Rise of the Miser: Claus, #5

by Tony Bertauski

  That’s when a rather innocent email arrives.

  The miser had been following him for years, thanks to methodically well-placed stories that show up in her newsfeeds. The connection wasn’t hard to make. Naren thought about it before replying.

  And now we are here.

  So it is with heaviness that I put the last memory egg away. They glimmer with the richness of life lived and forgotten. I hope to return to them one day and bring them back to life, but I know it’s not likely. What I have to do now won’t let that happen. Naren taught me how to feel and how to serve life. Right now, life is calling. I’m part of the story.

  And I need to save the kids.

  KANDI

  34

  The clanging of a metal pipe yanked Kandi from a muggy dream.

  She jolted upright as it hit the floor. Legs pulled up to her chest, she curled up on a fat chair. The window in front of her was scuffed. Beyond it, the full moon illuminated the island. Nestled in the palms, the warehouse flickered with Christmas joy, and above it the sky twinkled.

  She’d never seen so many stars.

  When she was little, she would pull a chair up to the window on Christmas Eve. The radio would report seeing a sleigh soaring away from the North Pole. She would watch for it and swear she would stay awake until it landed on her house. But every year she would fall asleep. Her dad would carry her to bed.

  Where are you, Dad?

  She instinctively reached for her phone. It was back in the master suite. She was trapped by her own doing.

  It was almost Christmas.

  Something broke in one of the rooms. Kandi climbed out of the chair, her head full of sand and knuckles scuffed. The hallway was littered with makeshift pry bars and projectiles that had only bounced off the window and door. Decorative paper cutouts were strewn among the wreckage. She picked up one of Sonny’s intricate snowflakes.

  The new Sonny.

  Cris was scavenging in the lab where things were breaking. In the other lab, the rhythmic pulse of a printer continued. Kandi looked at the sweeping tubes and flowing wires dancing within the transparent box. Large hairy feet nearly touched both walls. The legs were stout and short and the buttocks plump.

  The tubes were building the belly.

  A machine designed to print a kidney or a heart was creating an entire body, feverishly building the organs inside it. The helper would be done by morning.

  Christmas.

  Until she saw the thing walk out and smile, she wouldn’t believe it. She even doubted Cris was telling the truth. She called the thing being printed an it. Was that what Cris was, an it? He believed what he said, but she didn’t. There was no way he came out of a box.

  Would I know the difference?

  Something fell. This time glass shattered. The table where the new Sonny had been cutting his decorations was flipped upside down. Two of the legs were missing.

  “Help me move this,” Cris said.

  They’d been attacking the second-floor door for almost a day and had only managed to scuff the paint. Cris walked barefoot through the debris.

  “Careful!”

  His feet were bleeding. There were cuts on his heels and between his toes, but the spots on the floor were dull gray, some shaped like footprints. She looked away, pretending the gray liquid had spilled from vials and was not oozing from cuts on his feet.

  “I found this.” He held up a wedge-shaped object. “I just need something to hammer it into the doorjamb. I think we can short-circuit the locking mechanism and pop it open.”

  He moved a long panel and bumped the ceiling. The soft tile showered white material down on him. It looked like snow. Above it, black pipes were mounted on a hard ceiling. The light fixture was broken and a sprinkler nozzle was bent.

  The miser will be furious.

  They’d trashed everything important to her. How did she not see that coming? Unless this was the most secure room on the island, it seemed silly to lock them inside the lab. Maybe she just didn’t have time to move them or trusted they wouldn’t be this rebellious.

  Or she’s afraid Dad would have seen me.

  While Cris searched for a hammer, she went back into the printing lab. There had to be a way out, some sort of emergency escape if things went wrong. She’d searched the computers already and decided to do it again. As she tapped the keyboards, the monitors woke up with the sound of jingle bells.

  There was no email, no internet. It wasn’t a PC or Mac, no Windows or anything familiar, just foreign programs and coded messages. She clicked icons and tapped keys until the screen was a mess.

