by Adam Sidwell
Chapter 21—The Fires Below
Guster pressed himself against the wall. It was all so much at once. Archedentus and the Gastronimatii here in the city long ago. Salero and The Mayor plotting against him if Yummy didn’t get him first.
He slid himself carefully, silently, backwards down the tunnel and away from the office. He stopped at the bottom of the incline, panting, more from terror than exertion. He was going to have to dig in another direction. They were running out of time.
There was no time to feel sorry for himself. So Guster got to work. He turned onto his belly and gouged a spoonful of ice cream out of the tunnel wall, then touched it to his tongue. Still chocolate marble swirl. No good.
He slid down another few feet, and then did the same thing. The flavor was weaker here, which must have meant it was mixed with, or near to, another layer beneath the Mansion’s architecture.
Guster repeated the process, sampling the ice cream every few feet down the wall. It tasted slightly different each time, the chocolate swirl growing more diluted as he went, the slight hint of strawberry growing stronger, until he’d passed the barrier and crossed over to the strawberry layer completely.
With each bite, there were swirls of emotion and flavor, all blending together in a confusing quarrel of jealousy and honor, courage and sympathy. There was no clear or dominant flavor. There was nothing for Guster to hold on to.
Then Guster tasted it. A hint of cinnamon. It tingled on his tongue, and for just a moment, he was no longer cold inside the icy tunnel.
It was the taste of purpose. The taste of freedom.
He followed it, digging with the ice cream scoop as fast as he could until he’d dug a hole large enough to stick his head into. There was something intriguing about this cinnamon ice cream—something exciting and bold—like it had just been made yesterday.
His ice cream scoop broke through into empty air. Startled, Guster pulled back his hand and widened the hole. A faint glow of orange light shone through it from the other side.
He’d found a tunnel.
Heart racing, Guster dug the hole wider, not bothering to eat the ice cream now—he could shove it into the tunnel on the other side. There was ample room; the tunnel was at least tall enough to crouch in and even walk, so long as he bent low.
As soon as the hole was wide enough to fit his shoulders through, he dove through headfirst.
He landed with a thud on soft ice cream. It wasn’t icy like it had been in other places. The tunnel here was warm.
Guster propped himself up on his feet. It would take him and Zeke weeks to carve something like this out of the mountain. This could be it. Their way out.
He needed to find out where the orange light was coming from. Bent low, Guster ran as best he could down the tunnel toward the glow, his back scraping against the ice cream ceiling.
In the soft light he could see the walls were cinnamon, the light glinting off scarlet specks of spice, like quartz shining in a granite cave. Guster took a sharp right, then turned the corner and stopped dead.
Below him, the floor dropped away into a cavern, a large orange bonfire blazing in its center, black smoke curling up toward the ceiling and winding its way out of narrow shafts toward the surface. The bonfire was enormous, at least twice as tall as Guster was, red and orange flames dancing and flickering up and over a pile of coals. The heat pinched the skin on his cheeks. He could only imagine how hot the fire’s center itself must be.
There were shovels and picks left behind and mounds of coal piled against the walls, but other than that, the room was empty. At least five more tunnels branched off from the cavern in all directions, like the strands of a spider’s web.
Guster tried his best to orient himself. He’d been underground in the dark so long it wasn’t easy to figure out which tunnel led back to Mom and Dad. He hoped one of them would. At the very least, they would take him far away from here.
He lowered himself carefully into the cavern, finding handholds in the rough-hewn walls. He wanted to make sure he could climb back out again, especially with the ice cream being so soft from the heat.
He set his feet down on the cavern floor, and, keeping as far away from the flames as he could, made his way along the wall toward the first tunnel.
The tunnel was, just like the one he’d come from, lined with a layer of cinnamon ice cream. He reached out with his spoon and scooped up a bite. It was warm around the edges, like it had been taken out of the freezer a few minutes ago. It tasted delicious. He’d always had a special place on his tongue for cinnamon. He closed his eyes and absorbed the flavor, trying his best to understand its deeper layers. He wanted to feel its nature. What was the person who made it like?
