Jackie woke up miserable, as hung over as a full spec medium tier Lab Brat can get without drowning on their own vomit, and still pissed off. She stayed in bed until noon, putting off her to-do list one by one despite her promise to Cordon to stop making Mondays so bad (she’d stop complaining to them if it didn’t make her feel so much better). ‘Not like she can see how shitty everything is anyway’ Jackie thought before wincing at her own cruel joke and turning over as if to banish it from her mind. Eventually the smell of her own breath got to her and she groggily made the journey to the bathroom one laborious step at a time while hoping if she fell that the Fluffies would get out of her way.
Cordon’s voice rang out first. “Mummah am awive! Told ou!”
“Cosmos nebah say Mummah not awive! Just scawed. Wast time Cosmos twust ou!”
Jackie paused and groaned. These two were almost too much for any morning. Let alone today.
“Mummah stinky.”
“Mummah nakkey!”
“Fffck ‘ff.”
She hadn’t expected her face to be this numb given her arms felt fine. The Jenga legs and feet made of dull pain may have been a good bit of foreshadowing though.
“Mummah, pwease nu say bad wowdies. Cowdon know ou feel bettah when ou do, but pwease nu. It gud day! Cowdon feel bwight on fwuff aw day!”
For such a sweet and helpless girl, Cordon knew just how to accidentally stomp on Jackie’s heart.
She sighed
“M’sorry. Just sore. Gonna shower, then feed you guys. Kay?”
“YUS MUMMAH! Tummie gibben huwties but not wanna say nuffin, am su happy! Gonna hab nummies wif Mummah too?”
“Mmmm.”
“YAY!”
There was a thunk as Cosmos, who had been doing happy wheelies on her scooterboard, hit a wall.
“OWIES!”
There was a pause and a momentary sob.
“Cosmos am otay.”
Brushing her teeth felt like it was taking all her focus. More than a little bit of toothpaste water slid down her throat, ensuring a rotten gut later. The shower felt lovely though. She thought she may have fallen asleep resting her head against the wall, and wasn’t sure how good she’d lathered nor if she’d rinsed everywhere she did. She turned off the water and allowed herself to drip off.
Fritz was waiting when she opened the door. “Ou nu hab cwoves Mummah.”
She wanted to snark something back but all she could come up with was “Bare-assed like you.”
“Fwuffies hab fwuff. Ou onwy got a widdwe bit of fwuff.”
She picked him up and held him close as she made her way back to the bed chamber.
“My headfluff is longer than your whole body.”
“Fwitz was tawkin about ou weggies.”
“You little shit! I should kick you.”
“Dewe easiew ways tu bweak ou ankle dan kick poow Fwitzy.”
She laughed despite herself. A life spent in front of the TV had given him a good understanding of comedy, even if his jokes were limited to repetition, observations, and recontextualization.
He sat on the bed with his eyes closed looking like the perfect pampered pet while she threw on undies, black shorts, and an old soft pink top she still somehow had from high school. She didn’t remember packing it or seeing it before now, but it was perfect for a wasted day. The lab coat made it around one arm before being tossed back onto the chair. Dress for the job you want, after all. Hair tied into a simple ponytail, she picked up Fritz and made her way up to the office. “Geez, how can you still walk when you’re this heavy?”
“Fwitzy am dangewous weapon. Thwow Fwitzy at bad hoomin and bweak hoomin in half. Den Fwitzy num dummeh.”
“My arm would snap like a twig if I tried throwing you.”
He tried to joke back but was caught up in giggles, which made her laugh too. By the time they walked through the doors to the cafeteria Cordon and Cosmos were treated to the sight of two red and breathless laughing idiots. It made her headache so much worse, but she absolutely did not care in the slightest.
Fritz was set on the floor next to Cordon and Cosmos. She liked having him eat next to her on the table, but she hadn’t come up with a good way for the blind and crippled Fluffies to be there with him safely and still be able to get to the litter box. Turning every stairway into a ramp had been a miserable task and she was all DIY’d out for a while.
