by RyFT Brand
Jazz, Monster Collector in:
Jazz Attacks
season one, episode twelve
RyFT Brand
Copyright 2014
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to
persons living or dead are purely coincidental.
JAZZ, Monster Collector
Season One: Earth’s Lament
RyFT Brand
Episode-12: Jazz Attacks
Twelve hours to backlash.
“Hey-be, new-be, who might you be?” a tall cud demon asked. He spoke with a gargled voice garnished with bleating. His long chin hairs were stained yellow and he reeked of urine and something I couldn’t identify that smelled even worse. He wore a tattered jacket with sergeant’s stripes. Cud demons looked very much like a goat up on its hind legs. In the days before the Inter-dimensional hostile takeover of Earth, cud demons were a favorite lackey of sorcerers and high order demons, hence all the old legends of devils that look like goats. Male cud demons are aggressive and insanely loyal to their masters. They’re also stone, cold stupid.
“Cole,” I said with as much bleat as I could muster. My heart was racing. This was the moment were I found out if this plan of mine had a hope of working. If it didn’t, everyone I cared about was dead.
“Coal,” another cud demon said with a bah and a chuckle. “Like a rock, that’s so snark.” He was armed with a spiky club.
“You know what else is funny, laughing boy?” the sergeant asked.
When laughing boy shook his head, sending his chin hairs swaying, Sarge smacked him on the back of his head with a blackjack, a leather club capable of inflicting great amounts of pain. Laughing boy bleated his discomfort and spat out a disgusting glop of cud.
I had to bite my cheeks to keep from laughing.
“Now get out of here and report for kitchen duty and laugh your way though peeling the grass clippings!” the sergeant bellowed and, with a kick to laughing boy’s posterior, sent him stumbling away.
“The rest of you line up, the Boss is coming!” he shouted, then, with a burp and a gulp, drew a wad of cud into his mouth and began that creepy sideways chewing action.
I got into formation with a dozen cud demons. Each of us was armed with clubs, some plain, some spiked. None of us stank as badly as the sergeant, but we all still stank.
“All right you scum-bags; straighten up and fall in. The Boss will be here any minute now and I want you all on your best. Any foolishness and I’ll skin you and tan the stinking hide myself. Got it?”
No one said a thing, either they’d lost attention or were too afraid.
“Got it?” the sergeant bleated at the top of his lungs.
“Yeah, yeah, we got it, we got it,” the rabble replied at a variety of timing and enthusiasm levels. “Got it,” one demon said really late as he’d been chewing vigorously.
“Swallow that cud, private!” the sergeant shouted and punched him in the stomach. The private grunted, doubled over and spat cud all over the floor and the sergeant.
The sergeant looked disapprovingly at his further soiled jacket, then at the cowering private. Then Sarge’s face folded into a furious scowl. He dipped his head and rammed the private hard with his twisted horns, smashing him back into the roll up door. The private cried a terrible bleat and I heard ribs crack. When the sergeant pulled away the private crumpled to the floor. Sarge grabbed him by a horn and ripped him to his hooves. “Now you stand there and keep your cud-hole shut, got it?”
The private, clamping an arm to his broken ribs, nodded. By the expression on his hairy face, he was feeling none too good.
This was getting better and better, but I had a job to do so I crossed my apparently spindly legs and began to wiggle. It took longer than I would have guessed for the sergeant to notice. At last he stomped over to me. “What’s you’re problem, new-be? Need a lesson in following orders, do ya?”
“No,” I shook my head. “But I really got to take a piss.” I flipped my long chin hairs. “Mind if I go freshen up the beard, I got a date tonight.”
The sergeant got so angry I was surprised that smoke hadn’t wafted out of his pointed ears. He used two fingers to grab me by my big nostrils. “Freshen up!” he screamed as he shook my head by my nose. It would have hurt something terrible if it had been real. “You just stand there and piss your damn pants, private.”
“But,” I said, faking a nasally bleat. “I’m not wearing pants.”
“Okay then, forget it,” he said, released me and turned to walk away. For a second I thought he was too stupid for my little ploy there to work, then he spun around and I’m pretty sure I saw a puff of smoke waft out of his left ear. “Not wearing pants!” he shouted spitting all over me. Then he punched me hard in what would have been a cud demon’s crotch. He actually hit me in the stomach. The battle armor concealed beneath my disguise absorbed most of the force, but it still hurt. Cud demons aren’t as strong as bvorcs, but they’re still pretty strong. I doubled over and grunted. He grabbed one of my horns and pulled me up straight. “Okay Coal, you get into the stinking latrine and you clean every inch of that quagmire, and if it’s not spick’n span when I come to check it, I’ll dump you down the toilet and let the fecal worms devour you, got it?”
“Umm,” I said, drawing this out for effect. “Where do I find a mop?”
Sarge grabbed my chin hairs and gave them a hard downward yank. “Clean it with your precious beard and see how your date likes that, got it?”
I gulped and nodded. “Got it.”
“Good,” he said then got me stumbling forward with a tug of my beard. As I passed he gave my ass a solid kick. I bleated out a genuine cry of pain, then, clutching my rump, hurried away while I still had a chance of pulling this off.
I walked as fast as I could while imitating the cud demon’s hobble. I hurried into a wide hallway at the back of the warehouse and started searching rooms. I found the latrine, actually my nose found it first, but I passed it by as I wasn’t actually in need of the restroom, thank goodness.
I checked door after door, but most of the rooms were either empty or full of stacked corrugated containers. I shouldn’t care what Boss Geeter was distributing though the place, my time on Mirth was close to ending, but apparently my curiosity didn’t know that. Despite a desperate needed for haste, I slipped into the room and straight up to the nearest box, one that was by itself on the floor and already opened.
I dug through the packing shreds and my hand found something hard and heavy. I pulled out a gun. Not a glow-dart gun, not a mellow sling, not a resin cast cell divider, it was a regular old, run of the mill, automatic machine gun, the kind that worked on an explosion, not magic. A couple of weeks ago, I dug a bullet out of the wall at the attack site Mickey the Sasquatch showed me. From his description it sounded like men in armor had shot the deferred species with regular old fashioned guns. But why? Who’d, except for me of course, want an old gun, let alone cases and cases of them? On a world of magic guns are about a useful as shoes on a snake. What was Geeter up to? Then an even more unsettling thought arose in my mind; maybe Geeter didn’t want them at all. He was, after all, still just a monster. Maybe someone was pulling the dwarf troll’s strings; maybe the someone who’d been hitting the deferred species population; maybe the same someone who’d been behind the inter-dimensional hostile takeover of Earth.
I stuffed the gun back in the box. I was giving myself the shivers and I needed to stay focused, for my friends’ sake at least. My time was running out and Geeter’s distribution days would soon be over anyway.
When I was
nearly at the door something else caught my eye, something in a trash receptacle, something shiny. I dug out a small green rectangle with a bunch of silver spots and ceramic components—it was a circuit board. A something, just like the rifles, that didn’t belong on Mirth. And that had been the second such board I’d seen recently.
I shoved the board in my pocket and raced into the hallway.
The building was huge, and confusing, but had been easy enough to find with the portable tele-com I’d pinched off of Mickey, Geeter’s big foot henchman, who’d actually turned out to be okay. But that didn’t matter anymore. I was dying; or rather I should say that I was going to die. Not like in the, everybody’s going to die someday, kind of way, but in an actual, I’ve got about twelve hours to live before the magical haling stone I’d swallowed backlashes and I die a terrible, painful death kind of way. I had to move faster, stay focused on the objective.
I spotted a couple of bvorc’s in tailor-made three piece suits standing guard outside a door. Bvorks