by Andrew Post
Not a question. I was to be back by tomorrow. It felt bad to end the night on a note like that. Maybe I’d had several conversations with Thadius tonight but forgotten about them. Maybe I’d told him all about my stories. I cringed. I hoped not. They were bad. I started to get my crutches under me and pull myself down off the stool when I noticed Thadius had left something on the bar. For a man who said he needed to lock up soon, he’d left the means to do it: his keys.
I didn’t know how well he kept his shop. If he just left all of his scratcher stuff out in the open figuring if the Smocks caught him they’d eventually find it anyway or if he kept it tidy, things locked away and hidden around the department store—inside hollow mannequin chests, or what—but I recalled how many food wrappers were laying around and the general disorganization of his tools and wondered if that canister of fixins with the Smocks in it would still be there, waiting on the table.
I peeked out of the corner of my eye. Thadius was over talking to the guy who’d just announced his retirement. Something was said and both men, with tears shining, hugged. Now was my chance.
If I wanted to get progress made, I had to do something. I had to keep those horns sharp.
* * *
I returned from the tunnel with the fixins canister in my bag, plucking the spiderwebs from my hair. On the way out, I didn’t see Thadius or Beth. I left the keys on the bar and pushed into the cold night. The port wasn’t far, and I hoped the effort of clack-thumping down there would warm me up.
The beach was a long stripe of gray under the cloudy sky. My rowboat was where I’d left it, strapped to a wooden pylon with a bicycle chain and combination lock. I could see my breath. I dropped to my knees and tried the combination an embarrassing number of times, swearing and strangling the uncooperative lock.
A shadow fell over the scratched underside of the rowboat. Figuring it for Chin Tuft, I played it unawares for a moment while I got the unlock undone, pulled the rubber-encased chain loose, and turned with it dangling from one hand, ready to lash him across the face. Instead, it was Scarf Boy.
“Whoa there,” he said, seeing me ready to smack him into next week. He backed away, crunching in the cold sand. He looked pale in the glaring fluorescent streetlights shining down at us from the boardwalk. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do. I shouted from up there”—he pointed with a gloved hand toward the stairs, same place he’d watched me coming in my first day—“but I guess you didn’t hear me. Waves are loud tonight.”
I got my crutches under me. “What do you want?”
“I was going to come over to talk to you at the Siren earlier, but I had to go. I hoped I could’ve been back in time before close, but I was too late. I saw you down here; thought I’d come down and say hello.”
“Hello,” I grunted, turned, wedged a crutch under the rowboat, and with considerable effort, flipped it over.
“Need help?”
I ignored him. Instead of tossing the bicycle chain into my boat, I kept it wrapped around my forearm. Just in case.
“Where are you going? It’s a little late for a boat ride, isn’t it?”
“I’m going home.” Pulling the rowboat down the remaining six feet of beach to the water involved having to wedge a crutch under its nose and wrench upward, using mechanical advantage to push it through the sand. When I got to the wet beach, my progress slowed.
Without asking, he moved ahead, took the boat by one of its handles, and pulled. I wanted to get going either way, so I let him help.
“I’m Clifford.”
“Fantastic. I’m going home, so . . . thanks for the help and all, but catch ya later.” Not exactly elegantly, I tossed in my crutches, turned around, and dropped into the rowboat—successfully not turning it over on myself in the process. I pulled onto the seat, got the ores up, and began paddling. I’d soaked my legs to the knees but felt none of it.
“Don’t want to talk?” he asked, almost begging. He stopped in the water at ankle depth.
Now coasted out, I was able to row without scraping sand. Sitting backward, I couldn’t exactly ignore him. The guy just stood there, staring at me with his hands in the pockets of his skinny jeans, the collar of his denim jacket popped, wearing that I know something you don’t know smirky smirk.
Once I was out farther, completely straight-faced, I gave him the bird.
He just laughed, the sound carrying over the water making it sound like he was closer. He shook his head and turned to head back up the beach.
