Chapter Three: Dr. Pibberrific

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

“Who is the muthafucker rollin’ through the hood?

 Who is the muthafucker up to no good?”

            --The Coup

            The sun had not yet risen when Miles, riding atop Crackhorn, and Bumpy, jogging briskly beside the two of them and carrying in his hands the bucket of cats, came upon the church.  The structure was hewn out of granite, and at its center rose a monolith of the same material Miles had seen beside the path before he had arrived in the degenerate town.  Much of the central building--a diamond-shaped edifice half the monolith’s height--had been demolished, presumably by bandits or some particularly aggressive clan, possibly the Navarone.  The cleric who greeted the two travelers was a large, burly man without a hair on his head, and for a moment Miles thought he was the balding man he had encountered in the bar.  The once-elegant white robes the holy man wore were smudged and torn, and a bandage encircled his right hand.

            “Fuckin’ Tang Clan of Woe again,” he scowled, gesturing at the rubble.  Miles noticed, with a kind of nameless dread, a large letter W, slightly askew, which had been burned into the ground before the church.  “That damn Paul sent his peons to steal our collection money, the bastard.”

            “Paul,” Miles repeated quietly, and glanced at Bumpy, who surveyed the debris with wide, froglike eyes.

            The two followed the bald priest, whose name, Miles later discovered, was Anders, into the modestly decorated chapel, which the destruction had apparently passed by.  The windows, however, were barred, as though this were a prison rather than a church, and Anders’ eyes shifted nervously from Miles to the nearby grandfather clock as he noticed the visitors’ curiosity concerning this oddity.  At the altar, clad in robes not unlike Anders’, stood perhaps the most unassuming and killable creature Miles had ever seen (or could remember seeing), somewhere between a fish and a woman, although closer to the latter.  Her skin was a pale blue, her hair a bright shade of blue-green, and her arms terminated in webbed hands clasped, at the moment, in prayer before a large, grinning, and somewhat familiar statue above the altar.  Bumpy grinned back at the idol as if it were a particularly amusing senile old man.  The fish priest turned at the distraction and regarded the travelers with a sour look on her face.  Miles noticed a stripe of red fabric from the waist of her robe to the hem, a feature absent in Anders’.

            “Wow,” Miles muttered to Bumpy.  “What the hell is that thing?”

            “It’s called a brassiere,” his sidekick replied, his eyes focused steadily upon the fish woman’s upper torso.  “Let’s go see what’s in there, buddy.”

            “Bumpy, you’re a sick little fucker,” Miles nodded.  Then, to the finned priest: “What’s the deal with the red stripe? Looks like a frickin’ menstrual stain.  What’d you do, spawn all over yourself?”

            Bumpy laughed and clapped Miles heartily on the back.

            “It is a symbol of rank,” the fish replied indignantly, returning to her prayer.

            “Her name’s Nasty Bitch,” Anders soon informed Miles over a hefty glass of port wine in the priests’ quarters.  “She’s the lost princess of Atlantis, but don’t tell her that.  She’s got amnesia and that’s the only thing keeping her here.  She’d run off to the nearest lake and jump right in if she ever found out.”

            “I heard that,” the Atlantean called from the chapel.

            “Wendt damn it,” Anders cursed.  “Anyway, you guys’d better get the hell out before the clock strikes twelve.  Trust me.”

            “Tell me.” Miles downed the last of his wine and leaned back in the small wooden chair, his chuff portion growing slightly numb.  “Why do they call her Nasty Bitch? It’s not the most common of names.”

            “Oh, you just wait and see, home skillet,” Anders said knowingly, checking his watch.  His glass of wine toppled, and in the silence which followed, Miles heard a shriek of agony from the chapel.  “Shit, too late now.  Let’s go.”

