Secret Basement Lab Alphabet: A is for ATOMIZER

“Perhaps you better understand the seriousness of the position you’re in, Doctor Phadley,” he said, pausing to turn and close the door to the small attic room behind him. He flipped the light switch near the doorframe, illuminating the cluttered laboratory prison.

            “You’re valuable to us while you’re alive, working on the project at hand. When that’s done, you can see your daughter. If you’re simply going to make trouble, then that value diminishes greatly.”

            The thug pulled a thin cheroot from his suit’s breast pocket, and stuck it between his wormy lips. “As for your daughter…” he added coolly, lips wriggling around the cigar, “…her value is appraised in tandem with yours.”

            The smarmy crook lit the thin cigar with a match and took a draw. He then plucked it like a feather from mouth and exhaled a great ball of crawling smoke, which flooded the scientist’s face, tickling his nose with its pungent odor and triggering his asthma.

            “Get the picture?”

            “The picture was clear some time ago, Mr. Mason,” Phadley snapped between coughs. “But perhaps it’s time we take another look at it. From a different angle, that is!” The diminutive scientist reached into a pocket of his lab coat and produced a bizarre gadget, a sort of pistol with an antenna where the barrel should be.

            “Whatcha got there, doc? Some kind of fancy soldering iron?”

The scientist’s wrinkled fingers bunched tightly around the handle, his knuckles bleeding white with strain. “No, not a soldering iron, Mason. Something worse!”

Mason cracked a crooked grin. Whether the reaction was one of nerves or amusement, Phadley couldn’t tell. But then, he didn’t care, either. Mason was a crook. A killer. A blackmailer. A gangster.

“I gotta hand it to ya, doc, I never’d have thought you’d have the stones to try and stand up to me. I guess I underestimate you egghead types. ‘Specially one of your age.

“Now,” Mason said, stepping slowly towards Phadley, eyes locked on his the entire time, as if trying to hypnotize him, to influence his will! “Let’s have the doodad, doc!”

Phadley held steady, one arthritic finger curling into the trigger guard of the bright blue plastic weapon.

“Doc…” Mason sneered, taking another step, “don’t be foolish. Don’t make me take that away from you! Your daughter–“

Phadley squeezed the trigger, and the antenna nose of the small pistol crackled with a flash of energy. A thin beam shot from the end, and caught Mason square in the sternum.

The criminal stopped dead in his tracks. His chin dropped, his eyes went to his chest. His hands started to furiously slap at the small burn at his breastbone. At first it was a little hole, like a tear in the fabric of his shirt. Then, like a tarantula waking from slumber and stretching its legs, it started to spread out in every direction from around the point of contact.

“What…what did you do?” Mason shouted. “You shot me?!”

“Yes!” Phadley snarled. “I shot you. Not with a gun—with bullets!—but with this device that I’ve been working on since you’ve locked me away in this god forbidden place! This atomizer!”

There was no blood. The small blast from the atomizer had simply started a reaction upon contact. The physical being known as Nick Mason was being eradicated, eaten away from existence as the very atoms that composed his body were being dissolved and deleted.

“I’ve removed one ugly mark from that picture you were talking about, Mason,” the doctor sneered. “And there’ll need to be many more such marks erased before the picture of the future is worth looking at again.”

Phadley stepped around the evaporating Mason. He walked out the door that had secured his prison cell for the last seven months, and stepped into the stairwell that would take him down into the isolated farmhouse. The others would be down there, waiting for Mason to return. He’d need to be quiet and quick. And unflinching.

It was gruesome work, but necessary. If not for his sake, then for Cathy’s. He heard the noise of the radio from below. It would give him some cover. Quietly, trying to mute the squeaks of the hinges and the creaks of the floorboards, Doctor Phadley pulled the attic room door shut. On the other side of the door, now, was simply a collection of still lab equipment, a tidy cot he’d slept on, a few changes of clothing, and one small, still-smoking cheroot cigar, slowly fizzling from both ends.