And still—nothing.
I told him about Chang, the monkey-thing’s arrival, how much bigger it had looked.
‘Bigger?’ said Frankie. ‘You mean like it evolved?’
‘Well, I guess you could say—’
‘Like a Pokémon?’
I groaned. ‘For the last time, Frankie, it is not a Pokémon.’
He held up his hands. ‘Hey, I’m just looking at the facts, here.’
My coffee arrived and I sipped it in silence, watching through the glass front as early morning commuters bound for work flooded slowly past, wet sludge spraying up from their back tyres like explosive diarrhoea. It was still snowing, though no harder than it had been last night. I wondered what would happen when this “blizzard” finally hit, if they’d be forced to shut the roads. Seriously, it’s amazing just how ill-equipped we still are to deal with the elements. We can put a man on the moon, but functioning when there’s snow on the ground? Uh-uh—that shit’s complicated.
Frankie glanced up. ‘Wait—what if we’ve been going about this all wrong?’
I considered the expression on his face. Only two things got Frankie that excited—girl-on-girl wrestling, and the prospect of impending death.
I thought girl-on-girl wrestling was too optimistic, however.
‘What do you mean?’
‘This thing’s a baby, right?’
‘Sure.’
‘And who was the first person it saw after punching its way out of that fucking Poké Ball, or whatever?’
I stared at him as realisation dawned. ‘Wait—are you saying this thing thinks I’m his mom?’
Holy crap, what a week.
He shrugged. ‘Yes—no. I mean, what if it like, I dunno... imprinted on you, or something? Because think about it—why would it attack Chang? And while we’re on the subject, why didn’t it attack you?’
‘Well—’
He leaned forward. ‘Because Chang was threatening you, Dan—it was defending you.’
I thought it over a moment.
Could it be? Had it really just been rising to my defence, concerned for the wellbeing of its only parent?
‘But it did attack me...’ I reminded him. ‘Back at the apartment. Here—look.’ I pointed to the scratches on my cheek and forehead. Not exactly life-threatening, true, but a wound is a wound. And besides, it really stung. ‘See?’
‘It was taking a crap, Dan. You interrupted it. Shit, I would have tried to scratch your eyes out, too.’
‘And let me guess—that’s when it imprinted on me and I became its mother, right?’ I shook my head. ‘Goddamn it, Frankie.’
‘I don’t think you’re like its mother. More like you’re just linked with it, or something—you know, like E.T? Like maybe it sensed your fear at Chang’s place, and that’s why it attacked him.’
I let out a long breath. ‘This is so retarded.’
Frankie grinned. ‘Yeah.’ He plucked a fry from the table and pointed it at me. ‘So, going by that logic—where’s the one place you’d go if you were hungry and frightened and desperate, Dan?’
I began to tell him how stupid that was, then paused as I realised suddenly I did know.
I held his gaze steadily across the table. ‘This is so retarded...’
Frankie pushed his plate of fries away and stood, sending a fresh waft of garbage my way. ‘Grab your shit—it’s go-time.’
***
Back in the parking lot, we were surprised to find we had a visitor waiting for us.
She was sitting propped against the side of my Accord, arms folded, shoulders bunched against the biting cold. She looked very angry—but then, to be fair, that might have just been her normal face. We really didn’t know each other that well.
‘Mr Pratt,’ she said as we approached.
I groaned.
Espinosa.
I nodded. ‘Detective.’ I looked past her at my car, simultaneously acknowledging just how screwed I’d currently be if I hadn’t decided to clean the car last night. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’
I was feeling sassy.
She turned her gaze toward Frankie. ‘And you are?’
Frankie frowned. ‘Me?’ He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘Well, on a biological level, I guess you could say I’m mostly carbon—though it’s been noted I am unusually attracted to inanimate objects.’
A moment of confused silence from Espinosa. ‘You—?’
‘By which I mean I’m magnetic...’
She looked questioningly over at me.
I nodded. ‘It’s true.’
