The last of a chaotic stream of hovermobiles pulled back onto Salamander Road carrying a full tank of aquafuel as Cameron McCoy bent, lifted a rusted aluminum nozzle connected to a pump by a long black hose, pressed the trigger, and groaned with hearty relief as the fuel shot out upon his trucker hat to cascade down body, soak t-shirt, and wash the grime and sweat of a ten hour work day all away.
He stayed hunched over, showering with the fuel for a half minute before straightening up, tipping his head to the clear sky, and filling his mouth with a shot of the clear substance that was mostly water. Cameron gurgled, swallowed, and then holstered the nozzle back on the pump with a click before sauntering slowly to the air conditioned attendant's booth with tired, aching legs and a hard squint that may have been mistaken for something caused by too many sun bleached days out in hard desert country, but was actually due to the aquafuel having leaked into his eyes.
When he reached the booth he slid its metal door ajar and entered, soaked and squinting, to settle back into an old torn chair beside his co-attendant, Budweiser, who was slouched in his own chair, which was wooden and almost unbearable to sit in if not for the blue cushion that had been brought in by a previous employee a millenia ago, and had since seen too many years and too many man asses.
The two of them sat in a silent facade of contemplation for a long moment, both looking out across the wavering desert landscape that shimmered out beyong the roadway, while only Budweiser could really take in its arid beauty; Cameron could see only vague blobs of blue and red with the fuel in his eyes. He wanted very badly to rub at them with a sleeve, but maintained a cool hard squint at the risk of looking weak.
"You're lucky Mike's gone for the day. He'd run you down, seeing your shirt wet like that and knowing you's drinking his merchandise," Budweiser finally mustered the courage to announce.
Cameron laughed and looked at his friend through bleary eyes as Budweiser continued to survey the horizon, "I'm so lucky, you'd almost think I knew he was gone or something!"
Budweiser turned and stared into Cameron's squint; confused. "But you did know he was gone, right?" he asked.
"Of course!"
"Okay, 'cause, yeah, he had to go out to Phoenix to meet with Purity corporate."
"Were you not there when he told me that and handed me the keys to watch this place 'til he got back?"
"Yeah, I was, I just thought...."
"Then how the hell did luck play into this?"
"I just thought you forgot or something, but nevermind."
They sat in silence again, and soon the sting in Cameron's eyes overwhelmed him. He shifted himself slowly, putting his back to Budweiser, and discreetly blotted at them with his right sleeve while a world away and thirty miles up the road fate sped towards Cameron and his red eyes in a candy apple hovertible.
He could feel it, but name it not. His entire being seemed to be responding to the magnetic pull of the steel chaos barreling towards the station on the fringe of human existence and in his mind's eye could see a single streak of red coming at him from beyond the horizon. He felt a constant heavy thrumming and a sporadic pop in his gut. All this he mistook for symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome as he shifted uneasily in the chair.
"I think that pint of rocky road was expired. I gotta remember to check the dates on that stuff," Cameron groaned regretfully. He reflected back to the ice cream he'd found earlier in the day in the station's convenience store freezer encased in a thick mound of frost, and the way he had to chisel at it for five minutes with a plastic knife before the dairy treat was released from its would-be tomb. He had worried about whether it was still good an instant before remembering a show he had seen about a little prehistoric girl almost perfectly preserved in ice for thousands of years. That's when he decided it must be good; and it was actually delicious. It had been the perfect thing in this heat, but now it was doing something malicious to his digestive system. If the pint of rocky road had a face, Cameron told himself he'd like to hit it.
"I don't know why you'd eat that junk before noon, and in this heat," pronounced Budweiser as he shook his head slowly. "I never eat dairy on days like this, with not a cloud in the sky and the sun hot as the devil. You gonna hurl?"
"No, I just...." Cameron's voice trailed off as a cold knot seemed to tighten in his gut. His face went white. "Quiet. Just please..." he managed to squeak out feebly.
"You drink too much aquafuel, and you eat too much damned candy. We both know there's more than just water in those pumps. I saw a report that said they mix it with formaldehyde and red 5 for color, and then you wanna go and chug it."
