[fiction] Fifty Thrones of Shade - Part 3

/* Dear everyone, everywhere:  none of these characters are based on people I know personally.  At least not yet.  All of the names are based on what sounds cool, so if you see your own name, I sure as hell was not writing about you.  However, if you're a girl, just because I'm not writing about you doesn't mean I'd rule anything out.  Just an FYI.  */



Dillon

The attractive biker woman was fastening her helmet.  Dillon had maybe thirty steps from the door to where they parked to think of something to say.  Not to ask her out...oh heavens no.  She was like way older than him.  Just to be cool around her.  Something inside him, some primal urge was screaming that this was the moment, his moment, to act sort of cool around this woman that he'd probably never see again, or regret it forever for the rest of his life.

In all of that time the best he could up up with was "nice bike."  Give him credit;  he did spend a large part of the walk thinking about how much he would regret saying nothing.  It wasn't a bad line anyway.  Well, until he said it.

"Heyuhgh....nice b-bike."  Dillon's face colored red from the neck up.  His one chance and he sounded like a twelve year old.

"Thanks.  It needs gas," said the woman.  Dillon hurried to his truck, not looking at her.  "You know where I can get some?" she asked.

Dillon realized he had an excuse to talk to her more and brightened up.  "Sure!  Yeah.  There's a gas station down the street."  He nodded in the direction.

"Which way, that way?" the woman pointed.

"Yeah.  Actually, I need gas too, you can follow me."

At the gas station, Dillon pretended he was looking at the screen--well actually he was trying to look at the screen, but the woman's cleavage was clearly visible just past the gas machine.  He could see her face too.  Which meant, he then realized, she could see his.

"Shouldn't you buy me dinner first?" she asked.

Dillon's head snapped up to her face.  Well practiced.  He had to do it every day walking to class.  "What?"

The woman shook her head.  "I usually make guys buy me dinner first."

"Before what?"

"Well you're undressing me with your eyes...."

"Yeah," Dillon admitted.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Oh yeah?" she asked again.

Dillon nodded.

"Well..."  The woman lifted the pump handle back onto its socket.  She didn't let go first, and although it is odd to think that she'd just been standing there for five minutes resting her hand on the pump, it would be odder still if the average sportbike could take all that gas.  The woman walked towards him.  "I like steak."

Instead of speaking Dillon tried to work out what the hell she was talking about.

The woman grabbed his hand and wrote on it with a sharpie.  Dillon didn't resist because she was hot.

Angela
100 Duff Road
8pm
xoxo

As Angela reached the xo's Dillon became increasingly nervous, as she was writing on the back of his hand in permanent marker.  "I didn't need the x's...."

"I don't know.  Sometimes guys chicken out."  Angela winked at him.  Then she walked away.


Avery

The officer looked at him smugly.  "I'm sorry sir but your cycling license has been revoked by the State of Washington.  Its going to be a while before you can put on a helmet."  The man was not sorry.

Avery looked down at his bicycle and then up at the cop.  As the tiniest gesture of defiance, he put his bicycle helmet on anyway as he walked away.  The trick was to make it looked like you didn't know you were defiant;  these privatized cops were real shitheads.  Public servants sometimes shot unarmed people just because you were running away.  The cops that worked in for-profit precincts shot you just because.

Avery was on hit motorcycle when he ran into the same cop again.  The were both stopped at the same light.  It seemed highly unlikely that he would happen to run into the same guy.  Just as unlikely as the cop recognizing him with his helmet on, but it happened.

That's when the piano music started.  Avery heard it clearly; the notes rang out as if there was a concert hall in his head.  First a b flat, and then higher note twice, then coming back down....  It always preceded something rash.  It was as if his subconscious knew beforehand when he was going to do something stupid.  Avery was sure though, that this time, this time it was wrong.  The bitchy ass cop was probably ecstatic to see him;  profit cops got commissions on their tickets.  The piano notes were wrong.  He wasn't going to do anything rash.  He had a "speeding" savings account set aside specifically for situations like this.  He was just going to pull over and deal with the screwball again.  The piano notes were louder.  That was usually right before they stopped.  They were going to stop this time, all on their own, with no incident.  Avery was sure of it, until the stop turned on his lights, and accompanied their presence with just a single blip of the siren.  The piano notes stopped.

