Chapter Two: The Funky Cypress Hill Shit

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

"Who you trying to get craaazy with, ese?

 Can’t you see I’m loco?”

            --Cypress Hill

            Miles entered the town dramatically, taking full advantage of the breeze pushing against him. Makes my scarf look damn skippy flapping around like that, he thought. He wished for a few tumbleweeds brushing across the main street of the village, but that would have been a little much. He relished the somewhat awestruck look of the peasants in the dusty street, how women would scurry to bring their children inside the old ramshackle houses that dominated the scenery rather than come near him. He then realized that he was in fact, riding a giant penguin that snorted at every last object that came within a mile of it. Feeling somewhat humbled, Miles analyzed the town.

            The town was a small one; the sort that was really just a life support system for a main street. The main street was a small one; the sort that was really just a life support system for a really large bar. Miles noted that Crackhorn headed straight for it, with a steady trot that suggested he was all too familiar with this town.

            Crackhorn stopped at a dusty patch outside the bar, letting Miles off gently. He walked around for a few seconds, working off those cramps which could only have come from riding a mammoth penguin. As if telepathically, Crackhorn released a sympathetic burst of flatulent air.

            “I’ll be back in a little bit. I’ll see if they have any fish in there.”  He approached the swinging double doors before hearing a screech from behind him.

            “Oi! You! In the dowpy black ge’up!” Miles turned around, pulling out his spiked bat, which he had christened the Bizkicka following a troubling daydream. A dumpy woman in her forties missing several teeth stood behind him. She looked vaguely annoyed.

            “That bloomin’ fing oit moy bloody ca’!”

            “Cats, eh? Is that what he likes to eat?” He lowered the Bizkicka.

            “I bloody well guess sow! Oit moi li’l cowpcayke, it did!”

            “Hm...know where I can get some more?”

            “You’re a seck powppy! Yew seck li’l man!” Miles raised the Bizkicka, holding it in the classic attack pose.

            “Right own, right own.” The crone backed off slowly. Miles turned around to enter the bar, before he heard a young girl’s voice pipe in behind him.

            “Oi, mum, in’t that the fing that oit gran’pa?”

            “Losers.” Miles entered the bar.

            The space inside was divided in two by a thick pall of smoke, rather like a layerof fog over a swamp, which hovered approximately at eye level, and thus the patrons from whom it had arisen crept about with their knees bent, as if they expected a spontaneous volley of bullets to tear the lot of them apart.  Miles, his nostrils safe behind his scarf, strode pointedly to the bar and sat, gingerly avoiding an unidentifiable stain on the counter as he leaned forward to speak to the barkeep, a stout young man sporting a shirt on which had been etched in thick red thread the phrase TONS O’ FUN.  This oaf apparently took no note of Miles’ impressive stature and strips of fabric he had tied around his head so they would flap dramatically when caught in a strong breeze, and spoke a bit too loudly for comfort.

            “Hey, you want some brew?”

            “Got any cats?” Miles asked, nodding at the door when the barkeep cocked his head inquisitively.  “For my penguin.”

            “Had one a while ago, but my pal’s pretty damn scared of cats so I ditched him,” the barkeep replied with a shrug.  Then almost as an afterthought, “The cat, I mean, not...not my friend, see.”

            Miles spent the better part of a day searching the town for an individual sufficient for his needs, although what few residential areas existed had obviously been abandoned in favor of the bar.  It was as evening descended upon this desolate haven that he stumbled upon the disheveled peasant slumped beside a washbucket against the far wall of the bar, a plate of melted cheese sitting at his feet.  The boy was eighteen, perhaps nineteen, and resembled, strangely enough, Crackhorn: his legs were short, and his slightly stocky frame furthered the image.  A pair of twisted spectacles rested crookedly upon the boy’s nose, and in his long hair were caught particles of food and other things on whose nature Miles dared not speculate.  He jostled the waif out of his sleep.

            “Hey, you want outta this town?”

            “Where you headed?” the urchin replied.

            “Somewhere, I think,” Miles replied, for a moment losing his composure at the question.

