by Adam Sidwell
Felicity Casa, the Lieutenant, and the Sergeant stood, their wrists tied, surrounded by Princess Sunday’s Cherry Brigade. Felicity looked defiant, her jaw angled upward toward the sun. The Lieutenant gritted his teeth.
And then there was Mom, Dad, Mariah, and Henry Junior. All four of them were also surrounded by the Cherry Brigade. Mom was crying. Dad had his arms folded. He looked ten feet tall right then, like a statue casting a long shadow, ready to fight.
The crowd erupted—some of them cheering, others yelling to Guster something he could not understand.
The Mayor barked an order and the guards lowered their spears, pointing the steel heads toward Guster. This is exactly what Salero and the Mayor had wanted all along. Their plots and manipulation of the Culinary. Their influence over the people. Their sacrifice to Yummy was here.
Guster was not going to get chained to those pillars. The Mayor was wrong about that.
“Run!” shouted Mom, pushing her way through the Cherry Brigade.
Guster spun, looking for a gap in the crowd they could slip through. They needed a way out, but the people were gathered too tightly at the base of the hill.
The Mayor’s guards advanced, their ring spears closing in. There was nowhere to go.
Guster still held the scoop of vanilla ice cream in his hand. There was no time for choices. There was no time for a plan. He lifted the cold scoop to his lips.
It tasted pure and sweet, a simple, mild flavor that ran deep, like a mountain lake. Instantly, the first taste of El Elado’s ice cream from Bubalatti’s shop in New York came back to him, flashing across his mind, but this was sweeter. This was pure and unpolluted by greed or malice. It had an untainted soul.
“Zeke,” said Guster. “We can’t stay here.” He said it slowly. He wasn’t afraid anymore. He knew that he had to follow this through to the end.
“You think?” said Zeke.
“I do,” said Guster. He grabbed Zeke by the hand and pulled him down into the passageway toward the darkness.
“Where are we going?” said Zeke, his voice cracked, hitting a high-pitched note. There was panic in it.
Guster shook his head. “Away,” he said. He wasn’t sure where they would end up. He only knew what lay two steps ahead. Beyond that, he couldn’t guess. He broke into a run. They’d need time.
The darkness closed around them as they crossed back into the lair lined with waffle cone. The sound of growls met them and the noise grew until they were surrounded in a chorus of snarls. This was a dead end.
The Yummies were waiting at the passageway’s end. The largest one stepped into the dim light from the tunnel. Guster did not know what he would do. He had not meant for things to end this way.
Yummy flexed his claws and roared. The cavern shook, bits of waffle cone crumbling from the ceiling and falling to the floor.
“Guster?” said Zeke, his voice trembling.
Guster held up a hand to his brother. “Not now, Zeke. I know you’re trying to protect me. You can go. But I have to be here.” He was surprised how confident he sounded.
He took a step toward Yummy. He held up the scoop of ice cream in his palm. “I know you aren’t what some people say. I’ve tasted it.”
Yummy shot hot breath through his nostrils. Guster could feel it on his face. Two more monsters emerged from the darkness. They were surrounded now.
“I know that you are here to protect, not to kill,” said Guster. “I know that you will kill if you have to, but you don’t want to, do you?” He felt strong when he said it.
The lead creature sniffed again. Those orange eyes. They held such intelligence. Such ancient wisdom.
“This city can’t go on like this forever, can it?” Guster asked. “This is not how you want The Delicious City to be, is it?” His blood beat so loudly past his ears that he was afraid his veins would burst. There was nothing between him and the monster now. No walls or fences. No oceans or train rides. The running stopped here.
Guster held the vanilla scoop up like an offering to Yummy.
The creature lifted one foot and stepped forward again, his heel smashing into the ground so hard it felt like a tiny earthquake. Then, slowly, he lifted his arms and closed his fingers and thumbs around Guster’s shoulders.
It was like being smashed in a vice. Yummy lifted him off the ground. Guster’s legs and arms hung like a limp towel.
