The Mad Ophelias: Chapter 13
⋈ Sometime in the past.
Previously on TMO: Wil realized that he was not only interviewing the MadHatter, but that she also subscribes to an extremist theory that men are an inferior species, and at this point, obsolete. Meanwhile, post-gun range, Ophelia has taken SlyDevil down the stairs of her office to show her what she inherited.
DOESN’T TAKE LONG to pull all the nails out of the plywood over the door. A half-ass job, but the sign is just for show, something to ward off Doug or one of my co-workers if they ever bothered to come down. Bend down, pick up an old brick. Key is stuck to the bottom with duct tape. I pull it free and carefully place the brick back down on the floor. Don’t want the dust to show it’s been disturbed.
“Your security’s a little low-tech,” says SlyDevil. Her voice sounds tinny.
“Low-tech is reliable.” I wipe sweat from my brow with the back of my hand. Weird, because we’re below ground and the air is cool. Takes a try to get the key in the lock—my eyes are fuzzy—then a hard twist, then there’s a click, and I push down on the handle. Door opens with a grinding creak.
“This part used to be an old electrical substation. They just built the offices on top and left it.” The stale air smells of mildew and damp concrete.
“So you guys use it for storage?”
“No one else knows it’s here.” First thing I did after landing the job was pull the plans as Janet—exits, ducts, permits—but it’d just been labeled ‘basement.’ Couldn’t believe my luck when I saw what it was.
I reach for the switch on the wall. A dim light bulb hanging from a cord comes on—it’s connected to a deep-cycle battery that I swap out every two weeks.
SlyDevil steps up behind me and peers in. “Whoa.”
It’s a cavernous space, roughly the size of a warehouse. Hulking, rusted lockers, a massive rotary converter with rivets the size of a person’s head. A giant wheel leans sideways like it fell over sometime in the last century. Overhead wooden beams that might have been hewn with axes. Ducts covered with a thick layer of dust and cobwebs.
“You know what your story reminds me of?”
My jaw tightens. Fuck, she’s my ride. I cast a look sideways. Her face is still. Unreadable.
But I have the light.
“What I want to show you is at the back.” I carefully step into the substation. “And keep an eye on the floor. Easy to trip.”
I listen for her footsteps, to see if she follows, stays in the doorway, or tries to make her way back up the stairs.
She follows. “God, it’s so quiet down here.”
I don’t want her to figure it out before I tell her. The media made me too neat. Clean. The Prepper Princess. “Had to be quiet. This place used to convert AC from the grid to DC for streetcars. Rotary converters are really noisy. So they made the walls thick. Then the converters were replaced by mercury-arc rectifiers. Then the mercury-arc rectifiers were replaced by solid-state rectifiers. Smaller. More efficient. Quiet.”
My father watching me wire a car battery for the first time in the bunker. The thrill when the motor turned. Then the sparks that burnt a hole through my flannel shirt. Learned something, didn’t you. Current doesn’t care.
“Seattle shut it down when they changed from streetcars to buses right before WWII. Thought they’d save money on infrastructure. Too expensive to maintain the tracks, the lines. Or haul out the machinery. So they just left it to rot. Dug up the steel tracks and sold them for scrap.”
Christ, as soon as I get a word out, more come. Like floodwaters seeping under a door.
SlyDevil pauses next to an equipment bank with frozen dials and cracked glass knobs, entranced. Tucks the crowbar under her arm and pulls her cell phone out to take a picture.
“Don’t!” My arm darts out and grabs her wrist. “I mean, it’ll log the location.”
“So what? This place top secret or something?”
I swallow, let her wrist go. “Just…could I just show you something first?”
“For the love of all that’s holy, you’re being super weird.”
“I know, I know I’m being super…weird. Just…it’ll make sense. It’s just over there.”
She stares at me and doesn’t pocket the cell phone. Does the bus run this late at night?
And then after. I can’t even think about after. Because outside of my cat, the closest thing I have to anyone is SlyDevil, Eyasi, RoskHill, OddsBots, and Vajrapani. And MadHatter.
Even MadHatter.
“For fuck’s sake.” SlyDevil sticks the phone in her back pocket. “Why am I the one who always has to deal with everyone’s shit? You’re acting like a fucking student tonight.”
No one she complains more about than her students. When they need a ride, or a recommendation, or a place to crash. Never stops her though.
We reach the back of the room, five concrete steps down to a thick, metal door. Looks like it was salvaged from a World War I bunker with a thick metal handle. A rusting padlock secures it. Pick up another brick—this one’s fake and the key’s inside.
Little shake in my hand again, but I get it out. “Here, hold this.” I hand SlyDevil the light. Slip the key in the lock. Dark presses in on me, my lungs.
When he told me they were gone, I didn’t understand, not at first. Gone to the store? Gone to the library? But they were gone gone. Gone underground. He was gone too, just still walking around. Face got tight. Hard. Then mine did too.
