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Vengeance
Day Two
Because on day one Dib’s absence almost went unnoticed. Gaz knew that he didn’t come home, but she just enjoyed some time alone and was glad for the silence without his constant chattering. She wasn’t worried, but she didn’t have any reason to be. Dib sometimes stayed away from home overnight, doing weird “investigations”, but that wasn’t a big deal. It certainly wasn’t anything she should worry about.
The Professor worked all night on his newest invention, tinkering in the home lab until he was surprised by the sound of dawn birds. He trusted the kids to eat the pre-made meal in the fridge and put themselves to bed, so he didn’t notice his son’s absence. He loved his children, but Science is a demanding mistress.
Day Three
Gaz enjoyed actually getting to have her choice of cereals for once, and it was nice to eat in silence, instead of having to listen to Dib chattering on about aliens. Somehow he always seemed to know which cereal she’d want for breakfast, and because she slept later than he did, he almost always got the last bowl and left her with the crappy store brand junk or the cereal dust in the bottom of the bag. To add insult to injury he would fit almost half a box into a big mixing bowl, but when she complained her father would just say, “growing boys need nutrients. Wake up earlier if you want different cereal. Early bird gets the worm. Eat some Weate-os.” She hated Weate-os, but no matter how hard she glared at Dib he would just smirk as he stuffed his face with the good stuff.
The Professor came home about 8:00, which was early for him. “Hey kids! I got off early and rented a movie. Who wants to watch Lord of the Rings?”
“Again?” Gaz whined. “It’s always Lord of the Rings.”
“It’s a good movie, and there is no science in it. You know how much I hate how Hollywood deals with science. Those people don’t know an atom from a quark.”
After he made popcorn they sat on the overstuffed couch, watching the mechanical arm that Dib had made to deliver popcorn. It reached out to hold the bowl, spilling about half of the popcorn, which was better than usual. The Professor thought that Dib could have done a better job designing it, but at least it was an attempt at something scientific.
“Where’s your brother?” the Professor asked.
“I don’t know,” Gaz said. “Off doing weird stuff.”
“Probably. Someday he’ll discover the joys of pursuing real science. Until then we’ll let him have his little games.”
As usual, Gaz fell asleep half-way through the movie and her father had to carry her up to bed.
Day Four
The Professor received a call from Dib’s school, which surprised him. Dib was brilliant, and he couldn’t imagine him having any problems at that particular school. It was an underwhelming place– far below a Membrane’s level. He had considered putting Dib in a private school among his mental equals, but there was something wrong in the boy’s makeup that left him with a strange, warped view of the world, and in the end he had decided his children needed normal social contact more than the advantages of an education behind gates and complacent wealth. He was sure they would quickly catch up in college. They were Membranes after all.
He had been questioning that decision over the last two years, but he didn’t have time to find better options.
The school wanted to know why Dib had been truant for several days, and she sounded judgmental.
“I’m sure there’s a mistake,” he said, and then regretted it when the secretary subjected him to an irritated lecture about her careful record keeping. He quit listening about two minutes into her tirade. He was sure there wasn’t an actual problem, but when he arrived home, Dib was still nowhere to be found. Gaz said she hadn’t seen him in days, so he finally called the police.
“How long has he been missing?” the officer asked when he arrived at the Membrane household. Badge number 118 – the number of elements in the periodic table. The Professor focused on that fact, trying to block out the rising panic.
“Professor,” the officer asked. “When did you last see your son?”
“About four days ago, or maybe five. I’m not sure.” Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium… calm down.
“You haven’t seen your son for that long and you didn’t call sooner?” The Professor thought the officer sounded suspicious or disgusted.
“He’s a very active boy. He spends a great deal of time with his foreign friend.”
118 wrote something in his notebook. “What’s his friend’s name? We’ll need to talk with him and his parents.”
Boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen. Oxygen was important. He hoped Dib was still breathing. “Gaz, what’s that foreign kid’s name? The one Dib is always playing with?”
