RE: Vox Mentis
04-29-2015, 03:34 PM
(04-28-2015, 02:19 PM)Schazer Wrote: »First things first, you've got places to be (according to your cover story) and risk attracting suspicion if you're lurking around the airport for too long chatting people up. Where did you say the funeral was, and in what time frame?
Search the wallet, find out how much cash you've got and whether the owner is an Australian, providing you with a suite of ID and realistic-sounding locations and people to be catching up with. If there's a substantial amount of foreign currency, go get it exchanged.
If there's a credit card and the name on it won't immediately ring alarm bells, go find a kiosk that can book you a nearby hotel. Maybe hit up an internet kiosk (or if that requires coins you don't have then "borrow" some sucker's phone/laptop), which would let you quickly know that Broken Hill is a 2.5 hour flight or a 13 hour series of hitch-hikes.
The flight gives you a decent chance at "connecting" with someone who's a local and a workable set, who can put you up and down the track act as a sponsor in the event you want to pre-empt Immigration coming knocking. The hitch-hiking leaves less of a paper trail, gives you a bigger range of stuff you can get your hands on, and (if you don't have funds) saves you having to figure out how to buy a plane ticket.
Your choice.
(04-28-2015, 04:26 PM)Sai Wrote: »Actually, don't use the credit card for anything that leaves a trail. That means no hotel, where investigators can find security footage and talk to staff, no phone, and no flights. If the card allows for cash-back, though, you can get some more versatile money from just about any major chain store.
Fortunately, you find enough cash in the purse to prevent you from using any credit cards for now. Australian dollars are hilarious, you discover: bright and shiny, like money for children. You like them a lot. A quick check at an internet kiosk reveals that the nearest city to Broken Hill is Adelaide, and no flights are available until tomorrow.
You exit the airport. The sun is brighter. The air smells salty and feels wider, somehow. You wander for a few hours, and eventually find a seedy motel. You spend time inspecting the premises, and find no security cameras. You check in using cash.
You get to your room and start getting organized. Your stolen cards are too dangerous to use; you're not going to reach Adelaide on those. You pick up the phone and dial the front desk. "I want to play poker," you say. "Something informal."
Eventually, the guy stops recommending casinos and steers you toward an upper room of a nearby bar. It turns out to be middle-aged men in expensive suits, friendly and patronizing while you lose the first two hundred dollars, smiling over their single-malt whiskeys and advancing theories about creative ways to cover your losses. By then you have a queen under your left thigh and a king and an eight under your right. It's been three years since you've done this kind of thing, and a more attentive audience would have caught you. At one point, you try to feed a jack into your sleeve and miss so badly that the card lands on the table. You tense to run, but they only laugh and one man says, "That's enough grog for you." The man has red cheeks and is divorced, although he doesn't know it yet. "Sorry," you say, and put the card back in your hand.
You take him for twenty-eight hundred in the final round, going all in. His face turns incredibly red, like a balloon. No one is smiling now. The game's operator appraoches the table, but you don't need to be told; you gather your winnings, thank them, and when you reach the street, run as fast as you can back to your motel. Now you have your Adelaide money.
~
From Adelaide it's a bus ride, the world outside draining green until it's the color of snakeskin. The air-conditioning barely works and you keep being woken bu little trickles of sweat. There's only one other passenger, a woman with skin like coral who nods off before you're even out of the city and sleeps like she's dead. You wriggle around in your seat, seeking escape from your own body heat.
