Chapter 19: Chapter 18

Mr. Sada was still laying in bed. He had a beer in one hand, and a paper wrapped hamburger in the other. My stomach rumbled immediately, and I ignored it to stand in front of his bed. He was watching psychic TV again, the alien hosted cable news show. All of the TVs in his house were now made of the same material as my psychic phone and on the screen some real life drama was blaring, drawing me in.

The segment showed Buckingham Palace, its whitish-gray facade cracked and broken, one wing in total collapse. A cloud of lanky, horse-sized flying insects angrily buzzed around the ruined palace. Occasionally one of them would land and impale a nearby corpse with a proboscis the size of a spear. Several of the bodies on the ground looked hollowed out already.

Along the bottom ticker than the words “Terror Attack on Royal Family, All Dead, Attacked Pod to Blame. Terrorists dead on scene.”

I sighed. It wasn’t just the Sleem who had figured out how to weaponize BuyMort’s delivery system. It was everyone. Guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see us figure out how to work a new weapon, even if it did kill the people who set it off. 

After a segment was over, he picked up his remote and paused it, then slid out of bed. Mr. Sada walked to his window overlooking the camp and stared outside. I could see past him that Molls was slowly making her way back to the campground.

“She’s a piece of work,” he muttered.

“Got dressed down, huh?” I raised an eyebrow and he scoffed.

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what happened.” Mr. Sada chuckled and turned around. “Eh, I deserved it, the coke makes me an asshole. She’s ferocious, but you see the knockers on her? Fuckin’ weird man. Snake with tits.” He sat down at a nearby makeup mirror. It had been his wife’s, she caked the stuff on. Before the slimes ate her, anyway. “Big tits,” he muttered, and then shook his head with a laugh. I suspect Mr. Sada liked to think of himself as terribly wise. He was always having little revelations and laughs about things only he could understand. I sneered and turned away as he bent to do another line of coke.

When he came back up, he slapped his knee several times and sniffed loudly. “What was it you needed, Mr. Sada?” I allowed a dose of boredom and disgust to creep into my voice as I spoke to him, a sure sign of his degrading status. It was hard for him to fall further, he was already my least favorite person at the campground, but now I was starting to feel like I even liked Hobb better. Doofus grunted from his place on the floor and Mr. Sada whipped around to look at us.

“Oh shit, Tyson, my bad. Come have a bump son, my treat.” He waved at me frantically, insisting I come sit at the makeup table. There was a bottle of pills on the table as well. Ritalin. I zoned out. Hadn’t seen that word in a long time and it brought back the past.

I was seated in front of a doctor, my short legs dangling from the chair, with my father at my side. He was asking why the pills hadn’t worked, why I was still getting in fights. The doctor was shrugging, shaking his head, and insisting that not every brain worked the same. Behavior modification through medication was still possible, but stronger meds would have to be considered. My father looked down at me in the chair beside him, my knuckles still bleeding from the latest violent encounter. He started to ask the doctor about non-medication based options when Mr. Sada ruptured the memory by waving at me from the bed.

“Hello, Tyson? Anybody home?”

I raised a hand and began to decline, or maybe protest, but then I froze. Instead, I pointed at the makeup table. “Are you offering me a line?”

He nodded and waved his arms at the chair like a waiter seating high nobility, or one of those folk who bring airplanes in for landings with flags. I approached the makeup table and pointed to a line of coke he had laid out on a small mirror. I made eye contact with Mr. Sada and said, “BuyMort, I’d like to sell that.”

Mr. Sada’s scowl was immediate, as was the pod. It must have been nearby and been redirected because a pod flew in the open window and beamed away the coke before he could even react. He dove at it, too late, and desperately tried to snort it for himself. But the pod was thorough and didn’t leave a single grain of the line.

Purchase: Intoxicant, processed. Nu-Earth Cocaine. Rarity, common. Quality, poor. .09 morties dispensed.

Purchase: Construction material. Nu-Earth drywall dust. Rarity, uncommon. Quality, good. 1.2 morties dispensed.

“Why?!” Mr. Sada raged as he came away empty. He turned to face me and stopped instantly, glancing behind me to Hobb. I shot the tall gray man a look and he kept his position on the wall by the door. “Fuckin’ prick!” Mr. Sada sulked now, slumping to sit on the bed. He shook his head long and slow. Then he sighed. “I try son, but you keep spitting in my face and stealing from me.”

