Horde’s Oeuvre

image detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights 
- Public Domain Review 

by  Ian Power-Luetscher

A fucking gryphon got our mayor last night and now everybody in Pod24 is just losing their shit.

I hear the news on the community feed, during the “rise and shine” talk block. We’re in the kitchen and I’m pouring juice for Lydia when someone yells, “Kenny Staples got picked off by a gryphon outside of the bank. You can see it on securityCam8.” And then the feed goes bonkers, and I knock over the OJ carton. Lydia laughs as I scramble over to our digicomm, to try and turn it off before they get vivid with the details. I’m too late though, I’m almost positive she’s already gotten the gist.

Lydia is freshly four years old but she’s clever. A mop of red hair and giggles, my wife in miniature. She’s got these glossy brown eyes, dark and huge, like a bush baby. I’m convinced that they’re a window into her little brain. She’s on the clock 24/7 now.

I switch the kitchen’s digicomm to the weather feed: that’s where you can only talk about weather and if you talk about anything else, you get banned. I love weather feed, I put it on in our bedroom when I can’t sleep. Honestly, I don’t know why I ever tune in to community feed, it’s a shit show.

In reality, the community feed exists for this exact situation: I should know that the mayor got swooped by a gryphon. I just don’t want Lydia to know. Not yet. I want weather to be the scariest thing that Lydia can think of, for just a little bit longer: thunderstorms, lightning.

Lydia is staring at me, and I realize I’ve zoned out completely. There’s orange juice all over the floor.

“If we had a dog then he could lick up the spill.” Lydia says. She and Andrea have been gunning for a puppy for the last six months. I’m not convinced. I don’t have the heart to tell them that I saw the Rickmans’ german shepherd get picked off by a thunderbird when we first podded up, back before we had things totally built out. I love dogs. I don’t think I could handle something like that. I’m so much more fragile emotionally than I ever want Lydia or Andrea to know. Our perch psychologically, our ability to keep it together in this new reality, is more precarious than anyone wants to admit.

On Friday mornings, me and Lyd eat at the table together because I go in late. No high chair for Bushbaby now, just her little floppy muppet body in a booster seat. Lydia insists on using the same size spoon as I do and I love it because it’s roughly the size of her arm. If Andrea were here, she’d get the plastic spoon and bowl for her, because she’s practical, and then I’d get one too, so we were matching. However, Andrea has already left for the hospital—she’s much more important to the community than I am, and so the mice will play. We get to use kitchenware.

At the table, I can tell that Lydia has a question in her heart. But I’m pretty sure it’s about the mayor Kenny Staples and a certain gryphon and so I distract her by slurping up my bran flakes. We have a loud contest: who can eat their breakfast the loudest? You know, that kind of thing. Now that she thinks for herself, more and more Lydia asks about outside.

Lydia wants to know about the things that fly on the other side of the lucite kevlar plexiglass: hippogriffs, chimeras, big swarms of fairies that float at her eye level. The fairies wave to us right through the wall when we drive on Ridge Road. I tell Lydia that we need to be careful, I say that sometimes things might look one way but they’re actually another.

It’s a bitch to tell a four year old that she can’t be friends with the fairies. I don’t know how to tactfully relay to Lydia that the second she goes outside to play with them, a harpy will swoop down and I’ll see the claws and then bye-bye Bushbaby. Because apparently fairies and harpies work together. They hunt in fucking teams. This is the world now.

It’s my week to carpool, so on the drive to daycare, Lydia and I sing songs on KidChan: “Wheels on the Bus,” “Wishy Washy Woman,” the classics. I’m pretty sure she’s forgotten what she heard, until we pick up Junie, and right as she hops into the car, Lydia yells “A gryphon ate the mayor!” and then Junie’s dad Greg or Craig or whatever his name is, gives me a look like, “what the fuck Mark?” And so then I turn up, “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat” and hit the gas, because nobody wants to talk to Greg. Dude’s a fucking dud.

The minute I punch in at sanitation, I get the whole scoop from Tommy. This is how I know it must be true: Tommy never knows shit about anything, because he lives all the way out at the very eastern edge of Pod24. Out near the reservoir, and he’s all embarrassed about it. Tommy does something with water purification and so once a week he’s gotta come into sanitation to test for runoff with the containment people. I told him that if I lived out there, with all that space, I’d lean into the weird: get four wheelers, raise show chickens, build bookshelves that are trap doors.

