Chapter 8: Mad Jack Attack
It took Diddy and Lanky a while to gather the rest of the Kongs from the other temples, in a series of exciting and hilarious misadventures involving treacherous traps, mystifying mazes, seething sentinels, and a dastardly doppelganger of Cranky Kong, who made some fairly ominous predictions about the method of his death, that nonetheless offered little to the progression of the story. And soon, the eight of them (Snide and Squawks included) crammed into Funky's jeep and made their way back to the beach.
When they arrived on Shimmering Shores, five of the crew of eight gasped upon seeing the ominous, towering dreadnought moored a mere mile or two away.
"BWARK! I've never seen anything that big before!" squawked Squawks.
"Or so hideous!" Candy added in horror.
"And you expect us to sneak aboard that thing to shut down that slimy reptile's island buster?" Cranky demanded of Snide.
Snide sniffed and thumbed his nose. "That's the bread and butter of it."
They gazed at the hulking tower of iron, all trying not to wet themselves under its withering glare. Then Funky spoke, "Well, dudes, this is far as I take ya. My girl's not made to tread water, you know? But I'll tell you what: I'll head on back to the shop and gather some gear together that you can use on those scaly leatherheads. I'll be back once I'm stocked up."
"I'll go with Funky," said Candy. "I wish I could join you in teaching those meatheads a lesson, but I'll just get in your way. That's what we've got this big hunk for, right, Donkey?" She smiled sweetly at him, and he rubbed the back of his head and grinned sheepishly.
"I'll come with you," sniffed Snide. "You're gonna need my know-how to shut down that machine – just so long as you keep K. Rool and his goons away from me."
Cranky prodded him with his cane, "Just so long as you don't try any funny business while we're aboard. I'll be watching you like a starved Necky, and if I even smell a hint of double-crossing, I'll have Donkey here rearrange your limbs. Got it?"
Snide gulped. "Got it."
"Right then," said Cranky, and he immediately took charge. "Everyone who's going start swimming for that floating junk heap. Try to stay out of sight. We don't want them picking us out of the water before we get there. Once on board, we sneak in and find those buttons to shut down that device."
Diddy spoke up, "Tiny and Chunky are still aboard somewhere on there. We should try to find them if we can. They can help us shut down the machine."
Cranky waved his cane impatiently. "Fine then. Let's get moving! That doomsday device isn't going to shut down itself! Donkey!" He turned to the affable ape. "You're carrying my stuff… and me. You're not going to take it easy while I'm around, you can bet your crystal coconuts on that!"
…
SPROING-CLUNK. SPROING-CLUNK. SPROING-CLUNK.
The bone-rattling sound echoed deafeningly in the tight, steel corridors, yet they weren't enough to muffle the maniacal laugh and high voice of the killer toy springing right behind Tiny as she ran, her breath coming out in gasps.
"Run, run, run as fast as you can! You can't escape Mad Jack, I'll make you part of my clan! Kee hee hee hee hee!"
Not if she could help it! She just wished these cramped, metal hallways weren't quite so long. If she could find some open space, she was sure she could give Mad Jack the slip.
It wasn't long before she found that open space she was looking for, but it turned out to be not quite what she wanted. The hallway turned abruptly to the right and opened up into a giant manufacturing center where massive machines cranked out animatronic Kremlings by the hundreds on long conveyor belts. She was running out of the frying pan and into the fire here!
It turned out to be even worse. Once Mad Jack was out of the cramped hallway, he now had the room to really uncoil, springing higher and faster with a mad cackle bordering on insane! She only just managed to dodge him by ducking under the belts and cutting a zigzag between mechanical Kremlings.
"Oh, I'll catch you!" he cackled as he bounded back and forth behind her, "Oh, yes, we'll all catch you! My Krobots and I will catch you! KROBOTS! CATCH HER!"
And it was with a deafening shriek of metal grinding on metal that all the mechanical Kremlings turned their heads toward her and their eyes flashed red.
Oh, great, she thought. Now I've got an entire army after me.
…
Snide convinced the Kongs to swim around to the rear of Crocodile Isle where they were less likely to be spotted. Once they had all climbed onto the metal bank, Snide pointed up. "We should be able to sneak aboard without being detected if we climb into the Factory. Those scaly boneheads believe it's haunted, which is good news for us."
"Then let's not waste time dilly-dallying," Cranky barked. "Let's go, everyone! The sooner we deal with K. Rool and his machine, the sooner I can get back to my experiments."
So they started their climb up the giant metal Kremling, making use of the portholes, vents, and cobbled metal plates. Snide puffed behind them, inching his way slowly up. He stopped to catch his breath, gazing up at the distance that they had to go, and he paused when he noticed something odd.
"Those vents…" he murmured to himself. "That's steam coming out of them… but that's from the Factory…"
He had just told the Kongs that the Factory was abandoned and was thus the safest way to sneak inside. But if steam was coming out of the Factory, that meant it wasn't as abandoned as he'd said. The question was, should he tell them?