After grabbing the can of organic spaghetti there was a moment of hesitation before it was returned to the stack. Instead she went to the cupboard and pulled out the banana nut muffins, removing the wrapper from each and adding a spoonful of applesauce to the side of each on a plate. Four eyes were wide upon her as the jug of agave juice was used to fill each of their bowls.
They hesitated.
“Mummah, it am speshul day?”
“Why Cosmos ask dat?”
Cosmos looked at Cordon before remembering she was blind. “Oh, sowwy Cowdon. Mummah gib nana bwead an appwe sauce!”
“NANAS?! Mummah, nanas! …why nanas? Am speshul day?”
“Yes baby, today is a special day. Today is called Memorial Day. Its a day when we commemorate people who died in wars, and survived them too. If anyone bothers anyway.”
“Commomomewate?”
“Remember. Respect. Love extra special. Feel sad if they are gone, but happy that once they weren’t.” The words came a bit easier than they would if they were said by a woman not trying to survive a headache that could birth a god.
“Ooh. What am waw?”
“Fights. Killing. Territory. Booms. Sadness. Pain. For a long time usually.” These seemed like ideas they could understand. No doubt thinking in terms of herds fighting, which wasn’t as far off as an indirect metaphor would have been. “Ask Fritz for details.”
He looked at her with a rare disturbed gaze. He’d of course seen war on television, from cartoon plot arcs to documentaries to dramatizations to live coverage on the plastic wars in Australia. He was fascinated by them as much as he was terrified. She had seen it as a point of interest in her youth to put on Saving Private Ryan, Waltz With Bashir, and 187 Days In Quebec to watch him shake, weep, and piddle himself. Back before she’d comfort him if he was startled, before she’d insist that deep down Fluffies and humans were good (the latter a point she would argue against with anyone else but a Fluffy).
Cosmos gently lowered her head and touched the button to scoot forward, managing to stop in front of the plate. Fritz jiggled toward and began to lap at the applesauce but Cordon hesitated. “Den why good nummies?”
Jackie realized she didn’t really have an answer. It had just felt appropriate. “Because…it helps us appreciate the things others have done for us. They hurt so we didn’t have to. They had bad things done to them, and some did bad things, so they wouldn’t happen to us. The nice food is some of the things they earned for the rest of us.” It felt like a cheap answer. Jackie detested the cookout lifestyle, the beer cans printed with flags and marathons of irrelevant television programming. But to Cordon the words must have seemed profound because she sat in contemplation (while Jackie chugged glass after glass of water and downed baggies of soup crackers). By the time Cosmos was slurping down the last of the agave and Fritz was moaning in delight at the taste of the muffin melting on his tongue she had finished her thoughts and followed the sounds of her friends to her own bowl, stopping when the sensor collar buzzed and lowering her head to eat. She smeared half her muzzle in applesauce and tried to bite into empty plate at the first attempt, succeeding at a mouthful of muffin on the second. “Mmmm! Y’mmy mffn mmnh!”
Jackie gave up on glasses and took the entire pitcher with her, stooping to pat each Fluffy gently on the head as she passed. She needed an easy source of protein to really kick this hangovers ass, but Pixie hadn’t been by in awhile due to the complexity of the last order. The Chickenfluffs she ordered couldn’t get here soon enough. Once the dehydration passed she planned on a late lunch/early dinner of salted nuts.
She did the rounds quick, collecting chunks out of each litter box into the compost bucket and leaving it with the lid on by the vehicle bay elevator. Each Fluff-fetus in the ectogenic tanks was growing fine, tiny hearts visibly beating on the fish-like pink blobs with an occasional twitch from one. The braindead mother they were connected to still was alive as well and after a change of nutrient and colostomy bags she would be fine for another week. Jackie gave her a pet and told her she was a good mummah as usual despite there being thankfully no chance she could perceive anything.
The reactor was fine. She still had no clue what to do if it ever wasn’t, but like hell would she sleep if she didn’t verify all the lights were still their usual colors and blinking pattern.