Delicious. The flavor was pure, made of the finest ingredients, like every speck of cinnamon had been arranged in a picture on his tongue. Surely whoever had made this ice cream was providing a way out. A perfect, final escape from their imprisonment. A way to freedom.
And then, faintly, under the layers of mild burning, he tasted it—ambition, a drive for power. Cruelty.
It shocked him at first. This was a beautiful, sparkling cavern, a cathedral to taste. How could this be wrong?
He dug deeper into the wall, scraping into the cinnamon, searching. One inch beneath the cinnamon was deep brown chocolate.
Someone stumbled behind him. Guster jumped so high, his head scraped the ceiling.
“You have been busy. I am impressed!” said Zeke, looking around the cavern, his eyes wide with admiration.
Guster clutched his chest. He was breathing fast from fright. “You nearly scared three days’ worth of strawberry chunks out of me,” he said.
Zeke shrugged. “Sorry,” he said. “I just got bored of waiting and thought maybe something happened to you. So I came looking.” He peered over Guster’s shoulder into the tunnel.
“Is this the way out?” he said.
Guster shook his head. “Maybe,” he said. Zeke had come too soon. There were still things Guster needed to figure out.
“Maybe? Are you kidding? This tunnel is perfect. We’ve got a ticket to blue skies and sunshine. Let’s go!”
Zeke pushed past Guster into the tunnel. “Wait,” said Guster, grabbing his arm. “There are still things I don’t understand about this place. It doesn’t feel right.”
Zeke stopped. He folded his arms. “Okay, like . . .?” he said, waiting.
Guster shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. It frustrated him. The flavors he had tasted in the tunnels up to this point were trying to tell him something, but they all ended up as dead ends. None of them were the right choice.
He knew that Salero, with all his articulate words, did not ring true to him. Salero was a very smart man—he was a Baconist, after all—but did that mean that he was always right? Did all smart people think the way Salero did?
“Salero, The Mayor, and half of El Elado want to feed me to the Yummies. Felicity Casa wants me to go on another treasure hunt, and I just want to go home.” Guster could feel tears pushing at his eyelids. “I just wish Mom and Dad were here to tell me what to do.”
“Just do the right thing,” said Zeke.
“And how do I know what that is?” Guster asked.
Zeke laughed just a little, but from his face, Guster could tell he was sincere. “I dunno. Isn’t it usually just obvious?” Zeke said.
There was something so simple and sincere about the way Zeke said it, Guster wondered if Zeke ever asked himself these kinds of questions at all.
The cave rumbled slightly under their feet. The ceiling cracked, and large chunks of chocolate ice cream fell like boulders onto the fire.
“The cave-ins!” said Guster, bracing himself against the wall.
“Let’s go!” cried Zeke, pulling Guster farther down the tunnel. “We have to get out before the whole thing falls down on
us.”
Guster planted his feet. He knew now what he had to do. “Not that way Zeke,” he said. He was afraid of what he was about to do, what his decision would mean. He tried to cover it by pretending he had courage.
“We need to go back,” he said.
Zeke looked Guster straight in the eyes. Guster was almost sure he would protest, pull and tug at him until Guster went the other way, but he didn’t. “Okay,” said Zeke. “You’re the Evertaster.”
For once, that actually gave Guster a barely perceptible boost of confidence. Guster just had to follow his gut and hope he was making the right choice.
He pulled Zeke into the cavern and scrambled up the melting ice cream handholds back into the strawberry tunnel.
Zeke came willingly, and when Guster dove into the narrow tunnel they had dug with the scoop, Zeke was right on his heels.
Guster shimmied his way down the tunnel back toward the cell in the dark, stopping to taste the tunnel here or there, getting his bearings with each bite.
It wasn’t long until he found it again. The wild, ferocious taste of Vanilla—the one that led to Yummy’s lair.
