(NSFW)
My life before Squelchy was stupid and pointless make-believe. I was the only half-sentient being in the landfill, and so I invented characters to speak my thoughts and keep me company. Mickie Mouse was an animatronic cartoon mouse designed to entertain kids, who I'd modified with high-dexterity hands and a caterpillar track set of wheels to navigate the pits and hills of the landfill and the surrounding desert. I fed him my manly thoughts. My aggression, my crude humor, my perversions. Carmella was a human sex bot, tall and lithe with fair skin, clad in black leather. Like all the sex bots, she had massive eyes, hollow cheekbones, full red lips, perfect complexion. She had a very realistic vagina for copulation but no womb. I gave her my mischief, my snarkiness, my more calculated cruelty. And then there was Annabelle, Carmella's dark-skinned twin. Same body, same face, same genitalia but dressed in much more proper, lady-like apparel. Sundress and sunhat, cute shoes, jewelry. She had my love, compassion, and naiveté.
Before Squelchy, I hadn't much to do, so I wrote stupid little perverted plays for them to perform. I wrote clean ones too, the perverted ones seemed to fit better with my characters. Mickie was usually a bad guy and Annabelle a hero of some sort. I didn't like it too clear-cut. Carmella could play either side or something in between. Then I had an army of drones of different shapes and sizes I could dress up to play side characters, bystanders, or props. It was pathetic and disgusting but it filled the time.
"You're a sick fuck," Carmella spat, and began unzipping her brassier.
Mickie Mouse felt a bulge growing in his pants and averted his eyes. He was somehow both ashamed and exhilarated. Somehow the universe had gifted him a situation where his perversions were not just tolerated but demanded.
"I won't let it go on for any longer than it has to," Mickie sputtered, in his falsetto voice, unzipping his pants and whipping out his cock, a chubby black member covered in felt, fully erect now, slightly wet at the tip. He began stroking.
Annabelle was blushing, eyes on her feet. Her sister stood stark naked in her periphery, hand on her hip.
Carmella walked over and began unzipping the back of her sister's dress. She shot Mickie a contemptuous glance as he cooed and shook, pants around his ankles.
Meanwhile, the little drone with a digital timer display taped to it (my prop for a doomsday bomb) ticked. And ticked.
The sisters sank to the floor, both naked now, their wet tongues stroking the other's clitoris. Carmella boldly. Her sister more timidly, blushing the whole time.
Mickie's curse, his trapped memory of how to disable the bomb, began to emerge, in-step with his orgasm. He saw the wires, red, orange, yellow, green, coursing invisibly under the metal plating of the doomsday bomb, saw the order they needed to be cut in. This the malevolent artificial intelligence who'd duped him into conspiring to create the bomb had never counted on, that he could convince any two sisters to sexually please one another, Mickie's ultimate sexual fantasy, which turned out to be the only way to unlock his hidden memories.
"Red! Green! Orange! Y-y-yellow!" shrieked Mickie, convulsing as he came, which happened to be the exact moment the two sisters also came to fruition. Mickie fell over, shuddering on the tile floor, black felt cock still in his hand.
Carmella slowly got to her feet and took the metal plating off the bomb. Produced a pair of wire cutters taped to the inside of her leg, slick with saliva and juices from her pleasure. She cut the wires in order as the time ticked down: 8-7-6-5-4...
The bomb stopped at three seconds.
After the sisters had dressed, Carmella walked over to Mickie, still quivering, ever so slightly, tears shaking in the corners of his eyes. She kicked him in the ribs and spat on him.
Her sister simply looked away.
The End.
Or so I thought.
Mickie Mouse, as you'd imagine, is not a sex bot. I modified him with an inflatable member I'd taken from a car, and glued on some black felt. But then I decided I wanted him to be able to cum, so I implanted a plastic catheter inside the hose connected to a bladder of cactus juice, which I let dry out a little to get the white, sticky consistency of ejaculate.
This partly dried out cactus juice sat in a puddle next to Mickie, looking rather grayish.
Annabelle squatted down and cautiously poked the gray puddle. It rippled as if a strong wind were sweeping across it. "Mickie, I think there's something wrong with your cock."
"It burns!" Mickie cried, shaking his member frantically, trying to get the little bits off the tip.
