike of the Shitty-shama chief.  To each his own way, he supposed.  “To the Round One: Best of luck in any future endeavors to decrease your size, as you must do so if you hope to become a warrior in any army.  To the young chicken man: One day you shall find your way, whatever that may be.  To the nerdish wizard: Obey your master Miles as if he were your own father.  To the Atlantean female: May you always be ripe with child, and may the Great Wendt someday bless you with a larger bust that you may sufficiently nurse whatever future warriors you may spawn.  To--”

            Nasty Bitch drew back a hand and slapped Miles across the face hard enough to leave an impressive red welt.  Bumpy clucked in surprise, and Santa was too stunned to let out his usual string of profanity and lewdness.

            She hit me, Miles thought, unable to speak.

            “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Nasty hissed, her eyes burning furiously as she stormed off across the marketplace, presumably toward the nearest inn.  “He’s one of them now.  Santa, see if you can cook up something to burn off a little of his ego.”

            She hit me.

            Santa followed, casting an angry glance at Miles as he did, and Bumpy jogged along after his hero, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye.  Fernando grabbed his boulder with both hands and staggered off after them.

            “Don’t kill the messenger,” Miles wheezed around the lump in his throat.

            Wendt dammit.

            Miles had heard that Shaotang had interesting food, as long as one made sure that the chef didn’t put bits and pieces of missing neighborhood pets in them. He stalked off in the pursuit of such vittles.

            After an hour of walking, Miles found himself in an alley, in front of a restaurant called The Lucky Kitty. The smell of exotic vegetables and probably illicit chemicals wafted out. He shrugged before entering.

            The restaurant was mostly decorated with a dark red color, and had various sculptures, bas-reliefs, and paintings of long, fairly goofy looking dragons. There were several customers chatting with one another, or devouring large plates of oily noodles. Miles noted with an indifferent curiosity that Word was sitting at a table in the corner. In addition to his usual garb, he had a black bandanna with a yin-yang emblem wrapped around his head.

            Miles sat down and waved a waiter over. The waiter was a gaunt man, with a perpetual smile plastered onto his face.

            “Noodles,” Miles said.

            “We have sesame, stir-fried--”

            “Noodles. A few vegetables. The rest is up to you entirely.”

            “You.” Miles glanced up from the polished wooden table, and it took him a moment to realize that the black-clad man who had spoken had in fact been addressing Word, who slowly removed his cigarette from his mouth and inhaled the better portion of his bowl of noodles.  The black-clad martial artist, peeved at the zombie’s nonchalance, raised an accusatory finger.  “Bastard over there.  I bet you think you can beat someone like me.  Heh.  You bastard.  If you wanna be brave, fight me now.  My kung fu is better than yours.”

            Miles remained unenlightened as to the initial nature of this altercation--Word didn’t seem the type to provoke a fight, and the black-clad man didn’t look smart enough to accomplish such a thing.  Word lurched forward out of his chair and tackled the angry man, taking a sizable bite out of his shoulder as he did.  He followed this rather disgusting spectacle with a bite to the neck, severing some major artery and spraying blood across a passing waiter, who dropped his tray of food and rushed off to wash his uniform, babbling like an agitated monkey.  Word dragged his prey back to his table by the collar and doused what remained of his throat in a yellowish-orange sauce, entirely forgetting his bowl of noodles.

            “Your kung fu is pretty good,” an old man remarked as he took a seat across from the undead creature.

            “Word,” Word said from around a mouthful of ragged flesh. Miles noted that the odd ventriloquist ability that the people of this town had also applied to Word, as did the strangely distorted speech, which made every word sound as if it had been spoken into a tin can.

            “Buddy!” Bumpyentered the restaurant, once more wearing Nasty’s brassiere on his head.

            “Shit. How’d you find me here?”

            “I dunno. I just got the munchies.”

            “Look over at Word to solve that.” Bumpy cast a red-eyed gaze in Word’s direction before turning a greenish hue.

            “Eeeewww....”

