Til Death Do Us Part

by Leonard Petracci

  And I can’t reach it.

  Chapter 11

  They’ve realized that I’m not an Original.

  And they’re in denial.

  It’s my fault, really. My plan was to let them think I was an Original until I was gone, to make sure there were no speed bumps to my exodus. But I just couldn’t take it anymore.

  “I’ve been reading about diets lately,” said Mary at the dinner table three nights ago. I was in my highchair, spooning bits of green paste into my mouth labelled as green peas, though I had my doubts. In the background, classical music was playing through Scott’s prized stereo, the only thing of any value in this godforsaken house. I recognized it as Beethoven, and wrinkled my nose—I had found the man quite unpleasant when we had met, and much preferred Bach’s demeanor.

  Across the table, Scott raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes, honey? What were you thinking?”

  “Well, I was thinking maybe we could eat a little healthier. You know, for the baby. We can do it together, as a family thing.”

  “I think that’s a splendid idea. Do you have something in mind?”

  “Well, to cleanse us, I was thinking we could try to go vegan.”

  For an instant, all was silent in the kitchen. Then there was a clatter as my metal spoon dropped from my hand and connected with the tile below, streaking green mush across the wall on impact. Then I was standing in my high chair, face red, with the glass jar of baby food in my right hand, my arm winding backward to launch it like a baseball.

  My aim was solid, and the crib workouts had given me more strength in my arm than any baby should ever have. Mary would sport a black eye for the next week.

  And I think if I had stopped there, I could have gotten away with it. The Clarks could have excused it as happenstance, or an ill-tempered child, or poor motor control. It would have been dismissed, or laughed off, and dinner would have carried on in its usual monotonous, drawling fashion.

  But I didn’t stop.

  “Bitch!” I shouted, my fingers curled into a fist, my mouth barely able to form the words that were still new to my brain. “If you start cutting meat from the already shitty diet you have me on, I’ll be pan frying the cat, and he’ll be dinner!”

  Mary clutched her newly blackened eye as her other one widened, while Scott stared, his mouth slightly open. The family cat meowed from the corner in response to my words, breaking the tension that lasted for several seconds.

  “Those,” Scott stuttered, “were not what I expected for first words.”

  And since that event, I’ve been confined to my room—the door locked, the crib gate raised, and accompanied only by Scott’s stereo with its unending track of Beethoven music in what I believed was an attempt to scrub away the remains of my soul.

  “What are we going to do?” I heard Mary say from the other room, “What if he’s not an Original, Scott?”

  “Now, now, let’s not rush to any conclusions, we don’t know anything yet,” said Scott, struggling to maintain reassurance in his words. “It could be those cartoons we’ve been letting him watch. I’ve always suspected that they’re a bad influence. Or he could have picked those words up in all sorts of places. It might even be a sign of early intelligence that he could manage a full sentence. They say Mozart was that way, you know.”

  “I don’t know, Scott,” Mary said, her voice trembling, “What if, what if he’s, you know, one of them. One of the escapees.”

  I froze as she said this, and felt a chill run down my back. If Mary called the authorities, if the Clarks turned me in and I was properly identified, it’d be straight back to Carcer.

  “Please, don’t be ridiculous,” said Scott, and I breathed a sigh of relief, “He’s an Original, and to be sure, we’ll keep him in his room. Hopefully flush out any bad influence that the outside world has had on him. And if we have reason to believe he isn’t an Original, we can call an inspector, and then we can know for sure. Look, here, I’ll put the number into the phone. All you have to do is hit dial, and within the hour we’ll know.”

  “Ok, honey,” sighed Mary, and they continued their conversation, desperately avoiding the prior subject.

  I lay awake in the darkness, staring at the ceiling, knowing my freedom relied on my ability to plot my next move.

  By the next morning, I knew my options. And in the next two days, I implemented my plan.