            The assembled priests--five, perhaps six of them--were running about like a distressed swarm of ants.  Nasty Bitch had fallen to her knees at the altar, her entire body twisting as though something inside were attempting to rend its way out of her skin.  Her arms collapsed backward, sharp splinters of bone jutting from the elbows, and her waist expanded to the width of a tree trunk, tearing through the clerical robes as if they were paper and revealing thick, crimson skin like tree bark.  This new creature was easily twice Crackhorn’s size and bristled with muscle and armor plate.  Its teeth dwarfed those of the tyrannosaurus rex, which, Miles had been told by the midgets, was the essence of chaos.  The demon beast roared triumphantly and leaped into the midst of the group of priests, latching onto the nearest hapless clergyman (a thin man with a shock of orange hair and the letters RPD etched on his robe--perhaps another “symbol of rank,” as Nasty Bitch had said) with its massive jaws and shaking him roughly from side to side.

            “Ahhhhh, no!” the priest shrieked, whipping his arms around him as though an unusually large beetle had latched onto his jock and refused to let go.  “Get off!!”

            The demon beast finally threw aside its plaything and pinned Bumpy to the ground, removing his head with a single snap of its jaws.  Miles unharnessed the Bizkicka and dealt the creature a mighty blow which unfortunately glanced off of its leathery hide and sent the weapon spinning across the floor, where it came to rest against the grinning deity behind the altar.  So this explained the bars on the windows.

            “Gimme the fuckin’ meth!” Anders bellowed, dodging with ninjalike speed a blow from the demon beast’s massive claw.  “Pass the meth, we gotta get her hiiiiiiiigh!”

            A small bucket of crystals approximately the diameter and thickness of Miles’ hand was passed from priest to priest and finally to Anders, who retrieved a handful of the crystals, set the bucket beside the door to his chambers, and crept along the wall as quietly as possible as Miles darted for the altar, intending to retrieve Bizkicka.  In the end he had no need of it, as Anders leaped atop the demon beast’s rippling back and plunged his hand down its throat.  The beast roared once again and tossed the bald priest off, sending him through the vaulted doors at the front of the chapel.  The creature whimpered like a wounded puppy, collapsing back on its haunches as it attempted in vain to cough up the crystal meth which Anders had administered.  Its body seemed to shrink all around and fade from blood red to pale sea blue, and when Miles leaped to his feet, Bizkicka at the ready, he found that the beast had metamorphosed into its previous form.

            “That thing kicked ass,” he said as Anders staggered to his feet and draped his own clerical robe over Nasty’s prostrate form.  It occurred to him that this streak of bad luck which seemed to plague his sidekicks was something to do with the wording--he’d leave out the word “sidekick” from now on.  “Hey, you wanna come with me and Bumpy and be in our posse?”

            “Sorry about your friend,” she said weakly.  “I didn’t mean to....”

            “Oh yeah, um...kind of forgot about that.” Miles scratched his head as he watched the priests carry Bumpy’s decapitated corpse through the front doors.  A companion possessing such an odd power as this might be useful indeed, so long as he kept a steady supply of meth.  He made a mental note to pick up a week’s supply of it in the next town, in addition to Crackhorn’s rations (the penguin had gone through nearly an entire bucket of cats since their departure, and what few remained would last perhaps into the middle of the week, but no longer).

            “Anyway, Nasty, let’s get going. We’ve a lot of distance to cover tonight.”

            Nasty Bitch looked at him confusedly.

            “Where the hell are we going? It’s a little past midnight.”

            “Huh.” Miles shrugged. “Got a spare pew I can sleep on?”

            Miles lapsed into a deep sleep the moment his head hit the hard wood of the pew.

            It was a fine night, a family dinner. The dinner of the harvest. Father looks over at me, with a cruel grin spreading across his mouth. Curious. I can’t seem to make out any other features besides that.

            “Pass the peas, son. MOOHOOHAHA!!!!!”

            “Uh...okay.”

