by Andrew Post
“Okay, so about Squishy. I mean, is he—?”
Thadius carried on as if he and the scythe rifle were alone in the world. Which, I assumed, before I came along, was how things were here in the Mega Deluxo: a man, his shop, and his tools. “I was never really good at anythin’. That whole bit about not havin’ original ideas, okay, I can cop to that. But good Lord, it sure wasn’t for a lack of tryin’. But this? This is . . . I mean, just look at Squishy. I think he turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. I guess I’ve finally found my thingit. Thing I was good at, and be one-of-a-kind with, truly original. Shame it just happens to be illegal. But then again, not so terribly long ago, so was writin’ about certain things. Look at Marquis de Sade.”
Who? I stared at the scythe rifle. “To make something like Squishy, though, you’d have to harvest something that was . . . alive. Right?”
“That’s what I’m sayin’.” Thadius shrugged. “Jazz. I mean, that’s the term we use, but really, remix would be more appropriate. Either way, it’s just like it sounds, girlie. You want to make somethin’ that don’t exist, you just make it up. You use your goddamn ’magination. Taking Squishy’s look from the show and the character designer’s scrapbook I found online, I went in with some computer-aided design, pretty much made a CAT scan of what his innards should look like, using a raccoon and a mouse and some pictures of an octopus cut open, drew it up, and let the cauldron do the rest.”
“Do the rest?”
“Yeah. Fill in the blanks. You really think I figgered out how to put his blood vessels in and how to make his brain work and all that? I gave the machine my homework, what his guts should look like, what his skeleton should look like, and I put in my reference materials. Even directed it to the TV show for somethin’ it could use, and I let it, as I done said, fill in the blanks.”
“So it . . . figured out how to make him, like, live? The machine?”
“Sure as shit wasn’t me. Look, if you think I’m some kind of genius or somethin’, that before this I was stitchin’ cats together with sea lions, I’m sorry to disappoint. I did put a lot of hours into his basic design, but in the end a person can only be as smart as their Internet connection.”
“And you never made one of him before?”
“No. Not for a lack of tryin’, though. But she’s old. This here cauldron is one of the early prototypes, I figger. As far as designin’ goes, for jazz and all that, she’s a beaut. But when it comes to actual execution, this old gal’s clumsier ’n shit.”
“So if energy cannot be created . . . and it can only change form . . .”
“I ask for anyone who can’t pay at the Siren House with cash to bring animal skins, guts and bones, anything they want. The story goes that I know a tanner a few towns over. Really, they’re . . .” He snapped, looking for the right term.
“Materials?” I said, feeling kind of sick.
“What’s with the face? It’s the same as paint, charcoal, ink ribbons, a toner cartridge, or some brand-new guitar strings.”
No, I thought. It’s not. “Ever use it on a person?” The question just fell from my lips.
Thadius’s face twisted a little. “Once,” he said, holding up his hand, showing the pink swatch where his thumb once was. “But only by accident.” He glared at the scythe rifle. “Really should put a warning sticker on there, even if for myself. ‘Keep all appendages clear of business end.’”
When I said nothing, Thadius took a seat again. “I can practically see the smoke coming out of your ears from how hard your gears are turnin’.”
He had a second chair and, with a kick, sent it my way. It rumbled across the floor on its wheels, running over struck matches and wrappers in its path.
“I just . . . I just don’t know about all this,” I said, sitting. I threw up my hands and let them slap against my thighs. Only felt it in my hands. “Mosaic Face told me I should get in touch with you to join in the fight. Then you give me this canister and this recipe and make me create this thing that—I have to say—is making me think we’re not exactly on the up and up here. I . . . I just want to help. Make things better. I never wanted to live on an oil rig. I didn’t want to find the machine and get involved in all this molecular assembler stuff, but since that’s how things ended up, I—”
“What happened?”
“Huh?”
“What happened to make you this way, girlie?” He turned off the holoprojector.
“The electrical signals in my brain don’t reach all the way to—”
“Not that,” he said. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be a jerk, but what happened?”