  They were all like that.

  The only one she hadn’t looked at was attached to the printer. She was trying to avoid looking at the half body. She covered the box with papers. When she touched the screen, a progress report lit up. Specifications on what the helper would look like and how it would behave when it was finished were outlined. When she touched the main menu, it asked if she wanted to abort. She pressed yes.

  The box went silent.

  No alarm sounded. The door did not unlock, and no one came to rescue it. Thankfully, the half-printed helper didn’t walk out on its own.

  A landslide of guilt filled her. The thing wasn’t finished, so it wasn’t alive, but somehow she felt guilty for killing it. It didn’t seem right. It was just synthetic cells put together to look like a helper. It was no different than the computers in the room, but she was the one who kept it from walking out of the box.

  She started pushing buttons.

  The printer remained quiet. She found a history tab with a list of past jobs and the one she’d just aborted. Before she continued the poor little half-body project, she noticed her name was on a list. For a moment, she froze. The thought that she had come from one of these boxes paralyzed her. A profile filled the screen.

  Her picture was next to it.

  The new Sonny had seen it. But why was her picture there? With dread, she read about herself—her height, her weight, eye color, hair, body fat, even her social media user names. The miser knew everything about her, but the line under her photo was the most important.

  Status: 100% organic.

  She didn’t come from that box, and that made her feel more real than the thing that was currently in it. She even felt more real than Cris, as if her natural state of organic cells made her more important. Even better.

  Cris didn’t come from the box. He couldn’t have.

  Her dad’s name was next on the list. It was a similar setup with his photo and likes and dislikes and—

  “Got it!” Cris ran into the lab with a handful of stuffing. “I got it.”

  She shook her head.

  “Those are sensors.” He pointed at the ceiling. “When they sense smoke, they’ll activate the fire alarm. If there’s a fire, all the doors will unlock.”

  “What if it doesn’t?”

  “Everything she values is in this building. She won’t let it burn.”

  “We destroyed half of it already.”

  He studied the wreckage. “All the more reason to get out of here.”

  He went to the chair where she had fallen asleep. Cris pulled the stuffing out of the cushion and tore it into small pieces. Kandi reluctantly watched. She wanted to escape, but if the fire didn’t work, then what? And what happened if it did work? This was an island.

  “I need to move this.” He slid the chair across the floor.

  Kandi stared out the window. Something was different about the warehouse. The Christmas lights were on full display, but a large square of light had appeared on the roof. It looked like an open hatch.

  “What’s that?”

  Cris shoved the chair into the lab and returned. He was breathing hard, sweat tracking his cheeks. His eyebrows pinched together.

  “Hurry,” he said.

  “What she doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do know. You told me in the tunnel we wouldn’t live lies anymore. W
hat’s she doing?”

  He put his hands on his hips. He didn’t want to tell her, he only wanted to escape. But she wasn’t going anywhere until she knew the truth. So he told her what was in the warehouse and what the miser was planning to do with the new Sonny. And why a hatch was open on the warehouse.

  “That’s impossible,” she muttered.

  “She’s printing bodies.” He swallowed. Anxiety and fear went down hard. “She can do anything.”

  “She can’t fly a sleigh, Cris. There is no Santa, Cris, just men who dress up like him. He can’t travel around the world in one night and neither can she.”

  “Not in one night. She’ll do it in one second.”

  She couldn’t explain how Cris and Sonny and the new Sonny all looked the same. Maybe he was right, they were all printed and she couldn’t tell the difference, but Cris was still thinking like a child. Reindeer didn’t fly and elves didn’t live on the North Pole and Santa only took pictures in shopping malls.

  She followed him into the lab. Two wires dangled from one of the cabinets. He stacked a small pile of stuffing on the metal table. When he touched them together, sparks flew. Smoke rose up from the stuffing. He fanned it into a flame. Soon, the room was filling with smoke.