I looked over my shoulder to make sure I was heading the right direction, squared up the rig behind me, and when I looked ahead, he was already up the stairs, gone.
When I was halfway out, the water all around me flared with color. I felt a reverberation deep in my lungs, and my gaze shot skyward. Rainbow popper, closer than any I’d ever seen before.
The next time I went to see the pit that Thadius had shown me, I imagined it’d be twice as big. Another hunk was off to the Smock’s versh, to be balled up like some enormous intergalactic snowball in outer space and then mushed into their own Earth to make it bigger, slower.
Still, I was like a kid watching the sky after the grand finale of a fireworks display, wanting more. I stared at the aftereffect floating before my eyes, the spot where the popper had gone off now filled in with plain dark sky.
Smocks were out there, doing their business.
I felt a pang of paranoia but remembered in my backpack I possibly had the means to secure us a rather big jump in the right direction. Put one back together, question them, and get the fight back on track. I rowed on, carefully avoided the mines around the rig, and made it inside.
* * *
The sun on the side of my face shining in from the bathroom porthole window woke me up. I was on the shower mat in the bathroom, the taste in my mouth somewhere between awful and god-awful.
Squishy was there too, curled up within the C of my body.
I’d puked nearly as soon as I’d gotten inside the rig. I’d never been hungover before. The chop of Lake Superior hadn’t helped. Still, lying there, I felt fine for a minute. So for a while, I lay there petting Squishy and thinking highly of my super liver that worked all the alcohol out of my blood.
The skull-shredding agony didn’t make its appearance till I sat up. Came on like a buzz saw with a simple flip of a switch. I lay down again, this time on my back, and ran my tongue over my teeth. They felt fuzzy. “Never again,” I said to the ceiling.
I let the night’s events roll over me. Most of it came in clear. The incident in the Siren House ladies’ room, first. I was happy Beth came in when she did, but I hoped she wouldn’t think she’d need to look out for me all the time. For whatever reason, even though she and I were on about the same level with our disabilities, I felt like I should be looking out for her. Clearly, she can look out for herself, I scolded myself.
I found one crutch, then the other, got up, and went to heat a kettle of water for tea. It felt like I needed as much tea as my stomach could hold. I watched the kettle, waiting for it to steam, and thought about Clifford.
I snapped my fingers. “I should’ve said something about him being a big red dog. That would’ve been good. But I’m sure he’s heard that one before.”
Clifford, with his uncool retro apparel. Why was he dressed that way anyway? Maybe he wasn’t from Duluth. Maybe he was from somewhere else where the in look had moved on from the trendoid thing. Maybe he was actually with it, while the rest of us at the Siren House—most of the female staff doing the Gwen Stefani thing and the male half growing Luke Perry sideburns—were the ones truly out of style. Not that I’d know. It was hard to keep trendy in a post-A world, where there weren’t shopping malls or high-end designers around to tell us how we needed to look. Just one peek through my closet and you’d see how much I cared about trends: everything a hand-me-down from my mom or my sister. Patched, stitched, taken in here and there, all stained. I have a pair of jeans that was three pairs that Mo
m Frankensteined together.
The kettle whistled. The tea was a blend of stuff I grew myself, hung up in little bundles to dry around the rig. After adding enough sugar to nearly give the tea the consistency of mashed potatoes, it wasn’t so bad. I exaggerate. Mostly.
I took a seat at the kitchen table. My eyes found, above the kitchen radiator, the calendar Darya had made still hanging on the wall.
Old paper, with the squares for the days drawn in with a marker. The numbers all in her small, tight hand and the digits all uniformly, unmistakably hers—the serif font of her own invention, with the abundance of unnecessary curlicues and swirls. She put a lot of work into that. I smiled, even though it made my headache grumble.
It wasn’t her fault, but the calendar was now useless. The season had shifted just a matter of a few days. We’d gone from late summer to early autumn in a matter of a week. I’d been sweating during my first visit to the Siren House, but while leaving last night, I saw a layer of frost clinging to the edges of puddles. I left the calendar up. I couldn’t use it for the reason it’d been made, but that didn’t mean it didn’t have a purpose.