“With what? I don’t know what you’re asking me.”
“Don’t play thick. You know what I mean. No one joins a fight because they want to. They’re compelled to. I’m doin’ it for a reason. Mosaic Face is doin’ it for a reason. And don’t say ‘just to make things better, gee jolly,’ because let’s face it: no one in the world ever cared that much. We all have things to gain, on the personal level, for doin’ whatever we do. No shame in it. It’s just the truth. Said yourself you ain’t a religious person, so doin’ good to get to heaven doesn’t figger in. So let’s hear it. Your truth. Your reason for wantin’ in this fight.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Tough. I can revoke your membership, you know. Anytime I want.”
I stared at him, hoping he’d cave and let it drop.
He held my gaze, raised his eyebrows. “Well? This is my I’m a-waitin’ face.”
“All right, fine.” Nearly as soon as I let my mind drift in that general direction, I felt my chest grow warm and my eyes burn. I began, trying to outrun the knot in my throat. “We moved to the rig Dad found. Few years in, Dad and I found the machine. Started spending a lot of time with it, breaking stuff down, rebuilding, all that. Innocent. Killing time, really. On the rig, after I’d worked through all the seasons of Friends and Dharma & Greg, there were a lot of long evenings to fill. Anyway, we kept it a secret from my mom and sister since . . . I don’t know why. We just did. Because of that, Mom and Darya—my sister—ended up having to pick up our slack with chores. I mean, Dad and I were spending a lot of time with the cauldron.”
I had to pause a second.
“Mom fell one day. It was always wet all over the place, and there was sometimes ice and puddles of oil everywhere. We were used to falls. This one wasn’t real bad—the fall itself. But she tried breaking her fall, and this piece of walling on one of the exterior catwalks was all rusty . . .
“Dad knew right away, having gone through it before himself, that she probably had tetanus. He went into town to look for medicine. Came back, said all he could scrounge up was some over-the-counter antibiotics. We tried those, but when she started getting lockjaw we knew they weren’t working and—shit, sorry.”
“Take your time,” Thadius said softly.
“We couldn’t do anything. Dad went to shore a few more times, went a few towns over looking for anyone who could help her. She . . . She died while he was away.
“When he got back, he went a little nuts. He made a sort of defibrillator thing out of a car battery. Tried . . . zapping her with it a bunch of times. Took him about a week for him to stop trying. We wrapped her in a sheet, put some chains around her, and let her go. In the water.” I pinched a tear off the tip of my nose, rubbed it between my fingertips; gone. “We played ‘Lightning Crashes’ when we let her in. Her favorite. It was her and Dad’s song. Their first dance, at their wedding.” I remembered the video that one of Dad’s friends took: the song overloud, causing dropouts in the audio. Still, the picture of them dancing—Dad in his tux, Mom in her gown—beaming.
“I threw in my stuffed Squishy after her. I still don’t really know why. Maybe I thought she might be . . . lonely down there, or maybe I decided that if one thing I loved was going away, I should probably just give up all the things I loved that were mine to give.”
“Christ, and then that’s the
thing that I . . .” Thadius stammered, looking the way Squishy had gone to find banana chips.
“It’s fine. You didn’t know,” I said. “Anyway, a few months went by. All I remember of that time is that it was really quiet. Dad started spending more time away. He traded some things we had around the rig for a motorboat with a solar-converted engine, started taking that up to the other towns around the Lakes. He was in Chicago for a while. Came back with an unexplained limp. That was around the time Darya said she was going to leave.
“I couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t like it was exactly rainbows and lollipops around the rig anymore. Never really was, if I’m honest about it. Well, that’s not entirely true. It sure as hell was better when Mom was around. Anyway, Dad didn’t like that idea of Darya leaving. Threatened to kill himself if she left. Darya suggested that I go too, but I said no. She said Dad was beyond hope, but I didn’t believe it. So she went. Without me.
