CHUDSTORIES: FOR FUCH'S SAKE

(From "The Atomic Age" Creature Features)

They always said I'd grow up to be famous, and for once I didn't let them down.

For the longest time, I seemed to be around the corner from something BIG. In high school I'd seen a car go off a bridge into the freezing Hudson River and dove in to save the passengers. I got to the car, which had gone down around ten feet and hit the concrete base of the bridge only to find nobody inside. After poking my head in to look in the back, the fabric of my sleeve got caught and the eight year old girl who had safely swam to the surface with her mother had to come and save me. Then, two weeks before my brother's wedding I discovered what appeared to be an abandoned mine shaft in the woods of the property our family had owned since coming overseas as the country was born. When our high profile group, including a camera crew, entered we found no precious stones. Only the remnants of what must have been my great, great grandfather's extensive cadre of slaves. Dozens of bodies in tattered rags clinging to each other as life dripped away.

Although my motives were especially pure, the outcome brought increasingly larger amounts of negative publicity on my family. Where we once were poised to be the next family to rise to power like the Kennedy Clan, we faded. Not all because of me, but in no small part.

So I left. I tried Greenpeace, and while it was the most exciting years of my life it did little to help reverse the damage I had done to my name and the reputation attached to it. I tried PETA, and I did a small stint in the Salvation Army which only made me feel more distanced from humanity. I even went overseas and sampled a few religions. Once again, I wasn't "saved" though I discovered just how common mankind is at the core. I met my best friend in China, an older man who taught me the most important things about peace and war. I shit you not, he single-handedly did two things that I'll never forget, and while I've told a tall tale before I fear to with Yeoh since larger forces may strike me down if I do. He killed a man nearly twice his size with a silent, lightning fast jab to the neck when the man pulled a gun on the treasurer of my "cult of the moment". He saved three lives that day, and it was the only violent thing I ever saw him do. The second was when I asked him to euthanize the dog which had been utterly devastated by a group of wildcats. He took the animal into the garden and I never thought twice about it until the beast had come up to me a month later and slept at my side. Good as new. He'd never say how, only saying that the animal hadn't decided to die yet.

After Yeoh passed away I returned to the country of my birth and knew I had my next crusade when I heard about a rally at the Wildwoods Power Plant back near my hometown of Nanuet, New York. They had apparently been brought up on dozens of charges only to have their slick legal team keep the place running with only a few modifications to please the EPA.

So I picketed.

For those who don't know, picketing is boring and thankless work. I'd grown tired of marching, played enough hands of gin to write a book on it, and listened to far too much coffeehouse poetry. When Len Sariano suggested we go inside and shut the place down, I knew I was in no matter what the cost. Even death would have been better than hearing the word "melancholy" again from our resident Emily Dickensons.

It was a basic plan. We weren't financed or thought out. We knew the security had grown lax after our second week outside the fences, and once the camera crews left, so did most of the "activists". We'd wait until nightfall came and sneak in with the maintenance van.

I expected trouble, we got none. In fact, the maintenance people didn't even know English so we managed to score a few bottles of Gatorade from them. We then split up and agreed to meet in the back lot when the alarms went off or the maintenance crew left.

It took me exactly fifteen minutes to find the door leading down into the bowels of the Earth where the vile, contaminating heart of this monster lived. It took me two minutes to realize I'd come too late.

The bottom level of the chamber was already filled with a pungent, thick liquid that seemed like what Salvidor Dali's interpretation of a rainbow would be. Had I been so against sounding derivative at the time, I'd have said it was a living color.

Bobbing in the bizarre sludge were a few objects that once may have been known as... people. Now horribly malformed and pulsating with the same palette, they seemed to beckon me into their pool. I was frozen, and an exceptionally odd memory hit me.

I was eight and my father and I were in the back yard of our guest house. Large enough to house over twenty people in its own right, it was an old fashioned mansion that had once been featured on the tour of our 16th president. My father looked at me.

"Son", he said quietly as if we were past our bedtime with a parent listening, "Your mother wants to remodel this house and it's an awful lot of work".

"After months of money and construction, it's still going to be an old house so take what I'm about to show you to heart should your wife ever say something similar", my old man warned.

He led me to a wooden crate set out in the courtyard of the home around 400 yards from the gorgeous manor and opened the lid. He then pushed down on the object in the crate and in the amount of time it took to elicit a gasp, our guest house was consumed in 15 controlled explosions. What remained was an amazingly tidy set of ruins.

"Sometimes it's just easier to blow this shit up and start fresh", he snorted and led me inside for my very first beer. It was a bizarre moment but one that seemed to echo in my head as I became nauseous in this dungeon of pollution.

Without even thinking, I reached into my knapsack and withdrew the C-4 explosive Sariano had packed "in case we needed to make some noise".

I felt pangs of a strange new pain in my head as I prepared the device for a fifteen minute fuse. That would be enough to get everyone out...

"WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER?"

I prepped the device and noticed my legs had gone numb...

"GOT TO GET OUT OF THIS GOD DAMNED JOB!"

Here I am...

No more story to tell.

Voices? Am I hearing voices? Well here I am, now sitting here with the bomb. I can't move so I have no idea how much time there is left. The liquid has enveloped me, and it's strangely comforting except...

"WHAT'S THAT SOUND? DID I FORGET TO TURN THE IRON OFF?"

What in the world? I'm hearing voices in my head. It must be the sickness from this radioactive moonshine that's rendered me virtually useless.

Well, I guess I'll be famous now, huh? Matthew Fuchs, once considered the most likely to replace the illustrious Warren Fuchs as the CEO of the largest privately owned company in the Western Hemisphere.

"WHAT'S HAPPENING TO ME?"

Another voice, this one louder. Closer. I look down and see the goo has swallowed my legs up to the thigh. All around me are the lumps of what used to be people, now a collective of atomic goo.

I hope the bomb will go off soon. My body's way past the point of rescue and all I can hope is to end this menace and save the area from another Chernobyl. I ask God to take me, but instead of saying the words they echo in my head like the rest.

"PLEASE GOD TAKE ME!"

Then it hits me. These are the voices of the others in this toxic bath. We're united in ways I cannot comprehend thanks to this mixture of radiation and death.

My brother died in 1995. Destined for greatness, his plane went down over the Pacific Ocean as he trained for yet another skill that would make our parents love him that much more than me. I was crushed, but felt it would strengthen my relationship with them. Instead, they gave me a check for $100,000 and asked me to never return. Now, everything I do, I do for our family. The Fuchs name. Once near royalty, now just another wealthy group of aristocrats. I wanted to make them proud, and when the thought of saving the town from disaster first came, it seemed brilliant. Now I fear the explosion will carry this disease all over with tragic results.

My brother died, but I feel these new bodies are truer siblings than he ever was. As the chemicals unite us more and more, I feel warm. Acceptance.

The warmth increases by a billion as the flash goes off.

I bond with metal, wood, people, plants, and inferno as the mixture reaches the outside. Hundreds of lives fuse together and the mixture of hellfire and nuclear energy sends me and the others out into the sky. No longer solid, I am precipitated with my brethren over the city in millions of particles that are each the full embodiment of what I've become.

We land on EVERYTHING, and soon they are we.

I'm famous, though not in the way I'd planned. I'm making the world a new place. Whether or not it's better, we'll have to wait and see.

The atomic age has begun.