Lucille

 

“I must have opened the door to someone. I’m trying to remember, but man, my head is fuzzy inside,” said Roops while glancing around at his rifled collection.

“If I figure out what is gone, maybe I can figure out who it was…”Roops said absently.

Rupert D. Jones was a joker and a prankster. So much of the stuff on display in his office/living room was for décor and misdirection. He had a kind of atavistic desire to conceal.

One of the stranger things about this time was that there was no ownership on paper. How could there be? There were no papers, and no one was enforcing anything yet. The severe reduction in population had changed everything, from the ground up. A man owned what he possessed; however he got it. This aspect had not created too many problems yet.

But he had promised these boys that they could be his heirs so to speak, so there was no need to confuse them.

“Well…let’s take a look.” He heaved himself up out of his chair to start a brief inventory of the damage.

He picked up and righted several of his old beloved pieces from years in his past. He had kept it all. Before the end of the world as he knew it, he had played games on these things with his children. He tried to keep that memory in its proper place. He had taught classrooms of students how all this stuff worked. It might have looked like a bunch of junk, but it was a shrine to his past.

“Boys, look, I’ve been kidding you. None of this stuff works, and neither does that phone wire hooked up to the Navy server, as if. At least I don’t think it works anymore.” More rattling around, moving things.

“But I’ll tell ya what. They may have heard of this, but they didn’t find it! This here is the real dealio!” Roops turns around to face Gabriel and Jeremy with a smooth, vaguely kidney shaped item in his right paw. It was light green and maybe it glowed a little from inside. He held it a bit like a pistol. There was a kind of little eye up at the forward end.

Grinning, even with his sore head still throbbing, he settled back down in the big creaky chair. The boys found seats also and waited wide eyed and silent.

“Ok, this was a gift from the Shorties. You know about Shorties? Of course, you do. My nickname for them. They made it for me because I still use physical objects. They don’t need them, but I do. Or maybe, being the old gorilla that I am, I just like ‘em. Anyhow. It does it all. No wires. No waves. Yeah, it’s a mystery to me too. Maybe it runs on brain waves? Maybe it works on pure wubba-wubba. No keyboard. It projects onto any surface, and it can make hologram-like images right out in the air. I can talk to it, or just think real hard at it. That took a few tries, let me tell ya.

“I bet you’d like a demonstration!” He chuckled into his badgerish beard. Under the bushy brows his blue eyes sparkled impishly. For a moment, anyone could have seen the boy he had been.

“I call this baby, Lucille. Never mind. It’s an old joke.

“Hey, guys, I have an idea! Let’s try this,” said Roops, conspiratorially.

“Hey, are you two hungry or anything,” he asked, pointing out toward the kitchen.

“No,” said Gabriel. “Turn it on! Do something!” Both were nearly hopping where they sat.

“Well, ok. Here goes. ‘Lucille, show me who hit me and messed everything up in here. Who did I let in here?’”

Roops pointed Lucille’s little eye at an open area of space in the middle of the room. The air began to turn somewhat opaque, foggy.

Into this matrix of haze, a moving image began to form. It displayed Roops hearing a meek little rapping on his door and getting up to answer the door. He opened the door. Two young girls stood there.

“Lucille, who are they? I don’t know them!” Roops yelled in amazement.

A silvery sibilant voice said “Lucy and Margaret Milligan. Sisters. 13 and 15.” Gabriel looked thunderstruck.

The projected image of Roops continued. “What can I do you girls for,” he rumbled cheerfully, as the image proceeded.

The three watched as Roops asked the girls in and turned to face them.

Just then, Lucy removed a small jar of something from her coat pocket. She fiddled with the lid and put it back in her pocket. She stepped towards Roops and threw a cloud of powder directly into his face!

In the projection he felt around for his chair and subsided into it looking weak and blinded. Just as he sat, Margaret whacked Roops over the head with what appeared to be a sock with something like a baseball sized rock in it. His head fell forward on his chest, and he was still.

Both girls ransacked the whole decoy display, turning things over, looking behind other things. They didn’t seem to know anything about any of it. They looked terrified.

They ran out, as fast as two girls could, leaving the green wooden door hanging open.

Link to the story so far:Gabriel .docx