"Quiet," Cameron pleaded.
"And then you eat a whole bucket of chocolate ice cream."
"No, a pint... of rocky road," Cameron began to curl up into a ball atop the chair as the pain beat out from what seemed like his small intestine. He was convinced that Budweiser could not hear his voice at all.
"Fruits and vegetables. Good crunchy fucking things like apples and salad. If you let me," Budweiser gestured with both hands towards his own person. "If you'd let me train you I would have you shitting pretty in no time."
"I think I'm dying...." Cameron thought aloud as his bowels churned and he twisted and writhed in the chair. As he did so, Budweiser began a lengthy criticism of the modern diet complete with theories of cuisine conspiracies involving Homeland Security, China, and a manufactured lard containing trace elements of arsenic that was being mixed into cans of baby food across the country. "...and we all just keep shoveling it in our fat pink mouths," he concluded minutes later as he stood triumphantly and opened the booth's door. "I gotta pee. Cover for me." he told Cameron as he leapt from the booth, visibly energized from his tirade against the modern food culture.
He left Cameron curled up upon the chair like some disabled armadillo that had become stuck that way and stopped trying to do anything about it days prior, but suddenly the negative energy that had held his bowels in a vice grip moved out to the bones and muscle and then to the inner surface of Cameron's epidermis before forcing itself out through his pores, leaving his hairs standing on end and an electric heat in the air conditioned environment as it struck out across empty space to slam against the walls of the attendants' booth and leave them trembling violently as a horn sounded in front of one of the pumps.
Cameron sat up, lifted his head, and directed it towards the source of the sound; a candy apple Mitsuhana with silver trim, hovering a foot off the ground, and with its eighteen cylinder engine sprouting from the hood; thrumming and popping and seeming to cause everything to quake around it.
The woman behind the wheel was more of a girl, but from a distance her thick layer of makeup, bleached hair, and over-sized oval glasses matured her. When she saw Cameron rise within the booth she pursed her lips impatiently before presenting herself before the rear view mirror and beginning to tame, with fingers, the wild plumage atop her head that was thickly curled, white as bone, and settled out in all directions, manipulated by a high speed drive with the hovertible's top down, and the desert wind blowing without obstruction.
Cameron was halfway to the car when he recognized her in only the vaguest sense. The profile was so familiar and at the same time so completely alien in its beauty; as if she were some shapeshifting princess who had been to the station times before as some lonely trucker, but this day had chosen to reveal herself in true form. Stopping just before the driver's side door he could feel the force and the heat of the vehicle as it idled loudly. He shouted over the grumbling engine, asking her what kind of fuel and how much she wanted, and was left feeling foolish about the yelling when she flipped a switch on the dashboard and killed the engine mid-question.
"Fill it up fancy," she responded in a deeper, more distinct, voice than he had expected. He recognized that voice.
"Mobe or wrist?"
"Mobe," she commanded as she continued to beat and tear her hair back into place. Cameron went to the pump and unholstered the nozzle to insert it into the Misuhana's fuel tank. He thought of sex as he did so and looking up at the girl's face through the mirror's reflection he knew her name; Lane Delaney. The recognition was powerful enough to overwhelm his senses with reptilian desire. He had barely the sense to turn back to the pump, press the buttons labelled 'Fancy', 'Fill up', and then 'Mobile' on the pump's touch screen panel.
A scanning camera atop the pump clicked and a to-be-determined amount of cash was charged to the bank account of the hovermobile's owner. Cameron heard the fuel begin to travel from the pump into the vehicle's tank and he saw the numbers on the screen rise before turning back to stare into the face of a true celebrity looking back at itself through the sports car's rear view. He thought they were both concentrated on her image in the mirror, but through her large black sunglasses she watched the stranger she instantly thought of as 'fuel boy'.
A Second Civil War
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Dogmeatlives
- Living Legend
- Posts: 3193
- Joined: Mon Feb 27, 2006 5:35 am
- Location: Junktown, Phil's doorstep
A Second Civil War
Wasteland Radio, with Charlie C.