With that out of the way she sat down at the chair of the security office and began checking monitors and hitting the points marked by the software as having activity. Same as usual on most screens, Fluffies and stray dogs wandering around, one bear (who oddly enough ignored the Fluffies), and the usual homelessfolks that she was starting to recognize.
A herd fight, appropriate today, although thankfully it just looked like two Smarties screaming at each other while the Toughies stood looking confused; these two, red and blue, liked to poke at each other but never actually traded blows. She figured they were brothers or something given the similar age and both having the same dull green eyes and black mane Blue reared up and stomped right in front of red’s face, who responded by blowing a raspberry and spraying blue in saliva. Then back to screaming at each other.
Another cam, some young kids in hazard gear with cameras exploring the ruins of one of the mansions, which due to being the home of the former Hasbio representative would always be the first place they hit. She checked the past footage on that cam for activity, seeing there was two teams today and made a note (literally, on the white board). Nothing, nothing, an interesting looking Mare with two horns (note made, track her location and lure her if possible), nothing, nothing, then something strange.
Prolonged activity in one of the old pipe networks at an abandoned construction site she’d rigged her own cameras in with Fritz’s help (him on a lead in case she had to pull him out, inserting the camera onto the four screws drilled through the concrete from the other side and attaching the fasteners). But it was obscured, the night vision somehow foggy. She leaned forwards in her chair, eyeballing the screen for changes until she recognized the shadows were consistent. Something was covering the camera. No Fluffy should care, they’d buck the camera (and give up when they couldn’t destroy it by contenting themselves it had suffered, or sprayed shit ineffectively in its direction due to the angle at the worst) before ever considering sacrificing a valuable cloth for privacy even if they understood what the camera was. The next camera was another mystery, a semi-transparent orange suction cup covering most of the lens. It suddenly appeared, meaning it was likely fired from above; from its position on one fence overlooking a narrow alleyway someone would have to fire from atop the other fence. Jackie was quite unprepared for the answer on the final (non-Fluffy) footage of the day.
The site was a covered area, an intact but doorless separate garage behind an abandoned estate that had been leveled down to the foundation in the Fall. Yard full of fruit-bearing trees, tucked away between plenty of buildings on the same block too damaged to be of much interest. A perfect place for studying the homeless people, Fluffies, or more importantly how the two interact. When installing the camera she had also put up a transparent tarp as kind of doorway so nobody, Fluffy or human, would question the viability of the shelter nor worry about a surprise inside. Surprise had unfortunately belonged to her, from the dull and completely predictable cruelty shit-covered mundane humans showed to shit-covered genengineered animals to the same cycle of herd destruction that occurs when a foolish Smarty less than a year of age destroys their community and bloodline. Once she witnessed a homeless man come with a herd, seemingly acting as their leader and forming a Fluffpile on him after he cooked two cans of skettie-rings for them and himself. But the nature of the exchange was a mystery as the audio was down and they had not approached her cameras since.
This day a homeless man, wearing what looked like several layers of button-up shirts and toting several large and bulging nylon sacks, made it his home for the night after making a point of touching each wall in certain places ritualistically. He even booped the camera, leaving a fingerprint, but did not seem to recognize its nature or care (OCD, she marked on the whiteboard). The next activity on that cam was this morning when what she thought was the man was asleep slumped in the corner among his belongings. But then what appeared to be a man riding a horse entered the frame. From the upper vantage point at the corner of the doorway tarp it looked surreal, like an optical illusion or funhouse perspective. The man on the horse made motions behind him then dismounted. Only then when the man held the creature’s face and pressed his forehead to its own did she realize she was staring at a Poopie Fluffy with a saddle.
Her mouth dropped as she watched the exchange. Fritz chose that moment to come in, slowly waddling his way over to her and asking “Mummah see anything gud on teebee?”
When she didn’t respond he became worried and trotted next to her to see the camera. “…dat am Fwuffy, ow howsie?”
Jackie maintained her gaze, reaching beside her to pick up Fritz and hugging him close. “Mummah! Ou otay? Pwease say someting to Fwitzy.”
