Chapter Fourteen: Hey, MacLeod, Get Off My Ewe!

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

“Some get a little,

 And some get none.”

            --Naughty by Nature

            Miles spent that sleepless night and the better part of the next afternoon feeling as though his innards had been pulled out on a string and danced on.  He rubbed his eyes vigorously, attempting to drive away the pain in his head through the sockets.  He could have sworn he had had only a bottle or two of the Atlantean blue ribbon beer, but he had of course lost track after Nasty had introduced him to his new companion, which he had placed under his bed simply as a means of self-torture if nothing else.  He stood and stumbled off of his bed, landing painfully on his tailbone.

            “Why the hell am I SO FUCKIN’ HORNY!!!” he sobbed, kicking his legs.  He found himself staring at a pair of small, blue, three-toed feet, each toe terminating in a tiny, thornlike claw.  That’s pretty weird, he thought, his very thought currents causing him near-physical distress as they passed through the twisted remains of his brain.

            “You’ll get over it,” Nasty said, passing him a glass of water, which he eagerly downed, although most of it ended up on his face and tunic rather than in his mouth.  He leaned on her shoulder and staggered weakly to the door, where he found Santa Claus lying face-down in the corridor outside.  He had obviously passed out in the midst of executing a Blowtorch attack against Word, who crouched over the flame, holding out a stick with a pair of marshmallows.  He grinned toothlessly and nodded at Santa.

            “Wow, what a night,” Miles groaned, resting for a moment--crossing the distance between bed and door had really taken it out of him.

            “Word,” Word said, swallowing one of his marshmallows.  Santa snorted. A large blue burst of flame erupted from him. Word patted the small fires which had broken out on his head before regarding the blackened marshmallows in his hand. He flung them on the floor behind him and shambled off.

            “Uuuugghhh.....where’d y’go Rudolph? Honest...didn’ mean annithin by id....” Santa muttered before letting his head fall back into the puddle of vomit.

            “Nasty...” Nasty looked up at Miles. “I should probably apologize for last night, and tell you how genuinely sorry I am.” She gave a wan smile and started to speak before he cut her off. “But I won’t. Pull anything like that again and I’ll drop you off in that town full of Bumpys. Naked.”

            He wandered back to his room, ready for another four hours of sleep, which, as the Great Wendt had been singularly spiteful toward him during the past few days, never came.  He lay on his back for a time before reaching for another glass of water Nasty had left on the bedside stand and gulping it.  Get up, lazy bastard, his mind told him threateningly.  Get up, you’ve got to kill Paul, lead the Shitty-shama to their rightful place at the helm of this world, save these people from themselves and get them to Whitelodge, you’re their leader and they know it.  You are Miles.  Cat that won’t cop out when there’s zombies all about.  Sex machine to all the chicks.  Oh, hell, you were scared shitless in Raccoon Village and Nasty wouldn’t have tossed you in bed with a rock if you really had the method.

            He reluctantly limped to his door, noting absently that he had somehow acquired a large bruise on his shin.  He wrapped himself in his thick white bedsheet with as dramatic a flourish as he could manage in his present condition, though he later decided, when confronted with his image in a well-polished Atlantean shield, that the effect was not precisely that of the haunted loner he knew he was so much as a human head resting atop a pile of mashed potatoes.  He shouldn’t have been shocked, he supposed--he had simply assumed that Nasty, as a priest, a female, a confused amnesiac, was incapable of anything but goodness, and she had given him a mental kick in the balls for it.  Fran would have slapped him heartily upside the head if he found out about this, and undoubtedly thrown Nasty to his underlings like a leg of mutton to a pack of dogs.  “Kiss my rosy red ass,” he would have said.  And then, “Don’t take that from a woman--say HEY! Get back in that tent and make me some pie!”

            Santa and Word had vanished, and as Miles made his way toward the throne room, he was seized by a sudden mind-numbing loneliness.  None of them trusted him, he could feel it in the way they looked at him.  Perhaps Nasty had, but he’d made a mess of that as well.  He wondered how hard he would have to smack the ceiling to crack the glass and bring the ocean above crashing down on him with all its teeth and stingers and poison.

            “Wendt, how the hell did I get into this?” he groaned, pounding his fists against the nearest wall.  He would have been content to rewind his life to that moment when he had set off on the path through the Sycamore Forest and change his mind, take a fork in the road and end up in another town, continue on from there.  But time, as the disembodied voice which had called itself Leela had pointed out, did not stop for him.  He had a purpose now, and it frightened him more than any zombie or Voight Beast.