            “Let’s go, Bumpy.” Miles threw a few coins onto the table before exiting the establishment.  “Where’d you get the drugs, Bumpy?”

            “Oh...the leader of the town kicks ass! He has a big room with all of those things...the uh...long things...that you put the greenish leafy stuff into...and uh...smoke...?”

            “I get the idea.” Bumpy was having difficulties walking in a straight line.

            “Word’s pretty gross.” Miles shrugged.

            “Whatever. I’ve seen worse. Crackhorn eats cats, Word eats people.”

            “I really don’t look like a chicken, do I? Maybe it’s that thing for killing that chicken thing, the one that went BAWK!” Miles reached for Bizkicka.

            “You don’t look like a chicken when you turn that way.” Bumpy turned around for a second.

            Miles rubbed the blood off of Bizkicka’s spike before continuing on his way.

            Leader of the town, eh? Maybe Nasty’s there.

            Miles had upset people before, but never really cared that much. He didn’t like to see Nasty offended, but she failed to recognize how important the Shitty-shama were. They were what he was. It made sense to him, it felt good to have a group of people who regard you as family, who share the same heritage. It felt good to have a direction, even if it was crushing everyone weaker than he under his boot. As if on cue, he noticed a cockroach near his foot.

            Miles was about to stomp it, but was stopped by the strange appearance of the insect. Something about the roach looked....princely. It looked up at him for a moment. He heard organ music start up from nowhere in particular, before the roach spoke.

            “Dearly beloved-”

            Miles decided that he didn’t need anything else weird to happen to him, and crushed the talking little roach under his foot.

            Loser. All losers. Everywhere.

            The Emperor of Shaotang lived within a large and elegant house on the far edge of town.  This imposing structure was perhaps three times the size of the peasant houses he had seen in the town proper, and around it, in a series of painstakingly cultivated gardens of green plants, frolicked an abundance of cats, several of which Miles captured and tucked into his belt on Crackhorn’s behalf.  As he knocked at the intricately carved wooden doors and someone--presumably one of the Emperor’s servants--opened them to receive the new guest, Miles’ nostrils were suddenly assaulted by an outlandish odor from within the establishment which made him feel as if his brain had grown spikes.  He rubbed his eyes and blinked, the scene before him slowly coming into focus.

            The Emperor was a blonde-haired man with unusually tanned skin who had apparently consulted Word on matters of fashion and had gone one step lower; he wore only a pair of disturbingly tight orange underpants, and in one hand was a pipe nearly as long as Nasty was tall.  In his free hand was clutched a large, oblong board with a fin jutting from one end.  A row of similar contraptions rested along the far wall of the house’s interior, each more irritatingly colorful than the last.  A strikingly accurate portrait of the Emperor hung above the man himself, who lounged in a large wicker chair in the center of the room, surrounded by an ocean of pillows.  On this ocean bobbed Santa Claus, a pipe resting on his stomach, Fernando and his rock, and Nasty, who had obviously taken no note of the fact that she had left her robe unbuttoned when she had given Bumpy his odd headpiece.  Miles frowned and tossed the Atlantean her brassiere, debating whether or not he should say something, and finally flopped down onto the fringed cushion beside Santa.  The Emperor nodded and extended a hand.  Miles took it and immediately felt as though his own hand had been closed in a vise.

            Oh, man, he thought.  This is way out there.

            “I’m Dio,” the Emperor introduced himself, and slapped a pipe into Miles’ palm.

            “I find it ironic,” Nasty remarked, lifting an admonishing finger in Fernando’s direction, “that the only one of us who isn’t stoned is that damn rock.”

            “Hey, buddies,” Bumpy remarked, bursting through the door with pipe in hand and diving into the sea of cushions.  “Y’know, I’ve been thinking.  We gotta make a choice sometime.  I mean, for starters, choose life.  Choose Santa Claus.  Choose a fuckin’ hot Atlantean who turns into the demon beast and kicks your ase to the fuckin’ curb.  Choose mean old chickens.  Choose rotting away at the end of it all in some miserable ditch in Adirolf, and coming back to life five minutes later.”