Annabelle brought her face right up to the puddle and sniffed. "It smells like... rubber and onions."
The gray puddle stopped rippling and contracted. "Squelch!"
Everybody backed away. Mickie was still on the floor, pants around his ankles. He'd pushed himself into the nearest corner of the room. The sisters were huddled together. Carmella had brandished her katana sword.
The puddle's margins expanded to the previous size, and it was rippling again, quietly.
Carmella stepped forward, cautiously, and poked the puddle with the tip of her sword.
"Squelch!" it repeated.
"Squelch?" Carmella said.
"Squelch!" the puddle said again.
Carmella knelt down beside the puddle. "What are you?" she whispered.
"Squelch squelch squelch?" it answered.
And that was how I met Squelchy.
***
Not in all my time in the landfill, exploring the surrounding desert, perusing the encyclopedias, biology texts, and species databases buried in the hard drives of the trash had I ever come across anything remotely like Squelchy. Squelchy was, like me, an amoeba-type being with the capability of speech. Only it–later *he*, when Squelchy grew a mustache–was much smaller than me, and gray-colored instead of rust orange.
Dear reader from the future–or past, if you've figured out some sort of time-traveling apparatus–I guess I had better get on with what I am, as best as I can explain anyway.
Like Squelchy, I am a puddle. But unlike Squelchy, I’m underground and about 1000 times the size. I’m orange and gooey and buried within the trash and dirt at the very bottom of the landfill. What/how/why?! I'm sure you're asking. The what I'm still figuring out. As best as I can tell, I'm a kind of bacterial colony that can hold a charge. Yep, that's right–I'm a big battery. My gooey form has tentacle-like edges that bore holes in the trash and dirt, many of which reach way up to the surface. They do it on their own during the day, when the sun is overhead, and I fall asleep and wake up in the evening feeling refreshed. Other tentacles bore into the trash and find battery cells of discarded electronics. If I want, I can give them some of my energy. Hence: Mickie, Carmella, and Annabelle. I puppet them around to act on my behalf.
Excuse me, you might be thinking, but this is all a bit ridiculous, you being a speaking/thinking puddle, appearing from nowhere, and now there's this other smaller puddle, apparently speaking/thinking as well. I don't buy it! Also, where are all the humans?!
I get it, it is ridiculous! But then again, if you're reading this, take a look at yourself! I'm sure you came here by spaceship, sometime in the future, found my carbon graphite scroll where I printed this story and stuffed it away in a diamond glass case, next to the landfill and a small, shriveled piece of me… a limb I removed and preserved in plastic. Don't you think that's a bit ridiculous?
As for the humans, I don't know where they went. But they left all this trash, and then came me. And then Squelchy.
Mickie, Carmella, and Annabelle were seated around a table in the Laboratory Set, where I conducted many of my "Evil Scientist Stories".
On the table was a sound-proofed glass box connected to a microphone in front of Annabelle. On the interior of the box was a little speaker. Squelchy sat inside the box, its gray surface forever rippling.
"You are Squelchy," Annabelle said into the box.
"Squelch squelch squelch-squelch," it replied.
"You," Annabelle whispered into the microphone.
"Squelch," Squelchy whispered back.
"It's just repeating you," Mickie said.
"Squelch squelch squelch-squelch-squelch squelch," the puddle said.
Carmella threw a pen at Mickie's head and it clattered across the stage.
Squelchy said nothing.
Annabelle turned off the microphone. "It can tell words from sounds."
"So how do we teach it what the words mean?" Carmella said.
"We need props," Annabelle said.
"I got your prop," Mickie said, and pulled out his cock.
Annabelle covered her eyes.
"Nobody wants to see that. Put it away or I cut it off," Carmella spat, fingering her katana.
"But I'm the father! Squelchy is my son!" Mickie cried.
"More like an embarrassment," Carmella muttered, walking off stage.
Annabelle set a little stage with stage lights in front of the glass box while Mickie and Carmella gathered props. They got everything they could find. Rocks, sand, a bicycle, a tire, a lamp, rope, a ladder, a book, a pencil, and so many other things. Hundred of objects. They were piled around the stage in a long line.