“Then it was just Dad and me. And then, after a few weeks of me just sitting in my room staring at the wall, I decided to talk to him about it. All of it. I thought maybe that’s all he needed, was to talk, vent. I mean, Mom and Dad weren’t just married. They were in love. Like, majorly.”
Thadius said nothing. He broke eye contact briefly, nodding. It read in his face, I know that feeling.
“The day I was going to do it, talk to him, about everything, I went downstairs and found him in the room, the one where the cauldron was.
“He had her body in the scan tank. He’d . . . been putting her in, scanning her, rebuilding her. But each time she’d come out the same. I really hoped he wouldn’t think to do that, like I had. I knew it wouldn’t work, though. I mean, a year had gone by and Mom . . . well, it’s not like sitting on the bottom of a lake for a year could’ve ever possibly improved things.”
Running his hands over one another, Thadius shook his head. I continued, as much his face told me not to. But he’d asked, wanted to know.
“I yelled at him, told him he shouldn’t have gone down there and brought her back up, because she was resting, you know, in peace—like they say at funerals—and he just looked at me this weird way. He said I didn’t understand. Said we must’ve found the machine for a reason. Said given enough time and tinkering, he could bring her back. He knew he would just as soon as he found a way to filter out the tetanus. Like death could, with just the right tweak to the machine, be . . . undone, edited out of her, or something.”
“That’s why you were late,” Thadius said. “You must’ve sent that message to Mosaic Face right around the time your dad started trying to fix her.”
“No,” I said, “actually, it was after he’d left again. We really got into it, really talked—but it was all blaming. We blamed each other, like it was the other person who’d gotten us obsessed with the cauldron. Really, it was both our faults. If we hadn’t been so preoccupied with our shiny new thing we’d found, Mom wouldn’t’ve been doing so many of our chores, wouldn’t have fallen and—”
“You can’t blame yourself for that. It was an accident. If anyone’s to blame, it’s the Smocks. If you and your folks hadn’t had to leave to live on an oil rig, she never would’ve fallen and she wouldn’t have gotten sick and—”
“I know,” I said. “I know that now.”
Thadius caught my tone: I had more to say. He nodded, waved me on. We both knew who the true enemy was.
“Dad flew off the handle. I’ll spare you the details.” I looked at the floor, remembering another floor rushing up to meet me, my cheek burning. I didn’t want to talk about it. Thadius seemed satisfied with that. “After that, he left. Got back in his motorboat and took off. I haven’t seen or heard from him since. I closed up the room with the cauldron in it, didn’t even go down that hallway for a month. I had sent the message to Mosaic Face and was thinking of just never going, just . . . going about my life, like nothing had ever happened. Just live the rig life. Trying to pretend it all away.”
Thadius issued a small nod, leaning forward in his chair, hands clasped. “Listen, I’m sorry all of that happened to you.” He said it with such blatant earnestness that it made my lip quiver a little.
It took effort to thank him without a snag in my voice. After another minute, I said, “So, in the end, as much as I wanted to cut a hole in the floor around the cauldron and let the thing drop to the bottom of the lake, I couldn’t. I’d seen too much potential in there to just throw it away. It took time to come to it, but I realized I’d seen what bad it could do; I wanted to know what good it could do. And that’s when I got myself ready and came to town.”
Thadius turned in his chair to face the side of the cauldron with the roll-up door for the scanning chamber. “You’ve been through some shit,” he said, his reflection in the door panels stretched out like a funhouse mirror. “I didn’t think so at first, but I stand corrected. You got reason to fight, and that plus creativity is all it takes to join, as far as I’m concerned. I said you were in the fight before”—he turned—“but I really mean it now.”
It felt weird to smile, my face burning, but I did. Thadius smiled as well, a wet glimmer in the corners of his eyes.
“But you should probably know somethin’ now, kiddo. You can’t bring her back. If that’s your reason for wantin’ to know about cauldrons and how to jazz, I should tell you right now there’s no way. Somethin’ dead can’t be brought back if harvested dead.”
“That’s not why I’m here.”
