Shadow of the Mothaship | Page 5

go, "Wait-wait-wait, I got some good stuff. Everything must go, moving sale, you know?"
He looks really pissed and I know it hard now, I'm gonna get *taken*. I hand him up my bag, and he does a fast-paw through the junk. "What's this?" he asks.
"Old video game. Atari. Shoot up the space aliens. Really, really antisocial. Needs a display, but I don't got it anymore." I'd sold it the month before on a bored day, and used the eight cents to buy good seats behind home plate at the Skydome and thus killed an entire afternoon before Judgment Day.
There are some of the artyfarty "freestyle" kitchen utensils Mum used to sell for real cash until Dad founded his Process for Lasting Happiness and she found herself able to pursue "real art." There are paper books and pictures and assorted other crap.
Stude clucks and shakes his head. "If I just gave you the monofil and the fix-bath for this shit, it'd be a favour. Look, I can *get* real money for solvent. I *pay* real money for solvent. This just don't cut it."
"I'll get more, just hang a sec."
He haws-up Tilly but reigns her in slow, and I dash back to my place and fill a duffel with anything I lay hands to, and run out, dragging it behind me, catching the cart before it turns the corner. "Here, here, take this too."
Stude dumps it out in front of him and kicks at the pile. "This is just crap, Maxes. There's lots of it, sure, but it's still crap."
"I need it, Stude, I really need some solvent. You already *got* all my good stuff."
He shakes his head, sad, and says, "Go ask Tilly."
"Ask?"
"Tilly. Ask her."
Stude likes to humiliate you a little before he does you a favour. The word is *capricious*, he told me once.
So I go to his smelly old horse and whisper in her hairy ear and hold my breath as I put my ear next to the rotten jumbo-chiclets she uses for teeth. "She says you should do it," I say. "And she says you're an asshole for making me ask her. She says horses can't talk."
"Yeah, okay," and he tosses me the goods.
#
With stage one blessedly behind me, I'm ready for stage two. I take the nozzle of the solvent aerosol and run a drizzle along the fatty roll of the windowsills and then pop them out as the fix bath runs away and the windows fly free and shatter on the street below.
Then it's time to lighten the ballast. With kicks and grunts and a mantra of "Out, out, out," I toss everything in the house out, savouring each crash, taking care to leave a clear path between the house and the street.
On the third floor, I find Dad's cardigan, the one Mum gave him one anniversary, and put it on. She carved it herself from foam and fixed it with some flexible, dirt-shedding bath, so by the time I'm done with the third floor, my arms and chest are black with dust, and the sweater is still glowing with eerie cleanliness.
I know Dad wouldn't want me to wear his sweater now. They say that on the mothaship, the bugouts have ways to watch each and every one of us, and maybe Mum and Dad are there, watching me, and so I wipe my nose on the sleeve.
#
When the ballast is done, phase three begins. I go to work outside of the house, spritzing a line of solvent at the point where the foam meets the ground, until it's all disconnected.
And then I got to kick myself for an asshole. A strand of armoured fibre-optic, a steel water pipe, and the ceramic gas line hold it all down, totally impervious to solvent.
Somewhere, in a toolbox that I ditched out the second floor window, is a big old steel meat-cleaver, and now I hunt for it, prying apart the piles of crap with a broomstick, feeling every inch the post-apocalyptic scrounger.
I finally locate it, hanging out of arm's reach from my neighbour Linus's rose trellis. I shake the trellis until it falls, missing my foot, which I jerk away and swear at.
#
The fibre cleaves with a single stroke. The gas line takes twenty or more, each stroke clanging off the ceramic and sending the blade back alarmingly at my face. Finally it gives, and the sides splinter and a great jet of gas whooshes out, then stops.
I could kick myself for an asshole. Praise the bugouts for civil engineers who made self-sealing pipes. I eye the water line warily and flip open my comm, dial into the city, and touch-tone my way through a near-sexy woman reading menus until I find out that the water, too, self-seals.
Whang, whang, whang, and I'm soaked and blinded by the water