            The throne room had taken on some semblance of order after the previous night’s revelry had ended, although the walls and floor still bore stains of indeterminate nature, most caused, no doubt, by Word, who had failed to wash the custard off of his face and extract the spiked fruit which Moe had imbedded between his rotting shouldablades.  Moe and Curly stood on either side of Nasty, who slumped awkwardly in a throne which seemed far too large for her form.  An assortment of gold and jeweled objects had been thrown around her neck and placed on her wrists.  She didn’t look entirely happy with this turn of events.

            “Let’s, um...get to that place,” Miles said, and nodded.  “Whitelodge.  Um...Wendt damn.  Let’s just sleep for a week or so and then get going, I...wow.”

            Santa had been carried, still unconscious, to the banquet table, where he sat between Word and Larry, both of whom looked to be slightly better off than Miles in terms of post-alcoholic recovery.  Miles at first thought that Word had eaten someone, but then realized that his face was in fact smothered completely in red lipstick marks.  Bumpy was seated cross-legged in the center of the table, brassiere still tied in place around his head.  His cheeks seemed to radiate a crimson light.  Miles sat down heavily beside the zombie, reaching for a pot of coffee which one of the guards set out before him.  He drank half the pot and bowed his face to the table.

            “You coming to Whitelodge with us, Nasty?” he asked, every word stinging the scalded roof of his mouth.

            “I--I can’t,” she said, glancing at Moe and Curly, apparently her jailers as well as her minions.  “Sorry, I, um...this just isn’t me, is it? I feel like an idiot.”

            “Join the club,” Miles replied, pounding the side of his head against the smooth stone.  Pain.  Pain would wake him up.  “Yo.  Yo Santa, wake up.  Wake up, Santa.  Wake....”

            Miles punched halfheartedly at the rotund man’s shoulder and he awoke with a breath which seemed a gust of air from a foul crypt.

            “Gotta go, Miles,” he said, his words still slurred.  “Gotta go find the reindeer.”

            “What the hell are you talking about?”

            “The Nine Reindeer of the Northern Wastes,” Santa said, squinting at the torchlight.  “They...they ran away from me after she died, I have to...get them back, have to...sleep’s what I have to.”

            One of the guards served Miles another pot of coffee.

            “All right...” Miles said, trying to ignore the fact that every single nerve cell in his body was screaming at him, “so what now?”

            “I’m going to find the reindeer with Santa,” Bumpy said. Miles grunted. Bumpy was a pain in the ass, but he had always been fairly loyal to him before.

            “All right, Santa and Bumpy are out...Nasty?” She turned toward Miles.

            “As silly as I think this whole battle...er....thing is, I don’t think Paul and Sting should be allowed to go running around turning entire towns into zombies and arming the Rammstein clan with deadly chemicals.”

            “You’re coming with me, then?”

            “No.” Miles shrugged.

            “But, seeing as how I can order these people around a bit, I’ll send you some help.”

            “Thank you.” Nasty swallowed a few pills of aspirin before continuing.

            “You should be thankful. there are two reasons why I’m doing this. One is for you. That bit with the rock was pretty damn cruel, and I can see that this is important to you.” Miles nodded, still wincing at the thought. “Second, if the Shitty-shama do win the battle, and start getting ambitious about taking their prick-waving crusade to Atlantis, I want to show them that we have the means to destroy them, too.” Miles was skeptical at this, but he still nodded.

            “I guess I’ll need a crash course in how to fly one of those saucers, then,” Miles said.  “Or else somebody could drop me off in Whitelodge.  Don’t they have death rays or something? It’d come in handy when the clans finally get down to business.”

            “Well, I suppose they do,” Nasty said, rolling her eyes.  “Problem is, these people forget how to use them.  Apparently tying a few bricks to the bottom and flying in a low orbit works well enough.” She fell into an uncontrollable fit of giggling and buried her face in her hands.  “Damn, that’s really goofy, isn’t it?”

            “Well,” Miles replied, glancing at the still-drunken Santa and the small, froglike boy with the bra tied to his head, “I’d say goofy has become something of a relative term this past week.”

