I don’t wanna wake up, but I don’t really seem to have any other options at this point. I open my eyes, flop over in the bed, and think about getting up to go shave my tongue. Shorty pops her head through the door, fresh as a daisy with a big glowing smile. Her face is so bright it hurts my eyes. I wonder if there’s a dimmer switch on it somewhere.
“Hey sleepy head, get up!” she bubbles, “We’ve got something to show you.”
“Ok,” I say, laying there like a rock, “Just let me take a shower first,” I make no motion whatsoever.
Her smile sharpens and she runs the tip of her tongue across her upper teeth, ”We can do that…”
After she has thoroughly cleaned me, gotten my heart started again, and stuffed me into a jumpsuit and boots, she runs us down to the clubhouse in Short Fuse. I had made copies of the door key, and put them in the pockets of the club jackets when I handed them out. It seemed like the thing to do. So when we get there the door is open, and everyone is sitting around the table in the lounge.
“May I present to you, our glorious leader! Chief!” announces Shorty as we walk in.
“Uunnngghhh,” I groan.
Everybody laughs.
I allow her to lead me across the room and plop me down in a chair at the table. As we walk past, I could swear Miss Chief is laughing at me.
Once seated, I flop my head down onto my arms on the table and pretend to snore. They all groan. Then I slowly raise my head up with a cheesy grin and Cracker pushes a stack of photos at me. I take a look.
“Hey, they’re in color now,” I say.
“Yeah,” kicks back Hook, “We’ve invented that now. It must have been really dull back when all people could see was black, white, and grey.”
I give him the finger and they all laugh.
“Here,” he says, spinning a pen across the table to me, “You go first.”
I give them a look. In all of them, the world seems to be moving at impossible angles, with Miss Chief, still, and steady in the middle. It’s as if she’s stationary and the whole universe is moving around her. Her wheels aren’t moving her forward, they’re rotating the moon beneath her. There’s quite a few, and I don’t caption them all, just my favorites.
There is a really good one from the launch, where you can just see Miss Chief’s nose poking out through a thick cloud of tire smoke, snorting flames. The reflections of which, in her windshield, make her appear to have eyes. On this one I write, ‘From out of the past comes a thundering roar. Tyrannosaurus Rod, living dinosaur!’
Another of my favorites is from the middle of the run, where I am rocketing past Hook at the T. The edges of the image are wreathed in the exhaust flames briefly engulfing him. I’m giving him a sideways glance, and he’s so close that you can see his reflection in the window. ‘Hi Hook, sorry about the flame job!’ I write.
And then from the end of the run, where Miss Chief is sliding towards the wall with streams of smoke coming off all four wheels. I write ‘THESE BRAKES SUCK!’
Another, shortly after that when her front wheels touch the wall and her tail is lifting just slightly gets, ‘Bonk!’
Then I pass them all around and we sit and talk and laugh and joke. Whenever I look over at Sweet Thing, she no longer looks old. She looks like a little girl sitting around the table with her daddy and his friends. Wide eyed and happy. Beautiful and innocent. I realize that I am crying.
She catches me, “Chief, are you all right?” concern on her face.
“I… I just… It’s just…,” I’m sobbing now and it’s pissing me off, “Fuck!” I bring my fist down on the table, trying to straighten myself out, I give a big sniff, “Just… Thanks. Ok? Everybody. All of you. Thank you all so much. I… I’ve never had anything like this before. And it’s so… And without you all I never would have so… So just, Thanks.”
Mama comes over and puts her hand on my back, rubbing gently, “It’s ok, Chief. It’s good. We love you, too. All of us.” and she leans down and kisses me on the cheek.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
I sniff, and look up at her with a weepy half smile, and we just smile at each other like that for a moment, and I think I must look very silly. I turn back to the table.
“Sorry guys, I… I’m just overwhelmed. I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything,” says Sweet Thing, she’s crying now, too, “I know just how you feel.”
“Here,” says Punk, pouring glasses of his golden rum and sliding one over to me, “It’s on the house, buddy, you earned it.”
I feel stupid saying ‘Thanks’ over and over again, so I just wipe my nose on my sleeve, smile, give him a nod as I raise my glass to him, and take a drink.
“There’s one more,” says Hook, and from somewhere under the table he pulls out a big enlargement, like the one on the wall, and when he slides it over to me it’s the same picture with different faces, except for one. He’s done this one in black and white, too.
I look up at him.
“It seemed appropriate,” he says
“It is,” I answer.
Across the top is written, ‘Chief, Too, Fastest man on the moon, 201.1 Flying Mile!’ Under that is, ‘Love ya, Chief! Space Racers, Too’ and everyone has already signed by their images with their nicknames, and funny little notes to me and Miss Chief. At the bottom I write, ‘The day before the best day of my life so far. I love you all so much. Thanks, for everything! Chief’. And a few tears fall on the print. Then I pass it around the table and everyone gets all emotional looking at it. When it makes it back to me, I get up and tape it on the wall of fame next to the old one. I pause, looking into the face in the old photo that looks so much like mine in the new one, almost identical. I kiss the tips of my fingers and press them to the picture.
“Godspeed, Chief. You got balls the size of church bells.”
After we’ve all hugged it out, and people are filtering off, Hook takes me aside.
“Hey Chief, got a minute?”
“What’s up?”