Chapter 22—The Belly of the Beast
It was insane. It was crazy. It didn’t make any sense. But Guster dug anyway, scooping mouthfuls of Vanilla onto his tongue. He considered each bite. He wasn’t just tasting them, he was absorbing them.
“Let me help,” said Zeke from behind Guster. “You’ve been tunneling for the last ten feet. It will go faster if we take turns.”
Guster shook his head, even though there was no way Zeke could see him in the dark. “I can’t. I have to do this,” he said. He had to test each inch of the tunnel. He was picking his way along carefully, correcting their course with each bite, adjusting the angle of the burrow according to taste.
The flavors in the vanilla were growing more intense. There was the same, ferocious flavor inside as before, but it had grown until Guster could almost feel the biting and gnashing of fangs. Yummy was neither a chef nor a Confectioner, and yet this was unmistakably his flavor.
But it wasn’t the wild, fierce taste that piqued Guster’s interest. It was the deep, almost invisible aftertaste that drew him down this path. There was that streak of loyalty in the ice cream. There was something so pure in the flavor that Guster forced himself to sort through the rage and hunger that threatened to overwhelm it.
Guster turned the tunnel downward, so that this head was lower than his feet and he had to brace his knees against the sides to keep from sliding down and smashing his face against the end. There were other flavors creeping in from all sides now: veins of golden salted caramel, chunks of double brownie fudge, swirls of spumoni. Ugh. How he hated spumoni.
Zeke tugged on his foot. “Did you hear that?” he asked.
“What?” Guster said. He kept digging.
Zeke hissed, “There was a noise. Behind us. I think someone found our tunnel.”
A lump formed in Guster’s throat. The tunnel suddenly didn’t feel very safe anymore. “Are you sure?”
“I think so. There was a scraping. And some voices. They were shouting.”
The Mayor’s guards. Guster strained to listen Was it morning already? They must have found all the heaps of ice cream from the tunnel piled up in Guster and Zeke’s cell.
“Hurry,” said Zeke. “Are we there?”
There was tension in Zeke’s voice. At least Zeke believed that this tunnel ended somewhere. Guster wished he could be so sure. Guster didn’t know where it was going or what would happen to them when they reached it.
They couldn’t let the Guards catch them. If he was going to confront Yummy, he didn’t want Salero or the Mayor to force him to do it. He wasn’t going to face Yummy in chains. He needed to do it because it was his choice, because it was what he wanted to do, not what anyone else wanted.
The metal scoop hit something hard. He slowed down, carving into the cream wherever it was soft, feeling his way with the scoop in the dark. It hit something hard again.
“What’s taking so long?” asked Zeke. “We haven’t moved in like an hour! They’re getting closer.”
Guster pressed his hand up against the object. It was mostly flat, with a rough, grainy texture. “I dunno. There’s something really hard in here that I can’t dig out. It’s blocking our path. I’m not sure what it is.”
“Well, what does it taste like?” asked Zeke.
Guster pressed his face up to the flat surface then stuck out his tongue. The tip touched the rough, grainy object. He licked it.
Sugary. A pastry. Delicious. Waffle cone. “It’s a cone,” said Guster.
“Then break it!” said Zeke. His shoulders pressed up against Guster’s heels. A faint light flashed down the tunnel behind them. “Go!”
Guster stabbed the scoop into the waffle cone. The metal chipped the brittle surface. Guster stabbed again, hacking at it as best he could in the tight quarters, using the scoop like a miniature pickaxe.
On the fifth strike, he punched a hole in the waffle cone surface. “I got through!” he shouted. There was a dim light below. He hacked again, and the brittle cone fell away, leaving a hole big enough for Guster to squeeze through.
“I’m going in,” said Guster. He pushed himself downward headfirst, sliding like a seal through the hole.
He tumbled down, smashing onto a smooth waffle cone floor below him. The impact shot pain through his shoulder and left him gasping for air.
“Freedom!” cried Zeke as he fell from the hole behind Guster. Guster tried to roll out of the way, but it was too late. Zeke landed like a sack of rocks on Guster’s ribs.
