#I KNOW HE’D BREED ME SO GOOOOOOD | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bigegomagick · 10 months ago

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Ch. 2

The agony of being followed hadn’t left her, and she seized with panic as she realized they were helplessly heading toward the airport.

“Gabe where are all the exits?? Take an exit!” She demanded. Gabriel shook his head, concentration creasing his brow. Around them, tremendous long loops of road interlaced on every plane without intersection, loosely crocheted together. The great maw of the terminal rose up over the horizon of the freeway, like an anglerfish out of water, ovular, tapered at the back, with a wide dark mouth. The vehicles around them poured in and Hazel clutched helplessly to the handle over the window as they followed. Ships parked in clusters, as many as could fit, just inside the jaw. Gabriel brought theirs down to rest on its squat legs and took her hand.

“I don’t think I can do this,” She said; sweat beading on her upper lip. Her ears were on fire. “I can’t go through security. We have to go back.”

“You know we can’t. Pull it together, stay quiet, and try not to look so sweaty.”

They stepped down and towards the massive glass doors that slammed open and shut as travelers made their way out of the lot. The ceiling rose in an uninterrupted arc 60 feet above them, made of segmented dull sheet metal that absorbed most of the light that the insufficient fluorescents could muster.

She caught a vague glimpse of herself as she passed through the glass doors. Her brown hair was whitened with dust like a powdered gentry-woman. Her green bodysuit, tapered at the waist and ankles, was almost dry but had stiffened from the chlorine to an uncomfortable starchy texture. As she had a thousand times before, she raised her eyebrows and manually loosened her jaw, approximating an expression of ease and smoothing the harsh lines in her face. Soon, she was in line among the others, corralled by the inky boundaries of black stanchions. In the far distance, beyond the geometrically snaking line, she could see security agents waving beeping sticks through the auras of splayed bodies. Figures stepped meditatively, rhythmically, across thin carpet through the series of plastic thresholds. Those in front of her fell forward like dominos, folding to remove shoes and release belts.

On her wrist, she could feel the impatient pulse of her watch ticking. The moist area of softened skin under the band itched.

A security agent with scarecrow blonde hair called her forward. Leaning over her shoulder, she whispered into one ear, and then the other, “hi hi hi hi hi helloooo I’m just going to be giving you a quick check -check - check -chek chek. I’m going to comb your hair back … and then forward. Can you look at this light for me? Can you follow the light - follow the light - follow the light light light? Perfect perfect perfect. You’re doing great. And I’m just gonna *whispered* run my hands down your arms arms arms. And now the insides of your thighs. And calves. On the outsides of your legs legs legs gooooood. Good. I want you to imagine this beeping security stick is cooooombing over your aura. Starting at the top of your head and coming downnnnn — down to your toes. Thank you thank you thank you. And just close your eyes for me. Good you’re doing so good.”

Psychic pain where the bar touched the aura hovering over the crown of her head. Ache behind the eyes, like the fatigue of staring at a screen too long, as it brushed past her face. Cramping, cringing pain as it coasted past her chest. She reached out for Gabe but he’d already moved ahead in line, belt and shoes off, pants slouching indecently. He shuffled the cards from his wallet in his hands like a deck, bridging them between long fingers and letting them fall awkwardly, alternately. He was almost to the last checkpoint: at the center of a final winding line, a monolith or a toll booth. inside, an officer recited interviews through perforations in inch-thick glass.

Previous residences, partners, housemates, names and breeds of various pets through a life time. Address of your pharmacy of choice, streaming subscriptions, state ID and license of registration, papers verifying child abuse clearance and up-to-date vaccinations.

“Name and date of birth?”

“Hazel Crucifix, December 21st, 2058.”

Hazel pulled scans up on her phone and wrinkled papers out of her bag and offered them up. The officer sniffed through suspiciously, nose wrinkling as he came to her vaccination sheet. “It wasn’t flu season, so I’ll be updating that in the coming fall, when they make those available again. “ He nodded without looking at her. “Wrists please,” he said, stamping her inner arm with a rich blue ink that seeped out in a delicate topography of the grooves in her skin. Each wrist marked with the blurred outline of a breaching dolphin.

Hazel shoved the papers back into her bag and proceeded through the dominoed metal detectors, fifty or a hundred of them creating a striated tunnel to the back of the airport.

She caught up to Gabriel and fell in step behind him, each of them barefoot, arms raised over their heads. They emerged onto the other side of the airport and sat side by side with their feet folded under them and sifted through the ten foot pile of shoes. Hazel examined a platform heel that didn’t belong to her. The shoot from the ceiling coughed up a new pair and it tumbled down towards them, dislodging a Jordan that bonked Gabe on the head. Reaching her arm in to the shoulder, Hazel felt around for the smooth capped toe of her high top sneakers and tugged one out, creating a rubber-scented cascade into her lap. The second shoe appeared on her right. Gabriel was tightly lacing a pair of someone else’s combat boots beside her and winked at her as she watched. Long nimble fingers wove aglets through metal-bracketed holes, veins protruded from the pink flesh of his forearms. Hazel took his face in her hands and kissed him. “Let’s go to the airport bar” he said, retracting his tongue from her mouth.