Nah, there was no point. They had already come this far and there weren't any real alternatives. Besides that, he didn't have the breath to shout out a warning. Not to mention it would likely as not attract the wrong kind of attention.
A rather serendipitous if not unscrupulous decision by the weasel since as they got close to the vent that would lead into the factory, they heard a very calamitous clamor like thousands of Funky's jeeps were being slammed together and a shrill voice screaming, "GET HER! CATCH HER! DON'T LET HER GET AWAY!" which could only mean one thing: Tiny Kong was causing trouble in there.
Diddy leaped up to the vent, which was pouring out a thick, black cloud of smoke, and yelled through the grate, "Tiny! Are you in there? Just hang on, we're coming!"
Donkey heaved himself up next to Diddy, and then with his big, gorilla hands, ripped off the grate and tossed it into the ocean. Diddy scrambled inside, creating a Diddy-shaped pocket in the black cloud as it rolled out. Donkey squeezed himself after him, followed by Lanky. Cranky grumbled about taking a different route, one that wasn't so sooty and steam-broiling and Snide took another route entirely, not wanting to be stuck with the cantankerous, old primate or anywhere within reach of his cane.
Inside the ventilation shaft, the Kongs were making slow progress, with the black smoke assaulting their eyes and causing them to sting. They shielded themselves as best they could. Diddy called out for Tiny, his tiny voice dampened by the copious clouds of smoke and vibrating in the metal to make it sound tinny. He almost fell into the furnace. It was by a flash of orange in the dark smoke below him that he managed to stop himself in time.
"Thanks, Donkey," he said, unwinding his tail from Donkey's wrist.
"Welcome," said the laconic ape, his big hand over his mouth and nose to filter the smoke.
Diddy pointed behind himself. "That way's a dead end. We'll have to try a different route."
It was a sensible point, yet none of them could ignore the calamitous clanging echoing through the furnace and into the vents that indicated Tiny was in trouble. Each second wasted was a second that could be Tiny's last. They had to move quickly.
Donkey was not a patient ape. He wanted to save Tiny now! So for this dilemma he employed the usual answer: brute force. He braced his back against the top of the vent to give himself some swinging room and then smashed his fist against the bottom.
It took one smash and four seconds of prying the resulting metal blossom open to get through. Then two seconds more, they landed on the ground with the force of a nine-hundred and seventy-nine-pound cannonball that sent a shockwave through the manufacturing room, toppling all six-hundred fifty-three Krobots like bowling pins.
"Now what's this? What's this?" shrieked Mad Jack, ripping at the ribbons of shredded leather mask at the back of his head in agitation. "Three uninvited guests? This is unexpected and unwelcome! Unfortunately for you, I have an unpleasant undertaking for you underlings!"
"Yeesh!" exclaimed Diddy, hopping down from Donkey's shoulder. "You're a regular basket case, aren't you?"
Lanky added, "I probably shouldn't be asking but, uh… what exactly are you supposed to be?"
The answer to that was a tale of tragedy. Mad Jack was once a meek Kremling named K. Lever. He had been born with the genetic defect of abnormally high intelligence, and as a result had often been kicked around by the other Kremlings. His only friends had been the mechanical dolls he put together. Then all that changed when K. Rool (back when he went by the title "Baron") came along and put him in charge of constructing a mechanical army of Kremlings. At last, his talents were being appreciated and for a time he was on top of the world. Then tragedy struck when a jealous Kasplat "accidentally" knocked him down from a catwalk, breaking his legs and paralyzing his body from the waist down. Using his talent for tinkering, he fashioned himself mechanical prosthetics to replace his useless legs and afterward upgrade his puny arms. Eventually, all that metal gave him lead poisoning, which, among other things, ruined his mind until he was little more than a maniacal mechanical monster, bent on vengeance for all the horrible things anyone had ever done to him.
But none of the Kongs would get the chance to learn this lamentable lyric because then Tiny Kong came running up, and she leered at him, "Yeah, you're in trouble now! Donkey's gonna pop your head off and use it like a bowling ball!"
With a snarl, Mad Jack swiveled toward her then sproinged forward. She leaped upward with a yelp, just avoiding being crushed beneath his box, but her victory was short-lived for was she fell back down, he snatched her in his claws.
The Kongs howled in alarm and started forward to save her until Mad Jack thrust her into the air and yelled, "Hey! I was playing with her first! You gotta wait your turn!" She yelled and kicked the springs that served as his arms but he was oblivious to it. With a shrill shriek of glee, he sproinged across the manufacturing center toward a chute labeled in big industrial letters: TESTING CHAMBER.
"Put me down!" Tiny screamed. "Put me down, you big, dumb creep!"
Mad Jack only cackled in reply. He sproinged into the chute box-first, crashing through the gate, where they landed on a giant raised platform – an arena of sorts. On the walls were tracks for two giant mechanical arms to slide around. Their purpose was to handle any potentially dangerous devices that Mad Jack created, like chainsaw-wielding Krobots. If the dastardly devices were defective, they were pushed into the holes that checkered the platform and dropped to the flames below where they were immediately incinerated. Only now, Mad Jack was going to use it as a playpen.
