Baby Teeth (Chapter 8)

Brian finally meets a senior

8.

Dr. Hoover led me back to a small room that had the CAT scan machine. I had only ever seen them in movies, but surmised that it probably looked a great deal like the CAT scan machines in my world. Most things were near-perfect replicas of things in my world. I hadn’t even noticed another brand that wasn’t in my own world after the Jeff Peanut Butter incident. My eyes were constantly shifting around advertisements on billboards and TV shows for something like “Drink Pipsi Cola!” or “Drive the new Moyota Tacoma!”. For the most part, ads for large companies were the same in this world. Car commercials were a bit tough to figure out since I was never a big fan of cars and didn’t take the time to memorize which brands made which models. My job as editor for the news station also entailed making localized versions of national ads. On Tuesday, I received an ad for a “Nissan Maverick” which sounded like something that didn’t exist in my world, but I had no way of double checking that. CAT scan machines, however, would be completely beyond my understanding even in my world. The goddamn thing might as well have been the CERN Supercollider for all I knew.

The doctor got me set up on the table and slid me into the machine like a cadaver going into cold storage. It was truly a weird sensation, but not at all an uncomfortable one. The tube felt a little claustrophobic and I thought of a cartoon where a guy got into a submarine’s torpedo tube and was accidentally launched at an enemy sub. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what cartoon that scene was from, but I felt like I should. It felt like some special knowledge to me that I immortalized in my brain as a child so that I would be able to pull it out even when I was eighty. The question came into my mind of just how much influence the world could have on me if I was there too long. Was the fact that I couldn’t remember the cartoon some sort of indication that I was going to start forgetting everything that wasn’t in the world anymore? Were those memories going to be replaced with their doppelgangers, so much so that I’ll think that I had always been drinking Pipsi Cola and there never existed the same drink with an alternate name in a different reality? Eventually, was I going to forget about that other world at all?

There were a few beeps coming from the control room and a loud sound that seemed to signal the machine was powering down. The whirs of the internal mechanisms started to slow, but the doctor came over the intercom and told me to keep sitting still while the machine wrapped up. After it was quiet for a sufficient amount of time, the machine ejected me and I was allowed to get up and stretch.

“That was great, Brian. You were a great patient. Lots of clear images on our end.” Dr. Hoover said. His voice sounded a bit off from the man who showed me to the imaging room. Granted, I only spoke a few sentences to him as we walked over, but there seemed to be an assuredness or almost even a whimsy in his earlier tone. His voice over the speaker now seemed mechanical or even like he was trying to hide something. “Just sit still, Brian. The machine still has a little radiation going, so we’ll need you to stay in there until it’s time to get you.”

“Radiation?” I said with a small amount of alarm. “Am I being exposed to a large amount?”

“No! No, not at all. The amount of radiation exposure you receive for one CAT scan is inconsequential. We don’t go in there right away because we do multiple of them a day. That could really rack up over the years, if we’re not careful.” He laughed awkwardly, then took his finger away from the speaker button mid-laugh.

“Okay, cool.” I said, then thought of Carl’s joke. “Why did the cool guy go to the hospital? Because he was all sick.” The last thing I needed was to get sick. Who even knew if radiation still behaved in the same way in this universe as it did in mine? Wouldn’t even a slight difference be enough to mutate my cells in horrific ways? How could bacteria and viruses even evolve the same between worlds, or even my ability to fight them? There could be a common cold virus that existed here that I had no defenses against, but even a six-month-old child would have no problem fighting off in this world. Wouldn’t the same be true from all the shit I’m bringing into the world that exists inside my body already? Jesus, fuck, did I bring a simple virus from my world that could possibly endanger millions of people over here?

I told myself to stop spiraling. When I was a child, I was a bit of a hypochondriac. It hadn’t really been a problem since I got to the new world, or since I graduated from college, for that matter. These were rabbit holes that I didn’t want to go down, for fear they would turn out to be flood gates that were just dying to be released. I felt my breath start to get a little too close to hyperventilation, then I realized that the doc was still watching.

“Are you okay, Brian?” Dr. Hoover asked.

“Yes, sorry. I think I just got a little too claustrophobic in the machine. Plus, the thing about radiation was just a little worrisome, but I trust that you’re telling me the truth about it being no big deal.” I talked a little too fast. I choked out the last words of my sentence and realized that I hadn’t taken a breath during that whole response. My lungs instinctively lapped up air like a singer who didn’t know when to take a breath during their big solo.