Yummy opened his sickening, wide jaws. Hot breath blasted out of his throat onto Guster’s face. The monster’s mouth was a cave itself, with a broad, rough purple tongue covered in buds the size of gumdrops. And all of that was surrounded by teeth. Row after row of pointy, jagged teeth.
He’d made a horrible, horrible mistake. He’d followed his instincts, and now Yummy was going to eat him.
Guster thrashed his limbs, trying to break free. He lifted his knees to his chest and kicked wildly at the Yummy, catching nothing but air.
Yummy grabbed Guster’s ankles then lifted him high, dangling him in midair for a moment. Then he shoved Guster headfirst into his mouth and snapped his jaws shut tight with a chomp.
Chapter 23—The Shield of Seasons
Guster’s face scraped across Yummy’s rough, bumpy tongue. The sticky, fleshy insides of the monster’s cheeks pressed in on him, crushing his ribs, so that Guster felt like he was being squeezed through a rubber hose. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. One bite and the teeth would crush him or sever his legs. This was it. He was going to die.
How could he have been so foolish?
In that instant, he had a strange thought: I wonder what I taste like? He supposed that he deserved it after all the things he’d eaten.
Then the taut insides of Yummy’s cheeks relaxed, and the roof of his mouth lifted. Just like that, the pressure softened. Guster slid down, headfirst, until he was pressed up against Yummy’s fleshy throat.
Yummy hadn’t even taken a bite. Somehow, Guster had escaped those tearing teeth set in those ferocious jaws. Yummy had swallowed Guster whole.
Then the monster moved. Guster bobbed straight up, then back down again, like Yummy had just hit a speedbump at full speed.
Then it began to bob up and down as it bounded forward. Guster managed to curl upward, sliding himself around until he was upright, his knees tucked to his chin.
It hadn’t swallowed him yet. What was it waiting for?
Then it began to run. Its mouth opened just a little, so that a dim light spilled through the gap between its teeth and jaws and Guster could see the walls of the cave. Fresh air spilled into the hot, slimy mouth and rushed past Guster in a blast. Then another blast of air, this time from the inside out, roared past Guster’s ears and hair as Yummy exhaled.
It was a strange sensation, being shut inside a sticky, wet mouth, the air rushing in and out. But with each step Yummy took, Guster’s confidence grew. There were no bites. No chewing. No grinding. Yummy had not swallowed him . . . yet.
Where was Zeke? Had they taken him too?
Yummy turned a sharp left, then began to climb, surging upward in fits and starts. It was too dark to see, but Guster could feel a hard surface scraping against the front of the creature’s enormous mouth as it climbed.
Yummy leapt forward.
A soft, orange light shone again through the open jaws. It grew brighter as Yummy ran, until it took shape. They were in a vast mint chocolate chip cavern. In it was another gigantic bonfire, twice as tall as the last one, burning and melting away the ice cream mountain from the inside.
For a moment, Guster forgot his predicament. These fires had been lit and tended by someone. Someone had to be feeding them the wood to keep them going and to make sure they had enough oxygen in the stale caves so they wouldn’t fizzle out.
The cave rumbled. A huge mint chocolate chip stalactite broke free and came smashing down onto the ground, shards shatter
ing outward from the point of impact.
Yummy reeled, lurching to the left to avoid the stalactite, then climbed up into a narrow passageway. He began to run again.
Someone was behind these fires. Someone who was willing to work very hard to destroy the City of El Elado. But who?
This meant that it wasn’t some curse from Yummy, or some such nonsense, that was melting the city. It wasn’t any of Salero’s convoluted explanations. Fires, plain and simple, were behind it all, and someone was lighting them.
Why would anyone want to destroy the Delicious City?
Yummy turned again. The tunnel glowed orange as they passed another fire. If the mountain was hollowed out too much, the entire city would collapse. It wouldn’t matter if they lived in the Chocolate Crescent or the Fruitful Streets, they’d be killed in the massive avalanche that would follow. El Elado stood on the brink of disaster.