“His name is Zim, Dad. Why are you here?” she asked the officer.
118 smiled at Gaz. “My name is Officer Brian, Gaz. I’m helping your father.”
“We need to find Dib, honey,” the Professor said. “Officer Brian is going to help us.”
“Why?” Gaz asked. “He lives here. He’ll come home when he gets hungry.”
“Go to your room and let me talk to the nice policeman, Gaz. We’ll talk later.”
“Whatever,” she said. She left, and the Professor turned to Brian118. “I’ll find out where Zim lives and call the station.”
After Officer Brian left, the Professor stared at the blank screen of the television. He sat imagining all the reasons Dib might not come home until he fell asleep on the couch. Nothing came of the police speaking with Zim’s parents. They said that there wasn’t anything suspicious at Zim’s house, and that Zim’s parents seemed very normal.
Day Five
The Professor canceled his appointments indefinitely. He would still have his research; he couldn’t escape that. Super Toast had already ended world hunger, and he couldn’t deprive the human race of his brilliance with other world changing inventions. He could hold off on being a media darling though. His last press conference was a massive affair, as always.
“I have to announce that my son disappeared five days ago. We have no clues as to his whereabouts. I am officially offering one million dollars for the return of Dib Membrane. Dib, if you can hear me, come home son.”
There were numerous questions, most of which he had no answers to. At home the liquor cabinet beckoned, and even though he didn’t drink much he really needed a stiff one. A double Scotch didn’t help as much as he’d hoped, but he sat down to watch the news. Fluorine, neon, sodium, magnesium. Think about facts, he thought. Cold hard facts. Things that never change. He needed something to cling to.
Day Six
Gaz finally realized that something was wrong. She kept insisting that Dib was coming home, and told her dad she was going to do bad things to her brother for worrying her. Even though she pretended she didn’t care, the Professor saw her fiddling with her fingers and picking at her nails. He managed to hold back the tears until she went to bed. Aluminum, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur. Sulfur is a main component in gunpowder. Gunpowder. Violence. He had to stop thinking like that.
Day Seven
The Professor took a leave of absence from his work. He hadn’t been there often after Dib’s disappearance anyway, but as he walked to his office he couldn’t help but notice the looks of pity from people he barely knew. He just had so much to do, and he couldn’t concentrate enough to deal with the complications of the lab. For the first time he felt like science wasn’t worth what he had lost.
He had calls to make to the school, to the police station, to Dib’s mother. That didn’t go well. Even though she didn’t care about the kids she made a huge dramatic fuss over Dib’s disappearance. He ended up hanging up on her, and he went to buy a new bottle of Scotch. Chlorine, argon, potassium, calcium. Kids need lots of calcium. He hoped that wherever Dib was he was getting good food.
Week Two
Gaz and her father stopped counting the days, and they didn’t say much to each other anymore. She played her Game Slave, and her father drank and watched the news, hoping for anything – anything. Scandium, titanium, vanadium, chromium, manganese, iron. He needed to be strong for Gaz, strong like iron.
Week Three
He found Gaz in the kitchen crying, and he held her until she cried herself out, then tucked her in bed. He poured the rest of the Scotch down the kitchen sink and watch it swirl into the drain, trying not to think about how dried blood looked brown as well. They had to have an uncomfortable talk the next morning.
“He’s not coming back, is he?” she asked.
Cobalt, nickel, copper. Blood tastes like copper. Dear God. Dib’s blood is somewhere, spilled like melted copper. He hugged her close to himself. “I don’t know honey,” he said. “I’m sorry.” There wasn’t anything left to be said.
He was accustomed to knowing anything worth knowing, but the most important information in his life was lost to him.
His ex-wife pressed for a funeral, but he couldn’t admit Dib was dead, not yet. Zinc, gallium, germanium, arsenic. Arsenic. No. Don’t think about arsenic. His ex probably had life insurance on both of her children, which would be like her.