It wasn’t.
She looked us over again, an expression on her face like she was wondering if that was enough with which to arrest us. After a moment, however, she shook her head. ‘Right. Well, you’re probably wondering why I’m here—’
Nope.
‘—so I’ll just cut right to it. A man was taken into the emergency room last night suffering from deep lacerations to his face and neck; a Wesley Chang?’
That pain in my stomach again. Like a battalion of angry elves attempting to hack their way out using the world’s dullest pickaxes.
‘Never heard of him,’ I said.
‘Oh, no? Funny, because we visited his trailer. Guy kept a diary. Want to take a wild guess as to who was set to meet with him yesterday?’
Balls.
‘We also have witnesses claiming a man of your description was seen dropping him off,’ she went on. ‘A skinny, nervous-looking fellow. Bit of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?’’
Frankie leaned towards me and covered his mouth with his hand. ‘Got to admit, that does sound like you, Dan.’
I swallowed dryly. ‘How, uh... is he doing? This guy I’ve never met.’
‘He’s in a coma. He’s lost a lot of blood. It’s touch and go.’
‘Oh.’
I looked around, wondering what the stance of an innocent man looked like, if that was a thing you could fake. ‘So... am I under arrest?’
‘No—not yet. But I will be asking you to come down to the station with me to answer some questions.’
I nodded like I thought that was a very reasonable course of action. ‘What, like, next week, or—?’
‘Now, Mr Pratt.’
I hesitated. To our left, cars continued to amble by on the highway, their passage through the icy sludge making a sound like someone slowly pulling out a length of tape. ‘Like now-now?’
She took a step towards me, eyes narrowed to slits. ‘Get in your goddamn car. You’re going to follow behind me—unless you’d both like to ride in mine, that is?’
I looked over to where she was gesturing. A coffee-coloured, boxy-looking something—what I thought might have been a sedan. Wire-mesh grill in the back, separating the front from the rear. I knew without having to check those doors only opened from one side—and not the side the two of us would be sitting.
‘We’re good.’
‘Okay. Now, listen—do not deviate. Deviate, and I swear to every god out there I will jam my foot so far up your asses you’ll both be tasting dog-shit for the rest of your pathetic little lives—understand?’
Frankie and I looked at each other.
Brutal…
She nodded. ‘Good. Now let’s go. I’m freezing my tits off out here.’
She climbed into her car and we reluctantly climbed into mine.
She pulled away, and we followed.
‘What are we going to do, Dan?’ said Frankie from the passenger seat. ‘We can’t go give a statement now. That little monkey-bastard’s still out there. If we don’t find it, someone is going to get hurt.’
I followed the what-might-have-been-a-sedan onto the slip road, feeling the Accord’s tyres fighting for traction on the incline.
‘I know.’
But what did he want me to say? She was a cop. A really scary cop, for that matter. Citizens did what the cops told them. That was how society worked, the reason we weren’t all out on the streets throwing
faeces at each other or whatever. Obeying the law was how we all avoided ending up covered in shit.
‘We have to ditch her, Dan,’ said Frankie.
I was silent a moment as I considered this.
‘You do understand how that would look, right?’ I said. ‘I mean, we already look guilty. Now you want to flee her custody?’
He let his hands drop into his lap. ‘Doesn’t seem to me like we have much of a choice.’
I hate it when Frankie’s right.
Before I could have a moment to come to my senses and realise what a fucking terrible idea what we were about to do was, I gripped the Accord’s wheel tight and, crossing three lanes in an instant (and whilst causing a procession of angry yet completely understandable horn-blares), pointed us towards the turn-off.
I looked back across the highway, catching a fleeting glimpse of Espinosa’s face just before she fell out of view.
YOU MOUTHERFUCKERS, she mouthed.
We were fucking screwed.
***
Fifteen minutes later, and we were pulling to a stop inside Speedy’s lot, our arrival there marked by a bluster of snow-packed wind.