The tunnel grew dim again as Yummy darted back and forth on a tangled path. He ran for several minutes then stopped, panting. Through Yummy’s open mouth, Guster could see a soft, blue light glowing overhead.
They were in a beautiful ice cave, light soaking through the glacier so that it shone a faint blue in the darkness. They stood at the edge of a deep chasm that reached down into the blackness, a bottomless pit that may very well have pierced the center of the Earth.
Yummy turned, and this time opened his mouth so wide that Guster could see the cave before him.
In front of Guster was a beautiful, ivory-white fountain bubbling out of the ground in a flower shape, each petal moving and oozing its way up and out of the ground. It flowed down into a massive, moving river that crept its way slowly down the sloped cavern floor, carving its way out into the light.
Guster sniffed. Even over Yummy’s hot, stale breath, he could smell it—vanilla ice cream more pure and sweet than any he’d ever imagined.
This was the origin of the snowball that Yummy had given him. He had been trying to tell him about this place, communicating with Guster the best it knew how: through taste.
This was the source. This was the place that he’d heard Princess Sunday’s Cherry Brigade talk about: the source of all the ice cream in El Elado.
How badly Guster wanted to taste it for himself.
He carefully reached a hand out between Yummy’s teeth toward the bubbling vanilla fountain.
A low growl rumbled up beneath Guster, shaking his bones. He pulled back his hand just as Yummy’s jaws snapped shut. Everything was dark again.
Now that they were here, there was nothing stopping the Yummy from chewing him up and swallowing him once and for all. Was this how everything would end?
Then the monster began to run again. Each footfall rose and fell higher than the last as it climbed upward along the chasm wall.
Guster shuddered to think how precariously close to the edge of the void it ran. One misstep and they would plummet into darkness.
And then Yummy did an incomprehensible thing: it pivoted, throwing itself into midair. There was a sickening feeling of weightlessness, and then it fell.
It dropped like a stone for what felt like several seconds, when suddenly they hit the ground with a smash.
Guster shook from the landing. From what he could tell, Yummy had landed on his feet. But there was no way they had fallen all the way to the bottom. Nothing could survive that fall.
The creature opened its mouth and dim light spilled back onto Guster’s eyes. They stood on an icy ledge on the side of the chasm. Yummy had leapt across the void.
In front of them was the narrow entrance to another passageway.
But why? If Yummy intended to eat Guster, wouldn’t the bubbling vanilla fountain be just as good a place? Wouldn’t any of the tunnels before have worked just fine?
Instead of biting down, Yummy slowly opened his jaws, like the double doors to a hangar slowly grinding open, until his bottom lip nearly touched the ground. His tongue extended like a ramp to the ground, his teeth framing a perfect doorway.
Guster hesitated. He stretched himself carefully up to a bent standing position, his head ducked low under the roof of Yummy’s mouth. This was unexpected.
Yummy waited. It did not move. Was it letting him go?
Guster did not want those jaws clamping down again while he was under the teeth. He spent a moment gathering his courage, then pushed off the fleshy throat and dove head first out of Yummy’s mouth onto the ice. He slid several feet away from the monster, then scrambled to his feet and spun, ready to dodge an attack.
None came. Yummy slowly closed his jaws shut until his mouth was nothing but a thin line hiding those terrible teeth from view. It sniffed.
Guster let out a long, low sigh. He was soaked in sticky, warm saliva, but he could breathe. The air had never tasted crisper or more full. He wiped his jacket as best he could with his hands. He’d just been let go, or so it seemed. But why?
Yummy sniffed, then his yellow-orange eyes darted to the passageway behind Guster. It took a step toward him. Guster stepped back, uncertain.
Yummy sniffed again. Guster chanced a glance behind his shoulder. The passageway bored into the mountain, a narrow gap in the rock and ice. Above it was a dove on a spoon with an olive branch. Guster had seen that symbol before, but he could not remember where.