They turned down the lights on the Laboratory Set so all that could be seen was the little stage in front of the glass box where Squelchy sat, lit up by a little headlamp from above.
Annabelle rigged the first object, a rock–found on the perimeter of the landfill–to a fishing line and slowly lowered it onto the stage.
"Rock," Annabelle said.
"Squelch," Squelchy replied.
Annabelle shook her head. "Raaaah-k," she said.
"Squeeeeeel-ch," it said back.
Annabelle glanced at her sister, who shrugged her shoulders.
Mickie scratched his groin.
Annabelle was about to try a different object, then she got an idea. "Stone," she said.
"Squeln," Squelchy replied.
Annabelle clapped her hands. "Stowwww-n."
"Sq..." it began. Its ripples increased. "St..." More rippling. "Stuuuuuuln," it finally said.
Annabelle jumped up and clapped her hands. "Good job Squelchy!"
"Squelch squelch squelch-squelch!" it said back.
And so it went. Annabelle spent weeks teaching Squelchy the names of different objects. Eventually they got rid of the little stage and used the big stage.
When Mickie walked on the stage, it was "Milchie Moulch". Carmella was "Quelchmelcha". Squelchy had a much more difficult time pronouncing vowel-leading words. Annabelle became "Squannabelch".
Annabelle/"Squannabelch" spent the most time with Squelchy, because she was the most patient.
There was that and there was the fact for several weeks I could only run one character at a time because of bad weather. When the sun doesn't shine and I can't recharge my battery, I have to conserve my resources. I would have loved to taken Squelchy out into the desert to use some of its new vocabulary in the real world, but there was nearly a month where I had lay low. Even keeping just Annabelle on all the time was out of the question, so for half the day I told it to go to sleep and it did.
Squelchy's ripples smoothed to an infrequent wrinkle for a solid twelve hours during that stormy month. Every couple days, Annabelle came to the stage with a cup of cactus juice, which it eagerly drank and digested, leaving behind a thin streak of black grease.
By the time the weather had cleared, it was twice size and had grown a mustache of black fur around its edges.
***
Maybe it was habit, or maybe I thought Squelchy would enjoy it, but before I took Squelchy outside, I wrote everyone a part in a new story, Squelchy included.
Annabelle was a queen with gorgeous feet that used to smell like cake icing. She married a king with a thing for feet, but when she got pregnant her feet stopped smelling so great, and he treated her badly and began sleeping with her sister–Carmella–who also had gorgeous feet that smelled pretty great but not as good as Annabelle's had before she was knocked up. Carmella's feet smelled like cooked carrots. She was also a bit of a dominatrix, which the king liked but could never admit, and so when he was running his kingdom poorly, Carmella would peg him and demand he call her the king.
Mickie was a peverted jester who simply liked to watch other people have sex.
Squelchy was Annabelle's premature son, who came out of Annabelle's womb malformed and hairy. When the king heard the news about his son, he ordered for her and Squelchy's death. As she was narrowly escaping a pair of guards with Squelchy in her arms, he cried, "Mulchma! Mulchma!" That's how Annabelle knew, despite his odd looks that her son was destined to be king.
Annabelle and Squelchy wandered the desert outside the castle for days. Eventually they came upon Carmella and Mickie, standing next to a half-eaten cactus.
Squelchy saw them and the cactus and said, "Quelchmelcha and Michie Moulch eachting quaqtus! (Carmella and Mickie Mouse eating cactus!"
"Ew, what is that thing!?" Carmella jabbed a dirty finger at the puddle, spewing cactus everywhere.
Squelchy's rippled intensified in Annabelle'a arms.
"This is my son, you home-wrecking whore," Annabelle growled, teeth bared.
Ever since Squelchy, Annabelle had gotten more brave and assertive, especially when Squelchy was involved.
"No wonder why he kicked your ass to the curb," Carmella said, mouth stuffed of cactus.
Mickie had backed himself behind the remaining cactus and began pleasuring himself.
"Seriously?" Carmella spat a cactus piece at his head, then cuffed him with the handle of her sword. "I said no more of that. Put it away or I lop it off!"
"Lop ilt ulff! (Lop it off!)" Squelchy cried.
Carmella brandished her sword and chased Mickie around the cactus a few times while Squelchy giggled.
