Tommy Was A Dead Eye With A Super Soaker

Back in the summer of ‘93, the sun seemed bigger, the trees taller, and the days just stretched on and on like a rubber band you knew was gonna snap. We lived for Saturday morning cartoons—Ninja Turtles, X-Men, and that weird claymation show that always made Frankie laugh. My world was a patchwork of cornfields, gravel roads, and the kind of freedom you only get when your mom’s too busy with laundry to keep track of you. We’d guzzle cans of Surge, trade baseball cards on the porch, and argue about whether Michael Jordan or Ken Griffey Jr. was the real GOAT.

That was the year Tommy Grady moved to Birch Lane, right after school let out. He came from somewhere upstate, dragging a cardboard box stuffed with He-Man toys and a beat-up Sega Genesis. His dad worked at the grain elevator and looked like he’d been carved out of an old tractor tire; his mom never smiled much, always staring off at something none of us could see. Tommy was an only child, and his clothes never seemed to fit quite right—always a little too big or a little too small.

You probably know the type: bowl cut, grass stains on both knees, a grin that said “I dare you.” But with Tommy, there was something else. He didn’t talk much about where he came from, but sometimes, if the porch light was just right and we were all laying on our backs watching the stars blink on, he’d tell us about his old school and how he got in trouble for fighting. “It wasn’t my fault,” he’d say, but never explain what started it.

Tommy’s folks didn’t have much, so when he showed up on the first day of summer with a brand-new Super Soaker 100—neon green, with the pressure tank and that wicked yellow nozzle—we all thought he must have robbed a bank. He just grinned, pumped it up, and let loose on Frankie before anybody could blink. I mean, you gave Tommy a Super Soaker, and it was like handing Annie Oakley a pair of Colts.

We called ourselves the Birch Lane Bandits—me, Tommy, Jess, and little Frankie, who was always two steps behind and three steps louder than the rest of us. That summer, our turf was the stretch of road between the Johnson farm and the old Miller barn, a no-man’s land of dandelions, wasp nests, and the kind of mud that sucked your sneakers right off your feet.

Every Saturday morning, after cartoons and before the heat really set in, we’d meet up in Tommy’s backyard. His mom would bring out popsicles and say, “Don’t shoot your eye out, boys,” like we were packing Red Ryders instead of neon plastic water guns. She always loved saying lines from that movie while sucking on a marlboro.

But Tommy—man, he was something else. He’d fill up that Super Soaker with cold hose water, pump it till it whined, and then pick us off one by one from behind the old oak, never wasting a drop. Jess used to say he had “dead-eye DNA.” Even grown-ups noticed. Old man Johnson grumbled, “That kid’s gonna be a sniper one day,” which made Tommy’s dad laugh and Tommy’s mom frown.

I wish I could tell you those were just lazy, golden days, the kind that fade sweetly in your memory like the last notes of a summer song. But you asked about me about Tommy, and the thing you need to know is: nobody stays a kid forever.

By the time we hit middle school, we’d swapped our Super Soakers for BB guns and started talking about girls instead of G.I. Joes. But Tommy—he never really put the water gun down. He’d tinker with it, make it shoot farther, faster, colder. He was obsessed in that quiet way some kids are, the kind that makes you a little uneasy when you catch them staring too long at the way a stream carves through mud.

Looking back now, I wonder if we should’ve seen it coming. The way he’d smile when he soaked someone right in the face, the way he’d keep pumping after everyone else was laughing and begging for mercy. But we were just kids. And Tommy was just our friend.

It was the Fourth of July when things really shifted. The whole neighborhood came out for the annual block party—Mrs. Miller’s potato salad, sparklers in the driveway, and the long, slow sunset that made everything gold. We kids, high on watermelon,soda pop, hotdogs and freedom, started our usual Super Soaker war. Tommy had tricked out his gun again, this time with a double-pumped blast that could drench a kid from half a football field away. He looked like he belonged in a cartoon, the way he darted and spun, never missing, never even aiming for just shirts or shorts—he always went for the face or the crotch.

Jess got mad that year. He stormed off after Tommy nailed him right in the ear, left him sputtering and red-eyed. “That lil Shit head don’t know when to quit,” Jess said, kicking up a cloud of dust as he left. I tried to laugh it off, but in the back of my mind, I started to wonder.

