Sausagey Santa (7 page)

The other elves don’t seem to be as tough as Burt Reynolds Elf. They stay behind, like me. They have swords and axes in their hands, but they don’t have any idea what they’re supposed to do with them. Well, except for the one with the skull tattoo. He is fidgeting with some kind of gadget in a backpack. Maybe it’s a bomb or something.

“What do we do?” I ask them.

They look at me like I’m supposed to have the answers.

“Fight for Christmas?” Pig Nose Elf asks.

I shrug at him.

“You do something,” Unibrow Elf says. “You’ve got the cabbage suit.”

“Do you know how to use it?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

He looks at the other elves, but they all just shrug at him.

Skull Tattoo Elf gets his gadget working and buckles his backpack on. It makes a loud whirring noise like that of a lawnmower. His gadget is some kind of vacuum cleaner. A hose leads from its mouth into his backpack.

“Rock!” he tells me.

I wonder if Skull Tattoo Elf listens to adventure rock . . .

He points his vacuum on the horde of zombies and they back away from him. His weapon sucks the black coffee out of the corpses’ eyes. He goes after several of them at a time. Once all of the black coffee is pulled out of a zombie its body goes limp and falls to the ground.

“This guy knows what he’s doing,” I tell the other elves.

They nod and we stay close behind him for safety.

The bodies pile up in the snow as Skull Tattoo Elf sucks the life out of the undead creatures. I can’t see Decapitron or Burt Reynolds Elf, but I can hear gunshots and the whooshing of swords on the other side of the burning sleigh. Zombies swipe at Santa as he continues to cry for his fallen reindeer, but he doesn’t seem to care.

Coffee birds that have exited the bodies of Decapitron’s victims fly over the sleigh towards us. Skull Tattoo Elf tries to vacuum them up in midair, but many of them get through. They dive into the hollow bodies lying in the snow and we find ourselves surrounded by more zombies.

Asian Elf shrieks as a rotten claw rips into her stomach. Teeth tear into her neck and rip open her arteries, spraying black blood into the wind. Elves have black blood?

Skull Tattoo Elf points his mouth at her attacker and sucks the coffee bird out of its eyes, but he’s too late. She’s already dead.

“Into the grinding station,” Skull Tattoo Elf says.

We fall back, dodging the zombies to get into the black metal building. The corpses tower over me. I’m hobbit-sized now and won’t have the strength to break free if any of them clutch onto me. Unibrow Elf and I clear the horde, but Pig Nose Elf becomes entangled in a forest of rotten arms.

“Help!” he cries. “Not me!”

Skull Tattoo Elf turns back, but there are too many of them. Pig Nose Elf disappears into the sea of massive corpses. His screams become choking coughs as black blood fills his lungs.

“Santa, come on!” I yell.

Santa is just standing there as corpses attack him. They rip open his sausage casings. Meat goo empties out into the snow.

“It’s no use, me lad,” he cries. “The sleigh is destroyed. The children won’t get their presents this year.”

“Come on!” I say.

Skull Tattoo Elf pulls me away as he sucks coffee birds out of eye sockets.

We circle the metal structure until we find the entrance. It’s electronically locked, but Unibrow Elf cracks the thirty-eight digit code so fast that it looks like he has twenty hands at work on the lock.

When the door opens, he winks at me and gives me a finger-gun with a click of his thumb.

That was pretty sly of him.

Once inside, we shut the door behind us to keep the zombies out. The others are still out there but they didn’t follow us. I don’t know what Decapitron’s problem is. We’re here to save our kids, not kill a bunch of zombies to impress an elf with a Burt Reynolds mustache. I feel like we’ve really been growing apart ever since she died.

There is a spiral staircase leading up to the brain of the facility.

“Come on,” Skull Tattoo Elf says, leading the way up the steps.

Upstairs, we arrive in a large dark room. There is crying coming from the shadows.

“What’s that?” Unibrow Elf asks.

We following the crying to a big box in the center of the room. There are barred windows on the sides of the box. The crying comes from within. I recognize that sound.

“Angelica?” I ask, peeking through the window.

I see her in there, curled around her big sister.

She looks up at me and jumps to her feet.

“Hi, Sly Fry!” she cries.

