Greegs & Ladders by Zack Mitchell, Danny Mendlow (top 10 ebook reader txt) 📕

“Who's there?” I asked.

“Bob.”

“Who's Bob?”

“Me.”

I looked over the side of the canoe and saw just a person's head sticking up from the lake's surface.

“What are you doing in there?” I asked.

“Obviously I fell in and got stuck. What kind of stupid question is that? One just doesn't go for a swim and lounge about in probably the worst substance imaginable.”

“Sorry.”

“You're lucky I can't use my arms or I'd tip your canoe over.”

I paddled a few feet away from Bob just to make sure.

“You'd be dead as soon as the lake began its assimilation of your bloodstream!” he raved. “A fate infinitely tamer than my own. As an immortal I've been living like this in the lake for countless years.”

“Why has no one rescued you?”

“They tried. You may not think it when you look at my hideously tar-infected, mutated face, but I was a very important person in my pre-lake life. There were exhaustively expensive rescue attempts involving every known type of pulley, crane, winch or rope system in the near galaxies. It proved impossible to remove me from the living hook-like grips of the tar, so everyone gave up. My story fell into obscurity after I outlived all the people who cared. So now I am one with the lake.”

“You know, I'm also immortal,” I said. “Even before I saw you I was worried about getting stuck in the lake forever, but now that I've seen how agonizing your existence is I think I should get to shore as soon as possible before something happens.”

“You're immortal?” asked Bob excitedly. “That's great news!”

“It is?”

“Yeah!”

“Why?”

“You can join me! Jump into the lake!”

“Why would I do that?”

“So I have a friend to talk to for the rest of eternity! It's the ultimate good deed.”

“I'm not jumping into the lake.”

“You must!”

“Don't you think we'd get sick of each other?” I asked. “How many hundreds of years can you converse with the same person? It's only been 5 minutes and I'm already sick of you. Five Minutes.”

“You're just like all the rest.”

“The rest?” I asked. “How many people come here? I thought it was supposed to be impossible.”

“Very little of what appears to be impossible is actually impossible,” stated Bob.

“Right.”

“Except, of course, for the simple act of rescuing someone who fell into a lake of tar,” he added with a whiny grumble.

“Who comes here? Immortals?”

“Mostly.”

I wanted to learn more, but getting away from the lake was priority one.

“Well, see ya later,” I said. “Chin up.”

“I won't let you go!”

“What will you do?”

“I'll capsize your canoe with ripples!” he shouted as he began to thrash his head around like one of the many metal-headbangers taking in a Lincran parking lot festival. The neck-breaking motion caused no ripples. The dense anti-ripple consistency of the lake consumed all energy before it had a chance to escape.

It was a sad display. I turned around and continued my mission.

Even before I got to shore I could hear the call of the Garbage-Demons. Every few minutes I heard the drifting, ecstatic shrieks of the mysterious feeders.

I had to spend several nights in the swamp. I was not able to make good time because of the absurd amount of falling and rolling and backtracking involved with crossing a shifting landscape. There was also only a short window of time in which I could move, for the garbage-demons emitted their shrieking calls for only a few hours a day. The rest of the time I had no bearing of direction and had to sit down and wait until I heard the sound again, or until the land shook me off my perch. The latter usually occurred first.

The first thing I saw upon exiting the swamp was a sign reading This Way to Bin #897432 – GLPOA357%&11.FFF, aka The Bin Where the Beard of Broog Has Been Stashed.

All those letters had been painstakingly carved by Wendell. I could see faded blood drops where the dull knife had slipped.

While following the sign, it was clear I was headed directly into the main nesting ground of the Garbage-Demons. Hearing their shrieks over the last few days had given me plenty of time to nervously imagine what they were like. Demons are never good. Considering they feed on garbage, I had also been left to wonder what the area was like where they had chosen to nest. It could only be the area with the most rank concentration of junk.

My expectations couldn't have been more wrong. There were no demons at all. Instead there was a mildly tolerable bunch of tame mammal creatures, a sort of hybrid cross between a dog, a cat and a Quigg. All these creatures did was eat garbage, so they were actually a vital part of cleaning up the planet's destroyed ecosystem. Milt would have been overjoyed to learn about all the help that was going on.

Between the gushing fan, the obsessive mosquito and the hungry animals, there seemed to be a lot of life on this apparently uninhabitable dump.

I went to the bin. The beard was conveniently placed right on top, as if on display. I shook off the filth that had grown on the beard, even though I was already growing accustomed to the grimy dark-gray color of everything on Garbotron, including my own skin color which had grown a layer of caked-on moldy dust within minutes of our arrival.