Thing is, Tommy always played to win. By the end of that night, as fireworks crackled overhead and the grown-ups sang “God Bless America,” Tommy was the last one standing, his Super Soaker resting on his shoulder like a soldier’s rifle. The easy grin he'd once worn had all but vanished.

The next summer, Birch Lane started to change. The Johnsons moved to Omaha, the Miller barn collapsed in a terrible thunderstorm, and Jess’s parents split up, so he spent most weekends in town. It was mostly just me and Tommy, riding our bikes down to the old creek, talking about nothing and everything.

Now one day, we found a dead raccoon by the water’s edge. Tommy crouched down, poked it with a stick, and just stared. “You ever wonder what it’s like?” he asked. “To just… stop moving?” I shrugged, uneasy, and kicked a stone into the water. Tommy squinted at the animal for another minute, then stood up, dusted off his knees, and walked away. After that, things between us felt different—like I was always one step behind, never quite sure what he was thinking. The way he looked at that racoon stayed with me.

High school came, and our little world got bigger. Frankie moved away, Jess joined the football team, and I got a job at the hardware store. Tommy didn’t really fit in anywhere. He’d show up at school with new bruises, say he fell off his bike or got hit playing ball, but nobody ever saw him with a team. He kept to himself, mostly, tinkering with whatever he could find in his dad’s shed.

He still carried that old Super Soaker, now patched and painted, the plastic faded from a hundred afternoons in the sun. It was a joke to some of the other kids, but Tommy would just smile that tight, lopsided smile and let the laughter roll off his back.

One afternoon, I caught him behind the gym, fiddling with a strange, heavy bottle. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Just making it stronger,” he said, not looking up.

I told myself it was nothing. Just Tommy being Tommy. But that night, lying in bed, I couldn’t get the image out of my head—the Super Soaker, the bottle, Tommy’s strange, empty eyes.

Years passed. We graduated, scattered. Jess went to college, Frankie joined the Navy, and I stuck around, helping my dad fix up old tractors and dreaming about getting out. Tommy drifted through town, working odd jobs, always on the edge of things. Folks whispered about him—said he was odd, said he was mean. I think most people just plain forgot about him.

But I never did. Not really.

And when the news started coming in—about the animals found dead, about the strange, burning smell down by the creek—I thought of Tommy. I don’t know why, not at first. Maybe it was just the way he looked at the world, like it was a target and he was always lining up a shot.

Then, last summer, the sheriff showed up at my door. Big burley looking guy, with a badge that looked too shiny for our little town. “You know a man named Thomas Grady?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yessir, We grew up together.”

He looked at me for a long time before he spoke again. “We found something out at the old Miller place. Some kind of… weapon. Looked homemade. And we found this.” He held up a battered Super Soaker, stained and cracked, but unmistakable.

I felt my stomach drop. All those years, all those summers—it all came flooding back. The water fights, the long bike rides, the way Tommy never missed.

“He’s gone,” the sheriff said. “Disappeared. We’re still looking.” If you see him, You let us know.”

After the sheriff left, I couldn’t sleep for days. I kept thinking about that battered Super Soaker, about the way Tommy’s eyes used to narrow when he was lining up a shot. At first, it was just a bad feeling, like a storm hanging out past the horizon. But then the reports started piling up—stories whispered at the hardware store, in line at the diner, anywhere folks thought nobody official was listening.

A kid from two towns over came back from the creek with nasty burns up and down his arms. Said he’d seen a man in the trees, watching and holding something long and bright green. The doctors said it was chemical—like acid, they guessed. Old Mrs. Carter’s dog turned up dead, fur eaten away in patches, eyes gone milky. She cried so hard at the feed store the clerk locked the doors early.

The grown-ups told us to stay inside after dark, but I’d already stopped going out much. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Tommy’s skinny silhouette, standing at the edge of the cornfield, Super Soaker dangling from one hand, the other clutching a plastic jug.

I thought about calling Jess, but he was gone—off at college, living in a world where this kind of thing didn’t happen. Not really. Frankie sent a postcard from somewhere out west, said he was doing fine, said he didn’t miss much about home. I wanted to write back, to tell him everything, but what could I say? “Hey, remember Tommy and the Super Soaker wars? He’s gone bad. Real bad.”