Avery gunned the throttle.  He'd been keeping tabs on traffic and had a hole ready in the crossing lanes.  The cop followed, slowed slightly.  Avery wondered how the cop had found him, first on the bicycle, and now on the bike.  How did a cop so fortuitously discover his position on the one day that he absolutely had to drive?  Then he remembered:  his cell phone.  By government mandate every cell phone produced after a certain date reported his gps location to the telco, which really meant to the goverment.  Avery didn't know what that date was, but he should have.  He worked at one of the companies that wrote the software to track people.  Not really do the tracking, but ball it up nice and pretty on a map for law enforcement to look at.

Avery stopped the bike and threw his cell phone into a trash can.  The action cost him precious seconds, during with the cop caught up.  It is dangerous enough to ride a motorcycle in urban areas where you are just one idiot away from getting doored, but it is quite another to evade someone who passed specific training on how to catch you, especially when the only training you received was to find some random book called "The Art of Driving" and try to apply it to motorcycles.  He hadn't even finished the book yet.

Avery needed to make up time.  He rode like a man with a death wish until he spotted some oil on the road.  It took some time to find;  time enough to add two more cops on his ass.  And it was not actual, real oil, because that only shows up in movies, but some substance that was clearly slippery.  Avery headed for it, knee out, in a racing turn.

The average person can probably imagine happens to every motorcycle in the world when it hits oil, gravel, or even water while leaned over so far the rider sticks a knee out.  The bike slams all the way down, slides away, and usually the rider at least survives.  If you somehow had the acrobatic chops of a Circ De Soleil performer you would still have the problem of the throttle on the low handlebar, because your knees alone won't be able to hold the gas tank up.

If you made everything 2d, you could probably get a bunch of engineers to draw out the force equations, with the torque, and the momentum, and the angular momentum, and the coefficients of friction, and the coefficients of static friction, and the centripetal force, and the centrifugal "force."  It would probably take them 20 minutes though.

Avery saw all of that in an instant.  It blazed in his mind like a tiny snowflake, and every moment of the turn he watched the strands of that snowflake stretch and flex as he entered the turn, hit the oil patch, and the tires "lost traction."  He could see all of the counteracting forces with his minds eye as he applied just the right pressure in all of the right places to keep the bike upright without redlining the throttle.

The bike appeared to do an impossible skid sideways on both wheels.  Had, by some miracle, any other man made it that far he would have been thrown clear when the front tire gained traction and high sided him over the handlebars.  Avery did not fly off.  He felt the steel man take over, and grip with his hands, and the hundreds of frantic thoughts fell away in those endless moments as the bike skidded and he did not fall from the sharp jerk when the tires gained traction.  Then he was away.

Behind him, the first cop was distracted by the side of a strafing motorcycle and was undone by the oil patch.  The second cop could not have made a turn like that at high speed anyway, and drove through a wall.  The third cop, however, had plenty of time and remained on Avery's tail.

The steel man was gone.  Avery was all nerves and adrenaline.  He jumped on the highway, because that's what he always did.  Statistics show that most people got off the highway when they run, so he always got on.

The cop behind him shot at him.  Avery tried to remember if the commission on a dead traffic violator was higher than a life one, but he drew a blank.  Avery began dodging the bike side to side, but before long he was in a predictable pattern and the second bullet struck the top of his helmet.  The entire thing split and it didn't take long before it impeded his vision.  He ripped it off his head and gunned the throttle.  If he could make it to the other side, he could get lost in the ghetto.  It was surprisingly tough to local a motorcycle by sound alone in that area.

Ahead, he saw the bridge.  There was no traffic.  Just a line of police vehicles with their lights on.  They were waiting for him.

Avery took the last exit, turned left, and turned left onto the high way.  And that's when things got real shitty.  Something flew in his eye.  It was hard enough seeing anything at all with the amount of squinting he had to do;  flying along the highway with a speck of debris in there felt like a tiny little knife stabbing him over and over again.  But there was no stopping now.

Avery was in the second lane from the left.  He closed his eyes, leaned into the gentle curve, and followed the road by listening to the cars around him.  It was like a game of marco polo, only the objects were racing through the air like rockets.  He followed their sounds, ignored the sirens, and stayed near one of two of them.

Then by reflex he blinked at the debris was out of his eye, or at least pushed to the corner where it hurt far less.  Avery did a couple move he learned from the mysterious art of driving book and lost the cops.

You could ask Avery why he went through all that just to avoid a traffic stop, but he wouldn't understand the question.