He gave me a look. “Don’t try sellin’ me a dog turd tellin’ me it’s a Snickers. If somethin’ is broken, it’s broken. Sometimes you just got to accept how it is. I mean, if you want to be a part of this thing, that’s fine, but you can’t go into this with that as your motivation. You’ll drive yourself crazy.”
“But—”
“I don’t mean to intrude, ma’am and sir,” Squishy said, walking up with his fist buried in a bag of dehydrated bananas, “but when I was coming back this way, I happened to notice that directly out front in the parking area, there are several men in gray robes. Do you suppose we should go out there and inquire as to what they—”
Thadius shot up, his chair flipping over. “What did you say?”
“Men, all in dark gray uniforms, masks and hoods. Outside.”
Thadius turned. “Ever operate a flamethrower before, girlie?”
I barely had time to say no when Thadius ran around behind me and began carting me, still sitting in the office chair, along the back wall of the store. The wheels caught on random bits of debris and nearly sent us bowling into the shelves, but he didn’t let that slow us down.
Squishy abandoned his banana chips and raced behind us. I called him, and when he got alongside us, I scooped him up. He grabbed on, furry arms hugging my neck.
We burst into the stock area, my knees taking the doors’ impact numbly. Thadius let go, and I rolled to a stop while he went running down the stairs to the tunnel entrance. He came back up after a second, struggling with the tangled gas line, flamethrower in one hand.
“Do they not like fire?” I asked.
Despite all, he grinned. “Name me one thing that enjoys being burned.”
“How did they find us?”
“Come on, come on,” Thadius barked, striking match after match against his thigh, holding each in front of the pilot light, flicking the trigger furiously. Finally it took. At the end of the barrel, a small orange flame burbled. “There.” He pushed the weapon into my hands.
Squishy pressed his head under my chin. “Ma’am, I’m afraid.”
“It’s all right. Just stay quiet, okay?” Thadius reassured the squidmouse, then turned to run off again.
I barely had time to catch him by the sleeve. “Thadius, listen to me,” I shouted. “Smocks are people, right? I don’t think I’m very comfortable setting people on fire.”
He removed my hand from his sleeve, made me return it to the forward grip of the flamethrower, and patted it. “Why not? They have no problem doing i
t to us.” He moved to leave.
“I don’t want to kill anybody.”
Thadius sighed, came back to where he’d parked me, and dropped to one knee, putting me at eye level.
“The Smocks do not give two shits about who they hurt—in their roundabout way of defining it. If they get you, they’ll try to make you talk. They’ll want to know everythin’ you know. No matter how much you tell them, they’ll think you have more. They won’t let you go. If they get us, that’s it. We’re done.” He curled his hands over mine on the flamethrower. “Stay here. You got this whole back corner of the store. You got two places to watch: straight ahead and out these doors I’m about to go through. You see them comin’, you lay down on the trigger and spray ’em till they stop movin’.”
“But where are you going?”
Somewhere in the store, glass broke, sounding far away but still too close.
Thadius stepped back, apologizing with his eyes. “You have to man this side of the store. I’m goin’ to get the scythe rifle, but it needs ten minutes to warm up. Stay here. Give them hell if you have to. Don’t forget they’re responsible for all this. Don’t feel nothin’ when you do it, girlie. Hear me? Nothin’.” And with that, Thadius pushed his way out of the stockroom, leaving me and Squishy on our own.
There were many times in my life that I wished my legs would spontaneously begin to work. This was one of them.
We waited.
With Squishy hugged to my chest, I moved the flickering end of the flamethrower toward one set of doors, turned it, and pointed it at the other set. I could barely hear anything through the pulse in my ears, but I tried. I held my breath and listened.
A clatter. The sound was unmistakable: the mountain of shopping carts had toppled. The razor wire apparently hadn’t deterred them.
I’d seen them, up close, just this morning. They didn’t look all that menacing. But it was hard to tell what was really going on under those cloaks. I recalled the horror and sci-fi movies Dad and I used to watch together. Beings from another dimension. I pictured skin of rock, lizard heads, disguised eight-foot-tall spider things.