Yup, The town changed after that. People started locking their doors, keeping their kids close. The sheriff set up patrols, but Birch Lane felt hollow. I watched it all from behind the counter at the store, fixing screen doors and selling fertilizer, waiting for some sign that Tommy was really gone—or that he was coming back.

Then one night, just as summer slipped into fall, I heard it. A hiss, soft and steady, like a snake in the grass. I looked out my window and saw a shadow moving through the yard, slow and careful. My heart hammered in my chest as I grabbed the old baseball bat from beside the door and crept outside.

The moon was full, silvering the world in that way it does when everything’s about to change. And there he was—Tommy. Taller, leaner, hair longer and tangled, but still Tommy. He wore a threadbare jacket and boots caked with mud. In his hands: the Super Soaker, gleaming wet under the moonlight, and a jug with a yellow warning label.

He saw me and smiled, not the old lopsided grin but something colder. “Hey, Mark,” he said, voice low. “Remember how we used to play?”

My mouth went dry. “Tommy… what in the 9 rings of hells are you doin?”

He shrugged, eyes flickering to the house, the barn, back to me. “World’s a different place now. People don’t look at you unless you make ‘em. I always liked being noticed.”

I took a shaky step back. “ive heard that You hurt people, Tommy. You gotta stop this nonsense.”

He looked at the Super Soaker, turning it in his hands. “It’s just a tool, Mark. Like anything.” He squeezed the trigger, sending a thin stream of clear liquid into the grass. It sizzled, the smell sharp and chemical, burning my nose.

“That’s not water Tommy, Now what in the hells is it? Tommy Is that Acid?” I managed, my voice barely more than a whisper.

He grinned wider. “It hasn’t been water for a long time Mark.”

I wanted to run, to scream, to do something, but all I could do was stand there and remember the way things used to be. The lazy days, the laughter, the way we thought summer would last forever.

Tommy turned and walked into the field, never looking back. I watched him go until the corn swallowed him whole. I had Called the Sheriff on my phone, But he never came back. I had heard that the sheriff’s car tires had melted to the road.

I never saw Tommy for a long time after that night.

The years rolled by, but Tommy’s shadow hung over Birch Lane like a storm cloud that wouldn’t move on. Folks tried to pretend life was normal again, mowing their lawns, repainting their barns, waving as they passed by on tractors or pickup trucks. But you could see it in their eyes—nobody ever really relaxed. Not after Tommy.

The sheriff’s deputies kept busy, chasing ghost stories and chemical scares. A hay bale blackened overnight in the Petersons’ field, a row of corn withered to nothing, leaves burnt and brittle. Sometimes someone swore they saw a lone figure walking the backroads at dusk, something bright and plastic glinting at his side. But nobody ever got close. Nobody wanted to.

I kept mostly to myself, working long hours, fixing things that didn’t really need fixing. Every so often, I’d get a letter from Jess—he had a wife and a mortgage now, two states away. Frankie called once from a payphone in Montana, his voice thin with distance and static. We talked about the old days, but neither of us mentioned Tommy. It was like we’d made a silent pact: the past could stay buried, as long as nothing dug it up.

But Birch Lane remembered. That’s the thing about small towns—memories get passed around like hand-me-downs, growing stranger and scarier every year. Kids dared each other to sneak out to the Miller barn, whispering about “the Acid Man.” Parents warned them to stay away from strangers, especially if they carried anything green.

One summer, a couple of city kids came through, looking for trouble. They laughed at the stories, called us hicks and scaredy-cats, until one of them came sprinting back from the creek, blisters rising on his arms, screaming about a man in the trees with a “melt gun.” The sheriff searched the woods for days, but all they found were footprints and a half-empty jug with a skull and crossbones on the label.

I stopped sleeping again after that. Every creak of the house, every gust rattling the windows made me sit bolt upright, heart pounding. Sometimes I’d dream of the old gang, running wild under the July sun. But in the dream, Tommy’s Super Soaker was always dripping something clear and smoking, and his eyes were flat and hungry.