What would it have been like if they hadn’t gone? If I’d gotten the eggs? Or my tantrum had lasted five more minutes, so the car hit someone else? I picture this other me, in a normal apartment, with normal friends, a boyfriend maybe. I didn’t think people like this were real at first. That they’d never sorted through dried black-eyed peas to pull out the ones that’d gone moldy. Thought everyone was putting on a face, like me.
I push open the door. It scratches against the concrete floor. Waxy smell of cosmoline. Smoke in my hair and the Johnnie on my breath and it’s like he’s standing inside, in a dark corner, watching.
Hiya pops.
I turn to SlyDevil and my eyes are actually watery. “Hand me the crowbar.”
Solemnly, she does.
I use the hook part of the crowbar to catch a chain that turns on the bulb that’s connected to another deep-cycle battery. But it’s low. Haven’t swapped it out recently. So the light is barely there.
SlyDevil sweeps the flashlight around the storeroom. 20x30. It’d been rat heaven when I first broke in. Lots of soggy, old files to shred for nests. They’d made their way in through the duct vent cover that had fallen off and it took a few weeks to trap them after I’d fixed it. A month to haul out all the paper, two trash bags at a time. Then unloading the crates from the white, unmarked moving van. Stack them up against the walls, and in the center of the storeroom, with just enough space to walk around.
She lets the beam linger on the stuffed doe head hanging on the wall. My first kill. “It was a movie.”
“I know.” I walk over to the closest crate and put the hook of the crowbar under the lid. Give it a heave to lift it, then grab the nail puller. “What do you remember about it?”
“Well…it was about this teenage girl.”
I yank out the nail, then walk to another corner of the crate. My cheeks are hot, flush.
“She was raised by this nutty prepper dad somewhere on the East Coast, and he was totally paranoid. Thought the government was after them. Didn’t let her go to school. Getting ready for the apocalypse, that kind of thing. And oh god, there was this horrific scene with a pressure cooker bomb and a rabbit.”
That part was true. I had to pick out all the nails and BBs from its flesh before tossing it to the Rottweiler. I pull up on the lid, then pry out the nail.
SlyDevil walks to the other side of the room, looking upward. “The father gets sick. Chest pain or something. And the girl, well, she’s convinced that he’s been poisoned. She’s on high alert. Patrolling the property, setting booby traps, and all that. Then a mailman, well, he’s new and doesn’t know that this is a house where you just stick the mail in the box and run. He’s got a package and doesn’t want to leave it by the side of the road, so he drives on up. She shoots at him, gets him in the arm. And there’s a two-day standoff with the FBI.”
Another side of the crate. Another nail. This one’s rusty and doesn’t want to come out.
“Well. They’re thinking it’s some terrorist faction because it’s a nonstop barrage, so they wind up firebombing it. When she comes out, dragging her father, they assume she was a hostage or something. Officers rush to her. She grabs one of their guns and almost shoots one in the head. Was looking at doing some serious time, but got off because of the testimony of a clinical psychiatrist who said she’d been forced into a delusion. Didn’t know right from wrong.”
Hated that woman. Painted nails that always matched her shirt. Soft, wispy breath. Takes a little effort to fully dislodge the lid.
“Used to get at least one audition every year with that monologue where the girl cries on the stand. Based on a true story.”
I reach into the crate and brush away the sawdust. Lift out the AR-15. Perfect condition. “Thing is…I did know right from wrong. Making my father proud of me was more important. The story you saw. That’s what they wanted to believe. When he died in the hospital, I didn’t care.”
SlyDevil steps up closer to me, and I can almost feel the warmth of her body. “I liked the farm. It was a knowable world. A contained world. A world I had agency in. Everything was going to go to hell, but we’d be able to handle it. We knew things regular people didn’t. That’s a powerful drug.”
She places a hand on my shoulder and I don’t know what to do.
Rub my fingers over the barrel. “Never told the police about the bunker under the barn. He always said keep your good shit close. Took me forever to transport it all. Got another AR-15, ammo cans, grenades, blasting caps, det cord. I think I have a couple of hazmat suits but the filters in the gas masks need changing. Then there are rifles, shotguns, a dozen or so handguns, and some seriously nice hunting knives. Good for wetwork. MREs, water purification tablets, potassium iodide, antibiotics, trauma kits, meds that have probably expired. Gold coins. Silver coins. Cash.”
SlyDevil doesn’t say anything. Maybe she’ll be the one to call the police. Maybe that’d be the right thing to do.
“This is it. All that’s left of my family.”
She looks at me, the crates, lets the beam of light fall on the AR-15. Lets it stay there.
“Jesus Christ,” she finally says. “You are one seriously fucked up, broken person.”
“I am. I really am.”
“But then,” says SlyDevil, “these are seriously fucked up, broken times.”
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© 2026 J. Lincoln Fenn. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction published as a serialized novel on Substack. No part of this work may be reproduced, reposted, or distributed in any form without the author’s prior written permission. First publication rights reserved by the author.
Stunning chapter! It was super grounded. I was there for every step, smell, and memory. I love chapters like this one, where it’s actually a very small amount of time that passes, but because you interject the memories into it, the chapter feels rich with space and time. Great job, J!
at last, Ophelia's backstory! worth the wait.