Week Four
The Professor was trying to work up enough energy to shave He hadn’t bothered with much lately. They had enough money to last the rest of their lives if he didn’t want to work again and there was just no material reason to care about anything. He just sat and watched the news and listened for phone calls that never happened. The police had no leads, and he had been shocked to discover that he didn’t know enough about Dib’s daily life to investigate properly.
Gaz tried to help, but all she said was, “he spends most of his time messing around with Zim. The kids at school don’t like him.”
He heard the front door announce, “Membrane family member recognized. Welcome home.” The door opened and shut with a loud slam that bothered his overworked nerves. Gaz was home early. He heard her head toward the bathroom, and he was glad she didn’t feel like talking. He wanted to be alone. Selenium, bromine, krypton, rubidium, strontium, yttrium, zirconium, niobium.
About an hour later he heard the front door announce, “Membrane family member recognized. Welcome home.” The door’s sensor is malfunctioning, he thought. Then he heard it open and close.
“Dad, what happened here?” Gaz asked. He turned around and saw her pointing to a series of bloody footprints that led through the house toward the bathroom, a series of bright red splashes against the polished wooden floor.
“Gaz, go to your room and stay there. I’ll be up to get you in a bit. Don’t come out unless I come for you, OK?”
The Professor followed the footprints with a feeling of dread, stopping outside the bathroom door. A bloody smear covered the doorknob and sounds came from inside. He heard a clink of glass and a soft curse. He opened the door as quietly as possible and froze.
Dib was standing there as if he’d never been gone, as if his father and sister hadn’t been through hell, as if none of this had ever happened. He was barefoot and dressed only in a pair of jeans, but he was there, calmly picking glass out of his face with tweezers. His leg had blood running down it, and his face was cut in various places. His hair was speckled with glass fragments, and Dib was trying to remove some glass from cuts in his face and scalp. Molybdenum, technetium, ruthenium, rhodium, palladium. The Professor couldn’t breathe.
“Hey Dad,” Dib said. “Could you hand me the peroxide?”
The Professor handed him the peroxide. “Dib, where have you been all month? We’ve been worried about you.” He spoke carefully, as if Dib was a woodland creature that might spook and bolt. Silver, cadmium, indium, tin, antimony, tellurium, iodine, xenon. He used to love the inert gasses, so full of mysteries. How he hated mystery now.
Dib pulled another shard out of his cheek and dropped it in the sink. Clink. Blood and glass. Crimson ran over his hands from various cuts. “What are you talking about?” Dib asked. “Can you help me with this one? I can’t get to it very well.”
The Professor took the tweezers and tried to get the glass shard that Dib was pointing to. It was high on his scalp and to the side. His hands shook too much to remove it. “You’ve got a lot of glass there, son. How did this happen?” This isn’t real. Dib isn’t here. I’m imagining all this. It’s too good to be true. Cesium, barium, lanthanum, hafnium. He had to stay calm for Dib.
“I’m not sure. I fell through a window, and I came home.” Dib pulled a large slice of glass from his upper arm, and the area began bleeding. The towel he grabbed to staunch the bleeding turned red alarmingly fast, and Dib turned toward his dad. “Could you get the bandages? I can’t remember where we keep them.”
He’s in shock.
As Dib turned, the Professor got his first full look at his son. Glass and cuts were the least of his worries. Dib’s glasses were gone, which was probably why he wasn’t panicking. If he could have seen himself clearly, he would have been much less calm. A pink Y-shaped scar crossed his chest, beginning at his shoulder blades and reaching down to his naval. It was an autopsy cut, and a recent one that stood raised and raw as if it was just beginning to heal. How he had survived was beyond anything the Professor knew.
Another scar started from his hairline and reached all the way around, as far as he could see. Now that he looked he could see where Dib’s hair was shorter around the circumference of his head, as if it had been shaved and had grown back over the month he was gone. Three large, deep scratches crossed his chest.
“Dib, you’ve been gone for a month. Where have you been?”