Tommy never talks about runoff water when he visits. Mostly, he just talks about how he hates his house. Tommy’s house is giganto, Victorian, up on a hill. But he says it’s horseshit because it doesn’t even have a pool and everyone else has got pools.

I tell him we barely even use our pool anymore.

“Bull,” he says.

And he’s right. I swim in that pool every. Single. Day. It’s the best.

Me and Lydia do diving competitions. I’ve got her running and jumping in; sit dives, sculling on her back, somersaults. As long as she’s got water wings on, Bushbaby is fearless.

And on the weekends, Andrea will be floating in this big swan that she bought for herself from the manufacturing warehouse in pod8, and she looks so regal, perched atop her throne, reading Willa Cather or something. I’ll make her a humungo mojito in an insulated cup, and lull her into a false sense of security. Then Lydia and I play the Jaws game where we sneak up on her, ever so quiet, and then…

I don’t know how we’d survive without that pool. It’s like the best thing in our lives.

But I can’t say any of that to Tommy, so I remind him about his furnished basement. “You’ve got a furnished basement!” I say. “You could put a pool table down there.”

“Yeah Yeah,” he says. And I get it. Furnished basement does not a pool equal.

In the truck on the way out to the quarry, Tommy’s riding shotgun. I like it when Tommy comes along, it’s like having a partner. In a regular world, garbage men don’t work alone, but in our new reality, there aren’t enough people. I’m the only garbage man in Pod24. I’m the only one who even knows how to drive the thing. The garbage truck has like 18 gears, and to dump the back you have to do two things at once; it’s involved. I taught myself how to do it, along with help from some of the other garbage men. It took me a month before I wasn’t riding the clutch every other gear, but now it’s a cinch.

Tommy says that when Kenny Staples got taken, the gryphon was right at the door to the bank pod. It was waiting outside, behind his truck. Like it was waiting for him.

Early on, we had to separate the bank and a few other commodities into satellite pods a half mile or so from town so that people would stop pulling bank robberies. That was when everything was fresh, and people were still looting and acting all nutso. Someone would jack up the bank about once a week. It was embarrassing though, because even if they’d wear a mask, there’s only like 40 families in Pod24, and pretty much everyone knows everybody else’s voice. It got to be uncomfortable: people just robbing the same shit back and forth, folks showing up at the bank on Monday with a huge deposit of treasure, like they just had it lying around in their basement.

Nowadays the bank is off site, which is safer, folks are a lot less bravado and steal-y when they gotta go outside of our town-out into the wild.

To get to the bank now, people are supposed to wait for the underground public transport shuttle; it’s this kind of private armored train that travels to all the pods in our metro. I like the train. We took it to High Cliff State Park in Pod 1, and had a picnic last weekend. Andrea takes it to the other hospital pods too. The issue is that the train only comes every thirty minutes and it’s just this one little stop to take you the 500 yards to the bank. People can see the bank from the train station, it’s right down the road. And That’s what gets them. It looks so close. Nowadays, more and more folks are just gunning it over in their regular car: cowboys, flying over to cash a check or withdraw treasure. There’s no law against it. This is what Kenny Staples must have done.

Driving their own car out to the bank works 99 out of 100 times, so people are getting brazen. Things have been quiet for Pod24, we’ve had a good streak for all of this year. Now that this Kenny Staples business went down though, I’m sure it’ll be high alert again for a while, which is good, people should be more cautious.

The drag is that now we’re gonna have to do a pod council barbecue and meeting, and I hate that shit. I always get some bullshit task, like cleanup, because they know I’m the garbage man. “You’re good at it!” Mike Mcgregory says. Mike Mcgregory is the head of the podcouncil. He’s a nice guy, but something about him just annoys the fuck out of me. Andrea says he has “a face you want to punch.”

I love Andrea.

She thinks I should refuse when they give me clean up duty at the barbecues, but it’s easier to just do it.

“Who even has keys to the vaults and shit, besides Kenny?” Tommy asks. “Like how are we supposed to get at our hoards if we gotta barter with a dragon or something?” Tommy’s nervous because his brother in law had to barter with a dragon once. This was early on. He gave him all of his hoard, plus all of their silverware and anything else metal that he could get his hands on. That was when we were all still learning the new law of the land: shiny=good.

