• They rope you in by telling you your help will change the world. They give you a uniform and say you'll be an integral part of setting every unfairness right.

    What they don't tell you is that cleaning the mutant shark tank at 2AM is a real pain in the a**.

    The boss man, his scary amazon b***h queen, the one-eyed goons who outfitted you with the jet pack and sci-fi sidearm; nobody tells you the job description includes feeding the rocket spiders or hosing puke out of the boss man's private submarine.

    I know at some point I believed in something, enough to want to dress like a killer bee and run around fighting injustice, obviously. Enough to wear a ray gun to my job cleaning toilets. I just don't know how I got from wanting to make the world a better place to standing here, ankle deep in radioactive shark s**t, scrubbing stained green walls and wondering what they feed them to make them smell this bad.

    The mutant sharks are part of some brilliant master plan, but don't ask me how it works; nobody ever tells me anything. I'm awake in this waste pit instead of asleep in the bunker with my Comrades because I lost a bet; I was so sure Kaptain Kevlar was fireproof, but then the boss man seared him to the sidewalk like a big canned ham and now I'm on shark detail for two weeks. The winner, Comrade 22, is asleep in the bunker dreaming of gash, no doubt, the lucky b*****d. I don't know why I bet on someone with such a stupid costume anyway. I won't make the same mistake again, but right now the chemical fumes from months of mutant farts are messing with my head, so I take a break. I hoist myself up the hard way, clambering my skinny a** up the side of the tank; if I used my jet pack now I'd turn this airless abomination into a bowl of napalm, probably, and be as roasted as Kaptain Krunchy, definitely.

    Aside from keeping me up so late, mucking out the shark tank is far from the worst thing I could be doing. Worst is saddling the Megalephants. No, cleaning bird nests out of the weather machine. No, laundry. Laundry is the worst. It's not that I mind washing love stains out of the sheets or anything, I'm pretty sure the boss man doesn't even do those like a normal person, but his old lady has over 100 leopard print bikinis, each one unique, special, and bearing its own list of care instructions. After dry-cleaning bra number 87, it's hard to feel idealistic about saving the sea or whatever it is we stand for; I've all but forgotten.

    The nuclear sharks, Dolores and Fonzarelli, are restless in their holding tank, thrashing their malformed torsos against the thick glass and glowing with putridity. Fonzarelli is named, of course, after The Fonz; the boss's filthy Tarzan broad loves her Happy Days. I don't know whose idea it was to name a shark Dolores. The gender of the beasts is impossible to tell without doing really intimate things with a test tube, but you can tell them apart by their scars, big gashes in their rubbery skin left by one another.

    The sharks are fed with scraps from the boss man's table, a job which also falls to me for the next two weeks. The boss is vegetarian, craps green and eats mostly seaweed as far as I can tell, but that woman eats at least three whole animals at every meal, leaving desiccated carcasses of pigs, peacocks, dogs, and other unlikely creatures for me to drag to the tank. I've never seen her eat, but what she leaves behind makes me sick; piles of gnawed bones, drool, and half-chewed organs. The sharks leave nothing at all.

    I'm so tired I'm seeing double, and the fake yellow leather of my high uniform collar is really starting to chafe. The uniforms sure are snappy, but the designers, may they burn in hell, aren't the ones having to wear one every day of their stinking lives. Even my pajamas are shiny black and yellow. I yearn for them silently, cursing my unwise wager and reeling from unmitigated noxious shark fumes.

    They promise dangerous missions and guerrilla warfare and kung-fu lessons. They welcome you as a fellow eco-terrorist, and then they hand you a broom and a biodegradable bottle of soap. I gave up my life to back my ideals; now I have nothing to go back to and my ideals went down the drain long ago like so much shark manure.

    I glance at the long-handled broom beside me, and then at the holding tank. It's this leaky upright box, made of plate glass and iron, like the old Chinese Water Trap tricks Vaudevillian magicians used to die in. The keys for the iron padlock hang next to it. I wonder if the ridiculously stubby hind legs on the creatures could walk on land, and suddenly they don't seem so ridiculous. The wild idea builds first in my head and then in my chest, sending shivers of excitement all the way into my crotch. I move closer and then the keys are in my hands, jingling. With two mutant sharks and a hijacked submarine, I could set up my own organization; sure it'd be small, but I would be top dog. Finally, we could do things my way.

    The light strikes the keys, and they wink at me.

    ***

    Little rubber wheels squeaked as Comrade 22 pushed his broom and bucket across the sticky, stinking floor. Dolores and the Fonz dozed in their tank, looking fat and happy. Comrade 22 pushed back his antenna helmet and gazed wearily at the gummy red stains on the floor and walls, deep gashes in the plaster, remnants of last night's action. A tattered scrap of soggy black and yellow jumpsuit lay in the mess, crusty with gore and the occasional clump of hair. He picked it up and hung it over the side of the bucket with a wry snort before going to work. "I knew he wouldn't last more than two days. The boys in squad six owe me ten bucks each."