“Well, I’ve got some new information for you about your situation. You know how I told you that we had a bunch of old information but we couldn’t really get to it because it’s all obsolete systems?”
“Yeah, you figure something out?”
“Kind of. It’s the damndest thing. You see, that stuff is all on tapes, and all our tech is so high now, we don’t have anything stupid enough to figure out how to read it. Anyway, we found the old computer a few months ago in an old office. One of the first ones in the new section. The original Operations Control Room, O.C.R. for short.”
“No shit… Overseer.”
“Indeed, that would appear to be the case. Nobody had been in there in years. And it’s really archaic stuff, reel to reel, vacuum tubes and everything. We’ve had our best techs on it, but they haven’t even been able to get it to turn on. Anyway, when you ran Miss Chief yesterday, it rattled everything so much that from what we can tell, a box of old tapes fell off the shelf above it, bounced off the top of it onto the floor, and now the damn thing’s running!”
“Oh, jeez. You mean to tell me you’re dealing with an old tube machine, and you haven’t even tried whacking it yet? That’s like item number one in the troubleshooting guide for those things. Step one, Whack it! If that doesn’t work, proceed to step two, Whack it harder! If that fails to resolve your issue, please go back and read the fucking manual that you already threw in the trash! Oh, you guys…” I put my face in my palm and shake my head.
“Frankly, it never occurred to us. All of our new garbage is considerably more delicate. As for digging the manual out of the trash, I’d say it’s safe to assume that’s no longer an option at this point.”
“Point taken.”
“Anyway, that’s not the really wild thing. Out of the box of tapes, there was one that came out of the box and was laying right in front of the machine with the label facing up. It said ‘Lower Chamber’. When the techs came back in after your run, and found the machine on, they stuck that tape on it just because it was there, to see what it would do, and it worked perfectly!”
“Ok, cool. So what was on it?”
“That’s what’s so crazy! It’s about you! Or the old Chief, anyway. But from what I’ve seen of it, I’m not sure there’s any difference anymore. Sweet Thing has certainly always felt that way, and I think I’m starting to agree with her. Anyway, it talks about a chamber that’s constructed underneath this place, that contains some kind of device. And it’s old. Like really old. Like, was old when we got here, old. Older than us. Maybe older than humanity itself.”
“Alright. That’s some heavy shit you’re puttin’ down there, Hook.”
“You’re tellin’ me! Anyway, this chamber, it’s described as kind of a constructed, metal sphere, that’s suspended somehow in the room down there. There’s a walkway up to it and a door. The door isn’t locked or anything, but apparently the chamber has some kind of field around it. Like a vibration. Almost everyone who gets close enough to it gets sick, and most of the people who have touched it have died. All of them, in fact, save one.”
“Chief.”
“Bingo! He was the only one who never got sick around it, so one day he just said ‘Fuck it!’ and went in. He didn’t take anything with him except for a big ball bearing, because it didn’t look like a weapon, but if there was something unfriendly alive in there he wanted something to knock it in the head with. Apparently, there wasn’t anything in there except for some kind of device. He described it as, like a four foot long piece of big sewer pipe or something, with another piece coming off the side at a forty five degree angle. The forty five degree piece had an antenna with a ball end on it poking out. It zapped him with something. He described it as, not any kind of ray, but a vibration. Said it wasn’t like it was adding anything to him, more like it was just straightening out what was already there. Like there was a line running down the center of his body, and it was a little out of whack. When this thing hit him, it straightened it. ‘Straighten and Set’, he called it. Said it felt like he was being ‘tuned’ to a certain frequency, one higher than he had before. Anyway, when he came out he was fine, better than fine in fact. But the ball bearing he had in his hand the whole time was kind of, melted or something. That was the only thing odd about it, well, about him, anyway. He showed it to some people. Everybody thought it was strange but couldn’t make anything out of it. When they told him that he just laughed and said, “That’s fine, I’ll make something out of it.” Nobody ever saw it again. He started building Miss Chief right after that.”
“I know where it is.”
“What?”
“Go take a peek through Miss Chief’s window over there. Have a look at the shift knob.”
“You’re shittin’ me!”
“You’re a hot rodder now, Hook. You tell me. You got a palm sized chunk of metal that’s perfectly molded to your hand, what’re you gonna do?”
“Shit, you’re right! Make a fucking shift knob out of it. That explains, well, not everything, but a hell of a lot.”
“Yeah, like why she purrs. Why she makes other people sick, except for the one’s I’ve spent a lot of time in close, physical contact with. I guess the girls have been picking up some of my vibration, especially Mama, carrying my child and all. It’s like Chief left a piece of his soul here, in Miss Chief. She carries his vibration.”
“And it brought you back!”
“I don’t know about all that.”
“I do. And so does Sweet Thing. Look, if you’re gonna try and sell me some kind of ‘This is all just a big coincidence’ crap, save it. I’m not buying it.”
“That’s fair enough. I can certainly understand your point of view on the matter. So. Next question is — Where’s this ‘tuning chamber’?”
“That, is still a bit of a mystery. Chief was the only one who could ever get near the thing. After he left, a couple kids died trying to ‘be the new Chief’, and they sealed off the passage. We have a vague idea of where it is, but we haven’t found it yet.”
“You’ll let me know when you do?”
“You’ll be the first.”
I head back to the house and lay down in bed. My head is still a little rough, and I’ve got a lot to think about.