“No, I really don’t.” I sat down next to Mr. Sada and dropped my arm around his shoulder. “What I do is remind you that you do not own me, because you have the unfortunate habit of acting like you do.”

He scowled, and his head hung, but he didn’t try to pull away. “No, Tyson, that’s just the separation you’re feeling. I have to cultivate that, as an employer, or my employees take advantage of me.”

I pulled the arm away, minor contact was enough. “Like stealing bottles of tequila?” I asked with a laugh.

He chuckled too. “You’re an asshole, but no. Nobody buys that brand, I put em on the truck just to get rid of em. Clear some shelf space.” Mr. Sada faltered for a moment, but then continued with a laugh. “I dunno, son. Feels like you’re doin’ me a favor drinking that rotgut, and you work hard around here.” There he threw his hands up. “Far be it from me to get between a hard workin’ man and his drink. That’s why I offered you a line. Why’d you sell it?”

“That coke is mostly drywall, Mr. Sada. You should dump the rest of it, buy some new stuff if you really wanna be snorting that.” I raised an eyebrow at him. “I don’t judge, but yeah the coke kind of turns you into an asshole. I sold it cause I don’t like that stuff and I need the morties. You got me runnin’ dumbass errands all day for nothing. No pay.” He turned to face me, and I raised a hand to cut him off. “Lot rent is bullshit, don’t even say it. I’m crashing in Phyllis’ trailer cause your stupid slimes stole my shit, and this place wasn’t exactly great to live in before the end of the world. You aren’t offering shit, I just don’t have any place better to go. You gotta quit mistaking the two. And you really need to quit calling me son.”

Mr. Sada blinked a few times at that, and then raised the mostly uneaten burger and beer. “Sorry man, have you eaten today?”

I happily accepted his leftovers, and had the burger devoured in three bites. It was absurdly good. After taking a long pull at the beer, I offered it back to Mr. Sada. “Thanks, boss. That kind of makes up for nearly dying saving our only tenant.”

“You nearly died?” he asked as he took the beer. He took a swig from it and set it down on the end table near the bed.

“Yeah, like . . . kind of a lot since yesterday. One of those fuckin’ things from the storm snatched my arm off. The suit saved me, again. Saved me a bunch, actually.” I met his gaze and nodded, before I reached for the beer again. “Sorry about your downstairs, by the way.”

He shook his head and looked down. “I’m . . . sorry. I should’ve just left em out there. Fuck them, right?”

I didn’t respond for a minute, just sipped at the beer, and stared ahead. After the awkward silence, I turned and said “Look, Mr. Sada. I’m sorry about your wife.” He snapped up, eyes wide and he stared at me open mouthed. “Yeah, I know you two weren’t exactly close, and she yelled at you all the time, but . . .” I shrugged and took a sip from his beer. “You married her for a reason, I’m guessing, and it fuckin’ sucks that she went out that way. Rough shit to see. So, you know,” I handed him the beer with a shrug and continued, “we’re kind of it out here. You’re burning through her closet to keep eating and snorting drywall, and there’s no fuckin’ plan happening at all. We’re gonna die if we keep going this way.”

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Mr. Sada took the beer from me and narrowed his eyes. “That burger cost over eight hundred morties. Food’s getting’ fuckin expensive man. The slimes are tenants, we can’t just kill ‘em.”

I shook my head. “Nope, no deal. They keep trying to kill me every time I see ‘em. I’m already making friends with the giant, terrifying, sexy snake lady, you can’t make me deal with them too.” I stood and moved to lean against the windowsill. “I dunno what kind of arrangement you made with ‘em, but they killed your wife. You know they’re dangerous.”

Mr. Sada hung his head again. Then he shook it and looked at me. “They didn’t kill her, man. I did.” I saw a tear squeeze from his eye and roll down his cheek, and I said nothing. I just crossed my arms and waited. “It was an accident!” Mr. Sada gestured with the beer, nearly spilling it. Thankfully, there wasn’t much left, so I didn’t worry about getting splashed. He was openly weeping at this point. “A fuckin’ stupid fuckin’ accident! She freaked out about BuyMort and started selling off everything in the house. I didn’t do that to her closet, she did!” He gestured behind himself. “I just walked in to talk to her, and she turned to scream at me like she did, and just fuckin fell man. She stumbled on one of her own fuckin shoes and cracked her temple against the dresser in there.” Mr. Sada was pointing by the time he finished, almost screaming at the walk-in closet. His tears flowed freely, and he collapsed to sob on the bed, still staring at the open closet door.