The reason folks are flipping out is because Kenny Staples was big news. I always thought he was kind of a douchebag, but he was the guy in charge of converting our hoards into usable amounts and credit. Tommy says he was an accountant before everyone podded up, before the event or whatever. I say, I’m pretty sure he owned one of those Cash4Gold shops that were on the way out to the freeway.

We’re driving to the quarry to toss in Thursday’s waste. Tommy has to check if the water seepage is getting into the shale. He won’t shut up about how this gryphon was targeting Kenny specifically.

“I’m telling you, the thing knew him. It took him out like a hit,” he says.

How can I tell Tommy that I don’t care? Or at least tell him without sounding like an asshole?

I care about Lydia and Andrea. Bushbaby and Inflatable Swan Queen. And that’s it.

One thing about how the world is now: for better or worse, it’s clarified things. What mattered before, it don’t matter no more. When you’re worried about dragons, a lot of other shit kinda falls away. Declutter your life with monster attacks. That’d be my book.

And the thing I never say out loud, that I won’t even say to Andrea when we’re in the dark in our bed, all wrapped up in eachother, is that I kind of like it this way. I’m thriving in the new scary magical creature world. I love being a garbage man. Is that stupid?

“I know what you’re getting at Tommy. And I’m not convinced.” I say. Tommy is part of this growing contingent of people who think that the other pods are starting to magic up to take eachother out. Like that the other pods want to take over our pod: standard Lord of the Flies stuff. I talk to the other pod garbage men almost everyday when we’re at the dumpsites, or over transport comm. It’s just not true.

“Tommy,” I say, and I slow down so I can look at him while I drive. “There’s a cyclops the size of a brownstone apartment building living on the on-ramp to I-43, and you think that we should be worrying about what plans Pod21 have hatched up? Think local,” I say.

I can posit that a lot of the conspiracy theory junk that Tommy yammers on about stems from how he doesn’t have a pool. The guy who is the loudest about all of this “other pods are out to get us” shit, is fucking Todd, the dude that runs the mattress and furniture outlet. I often wonder if he has a pool. He doesn’t have a wife, because his wife left him and went to Pod 13, which is the nudist pod. That was what people talked about on the community chan for roughly all of last year. Then Todd somehow hacked the satellite tower and started his own chan: ToddChan, and began spewing this nonsense. I’m pretty sure that Todd wants to nuke the nudists.

After he tires himself out, Tommy shuts up for a while, and the drive to the quarry straightens out. I can spot the silhouette of a manticore somewhere out near the horizon line: impossibly large to be as high up as it is, but we are now in the age of the impossible. The truck barrels past the agriculture pods, and then the pharmaceutical pods where Andrea worked when we first had Lydia. There’s a herd of centaurs crossing the meadow that was Holy Cross High School soccer field—and as we near them I can see the leader of the group point at the folded down high grass from a White Tail Deer bed.

I like how the endless expanse of the suburbs is now the wildest and most dangerous terrain for humanity: all that cover and space, just perfect for things to nest in.

The sun is a laser, high and tight, poking out from a canvas of watery blue. The days are getting longer. We are hurtling back towards summer. I think about how things could be a fuck of a lot worse.

***

At the quarry I whip a U and back the garbage truck up to the unload dock. Then I put on my diving bell suit and make sure it’s electrically charged. I attach the tether to the truck. Tommy follows.

There’s only one part of my job that’s a little dangerous, and this is it.

The garbage truck is Pod24’s only vehicle that goes outside, and so it’s armored up to almost be impenetrable. The biggest things I’ve seen so far: dragons, cyclops, giants. They could take it apart probably, but it would be a bitch. And for what? To get the garbage inside? The thing about monsters, is that they’re either too dumb to care or too smart to care about my truck. In my experience, the big ones have no hidden agendas.

All the same, there’s a part where I have to get out of the truck and manually make sure that the load is empty and that there’s nothing that’s hiding inside when I close it back up. This is why I wear the diving bell, it makes me weigh enough that most things would have a hard time getting me off of the ground. Then take into account that I’m tied to the truck. Then take into account that I’m electrified enough that even a gryphon would get a nasty little shock, and it translates to pretty much everything leaving me alone. Tommy’s got the same set up that I do, except his is paid for by utilities management.