            “Choose a spiked fuckin’ bat,” Miles added, puffing lazily on his pipe.  The room had taken on a sudden startling clarity, as if a film of dust had been wiped from his eyes.  “Choose the Shitty-shama.”

            “No, buddy, choose lif-hey wait, put that do-” Miles flung Fernando’s one true love at Bumpy. With the exception of Fernando, the entire room erupted into a burst of giggles.

            “Hey...how dare you treat my one true love like that...that was really....rude.” Bob appeared from behind him, his fiery form looking a bit more blurry than usual.

            “Calm down, you little dweeb.” A short burst of flame lit Fernando’s pipe. For added measure, Bob also joltedFernando out of his seat by lighting the cushion underneath him.

            “AAAAAAHHH!! MAH ASS!”

            The room once again erupted into unrestrained giggling.

            “Hey, Santa, what the hell’s that?” Miles asked, noticing some manner of toy which Santa had constructed out of odds and ends he had found among the pillows, a clear tube the length of Miles’ arm, terminating in a greenish bulb lined with gold rings.

            “Think I’ll call it a bong,” Santa shrugged, setting his opus on the cushion beside him.

            “Hey!” Bumpy exclaimed, and abruptly collapsed laughing.  Miles groaned, anticipating another story concerning the evil chicken or some such thing.  “Hey, I--listen to this, guys.  What--what’s big and pink and drags on the ocean floor?” He paused, expecting no answer.  “Moby’s Dick!”

            His tittering, birdlike laughter died as none of his companions laughed at this rather cryptic statement.

            “What the hell are you talking about?” Dio inquired, taking another puff on his pipe.

            “Uh...the whale...?”

            “What’s a whale?”

            Bumpy scratched his chin, before shrugging. “Well...um, I dunno.  Just popped into my head and I thought it was pretty funny.”

            “Hey Dio, you ever see a little teddy bear guy who looks like he has a mouse glued onto his upper lip?” Miles asked, setting his pipe on the pillow beside him and staggering to the door for a breath of fresh air as a sudden feeling of nausea grabbed him by the throat.  The influx of cold winter air brought on a convulsive fit of coughing.

            “Well that’s a new one,” Dio remarked, turning Santa’s new toy over in his hands in an attempt to discern its function. 

            Miles was tempted to pursue the Paul angle, but he figured that someone like Dio wouldn’t mix with someone like Paul. Besides, his brain cells were a bit too fluffy to actually do anything like follow a line of questioning. Instead, his attention turned to a lengthy procession, peasants, merchants, and higher classes alike, which had gathered at the south wall of a large coliseum Miles had noted on his first circuit of the marketplace.  Peering blurry-eyed along the length of this assembly, Miles saw a large wooden gate, plated with what appeared to be liquid gold and boasting an impressive collection of posters and advertisements, set into the coliseum wall.  Alongside the first line stood a second, considerably shorter, its members each boasting an individuality which the first line did not--the peasants and merchants all wore some shade of brown, and the nobles were clad in gaudy red-and-gold apparel.  Miles rubbed his eyes and blinked as he recognized a figure near the center of this second line: it was the pale-faced, green-eyed man he had glimpsed on the path to the Shitty-shama training cave.  The wide, circular brim of his black hat obscured his face, but Miles remembered clearly, even in his current state of fuzziness, the pocketed pants and leather jacket.

            “Hey, um...” Miles snapped his fingers repeatedly, attempting to remember the Emperor’s name.  “Dio.  What’s with the parade?”

            “Huh?” Dio rose to his bare, callused feet with some difficulty and grasped the doorframe for support, squinting at the sunlight as he surveyed the assembled townsfolk.  “Oh, hey, I forgot about that.  It’s the...the day of the annual tournament we have every year.  Lots of guys who want money pair off and beat the crap out of each other, it’s kinda fun to watch.  Want to go? I’m supposed to be there anyway.  Master of ceremonies.  That’s me.” He thumped his chest proudly and Miles cringed at his vaguely unsettling musculature.  Dio looked his guest up and down and finally nodded in satisfaction.  “You look like you’d be pretty good in a fight yourself.  Not too late to enter.”

