Captain Shazam and the Mysterious Desert..

Here is a short story for you all the enjoy..

Captain Shazam looked over his shoulder. Behind him, the oasis where he had been hiding out for two weeks lay in chaos. Kitchen appliances and power tools littered the ground as smoke rose gently from the craters in which they lay. Small fires were springing up, soon to engulf the palm trees and half-eaten coconuts that lay strewn around the area. The sand beneath his feet was hot. Just the way he liked it. The Captain of slight build, about five and a half feet tall. He wasn't much to look at, but if you were to look at him you would see why his superiors had decided to make him a captain. Apart from being incredibly strong, he had the eyes of a wolf. Some had rumoured that he had once actually met a wolf, and that they had gotten along quite well. He turned and faced west, and as he did so a fridge landed three feet away from him, exploding on impact and flinging him through the air and over the edge of the dune. After descending the other side of the dune, in a manner not completely dissimilar to that of a slinky falling down a flight of stairs, Captain Shazam landed in a crumpled heap, his face and arms buried deep into the sand.

"You've never had any style, Keith" said a voice from somewhere above him. He felt the person kick him in the kidneys before clutching the shirt on his back tightly, and wrenching him out. Hurriedly wiping the sand from his eyes to see his would-be assailant or friend, Captain Shazam let out a roar of familiarity and hatred.

"Hazardous Withers, you slimy backstabber!" Using his good arm, after a brief moment of confusion and forgetfulness as to which was his good arm, he lunged at the man who stood before him. To most people, this would not have seemed like a good idea, but Shazam wasn't thinking straight. Hazardous was a strapping 7ft tall giant. His head was the size of a shield, his chest like that of a gorilla, and feet like those big, iron things that you tie ships to on the side of the docks, only slightly more proportionate to the rest of his body. But the scariest feature of Dr. Withers was his innate ability to answer rhetorical questions. Withers deflected Shazam, with the finesse of a mountain rerouting a small, commercial jet. Yet again the captain found himself flat on the burning floor, only this time he was face up.

Getting to his feet and picking up a nearby toaster, Captain Shazam brandished it dangerously at Hazardous Withers in an attempt to intimidate him.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?!" he asked, immediately regretting it.
"Well, I just picked you up out of the dune, after giving you a well-deserved boot, and now I'm standing here listening to someone wielding a device that took full advantage of the marketing potential in the world's latest best idea."
The Captain wasn't going to let Hazardous dominate the conversation like he used to back in fishing school.
"It's all very well you pitching up in the middle of the Sahara, which frankly is surprising on it's own, to then kick me and help me to my feet! But the worst of it all, do you know what the worst of it all is?" He asked, and then seeing the look on Hazardous' face he quickly interjected, "The worst is that you didn't remember my birthday last year!"
The toaster bounced off Hazardous' face like a poorly-timed compliment to a goth.

"No, I don't want to talk about it." Captain Shazam was walking just ahead of Hazardous, refusing to engage his reluctant companion in conversation. Just for fun, every few minutes he would turn around, kick sand at the knees of the doctor, and then run ahead in a brief moment of glee. Shazam didn't care. Hazardous Withers was the only person in the world who referred to him by his nickname from boarding school. It's not even as though his real first name was Keith. The honest truth was that it was Quiche, and Hazardous had had a terrible lisp throughout his youth. All those frustrations were building up again, especially the fact that he had missed his birthday, a crime almost punishable by death where the captain came from. He looked up at the sky. The sun crawled slowly toward the horizon. He liked how sneaky the sun was. With the patience of a broken clock, that great, fiery ball of gas bided it's time until it was millimeters from the edge, before fanning out in a brilliant display. The sun setting always made him think of fried eggs. And as the yolk spread over the horizon, he remembered that he was hungry.
"Oyi! Hazardous! You don't have anything to ea-" said Captain Shazam, just before the sand beneath him disappeared.

Down into the depths of the desert he fell, through what seemed to be some sort of sand tunnel. (I would like to point out that it is easy for the reader to poke holes in this description, saying things like, "It's not descriptive enough! I mean, how are we supposed to know what a sand tunnel looks like if it hasn't been properly described?!" and to those people I'd like to say, "Get some bloody imagination!"). When he realised that he was having to take breaths to maintain his screaming, Captain Shazam decided to man up and just wait it out. Before long he landed on something that seemed to have been strategically placed there for the very purpose of catching someone falling out of a hole above it. Even Shazam thought this was fortunate. On closer inspection he discovered that it was a mattress, queen sized no less, with the base of the bed to go with it. A few seconds later, Hazardous Withers landed beside him. It appeared that he had been chuckling all the way down and was now in high spirits. They both had a look around. The bed on which they lay seemed to be bathed in light, whereas all else was in darkness. After performing a brief analysis of their situation, taking into account possible dangers and unexpected calamities, they decided to have a sleep.

Light flooded their minds, and soon after that their eyes. Scrambling to their feet, they wearily looked around them. They were completely surrounded by appliances. Fridges formed the primary offence, with angle-grinders, kettles and a variety of other smaller self-propelled utensils filling up the gaps. This gave Shazam and Withers quite a shock, but their captors still seemed expectedly inanimate. Breathing a sigh of relief, Captain Shazam turned around to pick up his Shazam Super Socks, and found himself face to face with a lazercutter.
"Don't move!" said Hazardous. Shazam knew that tone of voice. It was the sort of tone that insinuated that one of the doctor's experiments had gone almost to plan but with one fatal flaw that was probably causing the reason for that tone of voice.

"What's going on? What have you done, Haz?!" said Shazam, unable to hide the panic in his voice.
"I may or may not have invented a method of animating inanimate objects. But they only seem to move when no-one is actually looking at them. The evil tendencies they seem to be showing, however, were fully intended." said Hazardous.
"Well that's just splendid!" exclaimed Shazam, "What were you thinking?"
"Well, I was.." Withers continued explaining in full detail what he had been thinking at the time, but Shazam was not paying attention. He had been distracted by a note that was stuck to one of the fridge's doors, held in place by a magnet in the shape of a Capatain Shazam's logo. Reaching forward, making sure that Hazardous was watching all the appliances behind him, he grabbed the note. He also grabbed the fridge magnet, as he thought it would be a nice memento if he made it out of this escapade alive.

"Right! It's time we got out of here, before someone loses their cool" mused Captain Shazam, keeping his beady eyes on an over-sized freezer. "I'll take the one's over here, and you take the one's over there." Staring straight ahead of him, Shazam braced himself before screaming his signature war-cry and charging at the objects before him. An intense battle ensued, with the Captain fighting all manner of electrical beasts. But soon his vigour subsided somewhat, and in a slow and awkward few seconds, he realised that they weren't fighting back. No sound was coming from the behind him, where he had left Hazardous to fight his own battle. The reason for this eerie quiet soon became apparent to him.

Hazardous was standing in a huddle of microwaves, holding an incredibly large mutliplug in his hand...unplugged.
"You're an arse" said Shazam. That was all he said to Hazardous for the rest of the week. After that, he thought that he should probably stop sulking and actually get out of there. Stacking all the appliances on top of each other, they created a vast white and silver tower. Upwards it stretched, higher and higher, glinting in the light that was still emanating from somewhere above them. After two days of intense balancing and near-death experiences, they reached the top.

The sand beneath his feet was hot. Just the way he liked it..

[To be continued, if I can be bothered.]

Toodle-pip,
andrewiconkerr