I caught my reflection in the stainless-steel face of the double oven. Kind of fun-housed but still me: slightly upturned nose, smattering of freckles, and a mouth that Dad always said looked like I just got through chewing a lemon. My nickname when I was still in diapers was apparently Serious. Looking at myself in the oven’s reflection, I could see it’d carried over into now, my twenties. But . . . I edged closer and furrowed my forehead. I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at myself in the mirror. I never wore makeup. I kept my hair long only because it could keep me warm when needed. But I was sure I should’ve noticed that I had the beginning of crow’s feet. And a single strand of silver at my left temple.
I looked a lot like Mom, actually. And as beautiful as I always thought she was, I didn’t want to look exactly like her, now, when I was only twenty-one. I looked forty. So it was true. They were aging us all out.
As I carefully singled out the silver hair and plucked it, questions burbled: How much longer could I expect to live? Would the last of my life fly by in a month? Would my teeth start falling out next week? What about my eyesight? It wasn’t like optometry was a booming business in a post-A world. What if I broke a hip? I was alone out here. No one would find me.
I looked at the gray hair between finger and thumb, twisting and bending at the most delicate drafts passing through the kitchen. “Shit.”
“What is it, ma’am?” Squishy asked. I nearly forgot he was sitting in the room with me.
“Nothing. We just need to get to work is all. Pronto.” I set down my cup of tea, found my crutch handles, picked up my bag with the fixins canisters, and took the zip lines down.
Squishy padded along, fighting to keep up.
The machine was as I left it, with the plastic sheet over it and the Hello Kitty tablet still connected by its USB cable, the screen asleep. I squiggled a finger across it, and it promptly illuminated, displaying that same group of options below the Flashcraft Industries logo. I dropped my bag onto the floor with a heavy clunk, took out the stolen canister, popped it in along with the flash drive, and set the tablet in my lap.
And stopped.
This could be bad. No. This would most likely be bad.
What would come out the other end? If I were to assemble a Smock, bring one back, would he know nothing, as Thadius had said? Or did he just say that to dissuade me from trying this? What if I could bring one back and question him, demand to know their plan? What if I threatened his life? Would he tell me how they could be stopped, divulge their weaknesses to me?
I had to try.
I hit Execute.
While the machine went to work, I went to gather tools from around the rig for the interrogation.
Track 15
MONSTER
I couldn’t leave anything alone. Mom always said I got that from Dad. As I sat in front of my cauldron with goggles and earplugs, I couldn’t help but think that, while I looked like Mom’s twin lately, inside, I probably resembled Dad a whole lot more.
I stared through the tinted goggles at the assembly cylinder, expecting results, silently demanding corrections to the things the world dared inflict upon me. Through the flashes of brilliant white, I watched as it worked to show me I could succeed where my father had failed. I tried to tell myself that wasn’t what I was doing, practicing to see if I could bring Mom back eventually. I had her recipe stored on my tablet. What if I took someone else, a Smock, for example, and use them as fixins? They were harvested alive. That’s what it took, right? But my guilt draped a sheet over that, said no, gave me a push on the chin to refocus my attention on what I was doing: hoping to question a Smock and demand they tell me how to stop them.
But some part of me, deep inside, sat next to the idea of bringing Mom back, petted the soft, warm idea, and cradled it, shushed it so the logical side of me wouldn’t be able to sniff it out in whatever dark corner it was hiding.
The tablet screen read 3 percent.
If this worked, there was a chance.
I know what you’re thinking. I hadn’t gone off the deep end so much as I was toeing its edge, staring into it . . . Okay, maybe I had gone off the deep end. But when you’ve lost everyone, come and talk to me. Tell me you wouldn’t consider the same thing, if presented with the option.
Trying to see what was going on in the cylinder but afraid it’d blind me if I leaned any closer, I felt Squishy’s hand on my shoulder.