            Grandpa is seated next to me...he’s getting a bit senile these days, but I’m too little to notice. I think I’m four or five, and for some reason I can’t take my eyes off of his ears. It looks like the beast in the cave I had always heard about, or at least what I imagined it would look like. He turns slowly toward me.

            “Son...glad you thought of your old man. Nothing like a good midget at the table to liven things up a bit.” Father looks confused. Grandpa stands up, and is looking at me. A flash of urine starts hitting my head.

            Miles awoke with a start to find Bumpy staring at him with a curious benign smile on his face.

            “Morning, buddy,” Bumpy chirped agreeably.

            “Uh...yeah.” Miles shook a few cricks out of his neck, and looked around sleepily. Strange, he thought. The church didn’t look that much like a Rammsteinian whorehouse when I came in at night.  He shrugged to himself.

            “You alright? You looked like you were having a bad dream.” Bumpy was far too agreeable to be around in the morning.

            “Yes. I was just remembering something. Something... from my past.”

            “Hey, you two want some firewater?” Nasty offered them a pair of shotglasses.  “It’ll wake you up real quick.”

            Miles shrugged and accepted the glass, noting with some confusion that the few priests who had survived the previous night had gathered in a circle around the altar and a substantial number of similar glasses had collected on the altar itself as in an offering to their god, which, as the trio bid farewell to Anders and his congregation and set out upon the open road, Nasty Bitch told Miles was known as the Great Wendt.  She had spent the past fifteen years in its service, and had come to accept the deity’s odd ways without question.  Reality, she said, was only as odd as one wanted it to be, and Miles, of all men, was not one to argue with such a statement.  The road forked after an hour or so of travel, and Miles swung Crackhorn’s reins to the right.  Bumpy followed obediently, his sheer presence seeming to throw bolts of radiance across the path ahead, Nasty jogging along beside the froglike young man, her small and cartilaginous frame appearing to sway with every breeze.

            “So,” Miles said to the Atlantean, “what’s your real name? I mean, I know why you’re called Nasty Bitch, but what’d they name you back home?”

            “That is my real name,” she replied.  “Short but violent story.  Let’s just say I was born at eleven fifty.”

            “ELEVUHN?” Miles belted out, and quickly bit his lip.

            “Yeah, I...yeah,” Nasty continued, falling a step behind.  “Anyway, I was born ten before midnight, so there I was in the incubator when the doctor dropped by to check on me, and I...well, you know.  They found him with his throat ripped out lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood, and they saw this gnarled little red thing with a mouth that took up its whole head, and I think the rest of the story tells itself.  How about you?”

            “I’ve got no story, I just--heads up.” Miles brought Crackhorn to a halt as he saw the odd company assembled along the path before them.  All wore baggy clothes and none looked strikingly intelligent.  The man in the lead struck some chord of memory in Miles, and he drew back slightly as he saw that each of the nine wore upon their shirts like a crest the same skewed letter W he had seen at the church, and that the familiar man carried a wooden collection bowl in the crook of one arm.  Three others moved forward to back him, arms crossed.  Miles reached for Bizkicka, and Nasty drew back the firing mechanism on a small bowgun she had concealed within the folds of her priest’s robes.  Bumpy waved and danced back and forth on his feet like a trained monkey.  “Get your shitty ass out of our way.”

            “Hey, my ass isn’t shitty,” Bumpy said with a hurt look on his face.

            “I wasn’t talking to you,” Miles retorted, again addressing the Tang Clan of Woe.  “Out of our way and we won’t cause you any trouble.”

            “We stand bold like flai-uh,” the man with the stolen collection bowl said, and Miles realized that this was the silhouetted figure he had seen following his outcasting from the midgets’ dungeon.  The loser set the collection bowl on the path beside him and crossed his arms in an obstinate manner, and Miles found his patience wearing thin. He jumped down from Crackhorn.

            “I say we torture the muthafuckers,” said a tall man whose eyes resembled a pair of glazed marbles, a hand-rolled smoke hanging loosely from his mouth.  His speech was punctuated throughout by a series of unpleasant slurping noises.