            “Maybe next year,” Miles said, dismissing the offer as politely as possible with a wave of his hand.  His mind had shaken off enough of the potent green plant’s effects to remind him that, should he enter this potentially deadly contest in his present mental condition, he might, with luck on his side, be able to glance down at the sword protruding from his chest and laugh before he collapsed in the dust.  Nevertheless, the spectacle might prove interesting so long as he remained an observer, and he sauntered, Wordlike, after the Shaotang Emperor, who exited his mansion through a small and inconspicuous wooden door at the end of the series of oblong boards, on whose purpose Miles could only speculate.  Nasty, Bumpy, and Santa followed at a distance, and Miles took the liberty of falling behind and buttoning Nasty’s robe--such oversights inevitably seemed to render any given situation far more complicated than it had to be, as the elderly citizens of Adirolf would attest to.  Her eyes narrowed and she opened her lipless mouth as if to say something, but closed it a moment later and continued silently along the dirt path Dio had carved from the bamboo forest surrounding the rear portion of his abode.  Perhaps, Miles speculated, Atlanteans recovered from the effects of Dio’s drug faster than did his own species.  Fernando, struggling to lift his rock, had lost his spectacles and was searching for them among the sea of pillows.

            “Wow,” Miles remarked, jogging unevenly in order to keep up with Dio’s majestic stride.  The sunlight, filtering through the thin but impressively tall stalks of bamboo on either side of the path, hurt his eyes.  “It’s really bright out.  Lots of colors....”

            “Sorry,” Bumpy apologized, eyes drooping.  Miles frowned and thought what an odd little glitch in the fabric of sanity this boy was.  Even in the words of madmen he had encountered previous to his incarceration at the hands of the midgets of Blacklodge, he had been able to glean some convoluted meaning, even, on occasion, to put their advice to use.  Bumpy, on the other hand, was quite simply warped without any hint of explanation, and Miles often felt as if the very idea of asking for one was idiotic.  Maybe the Great Wendt had hit his head prior to the boy’s creation.

            The arena in which the tournament was to be held was a rectangular structure, its four walls high enough to prevent escape by any participants seeking to run from a fight, and along its walls ran a series of steps wide enough for the townsfolk to sit on.  Assembled to one side of the primary arena was a second rectangular area in which had been planted a grid of bamboo stalks, each cut roughly at eye level.  Miles had once heard of certain fighting masters who were able to balance on these stalks while engaged in combat.

            “I think this is, like...our seat,” Dio said, gesturing to a filthy white mattress set at the center of the nearest row of stairs.  Miles remembered a similar mattress from his cell in Blacklodge.  A small roof above this strange throne provided some degree of shade.  Dio stretched his arms and lay on his side, wavinglazily to the roaring crowds which had assembled along the walls to watch the combatants.  He rummaged through a stack of thick white paper beside him, and, although Miles couldn’t have read the strange characters of the Shaotang even clear-headed, he assumed them to be the names of the fighters.

            “Okay,” Dio announced, his voice suddenly booming and strangely similar to the slightly garbled speech of his subjects, “from the golden gate we have last year’s tournament champion...the Beast from Whitelodge...Chexuuuuu!!!”

            The warrior who emerged from the gate Miles had seen from the porch of Dio’s house was an amazingly tall and gaunt figure dressed from head to toe in a loosely-fitting, checkered black-and-white outfit which provided some protection from physical blows and did little to hamper overall mobility, but Miles couldn’t imagine it would be particularly effective against the stroke of a sword or a knife.  In one hand, Chexu clutched a weapon the likes of which Miles had never seen before: a square, gridlike device forged out of some dark metal, lined on its edges with a series of gleaming blades each an inch in length.  His bony face registered no emotion, nor did the blinding glare of his massive, bald skull.  He reached the center of the ring in three steps and stood with his strange weapon.

