The Blonde

5:25 a.m.

The plastic robot face was the first thing he saw. A blue robot, solid jaw, face bolted together with plastic bumps meant to look like rivets. To his right, a fleshy strongman was torn open at the torso by a spear of glass. Pink slime oozed out of the wound. Yet the expression on his molded-plastic face remained the same. Now that was stoicism at its finest. Inspirational, even.

Kowalski lay broken in a sea of dusty toys, stuff he remembered from his own childhood.

That must have been when this shop closed down, the 1970s. Kowalski squinted and saw a painted wooden sign stacked vertically in the corner, SNYDER’S TOYS.

Cute.

All around him, toys. Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. Stretch Armstrong. Role models, dating back to the era of The Six Million Dollar Man. His main man, Steve Austin. The man Kowalski had wanted to be when he grew up. Even if it took a grisly M2-F2 rocket crash, and parts of his mangled body needed to be replaced with bionic ones. We can rebuild you. We have the technology.

Well, here was his crash. Thrown from a moving train. His skin cut to ribbons, his right leg broken in at least two places, his wrist snapped. And a gash in his scalp so bad, he could feel the blood oozing past his hair and down into the dusty wooden floor, soaking it. Come to think of it, the wetness on his face might not even be sweat.

Where were the bionic parts now?

Where was Oscar Goldman?

Oh, that’s right. He’d dumped his Oscar last year for the sister of a bank robber.

Katie.

Enough of that already. Get the fuck up. Kowalski rolled over, threw out a hand. Grabbed the edge of a splintery floorboard. Pulled himself forward about six inches. Then he had to stop. Getting dizzy. The pain in his leg was unbelievable. Must have been how he’d landed on it. He pushed toys aside. Chrissy dolls. White marbles. Shattered, yet still hungry, plastic hippos. Kenner mini sewing machines. Wacky Packs. Micronauts. Milton Bradley board games, whose cardboard boxes had blown out. Remco Mc-Donaldland characters. The stuff was everywhere. He must have knocked over a set of steel shelves when he came through the window. It felt like his body was pressed against shag carpeting, the kind his parents used to have in the living room. He crawled a bit farther and found himself eye-to-eye with Mayor McCheese. He used to have a Mayor McCheese doll. Normal body, big cheeseburger for a head. Never knew what happened to it. Maybe it had ended up here. Maybe he’d ended up wherever it had gone. Maybe he was dead. Maybe he had been hurled through the air and had landed in his childhood version of heaven: his parents living room, Christmas Day, 1977.

Stop it.

It took him ten minutes to reach the other side of the room, where the gym bag containing the head of Ed Hunter had landed.

Behind it was a shimmering play mirror, about as reflective as a sheet of aluminum foil. But Kowalski was able to see his face.

He saw it.

And he screamed.

His body shook, raging against itself.

He pounded the floor with his right fist, clawed at the wood with the damaged fingers of his left hand.

He had been so good about keeping everything together. Because he was a trained professional. Guy who didn’t let anything in. But the truth was, he was the same kid who’d played with a Mayor McCheese doll, the kid who would grow up to meet a woman and fall in love and make a baby with her, and both of them were dead now because he hadn’t been there to save them, and now look at him, covered in blood, flesh of his cheeks torn and mangled, pieces of his ear missing, but those eyes, oh yeah, those eyes were the same he’d had since Christmas morning, 1977, and they looked back at him and they knew.

They knew what it was like to be trapped inside a monster.