More a theme park than a restaurant, Speedy’s had everything any small child could ever ask for. Play-pits. Arcades. Ice cream parlours and animatronics—though these ones weren’t haunted, so far as I knew. It was opened in the fifties by a man named Hans as a simple pizzeria—that was, before success had seen it go supernova. Now it was the apex in child entertainment. A place where parents could go drop off their kids and leave them for hours on end so they could go pretend they weren’t parents for a little while. The parents got time away from their kids, and the kids got to have fun without the constant nagging from their overbearing parents.
It was the place my Grandma Helen had taken me a lot in those early months following my parents’ sudden abandoning of me. We would sit in the same booth, eat the same food (Speedy Burger Special), and have more or less the same conversation:
Gee, my parents are assholes, huh?
Yeah.
I’m not sure what it was about Speedy’s that appealed to me so much. It certainly wasn’t the food. But whatever the case, one thing I could always count on with Speedy, was that the guy would never, ever leave me—he couldn’t, he was fixed down.
There had always been something comforting about that.
The place was unusually empty for this time on a weekday. Ordinarily there’d be posses of small children dashing all over the place, their frazzled parents—those without the good sense to run the second the kids were inside—following quickly behind them, arms outstretched and faces pained, looking like they were about to have a major fucking aneurysm. Now it was mostly just teenagers, spread around in booths, sipping milkshakes and laughing in that totally annoying way teenagers do, unaware of the sheer misery that awaited them. The occasional adult or two, having no doubt pulled over to grab a quick bite to eat before continuing on to wherever it was they were headed. No sign of the space-monkey.
I stared up at the giant, porcelain Speedy Bear guarding the restaurant’s front, face now partially obscured with snow.
I nodded.
Hello, old friend. It’s been a while.
‘Okay, so how are we going to do this?’ I said to Frankie sitting beside me.
Whilst I hadn’t really thought about it during our desperate dash over here, it occurred to me now I had no idea how to approach what it was we were about to do—that was, providing Frankie’s reasoning was correct, and that the Novamite was actually even here. Which I think we can all agree probably wasn’t. One thing was for sure, we’d have to be discreet. The last thing we wanted was a panic on our hands.
Frankie turned to me, face unusually serious. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said.
I suddenly got a very bad feeling.
Wind gusting all around us, we stormed through the entrance doors.
Without so much as a pause to consider just how stupid what he was about to do was, Frankie jumped up onto a table, raised his hands above his head, and—in a volume you could have heard from space—shouted, ‘EVERYBODY! MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE? I’M LOOKING FOR MY MONKEY. I REPEAT. HAS ANYBODY SEEN MY MONKEY?’
A bout of confused laughter from around the restaurant.
He jumped down. ‘No good. Doesn’t look like anybody’s seen him. We should try out back.’ He thought it over a moment. ‘I’ll, uh... I’ll go check the ball pit.’
‘Maybe we should stick together, hmm?’ I said.
He sighed. ‘You’re right, Dan. Besides, he’s probably playing the grabby-thing, anyway.’
And so, long story short, we searched around Speedy’s, looking in, what I thought, were all the wrong places. We checked the diner, the ice cream parlour. Behind the counter where they stuffed the bears the kids all got to take home with them as part of the company’s draw. Nobody tried to stop us, or ask what we were doing there—which was a good thing, really, as I wouldn’t have been able to answer if they had. But I wasn’t that surprised; it’s hard to give a shit about anything when you’re on minimum wage and your primary responsibility is clearing up over-excited child vomit.
Once we were sure we had checked everywhere, we stepped into the centre of the restaurant and paused.
The Novamite wasn’t here—which meant this had all been a giant waste of time. What was more, in choosing to come to Speedy’s instead of the police station as instructed, I had also brought upon myself the angry wrath of an officer of the law—one who already had a bug up her ass for me, as it happened.
I shook my head.
Things just kept getting worse and worse.
‘Okay—now what?’ I said, glancing around.
Frankie put his hands on his hips and sighed. ‘Ball pit?’