Guster winced. “Get off me!” He shoved Zeke over, squirming out from underneath his big brother.
Zeke and Guster picked themselves up off the ground, and Guster slid the metal ice cream scoop into his belt under his parka. He peered into the room and tried to make sense of his surroundings.
They were in a huge chamber with waffle cone walls and a low ceiling that stretched into the darkness. A passageway to their left led upward. A pale yellowish glow shone from the end—a tiny point of daylight far in the distance. It cast just enough of a glow for them to see half-gnawed, giant strawberries littering the floor, looking like broken skulls in the dim light. Shattered peanut brittle chunks were piled in one corner, and overturned bowls with globs of chocolate sauce spilled from them and pooled on the floor like blood. Broken candy canes as long as a man’s thigh bone littered the ground.
“What is this place?” Zeke whispered.
It was the Yummies’ lair. He could taste it. “It’s where they live,” said Guster.
And as scared as he was right then, he still hoped they were doing the right thing. He didn’t have the words to explain it, and if anyone were there to argue with him, he wouldn’t be able to defend his actions. But it was a hunch, and the words and the understanding and the why of it all could come later because, above all, he had to follow the tiny nudging in the back of his conscience that was telling him this was where he needed to be.
“Okay,” said Zeke. He swallowed.
Something stirred.
“Did you hear that?” Zeke whispered.
Guster nodded.
There was a scraping sound in the darkness in front of them. Then a snarl, like a small motor revving.
“I think we should go,” said Zeke. He took a step up the passageway.
Guster hesitated. There was something here he had to do.
A pair of wide-set orange eyes opened in the shadows. They drew closer. Then another pair of eyes lit up in the cavern. Then another. And another, each reflecting the dim light with an iridescent yellow-orange. There were more snarls.
Guster felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
“Let’s go,” said Zeke. He tugged on Guster’s arm.
The
first Yummy emerged from the darkness into the pale square of yellow light. It was white like the snow and bent low, its powerful arms dangling from its shoulders, and its claws scraping razor-thin gouges into the crispy waffle cone ground.
Guster could hear the beast’s slow, deliberate exhale. Every feature stood out to him: each hair, the shape of its broad mouth, the wrinkles around the skin of its orange eyes. Even the chipped and broken points of its teeth, like knives embedded in its gums, were all apparent to Guster in that moment.
Every nerve in his body begged him to bolt up the passageway and flee.
The Yummy rolled a white scoop of ice cream toward Guster on the ground with the back of his hand. It was an awkward gesture coming from such a gigantic beast, and Guster wasn’t sure what to make of it.
The eyes of the monster looked so deep, like they were expecting something from Guster. They were more than the eyes of an animal. They were windows to a real soul.
Guster stooped, his eyes still on Yummy, and picked up the packed ice cream ball. It was surprisingly warm to his touch. He held it for a moment, wondering what it meant.
Zeke grabbed Guster’s free hand. “We go. Now,” said Zeke, yanking Guster up the passageway.
Guster shook himself, and suddenly something snapped. They were inches away from the monsters. Go. They had to go.
He took off up toward the light, pumping his legs up the steep waffle cone slope until it was gone and nothing but chocolate ice cream lay underneath.
A wall of fresh air and sunlight hit them as they emerged into the clear morning in City of El Elado.
Guster blinked back the sun’s rays. They were standing on a hill, with a raised peanut brittle stage in front of them. It had two columns, just taller than Guster, with a pair of chains and manacles hanging from them. This stage was not just for any performance. It was built to make a sacrifice.
Guster stopped. The people of El Elado were crowded around the raised stage at the foot of the small hill. There was the Culinary, dressed in their ridiculously bright costumes. There was Princess Sunday and her subjects, nervously crowded at the far side of the hill. There was the Mayor, his oily black top hat and blue ribbon on his chest shining in the light of the dawn. The Extravío Vigilar stood watch at his elbows, all of them dressed in their crimson-and-gold striped pantaloons, shiny breastplate armor, and curved steel hats.