“Brian. I’m going to ask you a few questions, just to see how your cognitive state is. Is that okay?” I heard the door open behind him and someone try to sneakily enter and close the door without notifying me. The soft click of the latch tipped me off and I thought I heard a shuffling of feet.

“That’s okay, doc. Fire away.” I said. I heard him chuckle before cutting himself off again. “What was that?”

“What? Oh, nothing. Sorry. Just an interesting choice of words.” He responded. “Can you tell me how old you are, Brian?”

“I am forty-four years old.”

“Yes, thank you. And, there is no reason for you to believe that you would be mistaken about your age? No past, undocumented history of memory loss or lost time?”

“Look, doc, if you think I’ve been abducted by aliens before, I get it. I’m a fun guy to be around. I’m sure aliens would love me too.”

There was no laughing on his end. “So, forty-four with no previous history of head trauma… You mentioned to the doctor that saw you after your fall that you lost a ‘baby’ tooth when you hit the ground. What did you mean by that?” Dr. Hoover’s words were starting to feel more like an interrogation than a probe into my medical history.

His mention of baby teeth struck me the wrong way. I knew there was something wrong in the world about teeth, but I didn’t think this trip to the doctor would put me on some sort of list of subversive actors trying to know the truth about adult teeth, or whatever the fuck was going on. Then, I remembered that Carl had asked me about having my jaw imaged as well, just to see if there was nothing wrong with it. They must have had a full image of my own teeth right in front of them and there was something wrong with them. “Uh, I’m fine. Just lost a tooth, but I feel fine about it. I lose baby teeth all the time, actually. No big deal.” I started making my way to the door. “You know, I feel like the radiation has pretty much evaporated and I should really get back home, so why don’t you just call me with the results, okay?” I pushed open the doors to the room and landed right in front of the security guard. His weapon was in his hands, still faced down across his belly. His finger wasn’t on the trigger, but it could be in a heart beat. I looked at the name patch on his chest. It read: RAMIREZ. The patch above it read: SSA.

“Lead the way, Mr. Jeffreys. The doctor can’t read your results in the hallway.” Ramirez said monotonally.

“Right. That’s gotta be a HIPAA violation, right?” I gulped.

“Oh yeah. Big one.” He gestured with the tip of his gun to walk in front of him. I did as I was told. The gun looked like it had big enough bullets to rip me apart with one shot. We had done a piece once at my old station on the difference between specially-tipped bullets used in gang warfare. Some of the bullets were outright illegal to buy as a civilian. Some of them could explode massive chunks of your body even with a low caliber. It was just the way the bullet was designed to break apart once it struck something. The gun that Ramirez carried was not only massive, but it looked like it could carry more extreme types of ammunition that I could never imagine.

I walked down the hall until Ramirez made me stop. He swiped a security badge into a card reader, and a green light illuminated above the door. An electronic lock disengaged - this time much heavier than the one in the glass box at the clinic’s entrance. Ramirez made me walk in first and I could feel his finger inching closer to the trigger with every step we took. I had the terrifying feeling like he was going to shoot me in the back of the head like when Joe Pesci’s character was murdered in Goodfellas. My neck tensed up and I even winced with every step that I took inside of the room, but Ramirez never raised his gun at me. I looked behind me and saw Ramirez pulling the door shut, which automatically engaged the lock.

The room was decently large and droll. The walls were a light grey and there were more glass boxes like the ones out front. They were lined along the back wall, which was made of brick. The three walls not pressing against the glass boxes were made of some other material that seemed like drywall, but I figured there was something much stronger just beneath the surface. Nobody was supposed to break in or out of this room. It looked like the combination between a community rec center’s gym and an animal shelter. The jury was still out if I was going to be the one put to sleep.

The lock disengaged on the door and Dr. Hoover walked through. Before, he was wearing a stereotypical, white lab coat, but now it was gone and the blue button-down shirt he was wearing had the sleeves rolled up like he meant business. The doctor didn’t seem like some random lab rat that spent his many years in college in the library. His arms were muscular and absolutely busting the seams of his shirt. I felt like if I saw both Dr. Hoover and Ramirez at the gym, I wouldn’t be able to tell which one was the soldier. “Fuck.” I thought. “Maybe they were both soldiers.”

“Brian Jeffreys.” Dr. Hoover pulled out a chart. “I’m tracking your Wellness Journey here and I can’t seem to find any records of your teeth from the past five years. That’s odd, Ramirez. Don’t you think?”