‘Think; where else could this thing—?’
Before I could finish, there was a cry.
To be clear, it is not unusual to hear the occasional scream or two whilst at Speedy’s. From the kids, mostly, whenever their elation grew too strong for them to hold in—but also from the parents. Because parenting is really, really hard.
But this was no cry of elation or parental distress.
Startled, we threw a glance over towards a door by the back, where it had sounded as though the scream had come from; a little nondescript metal-plated door, with one of those round windows on it like they always have on boats—portholes, I thought they were called.
A moment later, we were running.
The kitchen was a lot smaller than you’d have expected for a restaurant of this size. Sinks. Freezers. Fryers and stoves. Long silver counter down the centre, above which multiple different cooking utensils hung like the heads of defeated enemies. Black-and-white tiled flooring.
This wasn’t what caught our attention, though.
What caught our attention was the man we spotted the instant we entered the room—a cook, if his get-up was to be believed. Some Asian guy, short, with balding hair and a too-fine moustache. He was standing on a counter, a spatula in his hand (which I could appreciate), face pointed to a spot in the corner we couldn’t yet see from our position just inside the door.
We stepped into the strong smell of fried food and halted.
‘What is it?’ said Frankie. ‘What’s wrong?’
Asian Guy pointed with the spatula. ‘Th-th-there!’
We stepped further into the kitchen.
And there he was. The Novamite—my baby—squatting before an open refrigerator, his face buried in what looked to be an entire frozen chicken.
What followed next was a great example of biology taking over.
Instinct kicked in.
It was that kind of primal, raw urge, like what our ancestors no doubt felt whenever they found themselves faced with a potential life-or-death situation or a freaking T-Rex or whatever. The sudden realisation that this time there would be no backing away, no retreating. That, for better or worse, it was time to finally plant my feet and be
a man.
I pushed Frankie towards it.
‘Get it, Frankie! Show it your kung fu!’ I jumped onto the counter next to Asian Guy. I nodded and he nodded back, understanding passing between us. I just hoped he had another spatula. ‘Quick!’
But Frankie did not show it his kung fu.
Instead he walked over to where the Novamite squatted, hands limp by his sides, with not even the one kitchen utensil between them.
As I’ve mentioned already, Frankie has never been good at making informed decisions.
‘Hey, little guy!’ he said, kneeling down next to it. ‘What’choo got there?’
The Novamite turned, saw him. I expected it to gouge his eyes out, or bite off his head or something—which, really, would have been exactly what he deserved.
Instead, it let out a coo—exactly like a baby might—before quickly turning back to its food.
Frankie turned back to me, the biggest, dumbest grin on his face. ‘You didn’t tell me it was this cute, Dan!’ He reached out and petted it—never mind the fact that doing so was the literal scientific equivalent of petting a nuclear bomb. ‘Oh, you’re a handsome fella, ain’tcha? Hmm? Who’s a handsome fella?’
The Novamite continued to coo and gurgle and—I swear—giggle.
After a moment’s hesitation, Asian Guy and I climbed down from the counter and tentatively stepped over to join them.
We leaned over Frankie’s shoulder.
Okay, so it was cute—I mean, when you considered what it was, and all. The big eyes, fluffy body and whatnot. But that didn’t change the fact this thing was dangerous as shit. Appearances are deceiving. Throw a dress and some lingerie on a lion, it’s still a lion. However much you might want to spoon with it, it’s still gonna eat your face off.
Asian Guy leaned further forward and gestured at the Novamite with his head. I noticed he didn’t look that frightened anymore—didn’t look frightened at all, actually. ‘Does it have a name?’ he said.
From in front of me, Frankie held up a finger. ‘Okay, I’m just gonna throw this out there—Gizmo.’
‘Will you please get serious?’ I said. ‘What the hell are we going to do about this?’
Wood-chipper? Volcano? Where exactly does the government dispose of nukes, anyway?
Dan and Frankie and the End of Everything Page 10