  “It’s not working.” Kandi coughed.

  “Give it a second.”

  The fire grew larger and the smoke thickened. The table would contain it from getting out of control, so they left the room and closed the door. Cris listened like he might miss the sound of the alarm.

  “Maybe she dismantled the alarm,” he said.

  A few minutes later, he pulled the door open. Smoke billowed out.

  “We need a bigger fire,” he said.

  “Or I could just unlock the door.”

  That voice came from the printing lab. They stood in the hall, frozen with surprise. Kandi peeked inside; there was a face on every computer. It was big, round and grainy.

  With sand dollar eyes.

  “Sandy!” She grabbed one of the monitors. “How did you get here?”

  “You know how long it takes to slip through the firewall one byte at a time?” Sandy said. “A long time.”

  “Can you unlock the door?”

  “Uh, yeah. I’m in the system. Who do you think turned off the fire alarm?”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Because the miser would come running if that thing went off. It doesn’t matter if she thinks she’s halfway around the world or not. We need this building not to burn down just yet.”

  “We?”

  “Never mind. Put out the fire.”

  Cris stepped next to Kandi. Sandy’s sand dollars widened. His mouth grew slack. Cris pushed his hair back. The two stared at each other.

  “Sonny,” Sandy said. “Hey.”

  “I’ve got a new name.”

  “I heard.” There was a long pause. “You all right?”

  “Sorry I haven’t been back.”

  “Life on the run. I get it.” Sandy looked around and frowned. “Wish we had time for a game.”

  “Can you open the door?”

  Sandy grunted. Something whirred and popped. Cris looked down the hall and nodded. Kandi put the monitor down. Sandy watched her from all the computers.

  “I wish I could hug you,” she said.

  “You can’t,” he said. “I’m not real, kid.”

  Kandi patted the computer and he rolled his sand dollars. There was half a body in the printer that she wasn’t sure she could think of as real when it was done, but here she was getting all teary over an imaginary sandman.

  “You kids be good. He’s checking it twice.”

  Kandi and Cris ran down the stairs. It was just past midnight. They had nowhere to go, but one problem at a time. First, back to the resort to get her phone. She could find her dad; they could get to the boat and be long gone before morning. But when they reached the bottom of the stairs, she didn’t need her phone anymore.

  Her dad walked out of the first floor.

  MISER

  35

  There was a closet full of cloaks.

  They were gray and heavy and, to be quite honest, suffocating. But they worked. Bad things happened if they didn’t. But there was one cloak different than all the rest. It worked, too.

  She’d been saving it for this day.

  It was red with white cuffs and fluffy white trim around the hood. She’d printed it years ago and it sat in the closet ever since. But tonight was the night. A nervous flutter crackled in her stomach like embers fleeing a dying fire. She reached a white-gloved hand out from the fluffy sleeve and embraced her brand-new son.

  A very special night.

  The warehouse was on full display. Not a bulb was dark nor ornament fallen. The train chugged past the giant doors and whistled. The conductor—a plump orange-beard—waved on his way by. The lights flickered in Sonny’s eyes. He hardly blinked. She cupped her poopies in one arm and took his hand.

  He squeezed back.

  All the Christmas Eves that had come and gone with her staring at the doors, promising the next year would be different. And the next. Next and next and next, next, nextnextnext—

  Not this year.

  When the doors opened, a smile cast an orange glow on the snowy path. A song grew louder, a familiar tune with altered lyrics.

  Heether Miser’s coming to town.

  They even pronounced her name correctly. She hadn’t told them to do that. The inside of her hood grew steamy. When the doors were fully open, every helper stood inside—all the different shapes and colors and sizes in formation and full of song—and parted as she approached.

  The mountain was crested with snow.

  The floor shook as it pumped out the last of its gooey magic. The beauty of machines—they worked till the last minute. She listened to the entire song. Mr. Goody and Ms. Doody howled along. Sonny seemed a trifle bored when they sang it a second time.

