In which 173 gets a nice pedicure.
1973
Fritz was there when the shit started flying.
"Son? Did you see my water bottle anywhere?"
The bloodshot bull limped in the right foreleg, but it quivered with energy and pain. Fritz watched his father Fred Williams carefully coax it into the harness, and saw it slightly calm as its legs elevated, its stomach suspended in a sling.
The offending foot raised to the eyeline, Fritz's father applied the starting grinder, to level the hoof and lay its cavities and fault lines bare. The hoof horn was far too pliant, its environs far too moist for far too long. Fritz's father applied the hoof-knife carefully. There was as much danger in too-flexible horn as there was in a blunt knife; it is far too easy to go too far.
And as five-year-old Fritz peered around the back end of the harness in curiosity, the shit began to fall.
The spray licked over his face like fire. His caked eyes stung and watered, and as he fell back screaming, it entered his mouth. Too much for him. Too much for the bull, the screaming.
The bull squirmed in the harness. It kicked, as much as its uplifted legs would allow, as it swung fore and aft, and hit Fritz's father in the neck. He fell back amid a clattering of his instruments, and the last Fritz knew before he was taken away, the bull still roared.
2003
Fritz was there when the shit was a tidal wave.
His whole clique was there with him, surveying the site cheap enough for his new company's needs. An old Prometheus building Anna Scranton assured him was a real fixer-upper, only needing nineteen separate EPA Superfund operations to make it habitable.
The shipping container stood in the center of the warehouse, angled seventeen degrees from the wall. He prowled around it, rapping the metal to hear the ring. The container absorbed the sound. It was full.
So Fritz unlocked the doors and opened them wide to catch his inheritance.
And the shit flew.
The emulsion of blood and feces filled the container from top to bottom, and it poured out. It caught him in the eyes once more, but this time he knew enough not to scream.
As the flow abated, the Thing appeared, dripping.
It snapped. It twisted. It crucified.
The last that Fritz saw before he scrambled to a port-a-potty was a lump of concrete trying its absolute best to turn a head farther than the spine allowed, and failing, its efforts impeded by its bulky, cracked limbs.
…
Fritz fumbled to open his water bottle without opening his eyes. He poured it over his face, scrubbing the filth away with his other hand. A torrent of water. A trickle. Only when the water stopped dripping did he toss the bottle into the chemical-stinking toilet and open his eyes.
Eyes still stinging, he looked at his dirty reflection in the puddle on the floor and saw his five-year-old self inside.
Five-year-old Fritz turned away from the mirror. He heard whispers outside, blaming his father for keeping his focus on the bull and not making sure his son was all right. He crept out of the bathroom, hair still dripping and face still red from his lavations. He looked down at the bottle on the edge of the sink and anxiety crossed his face. He walked in the direction of the harness, clutching his father's water bottle the whole way.
35-year old Fritz looked down into the chemical toilet. He reached his arm in up to the shoulder. Finally, he pulled out the sewage-filled bottle. It was old and thin plastic, covered in rictus cracks, never meant to last more than a day. He traced the seams in the duct tape that kept it together.
Maybe it was just the port-a-potty fumes he was breathing, but Fritz felt an unmistakable connection to that day so many years ago.
He went back through his mind's eye. The construction and demolition tools in his truck. The widths of the building's doors. The patterns of the Thing's movement. Never resolving until he looked, like Schrödinger's cat…
And he pushed open the chemical toilet door, and closed his eyes.
Five-year-old Fritz crested the hill and stopped when he saw what his father was doing.
Fred Williams placed his hand on the bull's nose. He whispered to it softly, caressing its head and flanks. Finally, he knelt back down, tilted back his head, and closed his eyes in a wide smile, as if offering an opportunity for a second kick.
And the bull kicked Fred again. He fell back and cursed. The kick was made less by the harness, but it still hurt. Fritz rushed to him down the hill and offered him the water bottle.