“Good boy Fritz. Quiet now, mommy is watching the…thing there.”
Used to being quiet to enjoy movies, Fritz turned his head to watch the screen with her.
Soon more figures of the same scale came flooding in. The twilight hours must have ended because the night vision switched off and she could clearly see the figures. They looked like wild humans of all ethnicities, wearing a mix of equipment that was torn and mended with different kinds of cloth. They seemed to have a military theme in their dress, and some carried what looked like toy guns on their backs. But all were armed with improvised weapons, spears that appeared to be tipped in razor blades and swords made of steak knives. The leader, a dark-skinned…man, handed the reigns of his Fluffy to a pale and dark-haired female whatever they were, who walked it back to the entrance where what appeared to be a blond child thing until Jackie saw the beard kn his face accepted the duty to take the Fluffy outside. Jackie wished there was a separate camera out there, which she had considered in order to see any mutated rejects among the herds that took over the shed that she could claim.
The leader made hand motions to the gathered warriors who slowly unsheathed their weapons and took positions. Jackie estimated each was one foot tall based on the warrior standing next to an old hand trowel against the wall, but some were considerably smaller. The leader stood in the back watching with arms folded behind his back at attention while the female advanced on the sleeping homeless man. She let out a call of “GO SHMOE!” and started the attack. The center force lunged at the man, stabbing him repeatedly with their weapons. His body jumped and he flailed around before managing to stand. The center force fell back as the flanks charged at the man’s ankles, making him march in place as he leapt from foot to foot avoiding the attacks before a blade found purchase into his achilles tendon. He fell forwards, catching a few warriors on the left with his arm though they got to their feet and scrambled away. The man looked up at what was attacking him and screamed, covering his face and moving to try and clear space around him. The flanks returned to his legs, on the left they piked his legs with their spears and darted back repeatedly before he could swat them while the right focused on crippling his other ankle. He abandoned his face to try and protect his legs before the center charged. They hacked at his neck, and though he grabbed a few and crushed them (Jackie noted, with the rational part of her mind, that they were organic and were pulped like a giant from a dark fairy tale had gotten ahold of a knight). His struggles slowed until he no longer had the strength to move his arms. He made one final attempt to lift himself by his shoulders before he fell still, eyes rolled upwards and mouth dripping blood.
The tribe waited until the leader stepped forward, clambering up on the man’s chest and putting his hands on his knees to bend down and look the dead man in the face. After a minute he nodded, stood up straight again, then turned to his people. “THIS IS ONE TO GROW ON!” A cheer rang out among the tribe, and the leader cupped his hands around his mouth to call out “GIVE US YOUR HUDDLED MASSES!” More figures entered the tent while the warriors cut strips from the man’s clothing and tore them away until he was naked. Then they took positions at attention at the sides of the shed. The leader stepped forward and took his kitchen knife sword, sawed off one of the man’s nipples, and ate it. Jackie gagged while Fritz shuddered, and the warriors cheered. The leader stepped down and beckoned the newcomers forward, who ran past him and set upon the corpse. They appeared to be females and children, and her suspicious on their sizes were confirmed as she saw the developed breasts on ones that were one foot tall and others around a third that height. Some tore open the man’s stomach and began slicing into and consuming his intestines, others bit straight into his thighs. A ted-haired female clad in what appeared to be the muddied dress of a special edition fashion doll slowly walked forward and embraced the leader tenderly while two other females who had entered the building at her side castrated the homeless man. Due to the position he had died in the camera was pointing directly at his groin.
“Nuuu. Nuuu. Why?” Jackie held Fritz slightly tighter, hearing his panicked breathing. She regretted explaining that the cameras took video of what was really around them.
The handmaidens brought the testicles to the small queen, who kneeled and offered one to her mate. “A soldier cannot march on valor alone.” “This soldier is well-supplied, little lady.” She smiled and passed it to her handmaidens instead, who thanked her and feasted on it while the queen dug in. Once she was finished she stood beside her husband, who kneeled and parted her dress to reveal a very pregnant belly hidden beneath the sparkling folds. She hummed a tune that Jackie didn’t recognize while he cradled her in his arms. She hadn’t even asked before Fritz said somewhat breathlessly “Dat am Battwe Hymn Of Da Wepubwic. Am ‘mewica song, Mummah.”