            “Ah...that would help. If that’s not the vaguest offer I’ve ever accepted, it’s a shoo-in for first runner-up.”

            Miles pondered the benefits of a wiseass sidekick momentarily before he shrugged and did a few squat-thrusts to regain his bearings.

            “Let’s go then. Know where I can get any cats?”

            “Hm...uh...yeah, probably at Big Gay Al’s. Right down- AAGH!” The urchin’s sentence was cut off as a crossbow bolt pierced his heart.

            With Bizkicka grasped firmly in his veiny hands, Miles made a gestalten sweep around the room. He stared at the array of unintelligent faces, all busy with the task of drinking their beerish swill.

            Except for two balding, inebriated men. Fiddling, he saw, with a crossbow. He approached, thirsting for vengeance, roughly shoving anyone in his way aside.

            “No, no, you idiot. If you load it like that, it’ll go off.”

            As he approached their table, Miles faltered for a moment as he sensed a vague familiarity about the first man’s face, a familiarity which became all the clearer--and all the more frightening--as he took note ofMiles’ presence.  He recognized the curled, weaselish lips and the untidy ring of hair which circled his head like a halo on some filthy, fallen angel.  And he recognized the beady, simian eyes, peering out like a pair of weevils from adjacent knots in a disease-eaten tree.  Although the fat, balding man’s lips didn’t move, the words came to Miles unbidden as they had in his dreams: He sees you.  He sees you! He slowly harnessed his weapon and pondered his next move: if he chose to introduce the bald man’s head to Bizkicka, he would destroy something he felt he had no right to destroy: the truth, the answers he sought.  The balding man rose to his feet and sneered as he approached.

            “Out of my way, peasant.” His voice was clipped and carried an air of sophistication.  “The stench of the fields hangs over you like a pall.”

            He roughly shouldered past Miles, tossing a cigarette in the direction of the insolent barkeep as he let the doors swing shut behind him.  The young lout’s shirt caught fire and flamed as though he had fallen into a puddle of lantern fuel and lit a torch.  Miles’ confusion was too great to be bothered with such things. He stood for a few seconds trying to make sense of the moment, before shrugging once more.

            “Sidekick,” he said aloud, much to the bemusement of several of the bar’s patrons. “a sidekick will be good. It will make sense. Sidekicks I can trust. They come from the earth.”

            He exited the bar, eyeing a large headed young man staring at Crackhorn. He too was large, but looked different from the last sidekick...the best word to describe him didn’t quite spring to mind. He looked the sort who would grow up on a farm, milking cows, wrestling bulls, and putting the fear of God into sheep.

            “You, there.”

            “Uh...yeah?” A low voice emanated from within his massive neck.

            “You want to be a sidekick?”

            “Whatever.”

            “Hop onto Crackhorn then. We’ll go try and get some food for him in town and then leave.”

            “Whoa....ride...with you?”

            “Not unless you like running.”

            “Er...no...but...a GUY?”

            “What?”

            “Nevermind. There are a few cats next door. Let’s go get them first.”

            “Agreed.”

            The two stalked off toward an old house, which the large headed youth told Miles was the house of a senile old man.

            “He has lots of fucking cats. He won’t miss one or two of them.”

            Miles nodded, still trying to think of the best word to describe this being.

            “Corn-fed!”

            “What?!” The youth spun toward Miles, one eye narrow with rage, the other wide with indignation.  His enraged lunge for Miles was cut short by Bizkicka’s nail puncturing his massive skull. The second sidekick in as many minutes fell to the ground, his head leaving a sizable crater as it landed.

