That evening, a reactivated Puck slid off the slab and wandered alone back to the guest house behind the Stein's big white monstrosity of a house.
How could they have left her alone?
She hated the house.
She hated the town.
She hated the Steins. (Especially their daughter, Frankie.) to the point that Puck wanted to get the Hell out, taking Uncle Mike and her twin, Maggie, with her.
(Raina could do whatever the Hell she wanted. The big clumsy ballerina was somebody from Uncle Mike's life before he became theirs. Uncle Mike said he loved all of them, but Puck could tell that he loved Raina most of all, which really pissed Puck off – especially when Raina insisted Puck be especially kind to Jeremy the dog, who smelled really bad and drooled a lot and Uncle Mike agreed with her like some stupid sheep.)
Fresh out of long term storage, they'd been paraded in front of a crowd of serious looking adults before Uncle Mike ordered everyone to stuff what spare parts they could fit into their bodies and follow him out of the unaccountably stripped Circus Baby's Pizza World the second nobody was looking
He'd been clearly terrified as he heaved everyone into the back of an idling delivery truck before driving off into the unknown - which was saying a lot: Uncle Mike was a badass.
Somewhere along the way they stole clothes to hide the fact that they weren't human anymore and hadn't been for a long time; that's when Puck's bad spells started.
Puck would puke up rusted parts, black rot, and mildew on the side of the highway, and when finished, they'd move on, tapping into power lines and backyard patio outlets to keep themselves going, the stolen delivery truck abandoned somewhere around Bakersfield in some big box store parking lot.
Sometimes on foot, sometimes hiding in the back of some big truck or hopping a freight, the little group zig-zagged across the country, even dipping into Mexico or up into Canada – following marks in chalk and scratches on the pavement to temporary refuges once Uncle Mike reluctantly admitted that Charlie had hired a very tall man in a suit to hunt them down for scrap.
That was when they broke up into little groups for months at a time, invisible among the homeless and unwanted.
Sometimes it was Uncle Mike and Puck going one way, with Raina and Maggie going the other.
Or Maggie, Puck, and Jeremy.
Or Puck and Raina, and sometimes Jeremy, who didn't seem to care as they took turns sharing an extension cord they'd plugged into some stranger's fence charger or back patio outlet.
Problem was, Uncle Mike was dying.
His massive four-hundred-pound body, draped in stolen clothing, limped; the sockets in his hips and knees grinding audibly with each step as they crossed the country yet again.
The twins had clever hands compared to his clumsy, blunt paws, but the results of poor maintenance and being caught out in the weather too many times were beyond them as he directed them through fixing whatever problem his rapidly failing frame tossed at them – a deterioration that sped up after he realized that the shock collars they'd always worn had some sort of tracking device hardwired into them after Charlie's flunky almost got them first in in Tulsa and then in Philly.
If he could get their collars off and destroy them, they'd be free.
Problem was, the collars were wired directly into their electrical systems. Jeremy had tried to cut his off early in their run. Now he was more dog than the autistic young man he'd started out as.
But if risking another one of them getting fried meant shaking Charlie for good, it was worth it. One night, without bothering to tell Puck and Maggie what he was about to do, Uncle Mike somehow slid his short, clumsy teddy bear fingers under the red band that encircled his thick neck, and yanked — only to go down into a smoking, convulsing heap as a surge of electricity fried him from the inside out.
After that, what was left of Uncle Mike let Puck take over. Following a set of hobo marks that the five of them had never made while watching things unwind in Salem, Oregon from the safe distance of the static of FM radio and stolen newspapers – the three of them joined the underground flow of the unwanted to the northwest after the hidden came out in the open in the shape of a vampire, a werewolf, a mummy, and a… whatever Frankie Stein was. Frankie called herself a 'Synth'. Puck called her a whiny white bitch.
(So what if she was green.)
On the final stretch, Puck hotwired a truck they'd found abandoned on a rural highway and with Maggie in the seat beside her, taught herself to drive on the final hundred mile stretch to Salem while Uncle Mike lay inert under a tarp, a blankly staring heap of broken plastic and steel.
Oh sure, once they got over their shock at the mess that landed on their doorstep, Viktor and Vivica Stein had been kind, but Puck wasn't sure if she liked what they'd done to Uncle Mike by making him human (almost) again – using a dog-eared picture of their protector in a Marine Corps dress uniform, muscular arm around a laughing, human Raina from a long time ago and far, far away as a template — with Puck and Maggie, who had murdered him not long after the picture had been taken, nowhere in sight.
This made Puck, who barely remembered that murder, uncomfortable as she and Maggie took turns like Uncle Mike had taught them, watching the Steins didn't try anything funny as they crafted him a new body from his old, burned out one until Raina and Jeremy the dog joined them, making their prickly found family complete.
This morning had gone totally down the crapper when after a day spent cleaning up after a remodeling by Wolf and Sons, Contractors, Uncle Mike had driven them all back to the lab and firmly ordered a retching Puck onto the slab for repairs because enough was enough with the rest of the family including Raina, backing him up.
Angrily, Puck complied, trusting that he'd not let the Steins change her the way they'd changed him.
She barely recognized Uncle Mike now, square face restored, blue eyes no longer painted on, and jaw realigned.
With a body that passed for human as long as he wore clothes.
A body that no longer needed Puck or Maggie's help to keep going.
A body that could carry Uncle Mike far away from them, leaving Puck and her twin alone in the dark once again.
Like they had tonight.
Ears and tail sagging, the cat-girl animatronic that had once been a star of Circus Baby Pizza World's main stage, slunk dejected through the door and into the little guest house, slamming her new bedroom door shut and searching for her power cord as her sister Maggie, a transitional mixture of cartoon fox and sixteen year old girl, lay quietly in her usual twisted heap, recharging for tomorrow.