Three Days by Ryan Ridge & Mel Bosworth
1. The Night of the Big Score
Redgraves called to say he loved me. “By love I mean laudanum. Loads of it,” he said and hung up. They must’ve knocked off a pharmacy, I thought. I drove out to the lamely named lake named Unnamed Lake. The moon looked like a giant reset button. At the edge of the parking lot, I flashed on my brights, and sure enough, there was Redgraves and Angel Adel holding hands on a picnic table under the old pavilion. Severed hands. They flung the hands at my windshield. One missed, and one stuck, and the stuck one proceeded to finger walk the length of the glass and out of sight. I stepped out of the ice cream truck and shoved a flare gun down the front of my sweatpants. The ground felt like pudding beneath my Birkenstocks. Redgraves and Angel blinked in the brights, unable to make out the expression on my face. Good. It wasn’t a happy one. I said, “Toss me your kisses, kids. The game is over.” Redgraves spat on the ground. Angel deftly handled a butterfly knife. I was outnumbered, sure, at least in terms of meat sacks, but the robots had my back. And they weren’t ordinary robots. They were also vampires. They ran on blood, and right now they needed fuel. From the surrounding brush, the robots scooted and wobbled forth like children in cardboard boxes. They circled the pavilion and unhinged their jaws to display metal fangs. Redgraves appeared perplexed, exasperated. He threw up his hands in a gesture of WTF. “This is what it’s come to?” he said. Meanwhile, Angel had gotten into it with one of the robots. The robot took her knife and her arm with it. Things had taken a grave turn, and quickly. I didn’t want it to end this way. And this was just one possible ending, but, sadly, it was the one in which we all happened to be standing. I pulled the flare gun and aimed for the moon.
2. Oxy Day
I sat at the front desk staring at a teenage mother swinging on a swing set with a baby in her lap when our worst valet, Jerry, hobbled inside and blocked my view of the playground across the courtyard. Jerry set down a set of Cadillac keys and said, “I had a motorcycle accident when I was eighteen, and I’ve been in constant pain since. Fifty years of hurting.” It was also the fiftieth time I’d heard this preamble to his accident story. I knew it cold. As Jerry spoke, I leaned into the desk and conjured the dangerous contours of the road and as I listened, I braced myself for the climax, the moment of impact after Jerry loses control of his Black Shadow and careens off the side of the coastal highway only to ditch the bike as he plummets down into the ravine and breaks his leg on a monstrous rock. I played out the scene right there in my mind: the compound fracture, the gulls circling in the Southern California sky like an answer to a rhetorical question, the blinding sunlight, and the sirens approaching in the distance, but today, now, right now, came something different. Jerry stopped his story short of the money shot and instead offered to share his stash. “Oxy?” he said. “It’ll take the edge off the morning.” “Don’t mind if I do,” I said, swallowing the pill with my lukewarm coffee. “Well,” said Jerry, rubbing his palms together, “what do we got?” I pointed over his shoulder and said, “What we’ve got is a young mother swinging on a swing set with a baby in her lap, and it’s making me nervous, and I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.” Jerry pivoted, squinted. “No,” he said. “That’s not a baby. It looks to me like a loaf of bread.” “Bread?” I said. “It has a head! Little arms. Are you okay to drive?” He cocked his head and said, “Duh. It’s like two football fields from the garage to right there at the curb. Besides, that baby over there could do it.” He winked and picked up the keys to a Lexus. “Does this need to come out or what?” he asked. I nodded. “Be careful,” I said. “Ha,” he said, “do you know I say to that?” I said, “No, Jerry, what do you say to that?” He said, “I say: be careless. It’s the proper way to live.” He shook the keys like a tambourine and stumbled wildly down the hall towards the garage, but halfway down the hall, he paused to stop and talk to a fake plastic plant for what seemed like forever. I returned my attention to the girl on the swing with the baby. Now she was swinging higher and higher and higher with no hands on the baby, and I could hear my heart beating against my ribcage. Then I felt that initial wave of the pain pill washing over me. Wow. Damn. Man! I focused on the girl again. She kicked her legs and went up, up, up, and that’s when it happened. That’s when the baby fell, and when the baby fell, I was on my feet. I was running. I was out the door. I was all instinct, baby! I was going to save that baby. I was sprinting to the playground faster than I’d ever run in my life when, mid-sprint, something hit me harder than anything had ever hit me, harder than that pain pill was hitting me, and it was hitting me hard, but this was so much harder, and it hurt, bad, and I was off my feet now, suspended mid-air, then blam, I was on the ground by the playground. In front of me, I saw a black Lexus. I saw a giant dent in the hood of the black Lexus. I saw Jerry get out of the black Lexus with the dented hood and then he was above me, saying,: “What happened? Why did you run out into the street?” And I said, “The baby.” And he said, “What are you talking about? What baby?” And I pointed to the playground and said, “That baby.” And Jerry said, “That isn’t a baby. It’s a doll. A toy. It’s not real.” The pain I felt was similar. It was unreal. I was down on the ground, but my internal organs felt all mixed up. Jerry said, “Don’t move. I’m calling for help. Stay still.” I nodded and said, “How about another Oxy?” He fed me another Oxy. Soon enough sirens screamed.