  Chapter 12

  Since my interruption of dinner, Scott and Mary came to my room much less frequently. It reminded me of Carcer—they were there to provide food and water, and to relieve me of soiled diapers, but for the most part they left me alone. Mary could hardly bear to look at me, keeping her eyes averted as she performed her motherly duties. Scott avoided me almost entirely, letting Mary handle the issue.

  Unless they were in the room, the door was locked. The only other area of escape was through the window, but I lacked the strength to lift the glass, let alone survive the two story fall. The jump from the edge of the crib to the ground was just enough for me to manage, anything further would come with serious injury.

  I took stock of my surroundings first, checking the contents of the room for potential supplies. In the corner there was Scott’s stereo, silent now, its power light winking at me. Had I a more developed brain, I probably would have been able to disassemble it, and perhaps construct some form of crude radio. But while I could remember information from past lives quite well, an infant's mind is not suited for solving problems of that nature. And even as a grown adult, I, with my adversity toward technology as a whole, would have found it difficult.

  In the other corner of the room were a collection of toys—blocks, a rocking horse, and one of those inflatable punching dolls that never falls over, its clown face staring at me with a mocking smile as it laughed at my dilemma. There were a few hangers in the closet, but these were all plastic—none of them metal that I could reshape and use as tools. Even if I did manage to unlock it, the doorknob was out of my reach, making it just as useless unlocked as locked.

  But stuffed in a hole I had chewed into the side of my mattress, half for my teething pain and half for more practical uses, there was still my stash. Over the months I had collected anything I thought would prove useful in the future, stealing away little knick knacks from the Clarks whenever I had the chance. There were two matches, nicked from the floor after the Clarks lit candles during one of their more romantic date nights—they had knocked them off the table in the aftermath of their fancy dinner. There was a sharpened pencil with half an eraser; half a jar of baby food, sealed; a wad of string, tangled, from the inside lining of one of my pajamas; and about half a foot of scotch tape, used, that I had peeled from where it held up a picture of them on the fridge.

  The Clarks were against magnets, believing them to be a health hazard to infants. I’m not sure where they found this idea, or how it made sense to them, considering the radiation emitted from their coveted cell phone, but I didn’t care. It had earned me some treasured tape, since they refused to buy magnets for the fridge.

  Despite hours of planning, I had only been able to come up with one solution. A solution so outlandish, so dangerous, and so audacious that even I had not wanted to attempt it.

  ***

  It may seem like I was harsh to the Clarks.

  I was. But not without good reason.

  The Clarks were good parents. They went out of their way to care for their child. They doted on me, they protected me, they loved me.

  But despite their good intentions, and their naive nature, the Clarks were obstacles. They alone stood in the way of my plans. They represented the road to Carcer. Going easy on them was the personification of failure.

  I didn't mean to destroy their apartment, and I know my justification is hollow, but they left me no choice.

  During my second day of solitary confinement, Mary came to feed me. I offered her my best baby smile, gurgling and making my eyes sparkle with excitement, and watched as her face softe
ned. She took me in her arms, then set me on her lap to spoon feed me baby food as my fingers wandered to her pocket.

  I didn't have to fake a smile when they felt the hard, rectangular outlining of the phone.

  I gurgled again, waving my other hand in the air and patting her shoulder, distracting her as my fingers slowly worked their way into her pocket and grasped the phone's edge. With a random motion of my arm, I knocked the baby food from her hands onto the floor, and she quickly reached down to retrieve it before I could spill.

  And with that bend of the waist, her phone came free, and I slipped it through the bars of my crib and under the blanket.

  She rocked me then, cooing gently as I was lulled into sleep. Or rather, a fake sleep, as real sleep would have been impossible with the adrenaline surging through my body, trying my hardest not to begin shaking with excitement.

  Ten long, impossibly slow minutes crawled by, Mary humming every damn lullaby that had likely ever existed, plus a few I swear she made up on the spot. I would know—I’ve heard enough in my lifetimes to cover nearly every combination of notes.