            “Point,” Nasty said, waving for another pot of coffee.  She had obviously gone through quite a few of them, as her hands were shaking violently and her eyes had widened to the size of coffee cups themselves.  It suddenly struck Miles that this situation simply was not right--Nasty was the one who had pegged the zombie cat with the bowgun, the one who had been kind enough to provide Miles and Bumpy with firewater that morning after they’d met her, and the only member of the posse who had the conviction to actually smack Miles in the head.  And the two of them now seemed to be on opposite sides of a chasm.  Nasty had risen to nobility faster than Miles himself ever could have, and she hadn’t even wanted it.  “I’d rather not say goodbye, because I know we’ll see each other again sometime.  Won’t we?”

            Miles shrugged and looked away, once again grateful to whomever had crafted the scarf over his nose and mouth.

            “When you boys are done pounding the crap out of each other,” Nasty said, “if the world’s still left standing, let’s meet back here, okay?”

            “Works for me,” Miles said.

            The lethal blue ribbon beer abruptly swerved around for a second assault, and he recalled only brief memories of the trip back to the surface.  No voices assaulted his ego or his patience during his sleep, and he regained consciousness some hours later on a dirt path presumably somewhere near the spot where the two sparring deities had unleashed the Voight Beast upon their party.  He and Word soon came upon the ruins of their campsite, a ring of stones, a pile of ash, a few tents which had since been torn to shreds by a winter storm.  Traveling with Word, he mused, Atlantean poet laureate or not, was inevitably a lonely (though hardly uninteresting) process.  The zombie regarded Miles curiously as he angrily kicked aside the stones around the remains of the campfire.  There was a good chance, after all, that he would not survive the coming battle, and an even better chance that, when the Shitty-shama claimed victory, he would be far too wrapped up in affairs of state and the like to return to Atlantis in the near future.  And the last thing he’d said to her had been, “Works for me.”

            There, he told himself, kicking the ashes around the campsite.  You see? You’re a stupid Miles. Stupid! Stupid!

            “Word,” Word said, placing a comforting hand on his shoulda.

            With no Gangsta Truck at their disposal, Whitelodge took another day and night to reach by foot, and for a moment Miles’ stomach clenched at what he would find beyond its white walls--houses and townsfolk alike torn apart, fires raging out of control, panic among the survivors.  Then he reminded himself that Nasty was no longer with him, and the tightening in his stomach moved up slightly, instead seizing his heart.  He shook off this unpleasant feeling as he and Word surveyed the town: intact, of course, oil lamps and candles burning in its windows, lanterns casting a dim yellow light across the cobblestone paths.  He noticed something odd about the structures themselves as he traversed the impressive network of streets with Word staggering disjointedly alongside: the houses were all quite large, even those which looked to be peasant homes, and the doors easily cleared Miles’ head by two feet.  It was as though some eccentric mage, passing through Whitelodge, had made the city itself grow somehow larger.  The mystery was dispelled as he saw a group of revelers laughing as they descended the wooden stairs of what appeared to be a bar.  All of them were at least equal in height to Chexu, the ill-fated martial artist he had seen in Shaotang, and the doors barely accommodated them as it was.  Miles tugged Word’s shoulder and they sauntered toward the bar.  A drink would be good.  To calm the nerves.

            To these people, Miles must have seemed a midget, and he hoped that none of them had been initiated into the Shitty-shama.  Although it seemed unlikely, he still remained on his guard, prepared to leap aside if a shaft of gold shot his way.  He took a seat at the bar and peered over the meticulously polished counter at the amazing assortment of alcoholic beverages the Whitelodgers kept in stock: bottles of blue ribbon brew twice the size of Miles’ head, flasks of whiskey and malt liquor far larger than any he had ever seen.  He liked these people.  Miles glanced over at a booth in a dimly lit corner of the bar and felt his stomach sink into his pelvis.  He was looking at a man he couldn’t possibly be looking at.  His tombstone, perhaps, but not the man himself.  There go my plans for Atlantean/Shitty-shama...um...peace talks, he thought sadly.

            “Hey, Miles!” Fernando de la Speedo called jovially, pointing to a senile old man who sat beside him in a booth.  There was something vampiric about this man, and Miles frowned as he lifted an arm, revealing a network of black lines along the shriveled flesh.  “Come on over, this guy’s making sense! Says he’s got something to tell you!”

            Miles rolled his eyes and left Word sitting at the bar, where a number of very large women had gathered around him and were in the process of getting him smashed.  The old man beside Fernando grabbed the ornate hanging light above him and turned it toward his face, casting strange shadows over his countenance as he spoke with a voice Miles would have, as a child, attributed to that vague standard of what a vampire should be.

