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By Root 1166 0

her father. She’d called him a phony and a perv, and he felt really bad for her. She must feel so embarrassed and ashamed to have everyone know. And the worst thought he had was that maybe her father had tried to do some of the same things to her. Maybe he had done them. Otis had read about men doing those things to their daughters, but he’d never tried to imagine how a daughter with that kind of father might feel. In fact, until he started wondering about Rusty and missing her and feeling bad for her, he’d never thought much about anybody other than himself—maybe because he’d never really spent a lot of time with another person, outside his own family, that is. Gotten to know her. Shared experiences with her, like stealing and vandalism and creating dangerous nuclear devices. So this is what it feels like, he realized, to let another person into your world. It felt much more dangerous than any nuclear device he could create, because he had no idea what the possible chain reaction would be. But when he thought about all the bad things he and Rusty had done, it made him happy, and he was glad of all of it. He thought about her at night, in bed, until he ached, and there was only one thing to do for that, but a different sort of ache came back right after. He missed her.

So, in order to keep the memory of Rusty alive, he went out and shoplifted lithium batteries from CVS and Walgreens and Target and Walmart, even though he could’ve paid for them. Once he got them home, he cut them in half with wire cutters and removed the shiny lithium strips and dropped them in a beaker of Crisco oil to prevent oxidation. Then, donning his gas mask, lead suit, and latex gloves, he put the thorium and lithium into a sealed aluminum foil ball and dropped it into a pan of oil, cooking it on his propane stove for half an hour. When he tested the ball, after it cooled, with the Geiger counter, all indications were go.

Then he had the thorium all ready to shoot the gun at. He had the beryllium strips for part of the fuel, but his final step was to transmute the radium—obtained from the clocks and the hidden tube of paint and the chunk ordered online—into a workable form. He ordered some barium sulfate online and mixed it with radium and strained the brew into a beaker. In the beaker it emitted a glow that told Otis it was ready.

A few days earlier he’d loaded up his gun with his uranium and beryllium and tried shooting it at the thorium. Nothing happened, nothing that could be measured with his Geiger counter. He tried this for three successive days with no results, and he began to get agitated.

That night he drove by Rusty’s house, looking for her, but it was shut up tight. No cars there, no lights on. Another night he walked over to her house, dressed in black, wanting to propose some Mrs. Archer harassing if she was up for it. The black SUV was in the driveway, but no lights were on. He knocked on Rusty’s window, but there was no response, so he snuck across the street and did some halfhearted Mrs. Archer tormenting by himself—tossed some gravel at her windows, picked up a flowerpot with fake daisies in it and placed it on the roof of her car—not very original tricks, but it was something to honor Rusty, and he slunk back home, missing her.

He discussed the problem of his gun not firing with Granddad, who suggested that in this situation one might slow the neutrons down using a filter of water and tritium, which could be obtained from night-vision gunsights. Otis looked them up online and discovered that night-vision gunsights cost more than a thousand dollars apiece. For two days after this discovery he wandered about in a daze, and one evening, when everyone else was all worked up about some new revelation in the Buff case—a fifth girl, one from Buff’s old church, had just come forward—Otis just walked into his parents’ room and took his father’s credit card from his wallet and ordered three gunsights to be sent to him FedEx overnight.

When the box arrived he took it with shaking hands to his shed. He carefully pried the sights open,