Made with AI trained only on my own artwork. The honest story of how, and why →
“It’s a check.”
“I know it’s a check, Telly. I’ve got eyes.”
“I’m just saying, it’s a really big check.”
Freak stood in the middle of the garage floor holding the envelope like it might go off. Nibbles had already abandoned whatever she was soldering, candy bar forgotten mid-bite in one hand, craning over his shoulder to read the number twice.
“That’s not a number,” she said. “That’s a phone number wearing a business suit.”
“It’s from the Trench brothers’ people,” Freak said. “Signed. Cleared. Actual money, in an actual bank, with our actual name on it.”
Tumbler didn’t look up from the vise he was tightening.
“Congratulations,” he said. “Now put it away before you drop grease on it.”
Nobody in that garage had ever seen a check that size in their whole lives combined, and it showed.
Telly kept picking it up off the workbench like it might have changed while he wasn’t looking. Nibbles had gone quiet, which for Nibbles meant something had actually landed. Even Tumbler, three decades a welder and allergic to being impressed by anything, kept glancing over at it between passes of his torch.
“You’re gonna stare a hole through that paper,” Freak said.
“I’m making sure it’s real,” Telly said. “Last time somebody told me good news, it was a landlord telling me the good news was I only owed him half what he thought.”
“This is different.”
“Everything’s different till it isn’t.”
Freak set the check on the workbench, dead center. lIt was a shrine now and this garage was its church.
“It’s exclusive,” he said. “The Trench brothers gave us their whole mechanical contract. Every S.L.A.G. that rolls through their operation from here out, comes through TNT first.”
“Because of Chuck,” Nibbles said.
“Because of Chuck,” Freak agreed.
There was a pause, the specific kind of pause that happened in that garage anytime somebody said the wizard’s name out loud. Where everybody silently agreed not to ask a single follow-up question.
“You ever gonna ask him how he actually did it?” Telly said.
“Nope.”
“Not even a little curious?”
“I’ve decided,” Freak said, with the solemn tone of a gnome who has genuinely wrestled this decision to the ground, “that whatever Chuck did to make three ex-convict mechanics hand us their whole business, I do not want it explained to me over breakfast. Some blessings you just say thank you for.”
“Smart,” Tumbler grunted.
Freak picked the check back up. Held it a while.
Something was shifting behind his eyes. It always happened right before he started talking with his hands, which everyone in that garage had learned to brace for.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“Uh oh,” said Telly.
“I mean it. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Ever since Chuck delivered on the first part of his promise, before we even knew if the rest of it would hold. I started asking myself... if it did hold, what would I actually do? How would I want this place run?”
Nibbles set her candy bar down entirely, which was practically a wedding vow from Nibbles.
“Freak,” she said slowly, “what did you do?”
“Nothing yet. I’m just saying.” He was pacing now, the good kind of pacing, the kind where his whole body couldn’t keep up with wherever his mouth had already gone. “I couldn’t just keep paying you a wage. Not after this. Not after everything you’ve all put into this place for years, way before there was a check worth staring at.”
“Freak.”
“So I want to make departments,” he said, all in one breath, like it’d get away from him if he slowed down. “Real ones. You each run your own shop, your own crew eventually, your own say in how it’s done. Nibbles, electronics and armor, that’s yours, full stop, nobody touches it without your sign-off. Telly, fabrication and field work. Tumbler...”
“I’m already running my own corner,” Tumbler said. “Been doing it since before you could reach that shelf.”
“Then it’s officially yours. In writing. With a title, even.”
“Don’t want a title.”
“You’re getting one anyway.”
Telly had gone very still, which for Telly was practically a fire alarm.
“Wait,” he said. “Like... in-charge kind of titles?”
“Manager kind of titles,” Freak said.
“Managers?” Telly’s voice cracked clean up an octave. “Like... people who get to tell other people what to do?”
“That’s generally the job, yeah.”
“I’ve never been in charge of anything in my life! I once got fired from folding boxes, ya know. For folding them wrong on purpose out of spite!”
“That was one time,” Nibbles said.
“It was enough to know you gotta have a good boss!”
Nibbles was grinning now. Spreading the way it did right before she said something that’d get quoted back at her for a decade.
“Individual...,” she started, “you mean we get shops of our own? Actual shops? With doors that say our names on them?”
“If you want doors that say your names on them,” Freak said, “I will personally hang the doors.”
“I want a door,” she said immediately. “I’ve wanted a door since I was nineteen.”
“You’ll get a door.”
She let out a squeal that made Tumbler drop his welding helmet down over his face just to hide the grin underneath it.
“Why though,” Telly said, quieter now, the panic settling into something closer to actual thought. “Why give it away? You built this place. It’s your name over the gate.”
Freak stopped pacing.
For a second he looked less like the fat, jolly gnome everyone teased about his coveralls. He looked more like somebody who’d spent a long time turning a question over in the dark before answering it out loud.
“Because I couldn’t have built any of it without you,” he said. “Not the reputation, not the contracts, not the years we all ate cold soup together waiting on parts orders that never showed. You’re not employees. You never were, not really, not to me.”
He looked around the garage. Grease-stained walls. A workbench that had eaten more knuckles than it had fixed machines. Three gnomes who’d stood in this exact spot with him through every version of broke this business had ever been.
“You’re family,” Freak said. “And family gets a say. Not a wage. A say.”
Nobody said anything for a second.
Tumbler flipped his welding helmet back up.
“That’s real nice,” he said, “and if we don’t get that flying rig finished by Thursday, none of it’s gonna matter, so somebody hand me the torch back before this becomes a hugging thing.”
“It was already a hugging thing,” Nibbles said, and hugged him anyway, torch and all.
Later, once the check had been walked to the bank by all four of them together, because nobody trusted a piece of paper that large to travel unescorted. Freak stood alone a minute at the garage door, reading the little brass plate he’d already ordered before he’d told anybody a single word of the plan.
TNT ... TOP NOTCH TEAM.
Departments coming soon. Ask any manager.
He grinned at it like a gnome who’d just gotten away with something.
Then he went back inside, because a flying S.L.A.G. wasn’t going to weld itself, promotions or not. Tumbler was already hollering that somebody better get back to work before the moment officially wore off.