“I was home yesterday,” Dib said.
The Professor held his watch so Dib could see it. “Look at the date.”
“That can’t be right,” Dib said. “That’s a whole month off.”
“No, son. The date is right. You’ve lost a month somewhere. Now tell me what you remember.”
His heart beat heavy, and he struggled to control his voice and keep the wild panic in check.
“I went to school, and I walked over to Zim’s house. He wasn’t home so I walked back. I stopped at the book store and got a coffee. Then something happened – something in an alley. Then…”
Dib stopped and frowned. “Then I fell through a window, and I came home,” he said hesitantly.
“That’s all? There is a lot of time missing, and that scar you’ve got isn’t from falling through a window.”
He reached into a drawer where he kept a spare pair of Dib’s glasses and Gaz’ contacts. Dib put on the glasses and stared at himself in the mirror. He touched the scar on his chest and head. “Dad? Where did these come from?”
“We’ll find out,” his father said. “I want you to go lay down on the couch. I’m calling an ambulance.”
Dib limped to the couch, leaving more bloody footprints. The Professor went to the kitchen so Dib couldn’t hear him, and he called 911. “Yes, you heard me right. My son came home today and he’s covered in wounds. His head and feet are bleeding, and he doesn’t remember what happened for the last month. He has some very odd scars as well. I think he might have been tortured.”
While he waited on the ambulance he pulled a chair up to the couch, surprised he didn’t wake Dib, but he suspected he hadn’t slept much in the last month. It was hard to convince himself that it was real. How many times had he woken from dreams where Dib had come home? He found himself waiting for the alarm to wake him for another empty day.
Dib was sleeping soundly. His father looked at his scars and the scratches across his chest, noticing that his wrists had scrapes and cuts on them as if he had been restrained. Torture, he thought. His precious little boy had been tortured. Tantalum, tungsten, rhenium, osmium. It wasn’t working. Iridium, platinum, gold, mercury, torture. Torture was an element. Like the basic building blocks of the universe, it was an irrevocable part of his world now.
Dib shifted in his sleep. “No,” he said. “Stop cutting me!” He woke up screaming, and his father held him until the panic had passed. “Don’t let it get me again,” Dib said.
“You’re home now, son. It’s safe here.” Thallium, lead, bismuth, polonium. “What do you remember?”
“I don’t know,” Dib said. They heard ambulance sirens approaching. As it stopped outside their house the emergency lights flashed eerily on the walls. “I just remember a green face, with big eyes and lots of teeth. And he kept laughing and cutting. It was horrible.”
Astatine, radon, francium, radium. He let the EMTs in. As he watched them check Dib’s vitals the Professor felt even more helpless. There was nothing that he could do. It was all in the hands of strangers now, and the thought left him slightly nauseous. He just had to desperately hope that they knew what they were doing. The more logical part of his mind knew he wasn’t thinking rationally, but that didn’t stop him from imagining all the things that could still happen to his son.
Gaz leaned out of her room. “Dad, what’s happening? Can I come out?”
“Dib came home,” he said. “Dib came home,” he repeated, rolling the reality around in his mind and testing it.
“Dib came home? Why didn’t you call me?” She ran down the stairs, but she stopped when she saw Dib. “Dib?” she asked. “You look really bad.”
He lay on the stretcher. “It’s alright, Gaz. Don’t worry about me.”
The Professor followed the ambulance with Gaz in the car. Actinium, rutherfordium, dubnium, seaborgium. When they reached the emergency room, he said. “Gaz, your brother needs us to be calm right now. He’s hurt and afraid. Do you understand?” She nodded, but the look in her eyes said that no, she didn’t understand.
Dib wasn’t critically hurt - at least not physically - which was bizarre considering his scars. He needed a lot of stitches, and a large piece of foreign material was pulled from one of the deep scratches, but other than that he just needed some blood. The doctors wanted to keep him overnight. The Professor arranged for Gaz to stay with his former secretary, and he sat in the waiting room until morning. Bohrium, hassium, meitnerium, darmstadtium.