“My angel! ” I say. “Don’t worry, the Sly Guy’s here to rescue you!”

Nora doesn’t say anything. She’s weak. It looks like her wound has drooled a lot of blood. A puddle fills the floor of the box.

I look at Unibrow Elf. “How do we open it?” I ask him.

Unibrow Elf examines the cage, looking it up and down. “The top,” he says.

We can’t reach the top of the cage. The window is near the bottom, but the top stretches twelve feet into the air.

“I’ll get it,” Skull Tattoo Elf says.

He grips the vacuum tube with his mouth and climbs the side of the box. Once he gets up there, he examines the top. Doesn’t see anything. He crawls across the lid and then looks at me and shrugs.

“Angelica, how did you get in?” I ask. “The top?”

She shakes her head.

“Where then?” I ask.

She points at the window in the back.

Unibrow Elf and I circle their prison to the back window.

“Ahh,” Unibrow Elf says, nodding at the barred window here.

He pulls a latch and the window unlocks. But as it unlocks the room fills with a clanking sound.

“What’s that?” Unibrow Elf says.

We listen carefully. It is coming from the cage. It sounds almost like . . . music.

I look up. A crank on the side of the box is turning, almost like a . . .

“Get off of there!” I yell at Skull Tattoo Elf.

He looks down at me. “Huh?”

The music stops and the lid of the box bursts open, sending Skull Tattoo Elf into the air. He crashes into the ceiling and his neck snaps. Then his limp body falls to the ground with a plop.

I look up as a giant head turns to face me. It bobs up and down on its coiled neck.

The jack-in-the-box doesn’t have the usual clown head, nor the pointy hat and pointy nose. Its head is a grotesque collection of body parts, frozen together into the shape of a head. I can see coffee birds swimming within its pinhole eyes.

Unibrow Elf and I run away from it as the head hisses and slurps at us with the dismembered torso it uses for a tongue.

It swings its head and the box jumps off the ground towards us. My daughters scream inside, as it begins hopping across the room. Unibrow Elf turns around to see how far away it is. The jack-in-the-box locks eyes with him and then speeds up, hopping three times hyper fast and then up high. Unibrow Elf cowers on the ground as the box smashes down on him, flattening him into a black sticky paste that oozes out from beneath the cage.

The girls scream high-pitched as the jack hops after me. I stop and turn back. It locks eyes with mine and then charges at me. It hops three times fast and then goes up high over my head, covering my vision in shadow. But I roll out of the way behind its back before it gets me.

I run for Skull Tattoo Elf’s body and remove his backpack. The meaty jack doesn’t realize that it didn’t crush me. It bobs in the corner of the room, basking in its supposed victory. Once I get the backpack on, I flip the vacuum’s switch and it whirs up.

The Frankenstein head jerks at me and hisses. I see inside of its mouth and realize that there are a dozen hands at the back of its throat. Since the jack doesn’t have any vocal chords, the hands rub their palms together really fast to create the hissing noise.

The jack charges at me, but I circle it with my vacuum pointed up. Black liquid drains out of its eye sockets towards me. Coffee Birds attempt to flee from the jack, but the vacuum has them in its pull. The jack attempts one more jump at me, but I hop cartwheel out of the way. When the sockets are sucked dry, the chunky head drops against the side of the box, its torso- tongue dangling out of its leg-lips.

The girls cheer and clap for me.

I do a moonwalk dance for them with gun-fingers pointing in the air. Then I do another cartwheel. It’s easy to do acrobatics when you’re small.

I help Nora and Angelica out of their cage.

“Why are you so short?” Angelica asks.

“Elf magic,” I say.

“You’re smaller than me,” Nora says.

“I’ve always been smaller than you,” I say.

CHAPTER NINE

CLOCK SAUSAGE

I take my daughters downstairs and exit the grinding station.

Outside, there is a giant battle going on between an army of snowmen and an army of Dungeons and Dragons elves. Boon made it. He regrouped the scattered elf ships and brought them here safely.

The shredded remains of zombies are sprinkled through the snow. Decapitron must have annihilated all of them. I scan the battlefield, but I don’t see antlers on any of the warriors. I can’t spot Boon, Santa, or Burt Reynolds Elf either.