Beside the bin I discovered a sound-system rigged to loop the recordings of shrieking demons. There was enough battery power and Investment Banker-fuelled generators to ensure the recordings would loop for thousands of years. I broke the system and funnelled what fuel I could into some empty bottles. The animals were noticeably pleased by the sudden cessation of the shrieking demons. It was a sound they had heard perpetually for all of their lives, since the beginning of the evolutionary path of their species. These animals, like the Grollers, have no memory. Until I intervened with the smashing of the stereo, their lives were a perpetual cycle of these stages:

1) Hearing the shrieks.

2) Feeling a paralysing fear towards whatever the shrieks might belong to.

3) Joyous relief at discovering the shrieks belong to a harmless ster

4) The complete forgetting of everything.

The hybrids could now relax and eat garbage. Their average lifespan tripled.

I wondered who had gone through the effort of setting up the sound-system. I thought maybe it was this Fralgoth character.

Being Immortal

Beard of Broog in hand, I traipsed off in search of my lost immortal 'friends'. It wasn't difficult. I found them rummaging in bin #894391 – GRQAJ219%&11.FFQ

“Hey, look, he finally evolved the ability to breathe and see and what not,” came the familiar mocking tone of Dr. Rip T. Brash The Third. “We thought you'd never stop wriggling and trifecta-ing about.”

“Tri-what-ing?” I said.

“The Trifecta.”

“And what,” I sighed, “is a Trifecta?”

“Crying,” said Rip.

“Puking,” continued Wilx.

“And Pissing in your pants,” they merrily exclaimed in unison. “At the same time!”

They broke out into laughter. I didn't get it.

“Yeah, whatever,” I dismissed. “So... you didn't have to suffer the same trials of adaptation as my body had to?”

“Pffft!” laughed Wilx. “What, you think this is the first time we've been banished to a garbage planet to uncover some sort of lost, magical, voodoo-antiquity?”

“You really have a lot to learn about being immortal,” said Rip.

That pretty much summed up everything at that point.

“I've got the beard,” I said defeated.

“Course you do,” said Wilx. “Of course you do.”

“Did you chat with that nutty little fruit fly?” Asked Rip. “I'm certain he gave us the wrong map.”

“Yeah... can we get out of here now?” I said.

“I suppose we ought to fashion some sort of escape vessel,” said Wilx. “Let's head over to the razor sharp ravines of pointy rocket ships.”

We walked for a long time in silence.

“Interesting fact,” said Wilx, punching numbers into a small, digital computation device. “When adjusted for relativity, that fruit fly is the oldest creature to ever exist.”

“Ha! Told you so,” said Rip.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Wilx, handing a bag of dried up, dusty and filthy superfluous internal organs to Rip, who began rather grotesquely to ingest them and move them about his insides back into place with a pointed stick.

And yes, if you must know, Milt is the only creature to match the meticulous attention to cleaning detail of The Quiggs. A strange being indeed.

Fralgoth: Notorious Intergalactic Thief of Voodoo Antiquities,

and the Movie 'Plasma Raiders 3'

As Wilx attempted to find a usable rocket ship, Rip and I sat down and tried to make sense of everything.

“What does this beard do, anyway?” I asked him.

“Do? The beard doesn't do anything. It's an inanimate piece of third-rate imitation Plutonian wool. The dodgy black-market kind. Itchy by the looks of it.”

“You mean there's no magical properties to this beard?”

“I don't know. Try it on.”

I wore the beard. More than itchy, it caused a temporary leprosy-like symptom within the first few minutes.I now remembered why I'd thrown it away.

“I could use some help!” yelled Wilx from the ravine of ships.

“Just taking an indefinite break!” Rip yelled back.

“You should go help,” I said. “I'm the only one who's earned a break, after what I went through to get the Beard. Did I tell you the part about the swamp? And the lake?”

Rip took off. I thought it seemed pointless. These rocket ships looked like props from a cheesy science fiction movie. A lot of them were. Wilx had noticed this right away, but instead of saying anything he decided to forage the ships for any alcohol that might have been forgotten by one of those D-Grade actors known for drowning out the regrets of their failed careers.

Rip had gotten the same idea, but all they ended up finding were the remnants of the actors themselves. I later learned these ships were from the set of the legendary unfinished movie Plasma Raiders 3, a production enshrouded with controversy. To achieve total authenticity for the great launch scene, the filmmakers had chosen to actually blast all the actors and extras into space. Only instead of renting out some real spaceships they merely strapped some spaceship-quality propulsion units onto otherwise completely fake prop ships. The results were mixed. The thrilling camera shots were fantastically unprecedented, but none of the actors survived. The rest of the movie was then set to be shot with lookalike replacement actors. During re-casts many of the investors lost interest and dropped out, being that the star-power of the lost actors was what had drawn their