The bedroom door clicked behind us as Hobb left the room. I sighed and walked over to close the closet door so he’d stop staring in it forlornly. “The slimes just found her body and ate part of it, I guess?”

“Yeah man, I walked in on them dissolving her and freaked out. Once I calmed down a little, one of them that could speak cut the deal.” Mr. Sada stopped crying and wiped at his nose.

I grabbed a box of tissues off the bathroom counter on the way by and tossed it at him, before settling back into my place at the window. “And what was the deal?”

His face screwed up and Mr. Sada looked away. “I’m not supposed to tell people about this, Tyson.”

My only response was an unimpressed shrug.

“Alright, fine.” Mr. Sada used the tissues and cleaned himself up a little. He was returning more and more to normal after his outburst, but his posture still hadn’t recovered. “There’s an old army base under the campground. The mobile home park was built on top of it after the base shut down. Its existence was secret, I had to get minor clearance to even buy the place.” He looked at my face and shrugged. “There’s nothin’ down there, it’s all just old empty concrete rooms and big-ass steel doors buried to hide the entrances. The slimes want to stay down there and work on their ship, they said if I let em, they’d take me with when they left, and pay me a few morties a week for rent.”

I frowned and leaned forward, narrowing my eyes. “So hold on, you want off Earth?”

Mr. Sada nodded and looked at me like I was dumb. “Yeah, don’t you? It’s fuckin crazy here now.”

My instincts told me to shrug, so I did. “I dunno, Mr. Sada. I think it’s like this everywhere. I went through the tutorial of this store, it’s been spreading for a really long time. Just taking over everything. I don’t really have a plan either, but I don’t think running away is the answer here.”

Mr. Sada shrugged and nodded. “Good for you. I’m getting the fuck out of Dodge. You can have the campground when I’m gone.”

I nodded again and we sat quietly for a couple of minutes. “So you want me to somehow get along with these slimes, until they fix their ship and take you with them. Then I do whatever with the campground?”

“Make it a love nest for you and the python, see if I care.” Mr. Sada shrugged.

A list of bizarre Human-Nah’Gh Relationship ads appeared before me. I slapped the window aside.

With a quick shove off the window sill, I stood up and moved in front of Mr. Sada. “All right. Deal. I’ll help you do that, and when you leave, I get the campground.” I stuck out my hand for him to shake.

He looked at it and cocked his head to one side, narrowing both eyes. “Hold on. I’m liquidating my own house when the time comes, and my stuff. All you get is the campground.”

“Sure,” I said, crossing my arms. “But I get to use the golf cart until then, and you feed me if you use up my whole day on your stuff.” Doofus grunted from the floor at the foot of the bed, and when I glanced over, he was staring at me. “Oh. And I keep Doofus.”

Mr. Sada’s eyes went wide, and he recoiled. “What? No fuckin’ way, why do you want my dog?”

I shook my head. “He’s not your dog, Mr. Sada. When BuyMort breaks into our skulls, they figure out what we call ourselves so they can sic other potential buyers on us. It picked the name Doofus out of his head, not Roofus. He’s my dog, he chose me. He stays when you go, or no deal. In fact, he comes with me right now.”

Mr. Sada stared at me, then said, “really?” He sounded like the fight had been taken out of him.

I kept going, tearing into him again. “Yeah really. You never spend any time with him, and your wife used to scream at him all the time. You hate your own dog, I just want him to have a family. Are you surprised?”

He sighed and leaned forward, showing me his bald spot perfectly. “No, man, I guess not. Just . . . yeah, take him. Fuck it.”

“Alright. Deal. I’ll keep working for you until you and the slimes fly away, and then I get the campground and Doofus stays with me.” I stuck out my hand again, my jaw set.

Mr. Sada glanced up at me and nodded his head grudgingly. “Yeah. Deal.” He raised his hand and shook mine limply. I squeezed his hand once and let it drop.

As I turned to leave, I patted my thigh and Doofus immediately jumped up to come with me. Just before I reached the door, it opened and Hobb entered. He pushed past me and went to Mr. Sada’s side. His rusty weapon was in his hand. “Boss!” The big gray man exclaimed. “They’s some’n here to speak wid you.”

 

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