  “Don’t fidget.”

  When they finished, she took a bow. The helpers swept them off their feet. The miser whooped and laughed. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t allow such a thing—it was reckless and foolhardy—but this was a special night for them, too. She let them carry her and the poopies and Sonny to the sleigh.

  A welcoming party awaited.

  Naren stood patiently beneath the conveyor feed. Although it contained an antimatter disseminator, the bag bulged with anticipation. It had been well fed.

  Claus was buttoned up and ready for flight. Force of habit, naturally. It was almost midnight. For the past couple of hundred years, give or take, he’d been climbing into the driver’s seat about now. This year he would copilot.

  Something’s wrong.

  Something rang a little bell in her head. Were they too willing or stiff or not happy enough? What was it? When she heard that little warning, she stepped back and examined the clues. The ceiling began to whine. The sky door was opening. Great snowflakes swirled in the updraft. There wasn’t time to sniff out the problem.

  Not tonight.

  Sonny hugged the fat man and didn’t let go. Nicholas patted his back with a halfhearted ho-ho-ho.

  “Climb aboard, darling.”

  Her son jumped onto the front bench and slid into the middle. The conveyor belt swung away from the sleigh, the last of its product dripping in the snow. The bag sealed shut and slunk deep into the backseat. The black-clad helpers, the so-serious ones she’d praised the last time, aided her into the driver’s seat and handed her the empty reins.

  Naren had worked miracles at her request. There was no other way to describe it. He had stopped the wilting disease afflicting her helpers and saved her son. The diversity was a bit much. And the black-clad ones—now seriously staring at her—were a little creepy.

  Nicholas dropped a heavy boot on the sleigh’s decking.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “You’re not coming, Nicholas.”

  He clung to the sleigh, about to pull himself up. Confusion
clouded his eyes as his lips moved somewhere beneath his whiskers. She smiled. Whatever he was up to just took a direct hit.

  “What about the children?” he stammered.

  “If everyone doesn’t get what they want, so what? There’s a lesson in that, too. We’ve waited quite a long time for this night, haven’t we, darling?” She pulled Sonny closer. “I’m not taking any chances. You stay, we go.”

  “You’ll have next year to go alone. Please.”

  “What are you doing, Nicholas?” If Sonny wasn’t between them, she would’ve leaned into him and studied his eyes. He couldn’t hide from her for long. “Something’s... up.”

  “I’m concerned for your safety.”

  “My mind’s made up. Stop touching my sleigh, go.”

  There was much more room on the bench for just the two of them anyway. She’d studied Nicholas for years. She knew how he pulled it off. Most of it was automated flyovers, if she wasn’t mistaken. Sometimes he dropped down the chimney to nibble on a cookie or gawk at a tree, but that was it.

  How hard is that?

  Even if she only made it halfway around the world, close enough. Maybe she’d just cover a continent. This was her first go. People had to understand if she only covered California, she was still giving it her all.

  Or maybe just Rhode Island. We’ll see.

  Nicholas reluctantly let go and left a snowy print on the deck. He stared with that open fish-face expression, like he’d just learned Santa Claus wasn’t real. The irony was sweet. She let go a piercing laugh, the new one she’d been working on, the kind that would press into his ears and never let him forget.

  “How?” he asked. “The reindeer won’t—”

  “I almost forgot.”

  She kissed her poopies between the ears and gave them one long hug. They leaped onto her lap then bounced to the ground. The helpers stood back as they pranced to the front of the sleigh. The miser watched Nicholas hold his breath. She’d seen this trick a thousand times.

  It was fun to watch someone see it for the first time.

  First, they turned red. It looked like they were holding their breath, inflating like red-hot balloons. Their tails grew into whips and their bellies swelled. Their ears flopped on the ground before stiffening into long, curling horns. Muscles bulged from their legs and their spines protruded. Large scales unfolded across their fur. They clawed the snow, their breath heaving through flared nostrils.