Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

“I just had that thing detailed. With flames on the sides. And I had all my DVDs in the back. Bah.” The baby spat. “So, I’m touched you guys came and found me… but did you have to come and interrupt my happy childhood so soon?” The baby glared up at her mother. “It was happy, right? I remember bits and pieces.”

Teri recovered from her shock long enough to protest. “Yes! Yes, it was happy! I swear. I’m a good mom. I was just taking you to the park. You like—she liked—Florence, my baby—she likes the park.” Teri started to cry, because it was becoming obvious this wasn’t her baby any more. The two men restraining Teri let her go.

“I bet. You seem like a good mom. And ooh, I like your shoes. Stylish, but good arch support.” Florence—or Captain Champion—turned back to Zora Aster. “So what was so urgent you couldn’t let me be?”

“It’s Demonico,” said the big bald guy with the head implants. “He’s traveling back in time and killing all his past lives one by one. He’s convinced that something really awful happened to him in a past life, and if he kills the right previous incarnation before it happens, he’ll be well–adjusted.”

“Huh.” Captain Champion, the baby, spat again. “Sounds like good therapy to me. And it’s a victimless crime. So what’s the problem?”

“One of his past lives is George Washington. And he’s killing them as babies, using a rocket launcher.”

The baby that had been Florence sighed. “Okay fine. I have to do everything myself. I assume you at least brought an exo? Not that this body isn’t lovely and all, but these hands aren’t going to be karate–chopping henchmen any time soon.”

“Got it right here.” The big man snapped his fingers, and a giant exoskeleton came lunging down to the pavement, landing in a crouch. It looked like a headless metal man, with huge shoulder fins and rocket launchers strapped to both wrists. The boots were big jets. As soon as the exo–suit landed, it swung open to reveal a baby–sized compartment in its torso. The members of the super–group—Teri realized this must be the Action Squad—lifted her baby into the suit and snapped her in.

Teri’s baby was seven feet tall and built like a metal sumo wrestler, with her head poking out between those huge shoulders. A see–thru reinforced plastic bubble swung over to protect Florence’s head.

“Flo, baby.” Teri looked into the face that was barely recognizable as her baby’s. “I know you’re still in there somewhere. Please don’t let them do this. You can’t let them. You can stay with me and be my little girl. It’s not too late.”

“Sorry.” And Florence did look sorrowful. “History’s at stake, ma. Maybe when this is all over, I can come back, and we can talk. I hate to leave you like this.”

“Don’t! Don’t take my baby!” Teri fell to her knees as the exoskeleton slowly lifted off the ground.

“Think of it as I’m being emancipated early,” was the last thing Captain Champion said before roaring into the sky, then banking towards that VTOL jet.

Teri watched them disappear, then pulled herself back upright. She pushed the stroller for two whole blocks before she realized there was no point, then she pushed the lever that immobilized the wheels and left it on the sidewalk in front of the liquor store. Teri thought about a documentary she’d seen, about people who left their children behind in their SUVs, because they forgot the kids were even there. She went into the liquor store and found a jug of bourbon almost the same size and weight as her baby.

John, her husband, phoned while she was still paying for the bourbon. She picked it up. “It’s not your fault,” he said, which didn’t make Teri feel any better. John had seen the Youtube, which had already started getting picked up by the cable networks.

“Come home,” she told him.

Teri hadn’t tasted alcohol since she’d known she was pregnant, and the first swig nearly killed her. She sat on the pavement. The paper bag’s crushed edges rubbed her hand raw.

John and Teri spent two days asking questions with no good answers. Do you call the cops to report your missing baby, if you actually know where your baby is? Was the superhero thing something that passed down in the same family, and if so, which one of them had marked their daughter for this? Was either of them something weird in a previous life? What were they going to do with Flo’s clothes and toys? Do you hold a funeral for a baby who’s not actually dead? John stopped shaving, and it only took him a couple days for his look to go from “nerdy stand–up comic” to something closer to the Unabomber. He didn’t sleep or bathe. Teri slept for twelve hours, three times as much sleep as she’d gotten in a twenty–four hour period in the past year, and then felt guilty for sleeping when her baby was gone.

“It’s really not your fault,” John said over and over, until she was sure he was searching for a way to blame her. Teri drank whisky from the bottle until it became an extension of her face and occluded her view of her husband.

Teri tried to take a week off work, and they told her to take a couple. She tried to do errands like any other day. When she bought toilet paper, she thought to herself, “What am I doing at the drug store? They took my baby. I should be doing something.” When she went to buy groceries, she felt like everybody was watching the star of “Mom Jacked by Action Squad” picking out the freshest rutabagas for her now–childless family. Every time Teri turned her head, she saw people look away in a hurry.

And then Teri saw Florence again. On television. Racing through the clouds to smash her engorged metal fist into the jaw of a giant koala, which toppled over and landed on its back in the middle of the Potomac. Florence still wore her exoskeleton, her red little face barely visible in its sternum, and she’d added a garish purple cape. Florence and the pink–haired girl—Zora Aster—high–fived each other.

Teri looked at pictures of Captain Champion from before she’d died, trying to see a resemblance to her baby. Captain Champion had been tall and fit (of course) with long wheat–brown hair and lips that looked pouty when they weren’t wrapped around that trademark cigar. She’d been imposing and butch, but with firm, half–exposed breasts and touches of femininity, like a big belt and pointy boots.

“Mom Jacked by Action Squad” had a million views, then two. People kept calling Teri to come and tell her story on cable TV or late–night network TV. A few times, someone jumped out of a car and took Teri’s photo on the street, then drove away. And a couple of stylishly dressed young people came up to Teri when she was buying painkillers or jugs of whisky to ask her if she wanted to do an interview.

“Maybe we should do it,” John said. “I mean, it’s terrible what happened, but our little girl is also making a difference. She saved the President! From that army of Teddy Roosevelts. Single–handed. I feel good about that. I wish I could tell her I was proud. She belongs to everybody now, but she’s still our girl.”

“That wasn’t our little girl,” Teri said. “That was the thing that’s taken over her body. She already died for them once, but they wouldn’t let it be enough.”

Teri felt ashamed, like she’d gone out of the house naked, like her bereftness was an offensive lifestyle she’d chosen. And then she remembered that none of this was her choice, and the anger came back. Teri couldn’t be around people without wanting to apologize and/or scream at them, possibly both in rapid succession.

Teri’s private drinking game:

Drink one shot if

A) someone says how sorry they are in a way that implies that you’re to be pitied.