“Yes sir, I do.” Ramirez tightened his grip on the gun.

“Now, you aren’t mandated to get your teeth screened until you turn fifty, but most people your age are a little antsy to figure out the age of their teeth and do it anyway. After all - it’s free. Why wouldn’t you let your curiosity get the best of you and have a little check?”

“I… Uh -” I stammered.

“Curiousity killed the cat, I suppose. Sometimes, adults such as yourself don’t get their teeth checked because it’s basically like telling them a rough estimate of when they’re going to retire. Is that why you haven’t checked?” Dr. Hoover started moving toward me.

“Uh, yeah. That’s it. Why would anyone want to know that?” I tried to laugh, but it came off incredibly fake. I wasn’t fooling anyone in the room about my intentions. Hell, I didn’t even know my intentions. The Me in this world had refused to let himself get a teeth screening. That led to an even bigger question that I hadn’t even thought about - did I take over this body or was there another Brian Jeffreys running around this world?

“I hear ya.” Dr. Hoover laughed. “I mean - we’re the ones that do those checks, so this kind of work is tough. It reminds you of your mortality every single day. Shit, we even see some people who come in and realize they’re on their last set, then they go home and get their affairs in order before blowing their brains out all over the garage. It’s a terrible thing to see. You, Brian…” He laughed again, hitching up his pants and cracking his neck like he was about to finally get to work. “You’re not one of those guys. You’re one of the other ones, aren’t ya?”

I took a step back, but Ramirez aimed his gun up just a little to send me a message and I stopped. “I don’t know what you mean. I swear to god, I don’t. I’m not from around here and everything is all just a little new and confusing.” I instinctively raised my hands in surrender.

“I forgot! That was in your chart too. You’re not from around here. I know the cult hasn’t spread to the East Coast quite yet, but let me give you a little history lesson. The last presidential administration came out hard against this new cult down in Mexico called ‘Dientes del Muerte’ or ‘Teeth of Death’. Now, once the President was shot it quickly came out that the whole thing was a racist dog whistle against a fake cult in order to promote tougher immigration laws. The idea of the cult was brought over stateside and now we actually have some fools out there who devote their lives to bringing on an early retirement. They pull their baby teeth out until their adult ones are forced to come through.”

“Sick fucks.” Ramirez interjected.

“Agreed. Now, you come here to an SSA clinic for a head scan and we ‘accidentally’ scan your jaw and see that you only have one set of babies left. Now, what are we supposed to think about you, being a forty-four year-old man on his last set of teeth when the youngest known person to ever get a set of natural adult teeth was sixty-five? Does that seem right to you?” Dr. Hoover had somehow towered himself over me without me even noticing.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ramirez disengage his safety. “What the fuck?” I said - unable to articulate. “What the actual fuck?”

“That’s all that we want to know. What the fuck? What the fuck were you thinking? Pulling out your own teeth to force the change - now that is fucked up logic.”

Dr. Hoover said in a clinical, infuriatingly neutral tone.

“I - I told you that I’m not from here and I meant it. I’m from another place - another world. A parallel reality. You watch scifi, right? It’s a common concept. It happened - I am proof that it happened!”

Dr. Hoover and Ramirez shared a look of disbelief, then they shared a laugh. Ramirez finally brought his gun up to his shoulder and aimed it at me. “Say the word, Sir. I’ll give him his early retirement.”

“Oh god!” I held my hands in front of my face, even though I knew those bullets were meant for hunting big game and I stood no chance to survive even one of them.

“Hold on, Ramirez.” Dr. Hoover said. “Maybe I can get through to him.” Dr. Hoover took out the printed CAT scan image of my jaw. He brought it up to chin level and started explaining like he were an ordinary doctor talking to a patient, and not like a government agent who held that patient’s life in his hands. “If you see here, you’ll notice a little gap in your tooth line. That’s where your last baby tooth fell out. Now, as long as you stop pulling out your own teeth and allow them to fall out naturally, a person your age can last about six-to-ten months before losing the remaining teeth. After that, your adults would come in and we’d be retiring you anyway.” Dr. Hoover chuckled to himself. “Now, what we do at this clinic is we take people who are on the cusp of becoming seniors - usually around age sixty-five - and we put them under strict observation in our retirement community next door. But you, my dear friend, have presented us with an amazing opportunity. If you would like, we could shoot you in the head and be done with it. Would you like that?”

