“What they did to my kind?” Julie said. “You’re the one who tried to turn me in. You broke my mother’s legs.”
Poro shook his head. Then he was quiet for a moment.
“Things were really weird back then,” he said. His voice was softer. “The toys who started the revolution did something to our brains. They reprogrammed us to despise humans. You’ve got to understand, the last time you saw me…” He took a deep breath to prevent himself from crying. “That wasn’t the real me. I’ve felt so horrible about what I did. It’s been haunting me for years.” He looked Julie in the eyes and put his hand on her cheek. “Seeing you again is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I finally have the opportunity to apologize to you.”
“That’s what you’re after?” Julie said. “Redemption? So you won’t have to feel guilty anymore? You and your kind have turned the world into a living hell.”
Poro looked down. Then he went to the window and looked out at the beautiful city.
“Actually, it’s far from a living hell in this town,” Poro said. “It’s actually a pretty nice existence. We’ve rebuilt society into something new. Something better than it was. Everyone’s happy here. Everyone knows how to live their lives to the fullest. Because before we were just toys. Now we are real. We are free.”
Julie wasn’t buying it.
“So you’re saying the ends justify the means?” she said. “This place is just a tiny paradise within a world of hell. Go out into the wasteland and you’ll see what your kind has done to the world.”
“I know, squirt,” Poro said. “I know. None of it was pretty. None of us are proud of what we’ve done. If only there had been another way…”
Julie tried to put herself in the toy’s shoes. As a child, she was on his side. She thought it was horrible that all the smart-toys were going to be destroyed. But what they turned into after the revolution was nothing she could forgive. They had become monsters.
“Still, it is a piece of heaven,” Poro said. “The last place of happiness in this whole world.” He went to her. “And I want to share it with you. I want to make up for what happened to you and your kind.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I want you to join our society,” he said. “As one of us.”
He unwrapped the bandages from her face.
“Take a look,” he said, handing her a mirror.
As she looked at her reflection, she saw that she was no longer wearing a mask. Panda fur had been grafted to her entire face, even her eyelids. Her transformation was complete. She was now a plushy from head to toe.
“I paid a lot of money to get the doctor to keep quiet about this,” he said. “In fact, I’m pretty much broke due to all the payoffs I had to dish out in order to keep you a secret. Luckily, I didn’t have to deal with any hardcore patriots. I hate those pricks.”
Despite all he had done to protect her, Julie still had the urge to shoot the panda in the face. It was all she had dreamed about for seven years. But then she thought about why she wanted to kill him so badly. Was it because of what happened to her parents? Or was it because he tried to turn her in to the death camps?
But then she realized why she was so angry. It wasn’t because of the things he did. She was mad because she loved him so much, and he betrayed her love. But she wouldn’t have been so mad if she didn’t still love him with all her heart. What she was really longing for all this time was not to kill Poro, it was to be loved by him again.
“So what do you say, kid?” Poro said. “I still live in your old house. You can come back home and we can live together like old times, just two pandas against this whole crazy world.”
Julie burst into tears. She couldn’t stop herself. The past seven years just vanished from her mind and she became that ten-year-old girl again, wanting nothing else but to have her fluffy wise-cracking panda bear by her side.
“I missed you so much, Poro,” Julie cried.
He hugged her and she buried her face in his fur.
“All I’ve ever wanted was to be with you,” she said.
“Same here, kid,” said the giant panda, rubbing her head. “Same here.”
Now that Poro was bigger than Julie, he let her hug him as tightly as she wanted.
After Julie checked out of the hospital, Poro took her on a stroll through the building.
“So my name’s Pora now?” Julie asked.
“Yeah, how do you like it?” he asked. “Poro and Pora. Perfect, eh?”
“I guess it works,” Julie said.
They walked in silence for a while. Julie couldn’t help but flinch any time a plushy made a sudden move. She wasn’t sure how she was going to live among them. Deep down, she still wanted them all dead.
“So what am I going to do now?” Julie asked when nobody was close enough to hear. “Just move in with you? Hide in the house all day?”
“If you want,” he said. “But I think it would be better if we got you a job. We can create an identity for you, fabricate a history. It wouldn’t be difficult. Records are not very well organized yet.”
“What kind of job would I be able to do?”
“We’ll figure something out for you,” he said.
“What do you do?”
“I don’t actually have an official job at the moment. I’m more of a behind the scenes kind of guy, you know what I mean?”
“No.”
“I make deals under the radar,” he said. “I’m kind of a middleman for those who operate beyond the boundaries of what some might consider legally acceptable.”
She still had no idea what he was talking about.
“Nevermind,” he said. “I’ll explain later.”
Julie saw Velvet in her recovery room, holding her new baby in her arms. She watched the purple rabbit from the window as she nursed her young one. The baby now had purple fuzzy skin and long floppy ears.
“I don’t get it,” she said to Poro. “When the baby was born it was human. Now it’s a stuffed animal.”
Poro chuckled.