            “And the challenger....Boooooooooob the BIIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGG!” A large, rotund man appeared from the other side. He affected a bicep flex in Chexu’s direction, whereupon Chexu flung his strange weapon, cutting off Bob the Big’s big head.

            “That kinda sucked,” Miles said, scratching his chin.

            The next few battles were fairly lackluster, until Miles saw a familiar figure shamble onto the arena.

            “And noowww......the miiiiiggghhh-teeeeeeeee WWWWOOOOOOORRRD!”

            “This should be funny.” Santa said, puffing heartily on his new invention.

            “Versus the Drunken Master from Alcotown...Billiam the Billowiiiiiiinnnnggg!” Dio was really getting into the announcing role, Miles thought.

            A nondescript young man entered from the other side. He looked like a fairly typical commoner in his late teens or early twenties, except he was staggering around at a gait which rivaled Word’s own.  In one hand he grasped his weapon, which Miles noticed was a large bottle of BD’s malt brew.

            “Huh huh,” Miles chuckled.  “Billiam the Blasted.”

            The battle was rather quick and unceremonious: Billiam wound his arm back several times and tossed his bottle of malt beverage; it connected with Word’s head with a dull, meaty thud and shattered on contact with the ground.  Billiam let out a drunken guffaw, and Word scratched his head in confusion.  His opponent turned to the assembled crowd and waved his arms happily before pointing at Word’s boxers.

            “Word....”

            “Heeeeey, ever wonder what this guy looks like naked?” He lunged forward, grabbing the elastic waist of the zombie’s Elevuhn-patterned boxer shorts and yanking sharply.  Beneath this pair was another, a tessellating pattern of teddy bears.  Billiam frowned, disappointed, and pulled the teddy-bear boxers to Word’s ankles.  Another set of heart-patterned underwear.  And yet another under that, this one boasting a design of smiling yellow faces like that he had seen on the old man’s button in Adirolf.  Billiam uttered a triumphant battle cry and pulled Word’s last pair of boxers off.  Miles, suddenly and brutally clear-minded, sat bolt upright, eyes wide.  Beside him, Santa stopped puffing on his new toy and shook his head in disbelief.  Nasty, leaning forward in her seat with her mouth agape in awe, nearly fell into the arena.  Bumpy collapsed laughing.  Fernando, arriving with the rock held in the crook of his arm, dropped it on his foot and began screaming.  The rock bounced down two rows of stairs, almost as if it had a mind of its own, before coming to a halt.

            “Oh, man, “ Dio said.  “No wonder he doesn’t wear pants, they just don’t fit.”

            Word scratched his head again and pointed to the exclamation point on his shirt.  He pulled his many boxers up and kicked Billiam the Billowing’s head clear across the arena, where it came to rest at the base of the north wall.

            “Word,” he said.

            The audience all started applauding the mighty, if not surreal, warrior. Word bowed with surprising grace before shambling off to wait for his next battle.  The following battle provided an interesting spectacle, if only for the rather odd appearance of its two participants: Chexu had done well for himself in the previous combats, and his opponent was a vaguely rectangular creature twice his size which resembled something between a block of plastic, a piece of tape, and a cow.  It had no neck, and its face was a masklike construction set into its broad shoulders.  This creature shambled out awkwardly on a pair of thin, stubby legs which didn’t look as though they would support the rest of its body for long.  At the cow-thing’s center was a gleaming red sphere, perhaps some kind of gem.  As the creature moved to clash with Chexu, its flat, tapelike arms folded out like reams of paper and rested at its sides, waving slightly in the breeze.

            “I see you are bold and zesty!” the monster remarked in an unusually high-pitched voice as it dodged Chexu’s blows.

            “I am more than that, you bastard,” Chexu replied, throwing his weapon, which, Miles noticed, was attached to a strong chain.  The square object imbedded itself in the red jewel in the pseudo-bovine creature’s torso (although, in truth, its entire body might have been considered a torso).  The alien fell flat onto the packed dirt of the combat area, lifeless.  Chexu laughed heartily.  “I am also robust!”

