Killer Cone Serves The Last Ice Cream You'll Ever Eat

The ice cream parlour on Neptune's eastern fringe had been outlawed in seventeen dimensions.

Business improved immediately.

Killer Cone worked behind the counter wearing a paper hat folded from expired arrest warrants. His smile was immaculate. His flavours were not.

Customers ordered things like Vanilla. He served Existential Pistachio.

Someone once requested strawberry and left speaking fluent volcano.

Children adored him. Parents signed waivers.

Every scoop came balanced atop cones grown from petrified lightning. They crackled pleasantly until the first lick, after which they developed personalities.

Most were polite, but one… One attempted to run for parliament. 

It came second, having led in the polls for the duration of the campaign. A last-minute cheating scandal was said to derail its chances, but rumour has it, Mercurian influence had something to do with it. They didn’t fancy working with someone whose creamy top melted every time they touched down for a state visit.

You’d be well within your rights (and sanity) to ask why people still bothered to visit this frosty little outpost on the Eastern fringe of Neptune’s worst area for real estate and blooming flora. The answer is simple: there was a tale (and quite potentially a very tall one) that suggested Killer Cone had, once upon a time, whipped up an ice cream capable of gifting its licker with eternal youth, an unending subscription to Gardeners Weekly, and between four and seven Katherine Jenkins albums on CD.

He denied he was still in possession of it or the recipe.

"It escaped,” he said, smiling that immaculate unaging smile, while running his fingers through locks so luscious, Samson would’ve squealed in envy had he gazed upon them. “It just got up one day, nabbed by mixing notes, and took off.”

But still, no one believed him. He’d been there for millennia, if the stories were true. He hadn’t aged a day. Neptune’s Ted Bundy, quietly dishing out towering cones of delicious cream, seemingly happy with his lot. 

Of course, the sceptics existed. Why oh why would Killer Cone continue selling ice cream if he were an ageless immortal with perfect teeth and lovely hair? He could be a model! An actor! A superstar!

But no. He remained hold-up, in that frozen wasteland, apparently content to be the subject of speculation and a delicious destination.

One man, however, didn’t think it added up. Lt. Geraldo Porcine, storied lawman and rider of an albino comet. He stopped by KC’s Cone Shop regularly, scoping out the premises, convinced if he showed up often and randomly enough, he'd eventually, he’d find something to hang on that sickly sweet schmuck.

He parked up his comet outside. It was happy to wait. It liked it on Neptune. A lot of snow. He felt at home.

"Any hazardous ingredients today, Cone?” Porcine strode into the parlour. His stance was wide to support his globular physique. He was a chode of a man, wider than he was tall. His feet pointed to the sides, and his knees had long since given up any hope of bending and instead operated as shock absorbers for his duck-like waddle. He wore a 27-gallon hat, which sat low on his head, the hatband gracing his thin and unintimidating eyebrows. His chin was French.

"Only the usual, Lieutenant.” KC smiled. Rows and rows and rows of pearly white teeth. The rows at the front were smooth and approachable — the kind of teeth most normal people would like to carry around in a small cigar tin and touch for good luck before chatting up a potential mate in a bar (you know what I’m talking about). But rows two to five (and possibly beyond that) were sharp, filed to a point, and dripping with ice cream and blood.

Unfortunately for Lt. Porcine, his eyesight wasn’t so good. He had really tiny eyes, like marbles viewed from a distance. He couldn’t so much make out the specifics of KC’s features, only the vague sense that he was super hot and very much out of place in the badlands of the solar system’s eighth planet.

“Why not try my latest mix, Lieutenant?” KC grinned with all his teeth (and the spares he kept in his back pocket). “I whipped it up this mornin’ just for you.” His eyes narrowed into a menacing glare, but the expression was lost on Porcine. Truth be told, he was a poor excuse for a cop. If it wasn’t for his awesome hat and sweet albino comet ride, there was a strong chance he wouldn’t have been taken seriously at all.

He dipped a silver spoon into a tub labelled Memory Ripple and took a slurp.

His tiny marble eyes rolled back in his head. His thin-lipped mouth dropped open. His French chin melted into the chilly flesh of his neck. His head rolled back, and he began to gurgle.

“Thaaaat’s it,” hissed Killer Cone. “Remember…”

Porcine’s eyeballs detached from their optic nerves and began to spin from right to left. He foamed at the mouth.

“Stop it,” Porcine tried to say as a fountain of ice cream and spewtum decorated the counter.

“Remember,” whispered KC, in the slickest, slimiest, sludgiest tone imaginable. Like a mucus-drenched worm, his words wriggled from the Killer’s mouth and slithered into Porcine’s ear.

“You knew what you would find, Lieutenant. Why did you go looking for that which wants you dead?”

Porcine tried to respond. He couldn’t. His tongue had melted. The rest of him was following suit. His eyes had stopped spinning. There were no sockets left in which they could spin. Just a puddle on the floor.

“Oh dear,” said KC in a syrupy sweet tone. “I seem to have lost a customer.”

Through the window, Porcine’s Albino comet trembled with fear. Still tethered to the bike rack outside, he wasn’t going anywhere. He was at the mercy of the many-toothed man who’d just melted his former owner with an ice creamemory charm. 

KC’s stared out the comet until it folded. It bowed what would have been its head if comets weren’t all head (so it just kind of rotated around ten degrees downward in the direction of its observer).

“But I gained a new friend.”

He tore off his apron and strode out of the parlour. The Albino comet cowered as Killer Cone seemed to grow in size with every step he took away from his role and the shifty choc-ice peddler as which he’d been known for time immemorial. 

“You and I are gonna have some fun, whitey. Let’s ride!”