The Fat Man_ A Tale of North Pole Noir - Ken Harmon [40]
“You need to be careful, Gumdrop,” Dingleberry said. “Mr. Cane is not taking any chances. Since no one has found you yet, he’s locked himself up with the toys and put a guard outside.”
“After the Forest of Mistletoe, I think I can take care of a guard,” I replied with as much strut as I could manage.
“Not this one,” Dingleberry said. He reached into his pocket, pulled something out and tossed it to me. When I caught a pecan, I knew who Cane’s guard was and I winced at the pain heading my way.
“Oh, Tannenbomb.”
CHAPTER 16
Oh, Tannenbomb
Dingleberry and Rosebud were fine with me going after Candy Cane all by my lonesome, but they would not hear of me taking on Tannenbomb solo, and I was in no position to argue. Not only was my engine sputtering on fumes, Tannenbomb was a serious piece of bad news.
Guarding Candy Cane was a monster nutcracker, a twenty-two-foot Amazon shell splitter who killed for peanuts. Legend has it that the oak Tannenbomb was carved from was struck by a mean bolt of lightning, spiking the wood with a hard-boiled venom that the devil himself envied, turning the nutcracker into one sadistic assassin for hire. Fire, silver-bladed axes, termites—nothing could defeat Tannenbomb, so Santa and Kringle Town’s finest always tried to keep him occupied with long hunts in the wilderness for the Rat King. If Tannenbomb were half as smart as he is strong, he’d know he was on a snipe hunt, but his brain is mostly drift-wood, so the ruse has worked for years. I don’t know how Cane found Tannenbomb and trained him to take orders, but he did it. There Tannenbomb stood, guarding the inner sanctum of Cane’s Xanadu lair and there was no getting around him. The clap of his wooden jaw sounded like your casket closing.
I was feeling about as tough as a Sugarplum Fairy.
Still, I had to do something. Cane was hiding behind the door ahead of me, thousands of toys with him, hoarding them so he could be the new Santa once the Fat Man shriveled up from exhaustion. I was the only one who could stop Candy Cane’s plan, but when I looked up at the Cashew King Kong I literally hoped I wasn’t, well, nuts.
“Here goes nothing,” I told Dingleberry and Rosebud. “I’m making this up as I go along, so just listen and watch. And pray.”
I stepped into the entrance hall of Cane’s private quarters. The room was huge, the walls as tall as a canyon. In the middle was a Christmas tree, one of the biggest ones I’d ever seen. It was so big Tannenbomb looked like a toy beside it. The tree was decorated with large golden balls, millions of them, and about thirty miles of silver tinsel. The gaudiness made my stomach churn. It looked like the tree of a robber baron. I came around the tree and faced the nutcracker, but Tannenbomb stared straight ahead, a good soldier. He didn’t even see me, so I thought I could possibly tiptoe around him. I took a few quiet steps to my right, keeping my eyes on the nutcracker.
I should have kept at least one eye on where I was going because less than ten steps away from the door, I walked all over a pile of discarded pecan shells. The noise sounded like a T. rex cracking its back.
Tannenbomb flared his nostril with a perturbed snort, and the growl that boiled out of his chest sounded like a freight train with a toothache. A hard, merciless eye found me among the nutshells, but it warmed when Tannenbomb realized he had something to kill. He lifted a boot to smash me.
Tannenbomb was quicker than I thought. As his foot came down, I dove forward as fast as I could, but felt the whoosh of the near miss run up my back like an ill wind. Splinters of pecan shells rained through the air like arrows, so, instead of standing up and running, I had to crawl like a bug scampering for a dark place to hide. Cane’s door was only a few feet away, but it might as well have been at the South Pole. In the next blink, Tannenbomb’s broadsword swept me across the room like a ball of dust.
The world was spinning and listing starboard, but I knew better