            “Beware,” the old man said, clawing slowly at the air with a bony hand.  “Beware the big green dragon that sits on your doorstep.  It eatslittle boys...puppy dog tails...and beeeeg, fat snails.” He paused, took a drink and continued.  “Beware...take care....”

            “Mister, what’re you trying to--” Fernando began, and was cut off by a wave of the old man’s hand.

            “Wait!” he exclaimed, and then brought his hand down sharply.  “Pull the string! PULL THE STRING!”

            Miles, thoroughly frightened, set about questioning the summoner as to how he had survived the Voight Beast’s attack.

            “Well, Bob chickened out on me,” Fernando said with a glance over his shoulda.  “So I ran and hid behind a bush while that monster’s back was turned.  Crackhorn took off with the Truck, I found him later while I was walking here.  He’s outside tied to a post by the back door--they said I’d have to pay if I wanted to bring him inside.  But...this’s the weird thing.  After I hid in the bushes I watched the thing sniff around for a while trying to find me, and this little guy with a hat and a gray mustache came up to him and just put a hand around his shoulder, like he was an old friend.  Then the beast walked off with the little mousy guy.”

            “Paul,” Miles hissed through clenched teeth, feeling a spark of anger which would, soon enough, ignite a massive flame that would put any Fire Tower or Ass Furnace to shame.  His hands itched for the coming battle.  Bizkicka would drink deep.  “You see where the two of them ran off to?”

            “Don’t know where the Voight Beast is,” Fernando shrugged, and pointed to another booth across the bar.  “But the mousy guy is right over there.”

            Miles whirled in his seat to find himself face to face with Paul.  The strangely benign old man nodded silently, squinting his eyes, and then turned to Fernando.  “I’m Paul.”

            Miles leaped to his feet and grabbed Paul by the lapels of his coat.  “I’ve done some idiotic things in my life, Paul, but you just made ‘em all look smart.  I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting to wipe that stupid little mustache off your face.  You remember a place called Raccoon Village? Big town, lots of people.  Until you gave the Rammstein Clan that chemical.  You...you evil bastard.”

            “You were the one who killed all those zombies,” Paul replied.  “And for the record, I knew all this was going to happen.  I knew you’d sit here.”

            “I don’t give a damn what you know, I--” Miles’ sentence was left unfinished as he felt a sharp pain in the back of his neck.  He released his grip on Paul and fell back into the booth with a grunt.  Above him was a sweaty face, grinning maniacally.  Sting leaped from the booth behind him and stood at Paul’s side, his ribcage rising and falling with every breath.  Miles struggled to his feet and found himself pushed back into the booth and pinned beneath a bare, muscular foot.  He grimaced.  This was disgusting.

            “I also knew Fernando would be here,” Paul added.  “Sting, beat the crap out of him.  Miles, I am not a man to argue with.  You should know that by now.”

            Sting caught Fernando squarely across the face with a disturbing roundhouse kick.  The wizard flipped over the back of his seat and landed in the adjacent booth.  The oily man then lunged at Fernando, brandishing a strangely curved serrated knife. Miles swung the Bizkicka at Paul, who ducked, but also slipped on a puddle of beer.

            “Sting.” Paul didn’t look at all disturbed by the fact that the Bizkicka’s nail was being held to his jugular. Sting picked up Fernando and held his knife to his neck.

            “Nice li’l standoff, eh?” Sting leered again as Fernando started struggling in Sting’s vegetable shortening-like grasp.

            “Bob...toast him...”

    “uh...I really can’t...he might stab you or something.”

            “Bob!”

            “Look at this freak’s skin! It could ignite, and then where would you be, huh? Ever think about that, you little nerd?”

            Miles was torn. He could kill Paul, and let Fernando die. He’d bury the little bastard under his rock, and continue to improve Shitty-shama/Atlantean relations, so to speak. All it would take would have been a quick jerk of the Bizkicka.

            “What’s your choice, then, Miles? I know it. Do you?” Miles felt the veins on his neck stand up and every muscle in his body tense with the urge to kill the limp little man at his feet.

            “Wendt damn it! How the hell do you do it? Every fucking time!” Miles let Paul go, and Sting in turn released Fernando.

            “I’m Paul. I know these things.” Paul nodded at him with a short, jerky movement of his head before walking off, with Sting following closely behind. “See you at the battle, Miles. It should be interesting to see how it turns out. I can’t wait to see the Shitty-shama’s fate.” With that, he exited. Miles stood clutching the Bizkicka so hard his palm began to bleed.