            “Torture niggaz, what?” replied a stout man beside him.

            “I’ll fuckin’ lay that big ninja fucker’s nuts on a dresser,” the tall man continued.  “Just his nuts layin’ on a fuckin’ dresser, right, and bang them shits with a spiked fuckin’ bat.  Whassup--BLAOW!”

            This suggestion was answered with a round of hearty laughter.

            “Yeah,” started a chubby clan member, “I’ll fuckin....I’ll fuc-” He was cut short by Miles swinging Bizkicka into the side of his head. “DEEZ-namn and shit...” He rubbed the Bizkicka-shaped welt.

            “Alright. That was the part without the nail. Get out of our way.” Miles said, doing his best to appear menacing.

            “Hmm...that won’t be necessary,” said the man in the front in an oddly emphatic manner. He stood out from the rest of the clan. The rest were fairly young, and dark skinned. This man, however, looked like the world’s largest puppy. Just shaved. And in his fifties. Miles had been mistaken in assuming Nasty Bitch to be the most killable being on the planet. Everything about him seemed to emanate harmlessness, from his short stature, to his mousy gray mustache. 

            “I’m Paul. You...you’re Miles. Come back to this wagon, and we’ll talk.” The rest of his clan started to object.

            “But we gotta go at this motherfucker.”

            “We gotta hit them shits!” One particularly short, ugly, and ultimately useless member interjected.

            “Yizneah, hiznee fiznuckin....oh hell...he slapped the Chef upside the head!”

            “Silence.” The little man silenced them with a clap. “I’m Paul. Are you?” At this, the clan stood silent, save for the salivary inhalations of the clan’s largest member.  “Come...we have a caravan in the brush. We’ll talk in there a bit.”

            Miles shrugged.           

            “Nasty, Bumpy. Stay here. Make sure Crackhorn doesn’t eat any of them.”

            “Hey, that’s them shits that ate my fuckin ho. Big ol’ penguin motherfucker,” piped in one of the clan. He looked like something a dog would have left on the ground on a humid summer day. The sunlight glinted off of his gold teeth.

            “They’re getting the idea. I’ll be back in a minute.” With this Miles followed Paul into the brush.

            The caravan of which this mysterious leader of the Woe had spoken brought a hint of a smile to Miles’ face, as he remembered a similar construction from his youth--the Gangsta Truck (created by some ancient and wise magician for the purpose of storing all his gangsta stuff) was twice Miles’ height and similar in width, and inside he could make out an impressive arsenal of bowguns, explosive powders, and other devices which looked lethal enough.  At the center of this arrangement sat a thin, muscular man who looked as though he had bathed recently in olive oil.  This short-haired individual wore nothing but a pair of underwear which looked as if it might have deflected an arrow, and with every breath his ribs rose and fell in a manner which seemed a bit too exaggerated.  A grin spread from ear to ear as he saw Miles and Paul, and he leaped down from his perch with a pronounced stretch of his arms.

            “That’s Sting,” Paul informed Miles, as if this were the most obvious truth in the world.

            “Go away, Sting.”

            “Perhaps this man could learn some manners,” Sting said, glowering at Miles.

            “I’m serious Paul. Make this mouth-breathing gimp go away.”

            Paul sighed wearily.     

            “Sting. Go do some pushups.”

            Sting smirked at Miles. And jogged off to a clearing where he soon started doing pushups.

            “That’s disturbing, Paul.”

            “Best bodyguard money can buy.”

            “Pretty tough, huh?” Paul nodded solemnly. Miles had to fight the urge to grab him and give him a vigorous noogie.

            “Come inside. We’ll have coffee.”

            “’Kay.” Paul opened a door with the lopsided W burned into it, and stepped inside. Miles followed after, attempting to discern the root of the odd smell which fouled the air of the Gangsta Truck.