            The house must have been standing for decades, and it looked as though it might give up at any moment its struggle against time and the elements.  The porch crumbled beneath his feet, and Miles found the endeavor of reaching the front door somewhat similar to wading through a wide stretch of swampland.  Decaying, insect-ridden wood lacerated his ankles and shins as he made his way across--or rather through--the old man’s porch, and when he reached the door he found that it had been equally mistreated by time.  As he knocked, his fist punched neatly through the door, cutting his knuckles.  The house’s remarkably intact interior reminded Miles unpleasantly of the haunted castles and mansions of which he had been told as a child: the preserved heads of various woodland animals adorned wall and ceiling alike, and cobwebs had encrusted every imaginable surface.  Lots of fucking cats, as his ill-fated sidekick had said, darted across the floor and up and down the stairs, and Miles had little trouble catching several of them and snapping their necks.  The bulk of the swarm, however, seemed to have congregated upstairs, and it was here that Miles stumbled upon the old man.

            Or what remained of the old man: his body, clad in a plain green sweater and a pair of slacks, was as covered with dust as his abode, and as Miles reached out to shake him by the shoulder (the old fellow might, after all, simply be sleeping, and an elderly sidekick would doubtlessly prove easy to maintain) his right arm collapsed in a shower of dust and dry chunks of long-dehydrated flesh.  A trio of cats leaped out of its way and scurried off into the depths of the house.

            “That was pretty cool,” Miles chuckled, and spent the following hour pursuing food for Crackhorn.

            Night had fallen while he had been about this tiresome task, and Miles jumped, startled, as he saw the strange creature leaning against one of the porch’s crumbling supports, smiling at him with an air Miles wasn’t entirely certain he liked.  His countenance was not dissimilar to that of a tree frog, his eyes a bit too wide for comfort.  Miles approached with some degree of suspicion--he had no memory of any particular enemies he may or may not have made during his past life, but he had seen the likes of this boy in the dark mental wards of Blacklodge Dungeon, and he warily debated whether to take him as a sidekick or not; perhaps he would live longer if Miles simply passed him by.

            “Wanna be my sidekick?” he asked.

            “Sure thing, buddy,” the boy shrugged.  As he darted to Miles’ side like an obedient dog, his foot fetched up against a step and he toppled forward, impaling himself on a jutting board.  A hurt expression crossed his disturbingly benign features as he died.  “Man, that was clumsy...I’m really embarrassed....”

            Miles sighed and thought, Fuck a sidekick.

            Dumping the evening’s catch into a washbasin he found tossed into the street beside the bar, he gave Crackhorn his fill of feline morsels and set about washing the bird’s feathers, which had become filthy with dust and mud since their encounter in the forest on the previous day--or had it been the previous week? Miles had long since lost his sense of time, and found that he had little need of it in his new life.  He wondered what role time and other conveniences must have played in his youth, and in his life before he’d been locked away from it all.  His pre-midget existence, as he now thought of it.  Crackhorn’s bath finished, Miles threw his leg over his steed’s broad back and gave the animal’s nigh nonexistent neck a sharp slap, spurring him into motion with an indignant snort.  The night had grown oppressively humid, and the weather had brought out all manner of frogs and toads whose cacophony of throaty croaks and groans upset Crackhorn greatly and caused him to swerve from the dirt path several times as the two of them rode out of town and set their course for the next, wherever that might be.  Perhaps he would find answers there, or perhaps only more questions.

            “Hey, buddy!”

            Miles turned to find the boy he had encountered outside the old man’s mansion running toward him at an unsteady gait, as though he had spent five minutes hanging onto a carousel and was now attempting to run up a steep hill.  His plain shirt bore no sign of injury, and no board protruded from his torso.  He stood catching his breath for a time, and Miles thought absently what an odd little world he lived in.

            “Man, this place lives on frogs,” the boy remarked casually, running a hand through his hair as he walked alongside Crackhorn and his rider.  “Thought you’d leave town without me.  Guess you’re kind of wondering why I’m still alive, huh?”

            Miles thought briefly of his prior experiences in the depths of Blacklodge’s jail, his subsequent encounter with Crackhorn, and of his various encounters within the confines of this tiny, degenerate excuse for a town.

            “Doesn’t matter,” he finally shrugged, and looked up at the moon above.  “You have a name, kid?”

            “Yeah, name’s Nathan W--”

            “Bumpy,” Miles nodded, and the boy smiled cheerily.  “You’re Bumpy, that’s what you are.”

Chapter Three: Dr. Pibberrific