So we get out together, and I can feel the rumble from below. I pull the lever to unload the garbage and it topples over the cliff. And for a few seconds it’s quiet, until the trash hits the water and I hear the screams and splashing and screeching and thrashing around. Anything I hear now has gotta be loud, because once I have the diving bell on, I can’t hear shit unless it’s something big. When I have the diving bell on, I feel like I’m underwater in a silent film. It’s not unpleasant.

I peer over the edge of the unload dock and look down at the water. It’s all churn and bubbles: a feeding frenzy. Everybody’s got the monsters that still freak them out the most, and for me it’s the underwater stuff in this quarry. Something about how we can’t see them makes it worse. I used to swim in this quarry when I was a kid. Andrea and I would come here when we were teenagers.

Tommy goes up to the edge of the cliff and throws down the utility’s depth charges. When we hear them splash and he checks his tablet to make sure they’re taking readings, that’s it. We’ve done this a hundred times. I’ve done it every weekday for the last two years. Tommy gets back into the cab and I look inside the trash compactor to make sure nothing’s there.

I hear a Kelpie neigh from down in the quarry. Already, there’s some coyotes coming to sniff at the garbage that didn’t quite make it over the cliff’s edge. Coyotes are cute. I kick a broken container of french fries towards a scrawny one and it jumps back, then forward again, to check things out.

 ***

“Some big wig wizard is hunkered down in the ruins of Maple Brewing Company. Out by Pod4. He’s the one who called the gryphon and got him onto Kenny’s ass,” Tommy says.

I can tell he’s all worked up again. I leave him in the truck alone for one fucking minute and the dude’s blasting Toddchan when I get back inside. I turn the radio off and put the truck in first gear.

“I don’t think that’s how gryphons work, Tommy,” I say.

“Do you know?” Tommy asks. “Have you studied gryphons yet?” He asks,

and I don’t say anything because his question isn’t trying to be cute. These days, that’s a real question. And I haven’t studied gryphons yet. I’m still on fucking dragons even though we haven’t seen one of them in 6 months.

Ever since the doors all opened and dumped every nerdy goddamn magical thing out onto our doorsteps, everybody has to study mythology and shit now. All of a sudden the dungeons and dragons kids are running the show, because you don’t want to get caught up in the loop of some fucking legend where you can’t talk your way out of it. That’s how it was at first, and it was a bloodbath. Fucking chaos: Baba Yaga shooting around the place, Rumplestitskin taking babies, dragons holding whole towns ransom just to get as much silverware and treasure as they can hoard. It was a shit show.

Once we kind of discerned the new law of the land (shiny=good), we could sort of make a plan. Monsters love bling. Who would have guessed it?

The worst was before we put the pods over us though, when we were just sheep getting picked off. Now we have impenetrable carbon-based plexiglass lucite with ventilated gills. The domes went up right on time, right before things got really truly apocalyptic. It’s kind of amazing how ingenuitive and stick-with-it, humans can get when the shit hits the fan.

When there’s a horde of minotaurs running towards your truck, you build a maze quickly. That’s a reference I wouldn’t have understood a year ago, but I’ve been taking all the adult learning classes at the library annex. All of us have. Sink or swim.

Tommy is starting to really fucking annoy me with his gryphon shit though, so I turn on weatherchan and gun the truck up to 70. It’s an hour back to our pod usually, but if I really haul ass we can do it in 45.

“Hope we don’t hit traffic.” I say, grinning at Tommy. He shakes his head.

“When you realize I’m right about this wizard shit, don’t come to me saying sorry,” he says.

“Tommy, if you’re right about this shit, I’ll help you dig a pool in your backyard,” I reply.

“It wouldn’t work.” Tommy says, and his voice is grim.” “The terrain is uneven. It’s because the house is on a hill.”

I nod in response and we listen to weatherchan for the rest of the drive. Two people from agriculture pod are arguing about The Farmer’s Almanac. I turn it up to listen better.