“But…why?” she whispered to herself.
“…Fwitz nu know Mummah.”
The pale and dark-haired female seemed to have taken over while the king was with his queen. She beckoned the soldiers forward as the females and children left satisfied, the ones bearing plastic weapons and fancy costumes like pilots and divers first while the more simply dressed and equipped warriors fed after. When the soldiers had their fill she gave a call of “REBELS, CLAIM YOUR MERCY!”
A new group entered, each limping under a damaged left leg. They all were ragged and slightly emaciated, zip ties binding them together in trios. All were male and identical, all bearing the symbol of what appeared to be a scorpion on them. It was almost like a birth mark rather than a tattoo or scar. They gingerly dug into the remaining flesh of the man. Before too long the second-in-command barked “YOUR NEEDS ARE SEEN TO. REPAY WITH LOYALTY AND SERVITUDE!” Despite there being far more than enough skin and meat left the Scorpions winced and exited, some less willingly and drug by their shackle-mates. “CAMP FOLLOWERS, TEND THE STEEDS!” Some of the children and what appeared to be injured and elderly warriors lead a parade of Fluffies in, leaving each to lap up blood from the floor and then to take bites anywhere the small people(?) had eaten from. They gave the usual proclamations of love and gratitude, and when each had eaten their fill the caretakers lead them to the warrior that owned them. The warrior then gave their mount a brushing with a small comb strapped under the Fluffy’s belly, a soft pat on the nuzzle, then waved the caretaker to lead them back out. A warmth suddenly began on Jackie’s lap as Fritz shuddered in her arms, almost hyperventilating. She ignored it.
Suddenly the warriors all looked spooked. Jackie leaned forward, straining her eyes to see what had startled them. The king jumped to his feet and looked at the wall opposite the entrance for a few seconds before shouting “FIGHT ANOTHER DAY!”
He picked up his queen and his Fluffy was brought to him. He mounted it with her in one arm, then watched as the soldiers filed out. Scorpions came and retrieved the bodies of the dead warriors before being followed by the pale and black-haired female. When the two rulers and brown Fluffy beneath them were the last living things in the shed the king turned the Fluffy around and passed the reigns to his mate before saluting the corpse. Then he claimed the lead again and bade the Fluffy to gently trot out of the shed.
Jackie watched intensely for a minute before the camera suddenly went black. The sound continued on for a time and she heard distant shouting, and sounds of a struggle. Then possibly a motor, although she couldn’t help bit feel like it sounded more like an electric guitar playing the same riff repeatedly before a similar noise stepping up and down in pitch joined it. Then the sound cut out too.
Jackie’s mind was racing, yet somehow she was unable to form a coherent conscious thought. She was still caught in the background of shock while the other part of her brain sorted what it had seen. It seemed Hasbio had made biotoys other than Fluffies. Sgt. Shmoe was real, and he was thriving in Cleveland. There was rumors of some kind of Hasbio strike team airdropped in during the chaos, but it was always seen as a crackpot conspiracy theory. Even the nutcases who thought the cure for Syphilis was being snuck out of the city likely never imagined it was jingoistic Lilliputians.
Fritz recovered before her. “Mummah? Fwitzy made bad peepees.”
“…I know Fritz.”
He sniffed.
“…Mummah?”
“Yes Fritz?”
“Did ou make bad peepees too?”
“Yes Fritz.”
“Oh.”
There was a moment of silence as Jackie continued gripping Fritz for comfort.
“…Mummah?”
“Yes Fritz?”
“Am Fwitzy and Mummah bad?”
“No Fritz.”
“Oh.”
Another pause.
“Fritz?”
“Yes Mummah?”
“Do not tell Cordon and Cosmos about this.”
“Yes Mummah.”
“ANY of this.”
“Yes Mummah.”