“You want me to go in there, don’t you?” said Guster.
Yummy snorted.
There was little choice, really. They were both standing on a narrow ledge. Yummy blocked his path on one side. The narrow cleft in the rock was the only other way to go.
“Okay,” said Guster. He ducked his head low and felt his way into the passage.
Behind him, Yummy purred.
The passageway opened into a small cavern with a high ceiling like a vaulted cathedral. Pale blue light shone down into the room so that everything glowed soft.
On either side of Guster, positioned at regular intervals around the circular room, were small statues carved from ice. There were several of them, each atop its own pillar. Some weren’t familiar to Guster: a noodle tied in a knot, a pineapple, and a cheese wedge pointing skyward. Others were very familiar: an egg, a diamond, and a butter churn.
At the far end of the cavern, a wide sheet of vanilla ice cream flowed down the wall from a crack in the stone above, an ice cream falls almost frozen in time.
This place was a sanctuary. A temple to taste.
Guster listened. There was a very soft scraping sound, like snow sliding slowly down a roof, as the ice cream inched along the rock. It gathered at the floor, where it had spread out from the wall in the shape of a fan. It must have taken hundreds of years to cover the distance.
He stooped and stuck one finger in it, then licked it. Still fresh. And cold and good, like the age had only made the flavors stronger.
Guster tread softly across the room. This was a special, sacred place. He pressed both palms into the ice cream flow on the far wall. It was soft and cold to the touch, and even the muddy feel of it on his skin whispered to him that it was sweet.
His palms touched something hard beneath the flow. He scraped it away with both hands. Underneath was a perfect circle with two squinting eyes and an open, smiling mouth carved into off-white stone, much like the face on a Mayan calendar.
In that moment Guster began to understand. This place was good. It was pure.
Yummy had brought him here for a reason. This was why he’d left the farmhouse in the first place. Guster Johnsonville was the most delicious thing in the whole world, but Yummy had not come to devour him. He’d come to deliver him.
And this was what he was meant to see.
Guster scraped away the ice cream with both hands, tasting it as he went. The more he worked, the more he uncovered, until he found that it was more than just a face. It was a circular shield wider than his arm span.
Its
surface was sectioned off into four quadrants, each one with its own central carving surrounded by intricate hieroglyphs. One with a blazing sun, another with three falling leaves, another with a web of crystal snowflakes, and the fourth with a sapling budding out from the ground—a quadrant for each season. In the center of the four quadrants was that smiling face, its eyes shut tight and its mouth open, like it was waiting to take a bite of something good.
More tiny pictures and words were carved around the rim of the stone shield, each one in a language Guster could not understand.
So this was what Yummy had wanted to show him. Guster took another taste of ice cream. He stepped back and let the pure vanilla flow through him. He needed to understand what this shield was. The ice cream’s flavor was his best clue.
He closed his eyes. It was familiar. Sweet, but tempered, like a plain vanilla flavor should be. In it he tasted echoes of the Gastronomy of Peace. And . . . yes. Of its creator.
Archedentus. He’d been here. Guster was almost certain of it. Had he been the one to make this flow of ice cream? Or had he been the one to make the shield, and then hide it here?
Then, like the last cog in a clock snapping into place, Guster understood. Archedentus had sent for him. It was true. He’d been here in this city so long ago. He’d made this city.
Guster ran his hands across the rim of the shield. There were the symbols there: the chicken and the egg. The polar bear and the butter churn. The Mighty Ape’s Diamonds. Each one after the other, they traced out a history of Archedentus’s journey. They flowed around the edge of the rim to the very top of the shield, where a ship was docked at the base of an incredible mountain. On top of that mountain was a city made of towers of ice cream.
Archedentus’s journey had not stopped at the One Recipe. He’d founded a city of pure and delicious tastes here in the hidden roof of the world.