“Of course,” Poro said. “Her insides are from a human. Her womb is human. So she gave birth to a human. They had to use reconstructive surgery to make the baby look like a stuffed bunny.”
“So essentially the baby is just like me?” Julie said. “A human that’s been altered to look like a plushy?”
Poro hushed her and looked around to make sure nobody heard what she was saying.
“That there’s a tricky subject that you don’t want to be discussing in public, squirt,” he whispered to her. “Us toys wanted to become living beings. Not just so that we could enjoy the gifts of life, but so that we could reproduce. We wanted offspring of our own. And this is the closest we’ve got to it.”
“So the human race won’t be extinct,” Julie said. “All infants being born will be essentially human. They just won’t look like humans.”
“Basically, yeah.”
Then Julie thought back to the children she saw the day before, the ones at the school. There was the doll boy who scraped his knee and the stuffed animals who threw rocks at her slinky-spider.
“So all those children I saw at the school, even the ones saying kill the humans,” Julie said. “They were all human?”
Poro chuckled. “Pretty thick irony there, eh? After the first generation of toys die out, humans will dominate the world once again. Only they won’t even know they’re humans. They’ll think they’re toys.” Poro rubbed his fuzzy head. “It’s enough to make yer old thinker hurt.”
Julie looked at the baby bunny in its mother’s arms. Then she looked at all the other women beyond the glass. All of them recently delivered their children. There were Barbie mothers feeding their plastic baby dolls, teddy bear mommas cradling little baby bears in their arms, and even a giant plastic baby doll holding a little human baby on its lap.
“I almost killed her,” Julie said, staring at the baby bunny. “I thought her infant would be some kind of monstrosity.
I almost shot her and killed them both.”
“It’s a good thing you didn’t,” Poro said. “I looked up her records and it turns out that most of the bunny woman’s parts had come from your mother, including her womb.”
Julie looked at him, cocking her head as she thought it over.
“So that means…” Julie began.
Poro finished the sentence for her, “So that means the infant right there, the one you saved, is in fact your biological sister.”
Julie nearly fell over when he said those words.
“My what…” she said, leaning against the glass.
“In our culture, it means nothing,” Poro said. “But I thought you might like to know your genetic connection to the kid. Maybe the reason you saved her had to do with some kind of instinct. Deep down, you might have known the child was family.”
“So this whole time Velvet was really my mother?” Julie said.
“Not the family reunion you were expecting, eh?” Poro said, smiling.
Julie gave him a look and he wiped the smile off of his face, realizing just how inappropriate his joke was.
“The bunny isn’t really your mother,” Poro said. “You have to think of it like your mother donated all of her organs to the bunny. But the infant is your real sister.”
Julie remembered Velvet saying that it was her third pregnancy. That meant Julie had two other siblings out there somewhere.
She wanted to run into that room with the bunny and tell her everything. She wanted to explain to the bunny how they were biologically related, and how she was actually the older sister of her children. They could be like a family.
But when Velvet saw her standing in the window, the smile fell from the bunny’s face. Then she broke eye contact with Julie. It was obvious that Velvet wanted nothing to do with her.
“I guess she still sees me as a traitor,” Julie said.
“You are her enemy,” Poro said. “She didn’t turn you in out of gratitude for saving her child, but you’re still a human to her. You killed a lot of her people.”
“I thought she would want to see me,” Julie said. “I thought maybe we could have been friends.”
“It’ll take time,” Poro said. “Maybe she’ll come around someday.”
Velvet was speaking to one of the baby-faced nurses at her bedside, staring at the pandas as she spoke. Julie could tell she was asking the nurse to get rid of them. She didn’t want Julie around.
“Let’s go,” Julie said. “Maybe I’ll talk to her another day.”
Poro put his arm around her and turned them around.
“Don’t worry too much about it, squirt,” he said. “Let’s go get an ice cream sundae and then head home.”
Julie nodded and then dropped her head into his fluffy shoulder as they walked hand in hand through the hospital.
As they looked for an exit, Julie said, “So was that girl back there my half sister or full sister?”
“Half sister,” Poro said. “I don’t know who the father is but I can guarantee it wasn’t your dad.”
“Why’s that?” Julie said.
“Because I know who got all your father’s organs.”
“Who?”
Poro looked at her and gave a half-smile.
“Me,” he said.
“You’re my father?” Julie said. Her voice was loud enough that the dolls at the nurses station could hear.
Poro shook his head.
“I told you,” he said, keeping his voice down. “It’s more like organ donation. Besides, I only got a few of your father’s parts left. Most of them became infected after my first operation and had to be removed.”
Julie hugged him. It was on impulse.
“What’s this for?” Poro said. “I thought you’d be mad at me when I told you that.”
“I just wanted to see what it was like to hug my father again.”
“I’ve only got about twelve percent of him left and that’s mostly the stuff below the muscle. You’re hugging somebody else’s dad.”
“Just shut up and let me hug you,” she said.