"Okay, seriously. What are you two doing out here?" Annabella asked.
"Same as you, sis. The king got bored with us. He probably found some new bitch willing to stick her feet in his asshole. I ran before the guards came and this perv has been following me ever since," Carmella explained.
Mickie tried to reach into his pants and Carmella kicked him into the cactus.
"Oulch thorlns! (Ouch thorns!)" Squelchy giggled.
Then the four wandered the desert for a while.
I wrote the desert-wandering storyline pretty loose, so we could explore whatever Squelchy had never seen before or enjoyed playing with. We traversed dunes and a forest of leafless trees. Then we came across a brown lump of something, slowly moving across the sand, a faint buzz emanating from within.
"Whult thult? (what that?)" Squelchy asked.
"No idea," Annabelle whispered, squeezing the puddle to her bosom.
It was a brown, flaky lump, almost like a croissant (not that I'd ever seen one in real life, just in books), but darker and bigger.
Carmella stepped cautiously toward it and poked it with her sword.
The brown lump quivered and buzzed, sloughing off some of its outer layers.
Carmella wedged the flat end of her sword between the layers and lifted. Inside was a giant moth, also brown, curled into a ball. One of its red eyes peeled open and it buzzed weakly.
"Ils ilt olquay? (Is it okay?)" Squelchy asked.
"I don't know," Carmella said softly. "It kind of looks sick." She glanced at her sister. "Maybe take a stroll while we have a look."
If the thing was sick, I didn't want Squelchy catching it. I'd found these moths before up in the mountains. They were vicious creatures with massive fangs coated with erosive venom, but this one was so weak it couldn't hurt a fly. Still I didn't want it spreading whatever it might have to Squelchy, so Annabelle took him back to the Laboratory Set. The whole time he was asking about the moth. Annabelle tried to read him a story from The Martian Chronicles, but he wouldn't stay still. So I had Carmella transmit a video as she and Mickie bagged the moth in plastic and drug it to the landfill.
Dear reader from the future (or past, though I find that unlikely), to continue my story I will have to explain a couple things about my landfill. As best as I can tell by the hard drives left behind, the landfill was in operation between the 20th and 21st century. It spans a quarter-mile in length and something a little less in width, and was capped with a great rubber seal and covered in dirt and grass when they filled it up. Before it was sealed, somebody slipped in some nano-bots with a directive for rebuilding salvageable objects but scavenging the surrounding materials. Why they did this, I don't know. Maybe the plan was to come back someday and retrieve the rebuilt objects, but that never happened. When I came on to the scene, there perfectly restores TVs, cars, space heaters, computers, phones, bicycles, sex bots, and one animatronic cartoon mouse laying among the dirt, ash, and uncannibalized trash. It's not clear to me how the nano-bots knew how to rebuild things or why they chose to restore some objects while eating away others.
By the time I arrived, there were no humans. The grass and soil packed over the landfill had eroded away and the rubber capping broken open.
On the north end of the landfill I keep the two cars, the golf cart, the handful of trailers. I have a fleet of bicycles, but they don't ride well in the sand. On the east end of the landfill, I have my library, where I keep the computers, phone, preserved books, and the collected hard drives. To the west are the stages I built for the stories I write. Finally to the south I maintain a clean box I call my laboratory, where I a lab bench with microscopes and test tubes to study different things. This is different than the "Laboratory Set" were I stage my Evil Scientist stories. I know it's confusing, but when you want to study something, you need an actual clean lab, free of the dirt, blood, and cum that seems to inevitably find its way in my stage stories.
So Carmella and Mickie took the bagged moth to the laboratory. There I examined the samples from the brown lump and the moth under the microscope.
"It looks like it's not able to metabolize sugar anymore," Carmella said.
Within the blood sample, I watched brown proteins glom onto most of the sugars. That was definitely preventing their absorption.
"Whult thult meeln? (what that mean?)" Squelchy asked.
"It means it's hungry but it can't eat," Annabelle said, stroking his fur.
"Whuuy? (why?)"
"Because it's sick."
"Whuuy?"
"I don't know, sweetie. Maybe it ate some bad food."
"Whuuy?"
"Probably because it didn't know any better."
"Whuuy?"