            He stewed over the encounter and nursed away the humiliation with  a flagon of bitter ale which might more accurately have been called a barrel.  This was the second time he’d let Sting get the drop on him, and the second time he’d let Paul slip through his fingers (although he couldn’t have known what Paul was at the time--he now knew, one way or another, that this man was more than simply the leader of the Tang Clan).  Fernando poured a bottle of beer over the rock, which sat on the table before him.  Miles’ skin tingled, itching to grab the skinny little man and twist his head around on his neck a few times.  And he had to go to the bathroom.  Whitelodge is a bladder’s worst nightmare, he thought as he slammed his fist on the table and stormed off toward the enormous double doors at the front of the tavern.

            He collided with a familiar gray-skinned, black-armored figure on his way out.  Kain grunted indignantly, drew back his hand as if todeliver a blow, and then smiled, apparently recognizing Miles from the bar in Pimptown.  “We meet again, Miles of the Shitty-shama.”

            “How the hell did you--?”

            “I am Kain,” the vampire replied with a nod, leading the despairing and very slightly drunk Miles back to the bar and seating him atop one of the unusually high wooden stools.  “I know these things.  Primarily the scarf, though--King Elevuhn.”

            “ELEVUHN!”

            “Ah yes, I’d forgotten about that,” Kain said, resting his iron sword on the counter.  “Useless man, self-absorbed and ignorant even by royal standards.  No offense intended toward your person.  There are many secrets, Miles.  You too will discover this...in time.” He glanced over at the senile old man sitting beside the disheveled Fernando.  “Such a pathetic excuse for a vampire.  Barkeep! A flagon of beer for me, and one for my companion as well!”

            The bartender, an exceedingly tall man with bony features, set a huge mug of beer on the table before Kain, who gestured at the beverage with one black-gloved hand.  Its contents flowed from the glass to Kain’s mouth, and he wiped his lips.  “These peasants, Miles--nothing good can come of involving oneself with their kind.”

            “You on your way to the battle?” Miles asked, and then remembered that he knew neither when nor where it was going to happen.  That blue ribbon stuff hits like a low-flying Atlantean saucer, he thought.

            “I’ve heard tell the clans are getting...uncomfortable with one another,” Kain nodded, ordering another flagon of beer.  His cheeks had gone from gray to rosy.  He abruptly raised his hands above his head and the contents of every mug and glass in the establishment drained magically into Kain’s gullet.  He whooped loudly, clapped Miles heartily on the back, and said with great relish, “Beer Shower.  Miles, there is a good song in Coorhagen, my home, a song we sing when we are drunk.”

            “Eh?” Miles’ vision was getting blurry.

            “See the stone set in your eyes,” Kain started dramatically, “see the thorn twist in your side, I wait for you-”

            Three hours later, Miles and Kain were wandering up and down the streets of Whitelodge, arms around one another’s shouldas, singing loudly.

            “III CAAAAN’T LIIIIIIIIIIIVE! WIIIIITH OR WIIITHOOOUUUUT YOOOOUU!” A giant boot was flung out of a window, hitting Miles in the top of the head. Somewhere in his brain, pain was registered, but nowhere where Miles was actually able to sense it.

            “HO-OOOOOOO! HO-O-O! I CAAAN’T LIIIIIIVE...” Miles noted that a very blurry image of Sergeant Fran was approaching.

            “Goddamn it, boy! Singing that damn wussy song!” Miles almost felt a dry sinewy hand slap him in the face. Kain had disappeared, leaving only a wavering flock of bats in his wake. “Better be sober be tomorrow, boy. Next time I won’t be so friendly.”

            “Uhh...why?”

            “There’s going to be a dick slapping contest, boy, and I’ve got me a stiffy. Go pass out and be fresh in the morning.”

            “Can I go outside?”

            “No,” Fran barked.

            Miles slapped aside a few drunken bats on his way back to the tavern, dimly registering that the clans were on the move, converging on Whitelodge, that the eve of the battle had come sooner than he had ever thought it would, and that he would need to be very, very drunk if he were to endure the onslaught.  He brushed past one of the giants on his way up the stairs.  The tall man stopped him with a tap on the shoulda and said gravely, his eyes speaking of greater truths: “It is happening again.  It is happening...again....”

            Miles shrugged and tripped his way up the stairs to prepare himself for tomorrow’s slaughter.

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Chapter Fifteen: Ugly Gorillas! Ugly, Go Away!