            “What the....” Paul stood, staring into a shiny metal coffee pot. “There’s a fish...in the percolator.”

            “Hm.” Miles shrugged, and sat in a small velvet chair. He noted, before plopping his ass into the middle of it, that the cushion was embroidered to resemble a psychotic looking befreckled head, adorned by a small crown.

            Paul sat down in an identical seat across from him.

            “This is a Shitty-shama vehicle. I can tell by the faces on the cushions.”

            “Yes...you’d know about that, wouldn’t you?” Miles sat stone-faced.

            “Who are you, how do you know my name, and what do you want?” Paul leaned back in his chair, his facial features briefly contorting into a Machiavellian smirk before once again returning to its puppyish droop.

            “I am the High Shiznit of the Tang clan of Woe. Once, I was a normal man, somewhat, victim to the same weaknesses and vanities of other folks. Life was a depressed haze, trying to drown out certain realities in a torrent of alcohol and pastries.”

            “One way to do it.”

            Paul blinked a few times before continuing.

            “Then, I had a rendezvous...a rendezvous with destiny, by way of doughnuts.”

            “Doughnuts?”

            “Circular pastries with a hole through them. Mmm...” Paul started salivating as his eyes rolled upwards.

            “Anyway...”

            “Oh...er...yes. I mouthed off to a couple of the younger members of the Tang, and was punched in the head for it.”

            Miles shrugged.

            “It happens,” Miles said, thinking of the many rude old men he himself had given a good hearty whack to.

            “Then...I found myself touched by the Great Wendt himself. I had a vision then...one of the future, of myself in control of the Tang clan. I knew I would need to challenge them. To gain leadership. Since then, the visions have not ceased. I have followed them, carving out a destiny.”

            “’Kay. How’d you beat anything in a challenge?”

            “Destiny. And having the foresight to carry a good sized bludgeon. Like I always say, it doesn’t matter how big they are, a box of tackle to the balls will--”

            “Uh...okay. Where do I come into this?”

            “You’ll find out. You have a good deal of unfinished business, Miles, which has begun to finish itself.”

            “What business?”

            Paul smirked with the apologetic expression of a dog found sitting in front of a yellow puddle on a fine rug.

            “I will give you this truck. Until we meet again.”

            Miles shrugged.  “Trucks are nice. It’ll give Crackhorn something to pull around, then.”

            “Be careful with Crackhorn. You’ll find that some cats shouldn’t be eaten, and that some owners don’t crumble to dust when you touch them.”

            Miles’ brief look of shock was hidden by the scarf on his face.

            Paul had little else to say, and still less of any immediate importance so far as Miles was concerned.  When he returned to the beaten path, the sun had nearly set, and the Tang Clan had departed (thankfully with Sting in tow) save for the tall, salivating man with the smoke hanging out of his mouth.  He leaned against Crackhorn, his arms limp at his sides, and Bumpy and Nasty Bitch slumped languidly against him, each with a newly rolled joint between their lips.  Atop Bumpy’s burr-like head was perched Nasty’s brassiere.

            “Hey, Miles!” he called, pointing enthusiastically to the undergarment.  “Check it out, buddy! I--I saw ‘em, and they turned into ears for me!”

            The tall Tang Clan member and Nasty both burst out laughing at this last remark.  Miles sighed.

            “Let’s concentrate here, shall we?”

            He nudged Crackhorn’s reins and the penguin obediently followed him toward the area of brush which concealed Paul’s gift--the event still lingered in Miles’ mind; no gift was free, after all, and Paul hadn’t struck him as one who took such things lightly.  Miles’ two companions collapsed spread-eagled onto the hard-packed dirt, and the tall man staggered lazily off in the direction in which his clan had fled.  Crackhorn made no protest as Miles harnessed him to the complex metallic frame originally intended, he imagined, to fit a horse.  A few quick swings from the Bizkicka bent the frame comfortably to Crackhorn’s muscular neck.  Miles leaped deftly into the seat--considerably more comfortable than sitting astride Crackhorn himself, though not half so fluffy.  A sharp snap of the reins brought the Gangsta Truck up the hill, and it rolled to a halt beside Nasty and Bumpy.  The former had apparently recovered from the ill effects of whatever evil substance she had been smoking and sat scratching her head disorientedly, but the boy still lay on his back in the path, chuckling to himself.