Early the next morning, his son’s little foreign friend arrived. “Hello Dib’s father. I would like to see Dib.”
“How did you know he was here?” the Professor asked. He hadn’t told anyone but his secretary.
“Um, my parents told me? I am NORMAL!” Zim said.
“Visiting hours start soon.” This Zim kid was the only friend Dib ever talked about. They played a complicated game about alien invasions together. Maybe it would be good for Dib to see his strange friend.
“Yes, Zim would like that,” the strange child said.
They went to see Dib as soon as possible. He was lying on the bed, awake and flipping through the channels on television. “Hey Dad,” he said listlessly.
“Hi son, I brought a friend to see you.”
“Hi Dib. How are you feeling?” Zim asked. He smirked.
“Not so great. I can’t remember what happened for the last month.”
“Really, none of it?” Zim asked.
“I remember a face, and pain, and bright lights over me, but that’s all. What did you do to your hand?”
The Professor looked down at Zim’s hand. One of his fingers was covered with a bandage. The other fingers had blue, claw-like fingernails.
“Zim hurt his finger, that’s all. This is a skin condition. I AM NORMAL!”
Now the Professor was beginning to remember why he’d never liked the foreign kid. He was really weird. Something definitely bothered him about Zim.
Zim left, and the doctor arrived. He discussed Dib’s case with his father and showed him the piece of material found in the scratch. The Professor held it up. “This looks like a claw,” he said. It looks like Zim’s fingernails. I wonder what kind of skin condition he has.
How had he never noticed? With a guilty sinking feeling he knew why. He had never intended to sacrifice his children to the pursuit of knowledge, but it had happened for the good of the world. At the moment, he wasn’t sure the world was worth it.
“I’ll take that if you don’t mind,” the Professor said. “I’d like to study it in my lab. Dib was obviously taken hostage and then attacked by an animal. Perhaps if I can isolate the species that attacked him, we can begin to determine who its owners are.”
And then they’ll pay, he thought.
“And then I can assist the police,” he said.
Gaz was waiting for them when they got home. She forgot she wasn’t supposed to care about Dib and ran around like an excited puppy. “Where were you? What happened? Was it bad? Were you in the circus?”
“I don’t know where I was. Leave me alone.” He headed up the stairs toward his room.
“Dib, your sister was worried about you. Come give her a hug.”
“Gross,” she said.
“Do I have to?” he asked.
“Yes, you have to.” He supervised the mandatory hugging, and then went to his lab to work on the claw from Dib’s wound.
It wasn’t human, or ursine, canine, feline, bovine, equine; it wasn’t anything he could identify. The claw belonged to no known species, and his lab had full access to the best forensic equipment. No one was going to tell Professor Membrane no, and he had every security classification needed to have the most advanced of anything he wanted.
He kept thinking about Zim’s “skin condition”. He had to get to the bottom of this. His son still woke up screaming every night, and whoever had done this to him might return. Roentgenium, copernicium, cerium.
Dib didn’t even enjoy eating cereal anymore. He wasn’t the Dib his father had known before he disappeared. He just sat and stared most of the time with a disturbingly blank look.
The Professor insisted on driving Gaz and Dib to school and picking them up, and he wouldn’t let them go out alone anymore, for any reason. Gaz grumbled, but Dib didn’t care. That bothered the Professor. Dib had always been the free spirited, independent child. He wondered what his abductor had done to his brain. He did have that head scar after all. Of course Dib had been to several neurologists, but they couldn’t tell the Professor much. They said he had a “brain cloud”. The Professor decided they were idiots.
He broke the claw down to study it further and found that it had aluminum at its core, but a strange, bluish form of aluminum that he had never encountered. He found another substance he couldn’t identify, something that showed up as unknown no matter how many tests he ran.