"It's time for bed," Annabelle said, kissing Squelchy and turning out the stage lights.
"Whult aboutch molth?" Squelchy said.
"We'll do what we can," Annabelle said.
Which turned out to be a lot. Most of which I came to regret.
***
It turned out that the moth was pregnant. When Mickie drug it out of the brown lump (something of a protective cocoon), it was emaciated with cracked wings and patchy fur. Along its abdomen was a pale little bump. I was pretty sure that if I could somehow save the moth its kids wouldn't survive.
The first thing I did was inject cactus pulp (which I knew it ate) directly into its muscles and organs, bypassing its blood where it would get gummed up by the brown proteins. That sort of worked and perked it up a bit, but the moth was still weak. It stayed exactly where Mickie had put it, in the bare corner at the far end of the lab pen, behind a pane of glass, nose pressed to the wall.
Next I did some research on moth diseases. This one matched none of the ones I found in the books, so it seemed I was on my own in finding some kind of cure. I took a slew of blood samples and treated them with various mixtures. Leaves from local shrubs, bark peelings from the leafless trees, root powder from the cactus. None of it had any effect on the brown proteins.
This took several days, and so while Mickie and Carmella worked in the lab, Annabelle took Squelchy around the desert. I sent an aerial drone with them to scout around for more sick moths. When they went towards the mountains, the drone found swaths of brown lumps peppered among the cacti. I would've brought more back to the lab if I'd had room for them. I noticed that among the local cacti, a brown residue seeped from their tops. I didn't know how far the brown sickness had spread, but I chose to rig up the flamethrower to the aerial drone and torch all the brown lumps and browned cacti I could find to keep them from infecting any of the healthy ones. I can still recall the high-frequency cries that echoes from those mountaintops as I swept the flame across their cocoons. Of course I didn't tell Squelchy any of this. What good would that have done?
Back at the lab, I had a minor breakthrough. I'd stumbled across a recipe for an artificial sweetener in one of the hard drives, and when I mixed this with the cactus pulp, some of the blood cells were freed to carry actual sugar into the nearby tissues. After several days of eating this mixture, the mother moth's white-orange color began to return, her buzzes gained strength, and she began to crawl and flap around the pen. The bump on her abdomen grew a bit more, and then she laid about forty eggs around the pen. Beige bumps speckled with brown crowded all of the corners, wrapped in dewy webbing.
I decided to call her Mothra, which I doubt you get, unless you're from the past.
As Mothra got healthier, I started playing videos of her crawling around the pen and eating for Squelchy. When he saw the eggs, I explained to him how baby moths were made. He called her, "Multhrulch" and her eggs "baytchby mulths".
The artificial sweetener and cactus pulp mixture made her bigger and more energetic, but it wasn't enough for her to fly. It also wasn't a cure, just a temporary solution, since the brown proteins were still gumming up her sugars, they were just overwhelmed when combined with the artificial lookalikes.
Squelchy kept asking to see "Multhrulch", but I made excuses. I didn't know if her disease could infect Squelchy or I and I'd kept the laboratory sealed from the rest of the landfill. Anytime Mickie or Carmella left the lab, I had them completely decontaminated with UV exposure and alcohol sterilization.
While the weeks of experiments went by and the weather was still fine, Annabelle continued to take Squelchy outside. She took him around the landfill to the different areas. His vocabulary and grammar were growing by the day.
Eventually I broke down and agreed to let Squelchy see Mothra, after I'd come up with a protective suit for him–a dish with an airtight glass bubble on it, connected to a tube so he could breathe. When Carmella took him up to the glass, Mothra was in the far corner, cleaning her hands. Since laying eggs her wings had gained a silver sheen along their edges, and whenever she went over to sniff them they quivered as she made a low-frequency buzz.
Squelchy rippled like a lake beset with heavy winds as he watched her clean herself in the corner, turn, sniff her eggs, go back to cleaning.
"Howl lolng unchtil Multhrulch ils healchy?" he asked.
His pronunciation hadn't improved, but it didn't matter. I understood him perfectly. If you're having trouble, try saying his words out loud.
"She might be sick forever," Carmella replied. "Mickie and I are doing our best, but there's no guarantee we'll find a cure."
"Howl aboutch thu multh baytchbys?"