Secretly, the wizard theory worries me. I don’t think that the other pods are out to get us, but the wizard thing is a real possibility. I don’t want to admit that to Tommy though, if you give him an inch on his ToddChan shit, he’ll take a football field in response. There are no rules anymore, nothing surprises me. And lately, this kind of shit’s been happening more and more. Not in our pod, but in others. They found some soothsayer trying to crawl through the air ducts in Pod20 a few weeks back. Andrea told me that there’s a witch coven that runs pod14 now. She says she’s gonna join up if Lydia and I don’t stop “Jaws dunking” her in the pool.

When I get home from work, Andrea and Lydia are both already in their swimsuits, ready for the weekend. Lydia runs at me, all muppet energy, and I kiss her on the top of the head. She smells like grass.

“Shish kebabs,” Andrea calls out, gesturing to the grill, and then she takes a swig of beer and sits back in her chair. On Fridays, Andrea starts dinner and I finish it. Lydia goes back to the lawn, water wings on, holding court with her stuffed animals.

I go to the kitchen to get started. I turn on weatherchan again, get myself a beer, wash my hands. Andrea’s got the chicken already marinated, and the wooden skewers are soaking in water, so I start chopping stuff. After a while Andrea comes in and I hug her. She has this robe thing on over her swimsuit, it’s all see through and flowy. I like it: she looks like a priestess at the temple.

“You smell like garbage.” Andrea says. She kisses me on the cheek. “I’ll finish this.” She says, and pushes me aside to begin chopping with precision. I smile.

I know that this isn’t fair, that Andrea has worked longer than I did today, but the gesture makes me feel so special that all I can do is nod and kiss her back.

As I walk upstairs to take a shower, I can hear Andrea flip the weather over to community chan. The feed is all shouting.

***

A half hour later, I come downstairs dressed and clean and Andrea is standing at the bottom of the stairs.

I look around. There are two men on our sofa. One man I know: It’s Mike Mcgregory, the head of the pod council, with the punchable face. The other guy I don’t recognize.

Mike stands up when I walk into the living room. He shakes my hand.

“Hiya Mark,” he says. “Sorry to barge in on a Friday.”

 I nod.

We stand there for a minute in silence. I take a swig of beer, the last of it. I can tell Mike feels awkward because I’m not in a hosting mood and neither is Andrea, but I let him sit in that.

“Mark this is, uh, John Caspen. He’s from surveillance.” Mike gestures to the man, we shake hands.

I look outside through the sliding glass door to the yard. Lydia is shouting theatrically at a teddy bear.

Mike grins sheepishly. “Mark, I know we’re intruding. And I wouldn’t dream of coming here like this unless we had no other options…But I’m sure by now you’ve heard about Kenny Staples?” He asks.

I nod.

“Yeah, so we kind of assumed that Kenny was dead, but John here says he isn’t. He says that they’re holding him for ransom,” Mike says.

Goddammit, I think. Tommy was right.

“Your mayor is being held in The Maple Brewery, we can see from satellite feed that it’s a team of…um things, working together,” John Caspen says.

“How do you know it’s for ransom, though? Maybe they’re just playing with their food,” Andrea says. I didn’t see her leave but now she’s back. She has a new beer, and one for me. She didn’t bring beers for Mike or John.

I love Andrea. 

“Apparently, this isn’t the first time they’ve done this,” Mike says. “John here tells me they’ve pulled a similar move with four other towns.”

They nod to each other, then I nod. We’re all nodding.

“We wouldn’t come asking, it’s just that the garbage truck is the only thing big enough to carry this kind of hoard.” Mike says.

“And it’s the only thing outfitted for outside.” John says.

“Every other drop off has gone smooth.” Mike says.

“You just drive out and dump the payload and then they bring your mayor out,” John says.

“Fuck that.” says Andrea. “Get someone from Kenny’s office to drive the truck. Or his family. He has sons.”

I take Andrea’s hand in mine.

“We can’t.” Mike says.

“Why?” Andrea spits.

“Because Mark here is the only one that knows how to drive the thing,” Mike says.

And I nod, because he’s right.

“Fucking Kenny Staples,” Andrea says.

I squeeze her hand.

*** 

Andrea doesn’t get all weepy. She’s more pissed off than anything.

“I do this shit everyday. It’ll be the same as always,” I tell her.

“I know,” she says. And then she passes me a container full of shish kebabs that she made for me.

The drive out to the brewery is fast, fifteen minutes maybe.