For a moment, I felt disoriented. Like the hand could’ve been Dad’s. I could almost hear him, grunting and sleepy, asking if I’d made any progress. The same as he’d do anytime he came to relieve me of duty in another of our attempts to bring back Mom. “No,” I’d say, “nothing,” and hit Purge, basically like hitting Undo, popping the coiled lump inside the assembly cylinder out of existence.
But it was Squishy behind me, not Dad. With a hand shielding his eyes, he didn’t ask about the progress but shouted over the tremendous racket, “What you’re doing, ma’am, if I may say so, I believe is a bad idea. You should probably listen to Mr. Thumb. I think he may know more about scratcher business things than you do.”
“I have to try,” I said, my back to him.
“I think you should probably stop, ma’am. The Regolatore are clearly very dangerous people. I don’t think they’ll appreciate being held captive. They might have a way to summon help—”
“Squishy, it’ll be fine.”
His reply was silence. He came around to my side and put a hand on the back of mine. When I didn’t react, just kept staring at the flashing operations inside the cylinder, his fingers wrapped around my index finger and pulled my hand away from the tablet.
“This is wrong.”
I glared at him. “This is how you were made, you should know.”
“I understand that, but it doesn’t make it any more right. You scolded Mr. Thumb about this, about scratching being a possibly immoral act, and yet, here you are doing the same thing yourself.”
Squidmice have pretty good hearing, apparently.
“So I’m a hypocrite?” I pulled my hand away. “You don’t get to lecture me. You’re just . . .”
“A character from an animated television program? Not anymore, I’m not.” He poked a finger in my chest. “You saw to that, ma’am.”
I turned in the chair toward him. “I was tricked into making you. If you’re pissed at anyone, it should be Thadius. This”—I pointed at the laboring machine—“is something else.”
“Those men Mr. Thumb harvested should stay as they are. They’re the same as dead, and they shouldn’t be brought back to life. Once gone to wherever it is they go, they should be allowed to stay there. Enemy or not.”
“But they might know something. It’s gathering intelligence; it’s reconnaissance. Any information is good information.” I tried sounding upbeat, as if this were good, honest work that I was doing, worthy
of an atta-girl. I heard myself—the tone of someone who’d spent plenty of time lying to herself, tricking her own heart into believing. I didn’t like myself right then.
“And what if they don’t speak? What were you planning on doing to them, then?” he asked. His little eyes flitted over to where I had set up an array of interrogation aids. Screwdrivers, a blowtorch. My pistol.
His eyes met mine. “Well?”
“How much of what I said at the Mega Deluxo did you hear?” I asked.
He glanced away. “Regarding?”
“You know what I mean,” I said. “You were off getting something to eat. I thought you were all the way across the store. You always had good hearing in the show, though. If that holds up here, you must’ve heard some of it.”
“Fine,” he said. “I heard you, about what your father and you went through when your mother perished. I’m sorry for your loss. And I apologize for eavesdropping, I do, but have you seen these ears? I can’t really help it much.”
“So that’s what you’re really scolding me about, isn’t it? That I shouldn’t follow in Dad’s footsteps and try to bring Mom back?”
“It wouldn’t be right.”
“All righty.” I reached for my crutches. “I think it’s bedtime for you.” I started to stand, but Squishy held his ground and didn’t get out of my way. “I can’t let you do this to yourself.” He went to the worktable, picked up the pistol.
“Squishy, stop!”
He held it in both hands, the .38 clearly too bulky for him to wield effectively. He turned his whole body with it, the white flashes from the cauldron pulsing his eyes green. The barrel was trained right at the assembly cylinder.
“Put that down right now.”
“You will be upset with me for quite some time after this, ma’am,” he said with a tremor, “but you are not thinking in the long term. I apologize, but I believe in time you will come to see I was right and—”
I lunged my left crutch at him, hoping to knock the gun out of his hands, but I missed and hit him square in the chest instead. He spun to the side, the gun turning with him, and it fired.