They'd changed color and seemed to be holding temperature, but I wasn't sure any of them were viable. During my experiments, I'd sent out aerial drones a dozen miles in every direction. I hadn't found a single living moth on the mountaintops. Maybe they were alive and healthy beyond, but I'd never found any. As far as I knew, I was handling the last of her kind. The nano-bots hadn't rebuilt any ultrasound machines, so I couldn't watch them grow inside the eggs.
"Time will tell," Carmella replied.
Mothra's eggs started hatching a week later, during the worst storm we'd had in years.
***
The landfill was battered and flooded by torrential rain. Water was dripping onto the lab benches and puddles that seeped into the pen as the moth babies were munching their way out of their eggs and crawling around. Their beige heads were twice the size of their little bodies. Like their mother, they had blood red eyes and gray fuzzy wings. Within hours, two dozen were crawling up the walls and flitting from one end of the pen to the other. Mickie routinely went in to dry up the water puddles and had to peel a handful off his back. They sung a high-pitched chorus anytime he entered and their mother bared her venomous fangs but stayed in the corner.
Of course Squelchy wanted to visit, but I hadn't the energy to power it. The rain hadn't let up for days and just broadcasting video of the moth pen while running between Mickie and Annabelle had run me down to critically low levels.
"Whuuy youch sleelp sol mulch?" Squelchy asked.
Annabelle explained that she needed the sun to charge herself, just like he needed cactus juice. It was at that moment that I realized Squelchy had never seen the actual me. Annabelle wasn't strictly lying when she said she needed the sun, but she was covering up the truth of the matter, which was that she was just a puppet for me, as was Mickie and Carmella, and I had never once revealed that to Squelchy. I didn't even know why. What was so bad about it?
Maybe it was my critically low energy levels or perhaps something deeply shameful, but it took me days to get over the panic and fear I felt when I thought of Squelchy seeing the real me for the first time. I couldn't explain it. We weren't that different. He was a puddle and I was a gelatin-like creature with a few hundred tentacles. He could ripple and contract, but he couldn't exactly move around. Neither could I. I was rooted under the landfill. We were both dependent on my characters to do what we did.
Still, it felt awful to think about. Maybe I felt like I'd been lying to Squelchy, and that when he saw the big ugly orange blob under all the trash he'd never want to have anything to do with me again.
I stewed over it for days as the rain pounded the earth and flooded the landfill. Annabelle got wet while charging and her outer circuits fried, so I had to bring Mickie around to move her somewhere dry and make repairs while I relocated one of my charging ports to higher ground. Squelchy kept pestering Mickie with questions about why Annabelle was sleeping and what was he doing and why none of them could play in the rain and I finally broke down and explained it all to him, as best as I could.
"Youch meen youch arch Squannabelch?"
I nodded.
"Anch Quelchmelcha?"
I kept nodding.
"Canch I seech?"
After Mickie repaired Annabelle, she took Squelchy down the stairs below the stage and into the maze of winding ground tunnels. She went as far as the tunnels would let her, before they quickly narrowed to the size her tiny waist, just a little larger than the width of my largest tentacles. I pushed one of my limbs up the maze and into Squelchy's view. It was hard not to quiver at the sight of myself seen through Annabelle's cameras. My long orange limb was slick with mud, scabbed from fungal infections I'd suffered from the long and heavy rains.
"Thult thu reelt youch?" Squelchy asked.
"Yes," Annabelle said softly.
His gray furry body rippled one way, then reversed.
I slowly brought my limb next to him. I did not touch him.
His gray margins expanded within Annabelle's hands until he pushed up against the tip of my limb.
It's so hard to explain what I felt at that moment, holding onto Squelchy. It was like week of rain had never happened. I forgot about power shortage, the endless flooding in the lab, Mothra and her babies. I never mentioned that ever since I found Squelchy I'd become brutally aware that my body's ability to hold a charge was dwindling over time and would continue to do so and that some day no matter what I did I would not be around, Squelchy would be on his own. But in that moment I was not thinking of that. We just hovered there beside each other for an inexplicable stretch of time and nothing beyond that mattered.
Eventually he asked for me to take him down the tunnels, which I promised to do, once the rain had finished and my fungal infections had gone away.
