The Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island (10 page)

"The machines are dead."

She wasn't going to reason with me. In the weak light coming through the crack of open doorway, I saw that the dungeon was filled with balloons.

The balloons obscured the hulking form of the Cuddlywumpus.

"Shut the door," Fanny said.

I gripped the railing in my left hand and turned to close the door with my right.

A pancake slipped in sideways before the door closed.

I stepped away from the door and tried to grab hold of the pancake before it scurried past, but the door swung open behind me. The door knocked me off balance. I teetered for a moment.

"
Haaaaappppiiiinnnessssss. . . ."
the pancakes moaned, as they surged into the dungeon.

I tumbled end over end.

Splayed out on the dungeon floor, I tried to stand, but the pancakes were coming down the stairs and they trampled me.

Fanny Fod screamed.

I threw wild punches. My fists tore through the groaning pancakes. Their syrupy guts piled up around me, forming a barricade that blocked the horde from trampling me any further.

I caught sight of Fanny. She stood beneath the Cuddlywumpus. The pancakes surrounded her on all sides. She spun circles, hitting the pancakes that came within range of her fists.

"Stay back!" she cried. "All of you, stay back."

"Fanny!"

She glanced at me as I struggled through the pancake guts and braced myself to break through into the circle of pancakes to help Fanny. But during her respite, the pancakes increased the pace of their onslaught by double. They shed their clumsy natures, moving now with a strength and agility they did not have before. They raised their heads, revealing rows of sharp, tiny, crystallized maple fangs, and they moaned, "
Haaaaappppiiiinnnessssss. . . ."

Before I could reach her, Fanny was buried in pancakes. I struggled forward, more desperate now than ever.

It did not appear that the pancakes took her down intentionally, but more like she had stood in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were piling up now, right where she'd stood. They crawled over each other, straining their newfound teeth and claws to get at the Cuddlywumpus, whose features now came into painful detail. The Cuddlywumpus had lost its fur. It was bald now, and green.

I knew I had infected the Cuddlywumpus. I could accept that. Harder to accept was the severity of the pickling. The Cuddlywumpus was in far worse condition than the pancakes.

Pickles sprouted from its flesh, obscuring its original form. The Cuddlywumpus looked like a seaweed-wrapped coral reef with a monstrous acne problem. 

A gash split its belly in two. Green balloons floated from the wound. That was where the green balloons were coming from. The Cuddlywumpus was filled with green balloons.

The pancakes piled on top of each other. They struggled their way into the belly of the Cuddlywumpus, where they made attempts to eat the balloons, but the balloons popped beneath the pressure of their teeth and claws. They fell to eating the flesh of the Cuddlywumpus.

The Cuddlywumpus mewled and whined. The pickled pancakes, in conjunction with the chains holding it down, rendered the beast totally helpless.

I knew the only way to save Fanny was to rescue the Cuddlywumpus, but if the beast was going to make it out alive, I needed Fanny’s help. There were simply too many pancakes in the dungeon.

I dove into the swarming mound.

I tore through soggy pancake flesh.

Pancakes bit into me, but they were only trying to get to the Cuddlywumpus.

As I searched for Fanny, I wondered about hump boy and the door-obsessed pancake. They had seemed intent on tracking me down when the pancakes first congregated outside the zucchini castle. The continuing pickled degradation must have torn apart their consciousness. They probably forgot all about me.

I called out to Fanny. She should've been screaming and she wasn't.

I clawed through pancakes faster and faster. I was almost buried in pancakes when I finally uncovered her.

The pancake pile had smothered her.

Fanny Fod was flattened, broken. I cradled her in my arms and brought my head to her chest. I detected a frail heartbeat.

I held her as close as possible without further ruining her body, warding off the pancakes swarming to eat the doomed and pickled Cuddlywumpus.

Pancakes crowded every available space in the dungeon. Syrup and brine sloshed up as high as my waist. Green balloons continued pouring forth from the gaping belly wound of the Cuddlywumpus. To reach the Cuddlywumpus now, the pancakes had to push through a balloon layer. The pancakes vanished as if the balloons were a low-hanging cloud strata. I heard them feasting. The Cuddlywumpus cried. At this point all I wanted was to carry Fanny Fod up the stairs, lock the dungeon door, leave the zucchini castle, and be rid of these pickled pancakes forever, but I feared that lifting her might kill her.

"Fanny, can you hear me? We must leave. We can't stay here. If you can hear me, I'm sorry about the Cuddlywumpus."