3. The Day Our Robotic Butler Went Ballistic
We’d purchased the robo-butler cheap from an eccentric salesman at Skinjob Lot who assured us that this astute android was the solution to our extensive home cooking and house cleaning needs, and, for a solid month, everything went better than expected — it scrambled a mean egg, it cleaned behind the fridge, it even tuned up my old Camero — until this morning, when you dashed into the bathroom, frantic and teary-eyed, and said, “Miss Molly is in pieces!” I said, “What?” But I was already up and headed toward the living room where I knew she’d be sleeping at this time of day, not bothering to wipe or even pull up my pants, I kicked out of them easily enough, and, when I got to the living room, sure enough, the robo fucker was pulling apart our beloved cat in messy chunks. Then it was dusting, or attempting to dust, with the furry pieces. It smeared blood and guts down framed pictures of family vacations to Disney, and atop old black and whites of long-gone grandparents eating sandwiches on beach towels. Pantsless and horrified, I told you to wake up baby Peter and get the hell out of here, then I bolted to the garage and grabbed my hammer. I did all this without thinking, as if the world had become a single tunnel through which I was forced to move forward, fueled by a keen sense of vengeance. Back in the living room behind the robo-catkiller, I brought down the hammer again and again, right onto its bald head, and it twisted around and tried to raise its arms to defend itself but it was losing steam, so then I was hammering its stupid, smiling, humanoid face, really bashing that sucker down, and between blows I noticed something through the window, something going on outside. It was my neighbor in his driveway with his wife, and it was a beautiful day, pulsing with bright blues and yellows and greens. The duo was dressed formally, he in a black tuxedo and she in a ruffled pink gown, and they were dancing. They were working a pretty good foxtrot, both surprisingly spry despite their advanced years, and I got lost watching for a beat too long. That’s when the robo-assassin grabbed and broke my wrist. The hammer hit the floor, and hot panic slammed into my soul on a dead wave of dread. “The world is reloading,” the robo-bastard said, rising up. “The world is reloading.” It said this over and over as it took me apart and my senses fell away like so much autumn. The last thing I heard after it gouged my eyes out and my heart stopped beating was a whispery, giddy, “The world is refreshed. The world is refreshed. The world is refreshed.” This was the day the war began.
Mel Bosworth is the author of the novel Freight, and co-author with Ryan Ridge of the short fiction collection Second Acts in American Lives. His work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tin House, New World Writing, Santa Monica Review, Melville House, American Book Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Western Massachusetts.
Ryan Ridge is the author of four chapbooks as well as five books, including most recently the story collection New Bad News (Sarabande Books, 2020). His work has been featured in Denver Quarterly, Moon City, Post Road, Salt Hill, and Southwest Review, among others. An assistant professor at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, Ridge co-directs the Creative Writing Program. In addition to his work as a writer and teacher, he edits the literary magazine Juked. He lives in Salt Lake City with the writer Ashley Farmer and plays bass in the Snarlin’ Yarns.