“The drinks are outrageously expensive.

And we’ve made it through security for now, but you and I both know that your name is on a list, with my name as a footnote. I don’t like this at all. If we should go anywhere, it’s to a handicap bathroom stall where we can wait out the next few hours without any cameras recognizing your face.”

“You even know where we’re going yet?”

“I planned the whole last trip, you’re not going to weigh in about where we go next?”

“You mean the charming desert outpost with the electrified pool and googly-eyed monster? That we had to fly ourselves to?”

“There’s a reason we don’t take commercial flights, Gabe. It’s on you that we ended up here, I tried to tell you to get off at the exit—

“There wasn’t an exit. All roads lead to here, we both know that’s no accident.”

Hazel pressed her face into her knees.

“I don’t want to travel anymore. Each dome has been worse than the last.”

Gabriel petted the base of her skull. “I’ve never seen corruption of environment data like that last spot. The whole set felt twisted and wrong. Where’d you hear about it again?”

“Some private channel i got dropped into. Some kid said it had been abandoned for years but that the damage was minimal, said it was a near perfect approx of a mid century bunker. “

“AI geodomes aren’t designed for longer stays, the code has its own sort of scheduled obsolescence so people move on to the next destination. If kids from this channel were squatting there…” he paused. “but I’ve never seen it react so aggressively before. Never been expelled from Eden like that.”

“It was worth a shot, it was free, we’re hemorrhaging cash. Do we even have enough for tix out of here?”

Gabriel pulled cash out of various suit pockets.

“Hmm. Not for anywhere nice. But a seedier destination, sure. At least an uncorrupted one.”

“As long as there’s a shower I don’t care.“

Most of their money they made undermining the travel advisory services, collecting credit numbers and selling them en masse on quiet servers. They never charged the cards themselves, but they had to be so careful, wiring only dribs and drabs from offshore accounts. In the end, it was like having a weekend allowance or a minimal government stipend, more generous than unemployment but just barely. Only ever enough for the grimiest three day trips, two nights and an 8 a.m. checkout.

“Let’s go to the airport bar.”

“Fine.”

The nearest bar was in the back of a restaurant, the Johnny Kuprionis Memorial Bar and Grille, which largely dealt in crab fries and chicken tenders. Hazel and Gabe wove past high top tables to the back, where a 20-something in an ill-fitting black button down doled out unhealthy pours and thick sangria. Gabe handed the laminated menus back to the bartender and ordered them each a glass of shitty red wine.

Leaning back in her stool, Hazel examined the mural that extended from just above the top-shelf liquor, up the wall and across the ceiling. In the foreground, a bald man, presumably Mr. Kuprionis, stood on the deck of a crabbing boat, clutching a cubic wire cage that teemed with crabs. Behind the ship, a frigid ocean roiled, life-vests and crab-pots clung together in buoyant mounds, streaks of lightning illuminated gargantuan waves and turned them an unnatural green. It was a masterful piece, uncanny and artificial, lit from within, recalling the great American landscape painters of the Hudson Valley some two centuries earlier. (Gericault, Turner) Hazel untangled the coiling, delicate letters on the condemned vessel’s hull: “Destination”. She shuddered.

Gabriel misguidedly followed her gaze to the screen embedded in the wall above the bar that displayed rotating descriptions of impending departures.

“What sounds good to you, little monkey? Big city living? Rustic Scandinavian asceticism? Geodome glamping in the Brazilian jungle?”

He was on his third drink and his cheeks had colored, lending him the appearance and affect of a charming toddler. His blue eyes tended to sparkle indiscriminately when he was inebriated, and Hazel could already see a tidy stewardess eyeing him up from the other end of the bar. She despised the sartorial mandates of modern airlines — slim black and silver body suits with ribbed padding on the sleeves, matching ankle moon-boots, all betraying a calculated nostalgia for a 20th century vision of techno-utopia that would never be.

She looked down at her own jumpsuit and dusty boots. Not much better, but at least, she thought, genuinely tattered by a life of adventure, not subservience to a sinister travel conglomerate repackaging nomadism as growth. Then she chastised herself for her superiority, for indulging a fantasy of sidestepping participation in the travel economy. She was here, at the airport, spending money on drinks, spending carbon on travel.

And what adventure? They pursued the crumbling, tertiary destinations forgotten by the airlines and coasted on abandoned amenities. Gabe called it the “mini-fridge diet”. They were train-hopping degenerate crust punks without the dreads. Wincing, she fished a loose wellbutrin from the deep cargo pocket on the outside of her knee.

“Let’s go visit my mother.”

#scifiart #scifi #dream journal #manic pixie dream girl #airport #short story #story #novel

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