Bella

"Yeah, that's what my girlfriend says," said Ed.  They had transitioned to the park for a walk.

"Wait, what?" said Bella.

"Yeah my girlfriend."

"You have a girlfriend?!?"

"Yeah, what's the big deal?" said Ed.  Bella felt her heart sink to the pit of her stomach and explode there.

"Then what are you doing this for?"

"Oh, no, see, I'm poly."

"What?"

"Poly-amorous."

"So, what does that mean, you cheat on your girlfriend?"

"No, oh no no no its not cheating.  Have you ever heard of an open relationship?"

"Uh, isn't that like, what creepy people do, like swingers and orgies and stuff?"

"Yes--no!  Orgies aren't creepy," said Ed.  "Oh Bella, the things I am going to teach you...."  He touched her shoulder awkwardly as he trailed off.  The trailing off part of his speech took too long.  Bella noted that this moment was the creepiest part of their conversation so far.   "Polyamory is like open relationships, only more meaningful."

"How is sleeping with a bunch of different people meaningful?"

"We're not limiting ourselves to a single partner.  We're not shackled by ignorance or victorian morality.  The vanillas--that's our word for closed minded people like you--think we're weird but we're actually more free."

"So your girlfriend is seeing other people?"

"Yeah, see the way it works is she's my primary, and the five other guys are-"

'Five?"

"Yeah.  Five.  Yeah she's really hot," said Ed with a dreamy face.

"So how many others you seeing?" asked Bella.

"Oh, well, uh...let's see...well just the one, right now...I mean I'm on this date with you."


Wilbur

Weirdly, Wilbur was not hungry.  He was walking through an upscale back yard--fuck the 1%--when he spotted a chair that looked completely out of place on the deck of a jacuzzi.  Little did he know, thanks to a poor understanding of statistics, that the property he trespassed on, elegant as it was, was owned by someone no where near the top 1% of income.

Wilbur had an inexplicable urge to sit in the chair.

"Huh," he said.  "Well if I was a rich motherfucker I could see how this chair would really tie the room together.

"Take a picture," said a female voice, "it'll last longer."

Kim had just happened to be sunbathing in the nude when the stranger entered her backyard and failed to notice her.  She also had no problem with him wandering around until he sat in the chair.


Fern

Fern found the park road easily enough.  She parked on the side behind Gideon and followed him into the forest.

"There they are," said Gideon.

"Did you call it in?"

"Not everyone is as prompt as you."

Fern raised her eyebrows and donned a pair of gloves.  She stepped over the bodies.  The jeans of the male were around his knees.  The female was covered in bruises.  Fern raised one of the arms and looked at the bite marks Gideon had told her about.

"What do you reckon?" asked Gideon.

"Well..."  Fern paused.

"Go on."

"It looks kind of human."

"Human?  You're saying a person did this?  Did they do it to each other?'

Fern looked more closely at the bite.  "Human, only...hm."  She pushed the dead man's lips apart, and then the girl's.  "I don't think so.  But the bites look every close to human.  I'll know more when we get these two back to the lab.

"The lab?  Why do you have to go back to the lab?  What are you going to do there?" asked Gideon.

Fern rolled her eyes.  "Just go with it."


Character #34

Character 34 found a small mini mart called Templeton's.  There was a girl behind the counter.  She probably wasn't Templeton.  Unless Templeton was her last name?  Character 34 looked at the food.  Weirdly, he wasn't hungry.


Dillon

Dillon scrubbed his hand furiously.  There was no way his mom could see this.   He had written Angela's address down, yes.  Written it down, written it down again, copied it, typed it, emailed it to himself and backed up the text just to be sure.  It was strange that Angela hadn't given him her number and only an address.  There was a chance that people were waiting there to kidnap him and harvest his organs.  He would have to take that chance.  And he couldn't tell anyone where he was going.

The scrubbing results were not satisfactory.  Maybe a bandage?  Pretend he hurt his hand?  That wouldn't fly--his mom would ask even more questions.  He made it in managing to keep at least one hand in a pocket, but he'd drawn enough suspicion.  There was no way he'd make it back out.

Then he thought of it:  hold something!  He tried every object in his room but eventually settled on a duffel bag.  He cut the straps and reattached them with duct tape so they would be shorter and his hand would be closer to the top of the bag, which is where he casually added a sweatshirt on top, twisted just enough to cover the writing on his hand.  What would he do when he came back home?  Who knew.