Fred took the water bottle, and, rubbing his own neck, offered it to the bull. The bull grasped it in its jaws. Water fell frothing from its mouth as it drank. At last it dropped the bottle and offered its hoof once more.
35-year-old Fritz crawled through the abandoned building, his eyes firmly shut. He heard the scraping of concrete all around him. He continued his blind journey.
Leaving the building, Fritz at last opened his eyes. He stumbled to his truck, opened the side compartments, and pulled out the hammer, the chisel, and the hose. He looked back at the door of the building. The Thing stood behind it, far too big to fit through. And deathly still.
Fritz approached the Thing in the doorway. He ran his hand over its concrete hide and brushed away some of the caked effluence. Deep within it echoed a tremble.
He told it what he was going to do, step by step. With the hose, he filled the bottle with clean water once more, and poured it over the Thing's clogged concrete pores. Again and again he did this, interspersing with a pressurized hose spray, until the water ran clean down its body.
Fred took back his knife and commenced carving the hoof again. He squeezed various areas until he heard pain, and then focused his carving there. His scraping uncovered a small hole from which stinking liquid sprayed out, and the bull groaned in relief, the pressure in the cavity finally relieved.
Fritz tapped his chisel all over the Thing until he felt it shudder, and began his chiseling there. It was tough work, and concrete dust flew out and up into his lungs, but a spray of the hose here and there helped it coagulate on the ground. He tapped into a cavity from which putrescence flowed, and rinsed it out. The shuddering of the concrete switched frequency; the rattling was now a purr.
Fred exposed the whole of the hoof-horn cavity to the light. The unnatural hollow could trap no more blood or mud where it could bother the bull. He made sure to leave enough horn on the outer edge to support the bull's weight, and he glued on a block to keep the weight off the sensitive hollow until the hoof grew back. When the glue had set, he released the bull from the harness and backed away.
Tomorrow the neck injury he was ignoring would land him a several month stay in the hospital, worsened by the delay in treatment. Years from now his CTE from incidents like this would see Fritz crying over his deathbed.
But not today.
Fritz exposed the whole of the concrete cavity to the light. Where it became clear that the Thing's structural integrity was in danger, he propped it up with rebar. Someday, he hoped whatever animated the Thing would heal its wounds; the dark-and-light layers he had chiseled through implied a growth cycle.
And now came the question of what to do with the Thing.
A curious man would study it, hand it over to some great biology lab, and unlock great secrets of the universe.
A fearful man would lock it up in its box for the rest of time, afraid that what it did to his Council, it would do again.
A compassionate man would take it in as a pet, treating it with love, care, and respect, and retrain it from its murderous ways.
As Fritz trundled it tied-up on a dolly-cart through the building, he told it of his plan to make lots of money for the Safe Cleanup Professionals by hiring it out as a field-fertilizing, scarily effective scarecrow. Until then, he said, it would stay in its box.
Of course, it wouldn't do to have a soiled habitat for their moneymaker, would it? They'd have to schedule a cleaning once every… how often? He'd use precise-sounding yet ambiguous syntax until they could figure out the right cleaning schedule.
And as he turned the corner, he saw his Council of '05 and remembered the massacre. He checked their pulses. Marion was still alive, as was Damian, Hiram, Reynold… it finally occurred to him to call an ambulance. The pain and overgrowth had inhibited the Thing's ability to kill, but the injuries were still severe.
The next day, there would be recriminations about how long it took him to care about his coworkers. The next day, someone would point out the flaws in how he had misinterpreted Schrödinger's Cat. Someone would speculate that the Thing's desire for a jump-scare would eventually overcome its preference for that jump scare to be visual, and so closing your eyes to deny it that was only a temporary measure. Someone would want to start a filing system on the dangerous or unusual cleanup jobs.
But now, he was flashing back to that day when he hugged his father as they watched the bull test out the leg as it walked away, growing more confident with the block, and galloping around the pen in excitement, and he took a sip, then and now, from his father's water bottle.