If they asked about the screams, he’d lie. He’d tell them that he hired actors who specialized in screaming. Then he’d have each little girl step up to a microphone, and he’d record her scream. When he played each scream back, they’d all laugh. It would sound so fake. Mitzi, too, would laugh. Back before she knew the truth.
Now she shuddered to think how easily her friends came to visit. The screaming and the laughing, afterward. Tension and release. One girl in a hundred would ask why the studio smelled like bleach, and Mitzi would shrug. To her that was just the smell of her father. He’d always smelled like bleach, his hands in particular. It had become a smell her nose no longer detected.
A snap. The doctor snapped his fingers. The noise jump-cut Mitzi back to the here and now. Sitting in the smoky examining room, the charred crud littering the bottom of the sink.
Dr. Adamah examined the ashes. One eyebrow arched almost to his hairline, and he asked, “Does the name James Fenton Washington ring a bell?”
What the doctor had dropped flaming into the sink was a stained bandanna. The red cloth smelled like acetate, like spray paint, even more than her bed did. Mitzi didn’t understand why, but she’d sensed that it was the item to hand over.
The cloth had blazed up in a flash. In the sink, flames had crawled over it, blue flames coated it. The cloth had twisted like something in agony. Charred patches peeled away like the black skin of a snake. Like shed scales. Larger pieces shattered into fragments. Fragments broke into flakes and fizzled out with a last spiral of acrid smoke.
The doctor lifted a hand to the taps. He twisted one and let the water run until steam rose from the sink. He moved a hand under the faucet, fanning his fingers to direct the water. Rinsing away the ash. Pumped liquid soap from a bottle and washed. He pulled paper towels from a dispenser on the wall. With clean, dry hands he turned to the electronic tablet on the counter and began to keyboard something. Not looking up, he said, “According to James you’re not out of the woods yet.”
Mitzi didn’t respond because she really, really did not want to hear the answer.
Regardless, the doctor asked, “When did you have your last period?”
Bless the scalpers. Even here, lining the sidewalk outside the convention center, young men stood waving lanyards. From each loop of cord dangled a laminated badge. For three hundred in cash Foster procured something to hang around his neck, and that, that got him inside the doors.
Inside presented a new dilemma.
Not two steps into this melee, a uniformed security guard was stopping entrants. She directed each elf or pirate to extend his or her arms straight out sideways while she ran a wand up and down them. And not a magic wand, this was standard issue for detecting metal. Same as guards used at airports worldwide. The gun, Foster had stowed it in the loose, flopping top of his boot. Before he could retreat out the doors he’d just entered, the guard was already waving him forward.
“Arms up, please.” Her tone was bored. Clearly, patting down mermaids and robots had long ago lost its charm.
Hers was an impossible task, to judge from the arsenal of ray guns and scimitars, crossbows, pitchforks, blunderbusses, muskets, fencing foils, daggers, spiked maces carried by knights, axes wielded by Vikings, the vampire killers armed with stakes and mallets, the Romans with broadswords, the hand grenades, claymores, staves, machetes, lances and pikes, the tridents, bullwhips, harpoons and tomahawks streaming into the building.
Foster resigned himself to getting busted. Busted and arrested. She ran the wand up the inside of his leg. The wand began to bleat.
“Sir,” she said, “I’ll need you to remove your boot.” She moved back a step.
Foster stood on one foot and pulled off the boot. Something clattered on the concrete floor. The gun.
The guard hooked the wand to her belt and placed a hand on her own holstered revolver. “Put your hands on top your head,” she said. She crouched to retrieve the gun. There was no mistaking it for a toy. What she didn’t do is check the clip for bullets. She stood and stepped back and ordered, “With one hand, remove your mask, now.” She unsnapped the guard on her holster.
If the crowds pressing past him noticed, no one reacted. Slow, with no sudden movement, Foster gripped the top of his executioner’s hood and pulled it off.
The guard gave him a long look. She slipped a phone from the back pocket of her slacks and held the screen near his face. Her eyes twitched between him and whatever image her phone displayed. “Here,” she said, and handed him the gun. “You have a good convention.”
Startled, Foster accepted the gun and started to thank her, but the guard was already shouting over his shoulder, “Next!”
Brainless wasn’t bad. Today, brainless was right up her alley. This world of grunts and clanking iron, the same tasks repeated mindlessly until failure, Mitzi loved it the moment she’d stepped through the door of the weight room. The Sisyphean repetition of lifting and lowering. Nothing represented life better than this endless losing battle against gravity. The grunts and cries that conveyed so much more than words ever could.
Here was an assembly line where people manufactured themselves. On these weight benches and calf machines. With its pulleys and pull-up