My face went cold and focused. “No. I would not like that. What is the alternative?”

“I’m so glad that you asked, Brian. You are going to go home, get up in the morning, go to work, stop pulling your own teeth out, and generally live your normal life. In the meantime, you will be kind of like a secret agent for us. I want you to meet all of your friends in Dientes del Muerte and compile a list for us with their names, addresses, and how many teeth they have left. If you don’t do that, you’ll be dead far faster than you could get those teeth out, plus we’ll have no choice but to pay a visit to your mother Cathy and sister Kristen. Gotta make sure they don’t follow down the same path you’re going. But, you know, my agents get a little trigger-happy sometimes and might not even get them into a clinic alive before they can be scanned. That would be a real shame.”

I clenched my teeth harder than I ever had before and launched myself at Dr. Hoover, but Ramirez shot a round at my feet before I could touch him. The bullet took a large chunk out of the concrete floor. I wanted to kill both of them. They had their wires a little crossed, so I didn’t completely believe they had done extensive research on my family yet. Kristen had been dead for years, but my mother was very much alive. They got her name right, so I was sure they could track down her address easily enough and kill her before she even had the chance to turn sixty-five and face whatever hell came along with being a “senior”.

“Easy there, muchacho. We can waste your ass right here, if that’s what you would prefer. I’ll still personally go down to Baltimore and put bullets in your family myself. Carl and Ramirez here are always telling me to take a vacation.”

“Stubborn son of a bitch never takes time off.” Ramirez teased Dr. Hoover, with the gun now aimed at center mass. “Shit, even on his vacation he’d would have work to get done!”

“To be fair, Ramirez, killing his family is like thirty minutes right off the plane. The rest of the trip would be lobster rolls and long walks on the beach.” They both started laughing.

“Alright, enough. I’ll do what you want. I’ll spy on the Dientes del Muerte. I’ll give you their information, just please don’t kill my family.” I relented. I finally lowered my hands and Ramirez did the same with his rifle.

Dr. Hoover stepped forward and patted me on the shoulder. “That wasn’t so hard now, was it?” He shot me a smile and in an instant I knew that I would be killing this man before I left his universe. If I had a foolproof way of getting back, then it would technically be a perfect crime. I would get out and would never be caught, but my doppelganger would pay the price. There was no evidence that the Me that lived in this reality deserved to pay for my crimes, so that would have to be something else to investigate.

“Can I go now?” I said with more than enough irritation in my voice for a lifetime.

“Soon.” Dr. Hoover said. “I want you to see something first.” He walked over to the glass box and input a numeric combination on a keypad. Instantly, the floor slid open and an elevator started to sound. “Show him Mr. Lowry, Ramirez. Make him a senior, then retire him.” Ramirez gave a stern nod to the doctor. “And Brian? Make sure to stop by reception on your way out so Carl can give you the info for your follow-up appointment.” Dr. Hoover swiped his keycard in the door and left.

Once the locks re-engaged, I realized that I was alone with a crazy soldier and whatever was coming up through the elevator. Ramirez turned to me. “I fought all over the Middle East. Seniors are hard enough to destroy in the heat of the moment. You sick freaks bringing on the change in middle age are way more dangerous. You remind me of the suicide bombers we’d always be on the lookout for. Only when you all go off, there’s nothing preventing you from doing it again.”

The elevator finally reached the floor level. A small, old man in blue pajamas and an incredibly frail body appeared. I had no idea what was going on, but I felt like I was starting to get some sort of picture from Ramirez’s cryptic speech. “Who is that?” I asked.

“Mr. Lowry.” He replied, then let his weapon hang low as he pulled two, small headsets from his pocket. “Don’t take this off, unless you want to die a whole lot sooner.” He put his headset on. I followed suit. Instantly, I could hear nothing of the outside world. They were the best noise cancelling headphones that I had ever tried. Ramirez knew. He communicated to me by hand signals. He pulled out a small, red button like a buzzer used in game shows. Then, he counted down with his fingers from three. It was a signal I saw used all the time in news production when coming back from a commercial. Ramirez was saying the same thing; everything we had just discussed with the doc had been the break, and we were now returning to the main show.