I hold out the vacuum to suck up any coffee birds that might be lingering in the zombie parts, just in case. I’m not taking any risks when my kids are involved.

“Well?” Nora says.

“What?” I ask.

“Well, go fight,” she says.

“I’m guarding you,” I say.

“Cowards guard,” she says. “Heroes fight.”

“You didn’t think I was a coward when I saved you back there,” I say.

She rolls her eyes at me like I don’t know what I’m talking about. The growth on her head pulses with the movement of her eyes.

I see Tea near the corner of the grinding station. She’s stabbing at a snowman with a spear, but it doesn’t seem to be doing any good.

“Come on,” I tell my kids.

I sneak up behind Tea and vacuum the coffee bird out of her opponent.

She turns around.

“You!” she says.

“Hi,” I say.

“Why aren’t you using your cabbage suit?” she asks.

“Nobody told me how it works,” I say.

“You should be fighting Frosty with Santa,” she says.

I shrug at her.

“I was rescuing my kids,” I say.

“Here,” she says, pointing at my vacuum weapon. “Give me that. I’ll look after your kids for you.”

She tells me how to use the cabbage suit and then points me in the direction of Santa and Frosty. Before I go, Angelica gives me a kiss on the cheek.

“I can reach you now!” she says, happy with my new height.

I snap a gun-finger at her and groove my way into the battlefield backwards.

Backwards!

I mean, how sly is that?

Dodging through snowmen armed with icicle swords and ice cube shields, I make it into a large intersection of the city where Santa and Frosty are battling out their final showdown.

Burt Reynolds Elf is nearby. He’s kneeling against a building, holding his wounds. Black blood drips over his fingers.

“Where’s my wife?” I ask him.

He points behind me.

Decapitron is staggering towards us, dragging her candy cane sword through the snow. Her latex outfit is all sliced up with deep gashes in her chest and shoulders. One of her antlers is missing. As she arrives, she leans all of her weight on my shoulder and nearly crushes me. She’s almost twice my size now. I can’t hold her up anymore.

“How’re the twins?” I ask.

I go behind her. The boys are gurgling at each other. They look down at me and smile. I smile back and wink at them. I go to give Matty a cootchy-cootchy-coo on the bottom of his foot, but there’s nothing there. His foot has been cut off.

“What the hell?” I cry.

“What?” Decapitron moans.

“His foot’s gone!” I cry.

“So,” she says, annoyed with me. “He’ll live.”

“He’s just a baby! You got his foot cut off!”

She shrugs. “It’s fine.”

“What kind of mom are you?” I say. “You fight zombies with your babies on your back!”

“What kind of dad are you?” she says. “You’re four feet tall.”

Burt Reynolds Elf laughs. He doesn’t seem to notice he’s about the same height as me.

“I’m the kind of four feet tall dad who just saved his daughters,” I say.

She makes a farting noise with her lips at me. It’s almost as if she’s drunk. She only acts this way towards me when she’s drunk. Then I notice a large wound on her head where the antler used to be. She’s probably got a concussion. She isn’t thinking straight.

I turn back to look at the battle.

It looks like Sausagey Santa must have gotten his nerves back after the reinforcements arrived. He is sliced up, dripping meat paste in the snow as he fights. His hat and white hair are missing, leaving just a balloon of sausage for a head. In one hand he fights with a large saber and in the other he has one of those vacuum weapons. He cuts at Frosty and sucks at his black soul liquid as well.

But Frosty is in good shape. Whenever Santa cuts off any of his snow flesh, he just replenishes it with the snow from the ground. Whenever Santa vacuums some coffee out of his eyes, there are always more coffee birds in the air to join the pool inside his head. But when Santa gets hit by Frosty’s large sickle arms, the sausage that is lost cannot be refilled.

Santa’s going to need my help for this battle. I pull my arms inside of my cabbage suit and find the controls, hoping I remember what Tea told me to do.

“Hmm . . ” I say to myself, trying to find the right buttons without being able to see them.

A scream fills the air as Frosty cuts Santa in half.

Sausage legs wiggle on the ground as Santa’s torso crawls away from the snow man. He still sucks at him with his vacuum, but he’s lost his sword.