The worst part was, some tiny, stubborn piece of me missed him. Missed the kid he’d been, before the world got mean and he started fighting back. Sometimes I’d catch myself glancing at the corner of Main and Birch, half-expecting to see him riding up on his battered bike, grinning and calling my name.

But that Tommy was gone. There was only the legend now—the Acid Man, the ghost of Birch Lane, the kid who could never miss, Dead Eye Tommy.

It was late August, years later, when Tommy came back for the final time.

That night, the air was heavy and close, thunder rumbling somewhere far off. I was closing up the hardware store when the power flickered, then went out. The world outside the windows turned pitch black, the kind of darkness you only get in the country, where the stars blink like cold eyes high above.

I drove home slow, headlights sweeping the empty road, mind racing with old ghosts. When I pulled into my driveway, I saw it—a single, muddy footprint on the porch. My stomach twisted. I left the truck running, grabbed the bat from the passenger seat, and stepped out.

“Tommy!” I shouted into the night, voice shaking. “If you’re out there, come on out. No more games.”

Silence. Then, from the cornfield, a low whistle—the same tune we used to use as kids, a signal that meant “I see you.” My hands went clammy, but I followed the sound, heart pounding, bat gripped tight.

The corn closed around me, muffling the world. I saw a flicker of movement, a flash of green plastic in the moonlight. Suddenly Tommy stood there, maybe ten feet away, Super Soaker at his side, a jug in his other hand.

He looked older, harder, but his eyes were the same. Wild.

“I knew you’d come, Mark,” he said, voice flat. “You’re the only one left who remembers.”

I swallowed, trying to keep my voice steady. “It doesn’t have to end like this, Tommy. We can get help. You don’t have to be the monster everyone thinks you are.”

He laughed, a dry, bitter sound. “I’ve always been the monster. You just didn’t see it.”

He lifted the Super Soaker, aimed it at my chest. For a second, I was nine again, daring him to hit me. But the liquid glinted under the moon, thick and unnatural.

I braced myself. “You want an ending? Fine. But you’re not getting out of here, Tommy. Not this time.”

He grinned, wicked and sharp. “Let’s play one last game.”

He fired. I dove, the acid hissing as it hit the corn behind me. I scrambled forward, swinging the bat, knocking the Super Soaker from his hand. He lunged at me, tackling me into the dirt. The jug rolled away, its contents leaking, burning a hole straight through a cornstalk.

We wrestled like kids, fists and knees and old, tangled memories. He was stronger than I remembered, desperate, almost animal. I landed a lucky hit, and he staggered back, clutching his side.

“It was supposed to be fun,” he panted, voice breaking. “We were supposed to be friends forever.”

“We were, Tommy,” I said, chest heaving. “But you changed.”

He looked at me then, really looked, and for a split second I saw the boy he’d been—the one who just wanted to win, to matter, to be seen.

He lunged again, wild, reaching for the Super Soaker. But I was faster. I swung the bat as hard as I could, the crack echoing through the field as it connected with the plastic body of the Super Soaker. The thing split open with a sickening snap, and a jet of acid splashed straight into Tommy’s face.

He reeled back, clawing at his skin, and for a moment I just stood there, frozen in horror. The acid ate away at him almost instantly, his features bubbling, flesh melting down to bone. And through it all, Tommy started to laugh—a horrible, gurgling sound, warped and monstrous. Even as his face dissolved, that laugh echoed through the stalks, high and wild and impossible.

Sirens wailed in the distance, drawing closer. Someone must’ve seen the lights, heard the shouting.

Tommy dropped to his knees, face a ruin, still laughing, still clutching the ruined Super Soaker with what was left of his hands. “Tell them I was the best, Mark. Tell them nobody could beat me,” he choked out, his voice barely human.

I nodded, tears stinging my eyes. “You were the best, Tommy. But the game’s over.”

He collapsed in the dirt, the hiss of acid fading as the jug ran dry. The deputies came crashing through the corn, flashlights slicing the dark.

They took what was left of Tommy away that night, the melted Super Soaker sealed in a plastic bag. They said he’d never see daylight again. Maybe that’s true. Maybe not.

But on quiet nights, when the wind rattles the windows and the moon lights up the fields, I remember the boy with the devil’s aim, and the summer when everything changed.