Free Multiplex Fandango by Weston Ochse Page B

with that. For all the living she did, she wasn’t living.
    A carload of young men his age pulled into the parking lot of the Black Dolphin. They piled out, falling drunkenly together in a gaggle of indefatigable fun and headed inside. She’d take one, just as she’d taken him, and she’d sacrifice him.
    Thomas remembered hearing something when he was in Iraq , and he couldn’t help but believe that it was connected to the tale she’d told him. Somehow, someway, the insurgents believed that there were force fields around HUMMERS. In an inspired sequence of insane determinations, they'd figured out that wrapping the explosive round with duct tape would allow the round to pass through the force field. With this technique, the insurgents found immediate success and began to wrap more and more RPG rounds with the tape, as if they’d discovered a secret as important and necessary as cold fusion. Thomas couldn’t help but believe that their belief in force fields stemmed from that singular RPG that had failed to explode June’s HUMMER in the city of Haditha , the insurgent gunner convinced his careful aim had been foiled by an American force field.
    Thomas would never be sure, but the odds were in his favor, and the mystery of how unrelated events could be connected and reinvented in logic would become his coda until the day he died.
    But for now he had a choice.
    And he chose to go home.
    And for a long time he forgot about his attempt to become a Don Quixote on the Sea of Cortez , tilting at sea monsters for the charms of a young woman.
    But then sometime in the future it will come to him. Perhaps even years later, standing in the aisle of a hardware store the memory will surface. Thomas Greely Jones will reach for a roll of tape and return to the memory of his days in Puerto Peñasco: June; the holy duct tape insurgents wrapped around their grenades; the RPG that rang off June’s HUMMER that didn’t kill her but killed her spirit; the constant search for control they all had with death at every door; and the tentacled-truth of the god beneath the waves who promised to remove his fear, if only he’d play a celestial game of bobbing for apples. He’d shudder at how close he’d come to dying so that someone else might live. It might take a moment, it might take an hour, but eventually he’d collect himself, put the tape in his cart, pay for it and return home to his wife and children. He’d use that tape to repair something mundane, something necessary, and think about how his life had almost been undone in his attempt to remove his fear and become the cavalier hero he’d always wanted to be. Then his wife would call him to dinner and he’d sit with his family, his eyes occasionally distant as he remembered the Sea of Cortez as he sat and ate and reveled, happy to be alive, a contented cavalier whose windmills are such things in life that we all try and tilt.
     
    ***
    Story Notes: There’s something about all Cthulhu Mythos stories that terrifies me and that’s the idea that we are some insignificant speck. I’d wanted to write another mythos story for a while, and when I saw the 100 foot statue of the fisherman and the giant shrimp in Puerto Peñasco (yes there really is one), visions of Dagon swam through my mind. So I channeled Brian Lumley and added my particular American perspective. Please forgive me for the ending. The story was about choice, ultimately, and once someone makes that choice, well, the story is over. I allowed for a little denouement, just enough to allow Thomas’s decision to sink in, just enough to allow that it could be yo u who made the same decision… or not.
     
     

 
     
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