He pressed the button and Lowry instantly dropped to his knees in pain. He put his hands up to his head like the button was telling some hidden speaker to release a high-pitched tone that only he could hear. I half-expected Lowry’s head to explode, but what happened was much worse. His teeth - his goddamn teeth started to fall out of his head. It was like whatever noise was being emitted was pushing the teeth out of his head. Once all of them were out, he screamed in pain as if more were coming. He was done with baby teeth, however. What was coming in was his adult teeth.

Ramirez took our headsets off just as the sides of Lowry’s lips started to split and his jaw unhinged. His lips receded completely back as his gumline jutted forward a couple of inches as if they were trying to punch free from his face. His lips continued to curl upward until his top lip was up to his nose. The nose then melted off of his face to expose his nasal cavities. His septum disappeared and left only a large hole where his nose used to be. Mucus began pouring out, either that or it was puss from some unknown infection that was ripping through his body. The entire time he was screaming in agony. There was something mixed in with the pain. It was… Laughter. Deep, guttural laughter that felt like Lowry was throwing his voice inside of his own soul.

Lowry pounded the floor and his hand instantly split open, exposing a talon-like appendage made from misshapen bone. He raised it and the damn thing could actually articulate. He got up, looked at us, and waved his new claw at us. To the senior, we were looking more like a meal with each change. I saw that the small, weak man was rapidly growing in size. His muscles were becoming more defined and freakishly large. It had been only a minute since he started transforming and he had already grown larger than Ramirez. “That’s what the huge gun was for.” I thought to myself as I watched the man grow. His muscles weren’t growing equal in size all over his body. There didn’t seem to be any reason for which parts of his body grew more muscle. I could see the uneven growth in various parts of his body, but every single muscle group took on a large amount of mass by the time the change was complete.

Finally, the man stood up and marveled at his new body. The muscle growth had stopped just in time for his head to expand outward in a lumpy growth. It literally happened with a pop - like the reverse of the explosive decompression that happens when a submarine is crushed in an instant by the deep ocean. I almost vomited, but I kept it in. When his teeth came in, though, that’s when I lost my shit. Two rows of teeth pushed themselves forward on the top and bottom of the man’s new, monstrous mouth. Blood gushed forth with each tooth. These looked nowhere near a human tooth or any other tooth I had ever seen in an animal. They were sharp, conical, predatory teeth that were made exclusively for piercing and ripping. They were long, too. Far too long for comfort. Just one of the teeth could have stabbed completely through a thigh. The oversized jaw looked like it could bite a person’s head off if they were unlucky enough to get their head directly in its mouth. This senior citizen was a killing machine. That I knew for certain.

“Get an eyeful yet?” Ramirez said with the hint of a laugh.

“I didn’t know this was possible.” I spoke without even realizing it. For the time being, I was completely dead inside. I wondered how something like this could be possible, but I was in it now. It was only a matter of time before I found out everything.

“You Civies don’t know it’s possible because we keep it from you. I don’t like that we do it because you all forget so damn easily in a decade or two. It’s not speculation - just history. Then, some dipshits like you and your boys at the Dientes del Muerte get it in your heads to turn yourself into these things early, except what you become is way worse and way harder to contain.” Ramirez walked up to the glass box, typed a short sequence into the keypad, and fire instantly filled the box. Lowry screamed for a few seconds, then died in the inferno. “All you need to do is work with us. After we get your buddies, you’ll come back here and we’ll make you extremely comfortable in your final days. When you’re ready, we’ll euthanize you peacefully with drugs. We’re not the bad guys, Brian. We’re just trying to protect people.”

I looked at the burning corpse of the old man who had become a monster. The SSA said they weren’t the bad guys, yet nobody was allowed to talk about what really happened to seniors when they lost their teeth. Ramirez said he could euthanize someone before they turned into one of those things, but why did he have one on standby just to intimidate me and show me the real stakes of the mission? Why the big gun? Why did he even have a button designed specifically to trigger someone’s teeth to fall out? I had gotten myself thrust right into the middle of the big mystery of this world. The most important question I had to figure out was if I brought my own body into the world, or if I had merged bodies with my twin. If I brought my own body that meant I brought my own teeth and might be immune to the curse of old age. If I had somehow become my parallel self, then maybe he was a member of this cult, and he had been pulling his teeth out to make himself into a weapon of domestic terrorism. Either way, if I wanted to survive, I would have to play the SSA’s game and find Dientes del Muerte.

“What do you say?” Ramirez asked as he put out his hand toward me. I looked at it for a beat, then shook it. I was making a deal with the devil, but it didn’t seem so bad considering hell was already on Earth.