            “Everybody here likes to say ‘bastard’ a lot, don’t they?” Miles observed.

            “It’s their way,” Dio shrugged, shuffling through the stacks of paper before him.  “We are nearing the close of this year’s tournament,” he announced, “and we have a mighty battle indeed! From the golden gate we once again have Chexuuuuuuu!” Chexu struck a pose in the center of the arena.  “And from the dragon gate, a last-minute entry, never before seen within these four walls...the IIIIII!NNNNN! SSSSSSS!!!!”

            Miles recognized this “INS” as the practically-dressed man from the Sycamore Forest path.  The man did a quick scan of his immediate surroundings, his flaming green eyes taking in everything around him. He then looked at Chexu, who was doing elaborate poses with his strange grid weapons. INS stood staring at him, waiting.

            Chexu flung several smaller of the grid weapons in INS’ direction. Miles stood in awe of how quickly he moved, not with any degree of stealth or grace, but just a tendency to not be in the way of danger. One or two of the projectiles clipped his coat, however. INS rolled to the ground, picking up several of the objects, and threw them back at Chexu.

            “AAAGH! Damn you, you dirty dog!” Chexu howled, clutching his mangled hand. Miles could see that a few of his fingers were missing, and the rest were covered in blood.

            INS darted toward Chexu, who brandished a larger gridlike weapon at him. He faked a dodge to a side of the unusual instrument, and then moved underneath it, delivering a blow to Chexu’s chest. INS then took the unusual weapon, and without hesitation, decapitated his opponent. The crowd howled with glee at this, but INS didn’t seem to notice. He turned toward where Miles and Dio sat, and strode toward them with an evenness and balance that caused everyone near him to step aside.

            Miles found once again that he couldn’t meet the other man’s stare.

            “I’d like my money please,” he said with a flat, entirely businesslike voice.

            “Why certainly, sir, and you’re welcome to join the festivi-”

            “No. I would like the reward as soon as possible.”

            Dio removed a pouch of gold coins from within his tight orange underwear and tossed it to the wild-eyed man, who snatched it out of the air and stuffed it into absently into one of his many pockets.  Miles was considering asking INS to join the posse and continue along the path to Whitelodge (and the inevitable clash of the clans, wherever and whenever that might take place) when he noticed two things: that he suddenly couldn’t speak, and that INS himself had vanished into the crowd like a shadow chased away by the sunlight.

            “Guy’s kind of a freak,” Dio remarked.

            “Did it just get a lot colder?” Nasty inquired, scratching her head.

            “Hey, you guys can stay for the feast and stuff if you want,” Dio suggested.  “We’ll have some brew, it should be pretty sweet.”

            “We’ve got a ways to go,” Miles said as he abruptly regained his voice, shaking his head.  Something was wrong here--he and the posse had been here for a day, and the town hadn’t been decimated.  Perhaps they should leave while they were ahead.  “We wouldn’t want to impose on you any more than we have.  Thanks for the offer though.”

            “Come back anytime, dude,” Dio said, once again under the influence of the green plant, a stash of which he had apparently kept alongside INS’s money pouch.

            Crackhorn, Miles noticed as he and the others purchased a few basics for the road--an extra tank of meth, a good supply of bread and fried bean cakes, various sets of clothes--had been scribbled on by some impudent peasant with a can of red paint, and Miles was glad he couldn’t read the characters, as they were doubtlessly obscene.  Word had already taken his seat near the back of the Stun Zeed, and was smoking a cigarette.  Miles and Nasty hopped into the wide seat atop the harness, and Fernando came staggering across the marketplace with his rock as Santa and Bumpy filed into the Truck, laden with supplies.  Jimmy and Sub-Woofer’s absence had freed up quite a bit of space, and all of them fit easily.

            “Damn, I think she’s getting heavier,” Fernando whined, eventually dragging the rock along behind him.

            “Word,” Word said.

            “What th--hey, what’s with that?” Fernando stumbled and fell as the rock apparently became lighter.

            Word shrugged.

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Chapter Thirteen: Moises Worth More Than My Life