The Aftermath of the C Cube

I: A Forgotten Errand

When Pex woke up, he found himself in a cramped lock-up cell in the Chicago district pententiary. His partner in stupidity, Chips, had already been up for a while. A while too long, that is; he had somehow tied six of his fingers into a dense knot and was trying to untie them. He hadn't thought of wiggling them yet.

After about six hours, a string of intelligible words exited Pex's mouth. "Chips, is this Phonetix?" To his credit, six hours was an unusually brief reaction time.

"I...uh...I don't think so. I don't see any computers."

"But the walls look kind of same."

"No they don't! The walls in Phonetix are kinda plastery, y'know? They're the kinds that break when you punch them like this - " Chips proceeded to dismantle his hands with a blow to the concrete wall.

Pex looked on, disinterestedly, as Chips cradled his rearranged hands and bawled like a baby. "Uh, Chips, did that hurt?"

Silence. Not unusual, considering the minuteness of Chips' brain.

When Holly had mesmerized them to goad Jon Spiro into invading Phonetix, she had had a tremendously difficult job. They barely knew what Phonetix was; to them it was just another curse word Spiro shouted all the time, like a bark to a dog. She had to teach them what competition was, for crying out loud; and so she had to use her healing powers to augment their intelligence by about four-hundred-and-fifty percent. That gave them a mental age of twenty. This enhancement still hadn't worn off yet, which was why this conversation could even happen.

Pex took about a day to decide that Chips' hands hurt. "You wanna go see the doctor?"

"But we can't even get out of this room. What are they holding us here for, anyway?"

"Gee, I dunno. Maybe the walnut I crushed in the interview did sue us for murder."

"Come on, you idiot, walnuts can't sue people."

"But he said he would! He said so!"

"Walnuts can't talk."

"Can too!"

"Cannot!"

"Can too!"

Just then, a cop walked by on patrol. A good thing too; he saved me from typing in another twenty lines of dispute over talking walnuts. (Thanks, Joe!) He looked incredulously at the two men. "Hey, aren't you two the guys who broke into Phonetix?"

Pex and Chips turned to stare at him.

"Yeah, you guys. Wanted for breaking into and entering Phonetix."

"Is that why we're here?" Pex asked.

"I should think so."

It took Chips a while to digest that information. He had bad digestion. "But, officer, we didn't break anything!"

"Yeah, we were just standing there playing the shoulder game!"

Joe turned away and walked on. Strange things, these guys. Bodies of gorillas with brains to match. Maybe they really were shaved gorillas. Well, stranger stuff happened. Like the time they detained some illegal immigrants from Ireland claiming they'd seen fairies at Stonehenge. Fairies! Now that was a joke. Them hippies and their acid dreams.

Pex sat back and thought through the events of the day.

Chips was startled. "Hey, Pex, you thinking?" It wasn't something his friend did every day.

"Yeah, I think there was something we were supposed to do but we forgot."

"Like what?"

"Did we leave the garage door open?"

That sounded stupid, even to Chips. "Stupid, we don't even have a garage. We live in an apartment, remember?"

"What's remember?"

"Oh, whatever."

"Wait, I think I – oh, that's what remember means! – I think I remember what we were supposed to do!" A long-dead region in Pex's brain began to flush with neural signals traveling with all the speed of snails on a hot afternoon.

"Yeah, Pex, what?"

"We were supposed to go to Frazetti's!"

"Oh, yeah!"

"We were supposed to tell her that her monkey and her metal man were dead or incapati...incatacip..."

"Broken."

"Yeah! Dead or broken."

"And Mr. Spiro owed her thirty-five grand, or something."

"But I don't get it. Mr. Digence didn't look too dead or broken when we were burying him."

"Yeah. I mean, he was crying all along, right? And dead people don't cry, right?"

"Maybe they do, huh? Like in that horror movie!"

"Yeah, the one with all that – that – horror!"

"Well, I still don't think Mr. Digence was dead when we were burying him."

"Maybe he was broken."

"Yeah, maybe. Or maybe he got killed after we buried him."

"Yup, there are strange things in the soil these days. Remember that worm we dug up?"

"Maybe one of those got him. Uhuh."

"Anyway, how are we gonna get to Frazetti's?"

"Maybe we could ask him – Hey, sir, yes you sir!"

It was almost the end of Joe's shift, when he was intercepted again by those two meatheads. He sighed. Why did his patrol route have to pass the cell of idiocy twice? "Yes, inmate?"

"How do we get to Frazetti's?"

"Yeah, we got a message to pass to her really important!"

Suddenly Joe was all ears. A connection between these buffoons and Carla Frazetti, mob daughter, could make a link between their boss, Jon Spiro and Frazetti's godfather, Spatz Antonelli, chief of the Chicago mafia. The day might have been worth something after all...