There was only one reason there could be a substance Professor Membrane wasn’t able to identify. This had to be of alien origin. As much as he railed against paranormal studies, it was the only realistic answer. Dib had been telling the truth, and his father had turned a blind eye for so long that monsters had abducted and tortured his precious son.
It had to be Zim. The “games” that his son played with Zim made sense now. If Dib had been telling the truth then Zim was an alien bent on world domination. There was only one way to find out. He needed a DNA sample. Then he could compare Zim’s DNA to the DNA he found in the claw.
He’d use Zim’s obvious obsession with seeming to be a normal boy against him. Praseodymium, neodymium, promethium, samarium. He was in the rare earth elements now, near the end of the periodic table. He’d never made it so far in his meditations without achieving some sort of tranquility.
One day he saw Zim and Dib talking as he came to pick Dib up. In the sunlight he could see the bags under his son’s eyes clearly. Dib hadn’t gotten a full night’s sleep since he’d come home. He was far too thin as well. Zim on the other hand was pudgy, and except for the skin condition seemed healthy enough.
“Hello, Zim,” the Professor said. “Are you waiting for your parents?”
“No, I walk home. I am ZIM!”
“I can give you a ride if you want. It’s too cold to be walking.”
Zim hesitated. “Zim is strong. Zim will walk.”
The Professor smiled. “A normal boy would accept the ride Zim.”
Zim climbed into the car with Dib and Gaz, shifting uncomfortably in the back seat next to Gaz. Gaz looked up briefly from her Game Slave and drew an invisible line across the middle of the seat. “Stay on that side or you die.” She looked back down, ignoring him.
“How do I get to your house?” the Professor asked. Zim pointed out the way, and the Professor stared at the claws that he suspected had scratched his son’s chest.
“You just live a couple blocks from us. Doesn’t he Dib?” he asked, more to check on his son’s state of mind than anything.
“Yeah,” Dib said. “Hey! You have a dog!” A green dog ran around the lawn, unleashed and drooling.
“He’s really stupid,” Zim said.
“He looks stupid,” Gaz said.
“What’s his name?” Dib asked.
Zim didn’t answer. His parents came out of the house, but instead of dropping Zim off, the Professor parked the car. “You kids stay in the car. I’d like to meet Zim’s parents.” He gave Zim his best smile and got out of the car before Zim could protest. Europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium.
He walked swiftly, and Zim had to almost run to keep up with his long strides.
“Well hello!” Zim’s mother said. “It’s so good to have you at our house!”
They invited him inside. The place was creepy, almost like a home, but not quite. Things were out of place. Sure, there was a picture over the couch, but it was a picture of a bizarre monkey. His parents were forced, comical. They lacked their son’s accent, or any distinguishing characteristics besides eyes that were a little too focused. Zim didn’t see a spark fly from his mother’s head, but the Professor noticed.
“We should have pie!” Zim’s mother screamed.
They live right in the middle of the Uncanny Valley, the Professor thought with a shudder.
They chatted for a few minutes, and the parents shouted crazier things as time passed. When he thought he had laid the groundwork, he asked Zim, “how would you like to come over and help Dib study for his test? He’s behind, and he tells me you get good grades. It’s something normal kids do, you know.”
“I think that’s wonderful!” the mom screamed.
“Boys do need friends. Otherwise they get weeeiiirddd.” The father said.
“OK then. Get what you need and we’ll go to the house. I’ll order a pizza for you kids.”
Zim got his backpack, and walked slowly to the car, glancing up at the Professor nervously. The little dog was still running in circles. “What’s his name?” Dib asked, pointing to the dog.
“Gir.”
“That name sounds familiar,” Dib said.
The Professor noticed that Zim only ate a bite of his pizza, and he didn’t seem to like it. He noticed a lot of things about Zim, now that he was taking the time to look.
Zim’s leftovers were exactly what he needed, and he took them down to the lab. The part Zim had bitten into had enough DNA to work with. Holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, lutetium, thorium, protactinium. Yes, he should be proactive.