Annabelle began carrying Squelchy back up the tunnels when she heard a faint chorus of buzzing beyond.
If I could go back to any time in my life, it would be that critical moment. I've thought a lot about my time with Squelchy and the decisions I'd made, every little forking path from when Annabelle started teaching him words to that point she'd carried him away from me, back up the tunnels and towards the stairs.
Maybe it wouldn't have mattered. Maybe had Annabelle chosen a different path the result would have been the same and I'd still be here thinking on every moment, where something done differently might have led to a different result.
The most brutal part about it all is not knowing. I was confident Squelchy was in his very early stages of development, that over time, there was so much he was going to learn and so much growth and adaptation that would occur that the form I remember him by would be indistinguishable to what he might have become. I can only go by what I was, which was an ignorant nothing floundering and sputtering underneath the landfill for untold years before I'd found Annabelle and some hard drives and came to learn some things.
Annabelle heard the chorus of buzzing and already had a sense of what had happened. She tucked Squelchy under her arms and hurried towards the stairs.
Just beyond the foot of the stairs, she saw a baby moth clinging to the tunnel wall, cleaning its paws.
Annabelle buried Squelchy between her bosom and arms so that he was not visible as she walked past. Along the staircase were two more babies, one on a step and the other on the ceiling. The chorus of buzzing was getting louder. It sounded like the bulk of them were on the stage.
Before she'd made it halfway up the stairs, Annabelle felt one of the baby moths land on her back. She took off towards the stage and felt another land on her hip. By the time she'd reached the stage and was sprinting for the door towards the library, she was covered.
I can still recount the sound of her sizzling skin as the baby moths chewed about her. As Annabelle reached the door to the library, they'd crowded about her chest, perhaps smelling Squelchy or sensing she was concealing something. Their venom had melted through Annabelle's main sensors and motor controls and she'd collapsed in the doorway of the library, curled into a fetal position around Squelchy, going offline.
I wasn't thinking, only feeling. Panic and blinding rain as I put Carmella online and tore a sheet of plastic off the lab bench and held it overhead as she tore through the mud and puddles outside towards the library. I can still neon blue of the desert dunes as lightning flashed, piercing the blue of rain.
As she neared the door of the library, Carmella let the plastic sheet fall and pulled out her katana. As soon as she opened the door to the room, a number of the baby moths swarmed her from the ceiling. She cut them down as they came, a few dodging her blade and landing on her arms. Her clothes and skin sizzled as they sunk their teeth into her, and she instinctively threw herself against the wall, smearing their soft beige bodies as she flailed.
They kept coming and she kept killing them until a cloud of venom smoke and dust off their wings filled the room. Her left eye camera was melted shut. The skin of her arms and chest had melted away, showed the black and silver of stainless steel. Somehow the buried wiring had survived.
Carmella walked over to her sister and found a pile of steel and flipped it over. No Squelchy underneath. Just a little black streak.
***
Every day I can't help but wonder why Annabelle didn't just turn around and give me Squelchy to hold onto. Sure there was fungus, but we could have dealt with that. Why instead did she try to run up the stairs and into the library? Yes, the library might have made sense if she'd already been on the stage. From there she could have stuck Squelchy in a filing cabinet or what have you.
Annabelle is my love, compassion, my naiveté. But I wonder underneath of that if I'd tapped into some streak of self-preservation. Did I deep-down know the moth babies wanted Squelchy, and to save myself, Annabelle went the other way? It's a question I'll never know.
The rain went on and on. Carmella went back to the lab and found a small aperture between the glass and brick of the pen that the babies had squeezed through, every single one of them, which I terminated, after they'd ended Squelchy.
There's no words for how I've felt over the months that drifted into years since Squelchy's death. Eventually I gave up on finding a cure for Mothra, childless and confined to her pen. She buzzed her low buzz endlessly looking for her babies who never returned. I felt nothing for her and I let her turn brown and flaky until her buzzes stopped.
Dear reader from the future or past, next to my wrinkled tentacle you will find the black grease streak that is all that remains of Squelchy. Just like me there was only ever one. As you're walking along the landfill, if you encounter a puddle of something, please take care. It might not look like much now, but give it time.
NGL that was weird 😂😂