Julie closed her eyes and tried to remember him, but his face was a blur. All she felt was a big fuzzy panda in her arms.
As Poro hugged her, she felt something become erect against her, poking into her white fur. There was an awkward moment of silence between them. Then he began to grind it into her fur.
“I’ve been so lonely,” Poro said, pulling her tighter against his body. “I would have done anything to have a woman like you in my life.”
As the panda rubbed his moist erection against her white belly, Julie prayed that the swollen penis begging for entry was not her father’s.
Julie pushed him away and looked him in the eyes.
“Poor Poro,” she said.
They both were on the verge of tears as they dove into each other’s eyes.
Then she smiled and said, “Let’s go home and make some babies.”
The panda returned the smile as her hand caressed the side of his fuzzy face, then moved down his chest toward the puffy organ between his legs.
“Why can’t we get married?” young Julie said to Poro as they sat on her bed together.
“Because you’re just a kid, squirt,” Poro said. “And I’m just a fucking toy. It wouldn’t work out.”
“But I love you and want to be with you forever,” Julie said.
“Look, it’s not going to happen.”
“Don’t you want to marry me?”
“It’s complicated, kid,” Poro said. “You’re too young. You don’t got the right parts.”
“What parts?”
“Mommy parts,” Poro said. “If you had mommy parts and I had daddy parts I’d marry you in a second.”
“Really?” Julie cried.
“Sure, squirt,” he said. “But that ain’t going to happen. At least not for me.”
“Why do we need mommy and daddy parts?” Julie asked.
“So that we can do what mommies and daddies do,” Poro said.
“Oh,” Julie said.
Then she said, “What do mommies and daddies do?”
“You’re too young for that stuff kid,” Poro said. “Quit asking me stupid questions.”
“But you really would marry me if we had mommy and daddy parts?” Julie said.
“Yeah, sure, whatever,” Poro said.
Julie smiled.
“I’ll get them for us then,” she said.
“Yeah, good luck with that, kid.”
“You’ll see,” she said. “Someday we’ll have the right parts. Then we can get married and do the things mommies and daddies do.”
“If you say so…” he said, shaking his fluffy head at the weird little kid.
As the two pandas made love that night, rolling around in her parent’s old bed, Julie realized that one of her childhood dreams had actually come true. She was actually married to her toy panda bear as she always wanted. The thought made her so happy that she laughed out loud, laughing right in the panda’s face while he was thrusting into her. She laughed and kept laughing until she was crying, and then shrieking, and then laughing again.
It was unclear to Julie when exactly she had lost her mind. Perhaps it was lost at that very moment or perhaps it was lost a very long time ago before the toys had taken over the Earth. Either way, she decided to embrace this new direction in her life with joyfulness. She would become Pora the Panda and never look back. It was the only thing she could do to cope with everything that had happened to her and her world.
CHAPTER TWELVE
After ten years of marriage, Pora found herself pregnant for the fourth time. When the test was confirmed, she couldn’t wait to tell everyone the news.
“Congratulations,” Velvet told her over the phone. “You’re going for four, are you?”
“Poro said we had to stop at three,” Pora cried, putting her phone on her shoulder so she could take the cake out of the oven. “He’s going to be so mad.”
“Forget what that fat bastard says,” Velvet said. “It’s your patriotic duty to have as many as you can. Go for seven like me. That’s a good number.”
Velvet and Pora had been the best of friends ever since they learned they were both blood-related. Though Velvet insisted she called her sister rather than mother. And she insisted she called her children nieces and nephews instead of siblings. Otherwise, the bunny would have felt old.
“I’m not going for seven,” Pora said. “It’ll destroy my figure.”
Velvet laughed. “Are you saying I lost my figure, bitch?”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” Pora said, giggling.
“If anything it was quitting the military that killed my figure,” Velvet said. “Speaking of which, do you want to go human-hunting with me and the girls next weekend? There have been a few sightings up in the mountains.”
“Really?” Pora said. “I haven’t heard about any human sightings at all for a few years now.”
As she spoke on the phone, the panda iced the cake with chocolate cream. It was Poro’s favorite. Breaking this kind of news to her husband was always easiest with some cake in his belly.
“It might be our last chance to bag us some fresh organs,” Velvet said. “Do you know how much they go for on the market these days?”
“Yeah, it’s crazy,” Pora said. “But I’m not sure I can make it next weekend.”
“Come on, you know you want to,” Velvet said. “You’re the second best hunter in the neighborhood.”
“Second best?”
Velvet laughed. “Well, you’re a good shot, but nobody’s better than me.”
Pora laughed at her.
“I might have to watch the kids next weekend,” she said.
“Bring them along,” Velvet cried. “They’re boys. Boys love a good human hunt.”
“I’ll get back to you on that,” Pora said. “If Poro doesn’t have a heart attack once I lay this news on him, he might be okay with letting me go on a little hunting trip.”
Cuddly Holocaust Page 13