“How did your test go?” he asked the next day when he picked Dib up from school.
“I got a B+,” Dib said.
“That’s…good,” he said with a sadness he barely hid. Dib had never gotten less than an A on a test before. “Hey, there’s your friend. Zim, do you want a ride?”
“Sure, I guess,” Zim said. The Professor took him home and chatted with the parents again. He was carrying a loaded gun in case he needed to defend himself. He didn’t know if they would get suspicious. He had bought a Glock and trained quickly, learning to use it almost immediately. Genius did have its uses when learning new skills.
He finished the tests on Zim’s DNA that night. The saliva from the pizza slice had aluminum in it, as well as the element he couldn’t identify. Uranium, neptunium, plutonium, americium, curium. How dare that little piece of trash pretend to be Dib’s friend when he hurt his son like that?
Dib hadn’t had much of a chance for a normal life anyway. He was always a strange child. Zim had robbed him of what little chance he had.
The Professor could be a patient man when he needed to achieve something important, so he made a daily habit of taking Zim home and chatting with his “parents”. He did this for weeks, watching his son finally begin to adjust. Dib started to eat regularly again, and he had some nights he actually didn’t wake up screaming.
After about a month he decided he’d make his move. The kids had a monthly visitation with their mother. They didn’t want to go, but it was court ordered. He usually picked them up from school and dropped them off at her house, staying in the car and watching until he saw the front door open. It was just across town but he had never visited the woman he was sure had only married him for his money. Science was the only mistress he wanted.
As he drove toward his ex-wife’s home, Zim said, “this isn’t the way to my house.” He sounded nervous. Berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium. He gripped the steering wheel in anger for a second, and then consciously relaxed. He needed Zim to think this was a normal interaction, just another day with a friendly Dad giving him a lift.
“I need to drop the kids off at their mother’s, and then I’ll take you home,” the Professor said.
“OK, I guess,” Zim said.
He dropped Dib and Gaz off and drove back toward his side of town. The smug satisfaction he felt when the garage door closed behind him was gratifying.
No one knows he’s here.
“I need to get a few things. Would you like to come see the lab?”
“Not really,” Zim said. “I don’t like labs.”
The Professor forced a laugh. “Sure you do. All normal boys like labs.”
“Normal boys…yeah. Ok, I’ll look at the lab.”
They entered through the cargo doors, and he turned on the fluorescent lights. “You might be interested in this, Zim. It’s called Super-Toast. It ended world hunger, but I’m still perfecting it. It could be more efficient.”
“Really?” Zim asked. He stepped closer to where the Professor was pointing, moving ahead of the human. The Professor put his hands in his pockets. Gun on the left, taser on the right.
Mendelevium, nobelium, lawrencium. There weren’t any more.
“The end,” the Professor said.
“What?” Zim asked. He turned around to see the Professor holding a taser. He dropped the human pretense and leapt at the Professor with a snarl, but he was still hit in the chest with a bolt of electricity. The smell of burning clothes and charred flesh hung in the air, and the Professor looked down at the writhing mess on the floor.
“I’ve never reached the end before. At least you convulse like a human,” the Professor said. Zim lay on the floor, blinking up at him. One of his cosmetic eyes had fallen off, and the Professor saw his large, red, inhuman eye. He picked Zim up and placed him on a medical bed. He attached restraints, making them tighter than he really needed to.
Lawrencium, lawrencium, lawrencium, lawrencium, lawrencium, he thought again.
There weren’t any more. He was at the end.
The Professor pulled out a medical tray filled with instruments placed with precision and sterilized with medical skill. He made sure Zim could see the tray, smiling when Zim gulped nervously.
“What are you going to do to me?” Zim asked.
“I’m going to start with what you did to my son.” He drew a Y-shape on Zim’s chest with a black marker and picked up a scalpel. Zim screamed, but it didn’t matter. The Professor’s lab was soundproof.
“Abduct this,” the Professor said as he made the first incision.