"Tag!" he yelled gleefully. "You're it!" He tossed Tiny toward one of the holes, which she narrowly avoided falling into by kicking off the very edge to launch herself to the other side, catching it and then using it to pull herself back up.
"Awww! Not fair! I so had you in that hole!"
"That is NOT how you play tag!" Tiny blurted, trying to hide the fact that she was shaking. She glanced up the chute. All she had to do was stall this crazy jack-in-the-box and then Donkey would come and pound his face into a lily pad. In fact, she could hear them coming down now…
Except it was taking too long for them to appear. There was a lot of banging and howling, and the chute was shuddering energetically, but none of her friends were popping out.
Mad Jack saw where she was looking. He swiveled his head in that grinding way that set Tiny's teeth on edge to look and then he turned back and grinned at her. "Oh, good. My lock is working. Those bullies won't steal you from me, that's for sure."
Which was exactly the sort of thing Tiny did not want to hear. Trapped in here with this maniac, and her friends on the other side, with no way to help her! She was on her own.
"Well, crap," she swore.
"Hopscotch!" countered the cracked Jack and sproinged toward her. She leaped back with a yelp, avoiding getting crushed beneath the giant box, and their game of chase resumed from where it had left off.
Tiny wanted to quit this game. She had to find a way to escape this arena and shake off the mechanical maniac, but the only way off was through another hatch labeled APPROVED high up on the wall, which was too slick to climb. She would have to find a way to use the two mechanical hands that kept sliding around to block her way to climb up to it.
She leaped onto one of the hands. It clenched in response, but she had already clambered onto its arm and was balancing her way across it. The other hand slid around beside its companion and snatched at her, but very nimbly she leaped above it and latched onto its arm.
Mad Jack stomped his box angrily. "Hey, you! Get off of those! Those are not monkey bars!"
"Why don't you make me, metal face?" she taunted, dodging the hands as they tried to catch her, slapping each other's wrist.
"Grr!" Mad Jack leaped up and landed in the palm of the left hand. Quick as a wink, Tiny shimmied her way further up the right arm while the left arm retracted to enable Mad Jack to keep up with her. Halfway up, she suddenly swung herself in the other direction. Mad Jack's hand (the mechanical one that he was riding on) reversed its trajectory to follow her.
Which literally threw Mad Jack off. His momentum pitched him forward onto the arm, which he made a desperate grab for while his box plummeted to the flames below. Longer and longer his springs stretched from his head and hands until at last they all uncoiled completely and his hands were violently ripped off the arm (the mechanical one). His scream vibrated off the metal walls like a hundred violins in agony and then was cut off as his head disappeared in the jets, turning instantly into molten steel, which drained through holes in the floor beneath and dropped into the sea.
Tiny breathed a sigh of relief. So not her type! She swung onto the hand.
It clenched around her in a suffocating grip. Her head swam as she desperately tried to take a breath. She was barely aware of a cacophonous clanging as dozens of mangled Krobots spilled onto the platform from the chute, followed shortly by Donkey, Diddy, and Lanky.
"Tiny!" Diddy yelled. "Where are you?" They all spotted her a moment later, turning blue in the grip of the mechanical hand. As they all raced toward her, Diddy yelled, "Hang on, Tiny! We'll save you!"
The other hand swung down to smash them into banana mush, but quick, little Diddy scooted out of the way and then leaped onto the arm. Lanky whipped a long arm on the mechanical arm as it started to rise and then used his other arm to grab Donkey by the back of his tie. Donkey used the momentum to leap up and grab onto the arm before it got too high and all three of them were on board.
Except Donkey's weight was dragging it down. Its gears squealed in protest as it tried to stay upright. With no other choice, Diddy leaped onto the other arm squeezing Tiny and attempted to pry the fingers apart himself. Lanky whipped his arm to latch onto the other arm and grunted with exertion as he tried to pull the two arms together. Living up to his title as the "King of Swing," Donkey swung himself from one hand to the other then swung himself up to straddle its wrist and with his incredible strength began prying the metal fingers apart.
Diddy yanked Tiny out of its grip and yelled at her, "Come on!" The two of them made a flying leap for the platform, Tiny's pigtails spinning behind her like helicopter blades. Lanky followed a moment later, using his long arm for greater launching distance, and finally, Donkey pushed off the hand for a leap, which broke a gear inside the metal arm, causing the first joint to fall and dangle uselessly. He slammed onto the platform.
Which caused the solder around the base of the pillar holding the platform up to crack. The platform wobbled, spreading the crack further around the base and throwing the Kongs to the platform, who grabbed the edges of the holes to steady themselves. "It's falling!" Diddy cried.
There wasn't much they could do about it, however. It rocked once more with a final crack and suddenly plunged through the floor, taking the platform and the screaming Kong clan with it.