            “Think we should ditch the gimp?” the Atlantean priest suggested.

            “He’ll catch up,” Miles sighed as Nasty climbed aboard the metal frame and took a seat beside him, crossing her finned arms pensively.  “He always does.”

            They continued on the road for several hours before Nasty Bitch posed the inevitable question.

            “Where are we going?”

            Miles shrugged. At that point, Bumpy came bounding alongside the Truck.

            “Hey buddies! Wait u-!” His request was interrupted. Miles and Nasty heard a splat, felt a bump, and heard another splat.

            “What was that?” Nasty asked with genuine concern.

            “I think Bumpy slipped and fell under one of the wheels.”

            “Do you think he’s okay?”

            Miles shrugged. Nasty calmed down after a minute or two. Miles noted that she was staring at him. He shrugged again.

            “Miles?”

            “Hm?”

            “Is that your reaction to everything?”

            He shrugged, glad to be wearing his scarf.

            “I have a funny tendency to slap people in the head with Bizkicka, too.”

            “Are you threatening me?”

            “No...”

            This time Bumpy was waiting for them on the side of the road.

            “Hi guys!” He flashed a smile at them. It quickly vanished when Crackhorn snorted, paused for a moment, and then swallowed Bumpy with a single gulp.

            Nasty Bitch shrugged.

            “Infectious, isn’t it?” She shot him a look of unadulterated hate. “Kidding.”

            “So, Miles. What’s your story?”

            “Story?”

            She sat forward in her chair a bit.

            “Yeah. Where are you from, where are you going?”

            “Not too sure.”

            “About what?”

            Miles shrugged.

            “So, you just go from town to town on your giant penguin, picking up the occasional companion, one of whom gets resurrected on a regular basis? That’s it?”

            “Pretty much. I only got the penguin just before meeting you and Bumpy.”

            “Hm.”

            “What’s your story?”

            “Uh...well, I’m an Atlantean princess...”

            “And I’m the last Shitty-shama batfighter,” he said, one eyebrow cocked.

            “No, really. I am. At least that’s what Anders said. ”

            “Oh yeah. The amnesia thing.”

            Crackhorn snorted in dismay as Bumpy shimmied apelike down a nearby tree as the Gangsta Truck rolled past.  He was persistent, Miles admitted that, but had no respect for the privacy of others, and apparently no reason to fear retaliation.  Perhaps the Great Wendt had seen fit to create, in a moment of spite, the ultimate nuisance, and had drawn Miles’ name out of some cosmic hat when attempting to select an appropriate test subject on whom to unleash this terror.  He absently unharnessed Bizkicka and buried its sharp end in Bumpy’s skull, dropping him before he had a chance to even think of uttering the word “buddy.” Nasty Bitch flinched at the sound and glanced back at the path.  Bumpy had gone.

            “You don’t talk much, do you?” she asked.

            “Nah,” Miles replied, scratching his head.  “Usually I either don’t have anything worth saying or anyone worth saying it to.” He winced.  “Sorry.”

            “S’okay.”

            “No, I mean that little monkey still has your bra, right?”

            “Nah, I got it back when he was puffing on that Woe Tang shit,” she said, waving the aforementioned article of underclothing as if it were a windsock, and then frowned at him, unbuttoning the top of her robe.  “’Scuse me.”

            Miles made a conscious but not particularly effective effort to look off into space.

            Oh, man, he thought.

Chapter Four: Du Riechst So Gut