  But then I was in my crib and she was leaving, switching off the lights and closing the door. Taking two quick breaths, I slipped the phone out from underneath my blanket, and turned it on.

  My heart soared when I saw that there was no code to use it. The battery was half full—as she had rocked me, countless scenarios of reaching the phone only to have it die on me had rushed through my head.

  Quivering, I tapped the call icon, and began pressing the numbers to reach Marco. The phone beeped softly as I tapped, and I fell silent, waiting a full ten seconds to continue dialing after silencing it. When I had finished, ten numbers filled the screen, ten numbers that would be my salvation.

  I pressed call, holding the phone to my ear, waiting.

  But there was only silence.

  And I looked at the screen.

  The infant in me wanted to scream in rage, and I barely quashed the sound. Tears flowed down my cheeks as I kicked my legs against the mattress, and slammed my fists against the bars. I nearly chucked the phone across the room, but held on to it, confirming what I had seen.

  Across the top, displayed in a neat font, two words jeered at me.

  No Service.

  When Mary returned fifteen minutes later to search for her phone, she found it on the ground where she had thought she had left it. To her, nothing in it had changed.

  She shut the door behind her, being careful not to wake the sleeping baby.

  The sleeping baby that had no choice but to continue his plan.

  Chapter 13

  It took three days to fill up the Bozo doll with air.

  And in those three days, I made two attempts at escape. I cursed, I shouted, and I drew their attention away from the corner of the room inhabited by Scott’s stereo. Yet despite my objections, despite my outbursts, the Clarks were in denial. I could get away with anything.

  Well, almost anything.

  I mentioned earlier that my infantile brain would have trouble working out complex problems. And while this is true, my brain could still remember facts.

  For instance, it remembered that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen. It remembered that those two elements formed a particularly explosive mixture when combined as gas. And it remembered how to make them from water.

  It was simple, really. Almost too simple. Stick a power adapter from the wall into a puddle of water, and the bubbles will begin to form. Catch them and it’s like stockpiling dynamite.

  The Clarks kept me well supplied with water—there was a pack of water bottles in the closet, all sealed. The hardest part of my plan had been getting the cap off a water bottle, the rigid friction material rubbed blisters in my skin as I tried to remove it. Wedging it between the bars of my crib, and twisting with both palms, I broke the seal with an audible click, my breath heaving from the exertion. With step one of my plan complete, I already felt ready for a nap. But my work was not finished yet.

  I carried the open bottle across the room to where the Bozo doll stood, its once laughing eyes widening in fear.

  “Sorry, bud,” I said, pulling at the valve that held air inside of it, “it’s you, or it’s me.”

  The doll never responded, its face lengthening as I squeezed the air out of it and it breathed its last. With the air gone, I poured water into the valve, filling the bottom of the now empty doll, so that it pooled in the bottom of the plastic. Then I took the jar of half eaten baby food I had stowed away in my crib mattress, dug out a mass of mush with a finger and deposited it into the puddle. There it mixed, electrolyte ions entering the water where they would serve to speed up the reaction.

  Then I looked up at Scott’s stereo, its light still blinking at me, and traced the power cord from the wall to the back of the enclosure. The plug itself was too high for me to reach, but the low voltage wire stretched low within grasp, and I yanked at it until the light was extinguished with a final wink. I held the end of the adapter in my hand, inspecting the circular prong at the end. It most likely would supply somewhere between nine and twelve volts, and for a stereo like Scott’s, there would be plenty of wattage for extra oomph behind it.

  I pulled the deflated doll behind the stereo to hide it from the doorway, then resealed the air valve. Then, using my gums and barely developed teeth, I gnawed a hole in the plastic just large enough for me to insert the adapter into the pool of water. I squeezed the adapter into place, then sealed the hole with the bit of used tape from the crib mattress. Tiny bubbles spiralled up from the makeshift electrode, slowly, ever so slowly filling the Bozo doll with volatile gas: slowly turning Bozo the Clown into Bozo the Bomb.