Mike and John both say that they can’t go because there’s only one diving bell. I tell them that you don’t wear the suit inside the truck, but I let them stammer out excuses while I climb in. The truth is I’d rather do it alone. They’ve loaded the hoard up into the back already. The thing that I’m the most worried about now is how on the ride back, I’ll have to try and make small talk with Kenny fucking Staples for fifteen minutes while I drive.

I pull out of our pod and onto the road. I wonder to myself if I could put him in the back and just tell him it’s the safest place for an important person like the mayor.

It’s not until I drive about a mile out into the open air that I realize that things are actually much different than usual. For one, there are fairies and harpies zooming all around me. Everything is suddenly a lot more curious about my truck. It takes me a minute to figure out why, but then I realize what’s new: I’ve got treasure in the back, not garbage.

I drive faster.

Passing I-43, I see the cyclops pop out from under the overpass. I’ve only seen that once or twice since I started, but as I get close to the brewery, it’s suddenly crickets. Nothing is swooping anymore.

This doesn’t make me feel safer.

I back the truck up to the entrance. I’m moving quick because I want to get this over with. I get my diving bell on and then honk the horn real loud.

A sphinx pads out, huge and silent, and then the gryphon. I wait for a minute or so, and then I see Kenny Staples and another guy walk out too. Kenny doesn’t look like he’s in too much trouble, he’s not hurt. I clock a few more gryphons up top, and then I recognize the man Kenny’s with:

It’s fucking Todd.

From the mattress outlet and furniture store. He’s the goddamn wizard.

“Ugh,” I say. This is some kind of dumb inside job. I think about how, if he were here right now, this would blow Tommy’s mind. I can’t help but laugh to myself, inside the diving bell suit.

Kenny and Todd take my laughing as a cue that I’m talking though, because then Todd starts talking and Kenny does too. They’re both smiling, I’m sure they think they’re being really clever, but I can’t hear shit. You can’t hear anything inside the diving bell, unless it’s really fucking loud.

All of a sudden, I hear something roar. And it’s really fucking loud.

Todd and Kenny stop talking. The Sphinx starts to run. All four of the gryphons take off and so I turn around and see it.

It’s a fucking dragon.

Because I have a garbage truck full of treasure. So of course it’s a dragon.

The dragon is even bigger than the cyclops. It’s red, like blood and rubies, or like cherries and chili peppers. Or maybe it’s like a meadow of hibiscus flowers? I can’t think of anything that’s as red as this dragon is. I have no point of comparison. When the dragon breathes in, the color does something shimmery and phosphorescent-luminous. It’s impossible to turn away, so I just stand there gaping at the thing.

Todd yells something, I can see his mouth moving, and his hands gesture wildly in the air, but I just climb back inside the truck. From in the cab I turn around in my seat and watch as the dragon blows a jet of crimson fire right at the entrance to the brewery.

This is what they do: dragons act exactly how you would imagine they act. So It’s bye-bye to Kenny and Todd, I see their bodies catch fire, and then I see the dragon walk up and tear into them. It eats fast, and it’s as gruesome as you’d expect it to be, but I can’t stop watching.

When it’s done eating, the dragon climbs up onto the brewery’s roof and perches itself there. It stoically watches my truck. After a while the thing roars again and the sound shakes the dashboard. I see a grip of coyote pups bolt out from the brewery’s side door. The dragon is watching me.

And so I do what I came here to do: I pull the lever and the second lever and I dump the hoard in front of the brewery.

I get out, in my diving bell, and I walk to the back and I make sure that all of the treasure and shiny stuff got out ok. And then I wave to the dragon and walk back towards the cab door.

I see the coyote pups cowering under a tree, there’s three of them. And I mull it over for a second. I grab the container on the seat next to me. I open it up and pull at a piece of chicken. I hold it out and patiently coax them all into the cab. The dragon watches us, bored.

Then I just get back in and put the truck in first gear. I turn on weatherchan. The moon is out and it looks like a grapefruit floating in a bathtub. The little coyote pups fight over the rest of the chicken kebabs. I drive slow and careful, watching as they tumble around the cab-all clumsy and new in their bodies. The littlest one, her eyes are big like a bushbaby. I turn on the headlights, and all three look up and then out the window to give their yelpy little howls to the moon. Things could be a fuck of a lot worse.

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