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LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY SAAB V

Max Lavergne

21 Apr 2022 — 7 min read

Let me tell you about my Saab. It was one hour to midnight at the green lagoon and I was throwing pebbles onto the surface of the water and watching the lights of the mutant angler fish wink out as they attacked. It was the day of my podbirth, the fifth anniversary of the sorry morning when I’d pierced my fingernails through the membrane of my gestational sac and flopped glistening to the floor of the abandoned clone warehouse. I always got morose on this day. All day I'd been stalking around, waving my chains in the face of anyone who looked at me wrong and smearing my acid gland on the flowerbeds around the public pond. Not that it had done me any good. Pa was still gelatinous. Foaming yellowly from his gills. Curled in a ball on the floor of the municipal bathhouse where he'd collapsed, still too toxic for any of the malformed attendants to move. Too fragile for the police to take away. The city streets were cratered from where the Anime Riots had torn them apart and smashed them back together, rippled and slippery like plastic surgery scarring, and bouncing pa over the lumps and furrows before he congealed would have meant a hell of a clean out for the back of their armoured van. You didn't get off lightly trying to sell pirated holocigarettes to the mayor's hatchlings, but on the other hand the van would be a write off. That was my old man for you. That was his foam. Fucked up.

I had three weeks worth of salicylic acid in a dropper bottle but I thought fuck it and squeezed the whole thing into my membranes in one go. I briefly saw through time. The past: pa lying nude from the waist down in a riverbank hole, looking over his green and atrophied legs at us kids and tossing a few rocks at us and then crying and then singing an old folk song, eyes closed, and smiling charmingly and gesturing to me to give him his guitar. The present: a yellowish slick running like crude oil into a bath. The future: smoke filling the humid sky, a grim-faced man with sawn-off shotgun standing outside my burrow. I blinked. One of the angler fish had swum to the surface and was looking hungrily at me. I shot out a hand. Its teeth made a whirring rattle as it tried to flay the skin from my wrist but I smashed its head on the rocks. I ate it whole.

I got on my bike and swung past the bathhouse. Everything was quiet. The bathhouse's clientele at a quarter past eleven on a Thursday night weren't exactly looking to attract attention. They weren't exactly happy to be seen, scampering on all fours into the bathhouse. At that time of night you were either there to scrounge stray spawn from the surface of the water or fuck the jets. Most of them were there to fuck the jets. That was none of my business. But the malformed attendant at the window was half-asleep and the steam coming from the vents was just steam and there were no police vans parked in the shadows. I rode on to my burrow.

It was quiet outside, but that's what I would have expected. I parked in the shadows across the path and stared gloomily at the dark hole in the dark night. I didn't have all that much going for me. If I'd crawled into my burrow and gone to sleep and never woken up, who'd be sad about it? Not me, that's for sure. Not pa now. The last of his adopted brood swelling the city's fertiliser stores might have once drawn a tear from the old man but there'd be none of that wherever he was now. But I was cursed with the knowledge of the man with the sawn-off and I lacked the disposition to go gentle into any good nights. I leaned my bike against some tree roots and staggered over to a patch of moss. It was only just midnight and I was already having trouble keeping my eyelids where they needed to be. Gravity and my bones were in the midst of a spirited debate, and gravity was winning. I slumped down.

It was unusually quiet. The throb of generators from the city was dying down and the mosquitos looked to have taken a night off. I tucked a bundle of leaves under my head and kept watch. A hybrid stag beetle the size of a toilet hauled carts of old medicine along the path, crunching its metal tracks on the sewer grates. A lungfish was silently devoured by ants. I averted my eyes. It wasn't pleasant to look at. I gazed up at the filthy yellow moon, the same dirty old piece of shit that had hung over all this boiling misery with fuck all to say about it all this time. The dinosaurs had looked at the moon and been miserable. Incredible.