  It took three days to complete the process. I barely slept during that time, sweating as I knew the potential energy of Bozo, just feet from my bed, was multiplying. If he somehow caught fire, if there was a spark from the stereo, if he started leaking—there were too many ifs to count, and nearly all of them ended in the best case scenario of me needing a new pair of eardrums and a far-more-likely worst case scenario. Death.

  When Bozo was fully inflated, I removed the adapter cord, and smushed the tape against the plastic to create a weak seal. I hauled Bozo to his new home, the closet. My hands shook as they delicately dragged him across the floor, and I shivered at the thought of the carpet creating a static shock as it glided along the plastic.

  But Bozo made it safely into the closet, his back resting against the drywall that led into the adjacent apartment. And I began piling everything flammable I could find around him—the stuffing from my mattress, the water bottle labels, the tangle of thread from my clothes, and any pieces of my crib I found the strength to liberate.

  I saluted Bozo, commending him on his service. Reassuring him that he would receive many medals for his bravery, and that he would be most missed. For generations, dolls everywhere would remember his honor.

  Then I closed the closet door, wedging a combination of toys and clothes underneath to hold it shut. At midnight I took the two matches I had stowed in my mattress, struck them, and shoved them under the closet door into the pile of kindling.

  Running as fast as my toddler legs would take me, I dove behind my crib, which I had previously tilted onto its side to shield me from the explosion. I chanced a look through the bars, watching as smoke began to curl toward the ceiling.

  And for one last time, Bozo smiled at me through the crack in the closet door, his face locked in laughter as the flames licked at his base.

  Chapter 14

  I reviewed my plan as I waited behind the crib, my fingers in my ears and my mouth open, waiting for the explosive shockwave. The wooden bars dug into my forehead, while the carpet made my knees itch.

  In the closet Bozo was leaned against the wall separating the Clark’s apartment from the one next door. The blast from the reaction should be enough to blow a hole in the cheap drywall barrier, a hole large enough for me to totter through. I’d have to move fast—
I’d only have moments before the Clarks would respond to the explosion and enter my room to find me missing. I could count on a few moments for shock, a few moments for discovering where I went, and assuming the hole was too small for them to fit through, a few moments for them to enter the other apartment.

  But if all went well, a few moments was all I needed. A few moments to make a single call, my ticket out of the Clark’s and to freedom.

  Sweat started pouring down my neck as I waited. Already it felt like it had been too long, that each passing second was the personification of a failed plan. That maybe I had forgotten too much chemistry, and the mixture was not flammable, but rather would only smolder or not catch at all. That maybe the fire wouldn’t be hot enough to melt through the plastic and ignite the gas. That maybe the Clarks’ apartment was built sturdier than I thought, and that the drywall would hold strong against the blast.

  I only had one shot before the Clarks would call the inspector. Everything had to go perfectly, meaning there was no room for mistakes or miscalculations.

  Suddenly my doorknob turned, and Scott stepped into the room, holding a jar of baby food, a spoon poking out of the top.

  We locked eyes, me peeking over the rim of crib, him with a confused expression on his face. My mind raced—the Clarks should have been asleep, not coming for a feeding. He must have heard the noise and come to quiet me down, assuming I had become hungry in the middle of the night.

  "What the—" he managed to say before the room shattered into light and sound.

  Flames erupted from the cracks in the closet doors before they buckled, cheap particle board splitting down the center and breathing fire like a dragon opening its jaws. The sound was a sharp crack, like a firecracker but much louder, shattering the window on the other side of the room. Clothing spewed from the closet—smoldering pajamas, socks, and shirts fluttering like bats escaping Hell. The apartment trembled, shivers reaching down to its foundation, the aftershock continuing for several seconds before the car alarms started sounding on the street, and the neighbors’ dogs began barking. The air had gained a humid quality from the reaction, and the room felt thick with warm water vapor, droplets already forming like sweat on the ceiling.