At the mention of the Cuddlywumpus, she twitched a little. Her bruised skin flickered a near-electric green before diminishing to a sick brown.

I thought she’d passed when a glimmer burst up in her eyes. “Gaston Glew, you’ve ruined happiness,” she said. She was smiling.

I shook my head. “We can still be happy. We only need each other. The world never meant much to us anyway.”

“Save the Cuddlywumpus,” she said, her voice gargled and scratchy like a broken machine. “The Cuddlywumpus is the source of all happiness.”

Her flesh glowed again. The name held a rejuvenating power over her. “My voice is decaying. My voice will be gone any moment. Whatever happens, know that I forgive you. I forgive you for ruining happiness. I forgive you for pickling my planet. I just hope that in your eternal plight, you find a way to forgive yourself for the terrible things you’ve done. I love you, Gaston Glew. May you always keep me alive in your heart.”

“I love you, Fanny Fod.”

I didn’t understand. She looked as bright and beautiful as the day I’d met her.

And yet, she was growing.

As I held her in my arms, she swelled up like a balloon. The Cuddlywumpus, pancakes, and balloons already filled up the entire dungeon, and now Fanny Fod swelled, putting pressure on an over-pressured room.

When I could no longer hold her, I scrambled to my feet and tore through the pancakes separating me from the stairs. Climbing the stairs was like walking through a steep, thick wall of pancakes, but eventually I made it to the top. I turned around.

A pickled syrup sea was swelling in the dungeon.

Fanny Fod was almost as big as the Cuddlywumpus now. Each of her blueberry eyes was already larger than me. Whereas the pancakes smothered her before, now she smothered them. And green balloons clung to her body.

She kept expanding.

She grew as large as the Cuddlywumpus, and then larger.

She was an orb of pancake delight.

A macrocosm of her peanut butter lips opened up wide, giving the appearance that Fanny was splitting in half, and she swallowed the Cuddlywumpus.

An enormous tentacle-tongue curled out of her mouth. She licked her lips and the tongue furled back inside. Her peanut butter lips clamped into a smile. Somehow I knew they would never come apart again. Her mouth would never open up.

I tried to cry out to her in confusion, in mourning, but as my mouth opened and my cries pierced the air, she blew up. She exploded in gradient tremors of green and gold light.

Fanny Fod had achieved Yummy Decay.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF FOD

She birthed a new universe.

Her golden flesh stretched ever onward, forming the background fabric. The explosion diced her eyes into a billion shrapnel pieces. They shimmered in the fabric. The blueberry stars.

The remains of pickled pancakes floated on, collecting together into meteors and asteroids. Someday they would get very old and collide. Some of those collisions would form planets.

Everything smelled and tasted beery and syrup-sweet. The pickled essence trailed it all like comet tails, but the essence tainted nothing.

Beneath me or above me, depending on which way you considered things, Fanny Fod’s peanut butter lips stretched for thousands of miles.

Her lips were a lonely island.

And on that island lay the Cuddlywumpus.

I traveled until I finally set my feet down on the surface of her lips. I stroked the hollow, half-eaten skull of the Cuddlywumpus.

I set to work burying all of its pickled tentacles in peanut butter so that someday it might take root and grow.

The Cuddlywumpus opened its eyes and blinked at me, then its eyelids drooped and it fell into a deep slumber.

The Cuddlywumpus was beginning its new life as a tree. Someday it would blossom and grow edible fruit. For now it would sleep.

I had one last thing to do before parting from her lips.

I dug my hand into the peanut butter and carved a gigantic
U
.

I stood and stepped back to evaluate my work. I had intended to scrawl Captain Pickle’s motto on the surface of her lips as a reminder to all future life, if there should be life, of the absolute necessity to march forth, to overcome the common struggle of all creatures no matter the cost. You did not have to be a pickle to understand what Captain Pickle meant when he said, “Unchain yourself from your briny fate, oh pickled prisoner!”

It struck me that when the Cuddlywumpus bloomed or life emerged elsewhere, fate would no longer haunt the creatures of the World of Fod, for with the creation of this world, fate dissolved. And that meant I was finally free.

I dug into her lips again and gave the
U
a tail, transforming it into a
Y
that stretched for miles. I worked for days without rest, trudging inch by inch to etch my new message into her peanut butter lips.

YOU ARE FREE.

My work here was finished. I had the rest of her body to sculpt.

In the wintertime of her universe, I floated on.