Then I heard the muted pop of an explosion a few blocks away. I knew what it was. I stood and limped onto the pathway. In the distance a siren went up and spotlights illuminated the black smoke pouring from the bathhouse. Pa had gone critical. The breeze carried shrieks. It wouldn't be long now. The bathhouse owners had had plenty of time to ID pa and figure out who his next of kin was to extract compensation. I skulked back into the shadows. But as I flopped down again onto the warm, damp moss I heard a familiar squelching. A metre away from me, close enough to touch, the rotting leaves and humus rolled and shook. A small pink hand burst through. Then an arm. It gripped a nearby root and pulled. A tiny baby covered in blue veins and thick, rippling muscle hauled itself from the hole and sat panting on the ground. I stared at it in amazement. Off-facility podbirths weren't a surprise to me, of course - I, who five years ago had also tunneled my way through soft river sand and soil to the surface - but I had no idea there was another old cloning facility under this part of the swamp. I beamed at the baby and it stared distrustfully at me. "I'm like you," I told it, tears in my eyes.

The snarl of an engine tore through the air and the baby shivered. It was warm in the clone sacs, and in the soil from the heat of rotting biomass, but now this little thing was topside it needed clothes. Pa had had to steal and mug to clothe us for the first six months, until we were tall enough to pass as biologicals. Well, this baby wouldn't. I held out a hand. "Come with me," I whispered. "My burrow is here."

The baby nodded uncertainly and waddled with me across the bright path. I tried not to hurry it. The air was silent. It was possible I'd inferred wrongly from my acid vision. Maybe the man with the sawn-off didn’t visit tonight. Maybe our paths crossed in the distant future. It was unlikely, sure. But anything was possible with those visions. Sometimes they weren't even real future visions, just your darkest desires manifested in a convincing pantomime of reality. Maybe I wanted to find my way to a rendezvous with a man with a sawn-off. Maybe that was it.

The baby was strong, but its legs were unpractised at walking. It limped and dragged its feet as we made our way across the thoroughfare. It was hard to not feel sentimental. This night, the night that pa, the crazy old freak who had taken me in and given me a family when it would have been easier to exchange me for a cash reward, died - this was the night I find a fresh clone hatchling? I felt the hand of destiny. Even if the family pa had given us was a terrible one, torn apart from within by cannibalism and psychosis, it was a blueprint. I looked at the baby and it smiled again. A sad little worn out smile. Already holding back the tide.

I quickened my step. We were at the very threshold of the burrow, its cozy darkness yawning up to greet us, when a bathhouse enforcer with a battered, blackened sawn-off dropped lightly from an overhead branch in front of us. "Time's up," he muttered. He held the shotgun out towards me.

"What do you want?" I pleaded.

"Oh, not much," he yawned. "This isn't a shakedown. You should have taken better care of your father. No hard feelings. Old men can be hard to control. But my employer has specific expectations of my job. I need to send a message to anyone else who catches a notion of sliming the bathhouse." He looked at the baby and frowned. He paused a moment, then clicked a button in his pocket and a 1968 Saab 99 zipped silently around the corner. It had been retrofitted for driverless control but retained a classically elegant look, with a lime green paint job and glossy black accents. The headlamps flooded us with yellow light. The enforcer squatted to look the baby in the eyes. "Get in the back," he told it gently. "No one needs to be a hero." He stood up and shook his head sadly at me. "I don't like visiting Clone Control, but this is all on camera. Can't wriggle out of it." He tapped a small black cylinder on the side of his head.

"Let's talk this out," I told him. "I'll sign my burrow over to you right now. I'll clean the baths by hand. Just smash your camera and pretend we escaped."

"It ain't that simple," he said sadly. I started to moisten my acid gland and he rested the shotgun on my browbone. Oh, well, I thought. Five good years. It was more than some clones got. Realistically I'd be compost in a couple of years anyway, when my starches and enzymes mingled too deeply and I dissolved into a painful, semi-sentient liquid. This might be better. It had been a bad birthday anyway. I looked the enforcer in the eyes. He'd glazed over. I held his gaze for a few seconds before I noticed that his skin had grown shiny and was growing shinier. In 30 seconds slime was beginning to roll down his skin, forming drips on his elbows and filling his shoes. I looked down. The baby had pulled itself up on its hind legs and used its sharp teeth to rip an artery out of the enforcers leg. No clue that the guy would go gelatinous. Dumb luck. The enforcer fell to his knees as the shimmering slime built up around him, forming a protective and increasingly toxic blob. "Well done, little one," I beamed at the baby. It giggled and spat. The smog in front of the moon parted momentarily. I took the baby's hand and we walked to the car. That's how I got my Saab.