Eventually you open an eye to a passing sign: BROKEN HILL, POP. 10,100. One corner is missing and the rest is peppered with gunshot. It flares in the afternoon sun, leaning drunkenly out of the baked red earth. You sit up and see a gas station, abandoned, and a tin structure with no windows that is you don't know what, also abandoned. A flat, sagging house with a dirt yard full of disemboweled cars. You glimpse a tall iron structure, vaguely Soviet, but it's on the other side of the bus and you can't see it properly. A thin dog scratches in the dirt. Another low store, this one advertising CHEAP PARTS, although for what you don't know. The windows of the stores on either side are blank. Everything is widely spaced, the center of its own little wasteland, and why not, because, you're quickly realizing, that's all there is out here: land, land, and land. You pass signs that say SULPHIDE ST and CHLORIDE ST, because they'd named their streets after minerals, apparently, and the bus turns onto OXIDE ST and begins to slow. You see a sign that says CITY CENTER and think, You've got to be kidding me. When you step off it's into burning air, the heat crawling into your nostrils and down your throat, and they haven't updated that population sign in a long time, like maybe twenty years, because there might be ten thousand flies here but not people. Definitely not people. You're standing at a crossroads; the streets are single lanes in each direction but still as wide as highways. There are a handful of buildings like they've fallen from above. The sky feels oppressively low, as if it's pressing down, combining with the blasted earth below to crush this town to nothing, and it makes you feel as if you're expanding, like your insides want to crawl out of your body like supposedly happens in space, where there's nothing to hold you in. "Home," you say. It's supposed to be funny, but you feel like crying until you die.
~
The waitress brings food and coffee and instructs you to enjoy. You watch Eliot spread a napkin across his lap, pick up his cutlery, and begin to dissect his eggs. He pops bacon into his mouth and chews.
"Go on," Eliot says through bacon. "Eat."
You pick up your knife and begin to push food around. It's beyond you how Eliot can shoot people dead and fly all night and then tuck into a hearty breakfast. It's wrong. Because Eliot knew those people he shot at the ranch, including a woman he shot dead, Jane Austen, and you shouldn't have an appetite after something like that. It suggests to you that Eliot really is psychopathic - not the crazy, voices-told-me-to-kill way, but actually, medically psychopathic, in the sense of lacking the ability to feel anything. But even this bothers you less than the way in which Eliot is eating, which is with quick, purposeful movements, his eyes sectioning up the plate for maximum efficiency. This is wrong because Eliot hasn't slept since you've met him. He should be exhausted.
"This is even better than I expected," Eliot says. He points at your plate with his knife. "You need to eat."
You eat without enthusiasm. Your bacon tastes like nothing. Like a dead animal, fried. Your eggs, aborted chickens.
"I'll say this for the Midwest," Eliot says. "They know how to do a breakfast."
You poke a bacon strip with your fork. In its rufescent flesh you see the man you shot on the overturned pickup. The way he folded up. You put down your cutlery.
"Are you all right?" No concern in Eliot's voice of course. It's just a question. An inquiry after facts. You rise and totter to the rear of the diner. You find a single, dirty toilet, lower yourself to your knees, and vomit. When you're done, you sit back against the wall, eyes closed, sweat popping all over your body. You decide to stay here awhile. You're safe in a bathroom. It's a four-by-six cubicle of sanctuary, for as long as you want.
When you can no longer believe this, you wash and reenter the diner. A man in a trucker cap with hollow cheeks and serial killer glasses eyes you over hash browns. You can read his face clearly: he thinks you were doing drugs. The waitress is sneaking looks at you, too. And there's a red-cheeked man wedged into a booth seat, who is watching a burbling TV bolted into the ceiling corner but wasn't a moment ago. You feel an urge to explain yourself. It's not what you think. I've just had a really rough day.. But that would be crazy. You'll convince no one.
You shuffle back to the booth. Eliot has finished his own breakfast and switched plates with you. "Hey," he says. "Order more. I'm paying."
"Are you?
"Well, no," says Eliot. "But you know what I mean."
You sit.
"You could use the protein," says Eliot, chewing.
"What's your plan?"
"Hmm?"
"These people, they're going to find us again, aren't they? They're looking for us right now."
"No doubt."
"So we need a plan."
Eliot nods. "True."
"Do you have one?"
"No."
"You don't?"
"I have a short-term plan," Eliot says. "I plan to finish your eggs." You say nothing. "Food is important. I'm serious about the protein."
"Do you have a plan or not?"
"No."
"Shouldn't you, I don't know, be concerned about that?"
"I am concerned about that."
"You don't look concerned."
"Would it make you feel better if I were sweating? Running to the bathroom to blow my cookies? It shouldn't. A panic state is not helpful to good decision making."
"It would make me feel better if we were moving," you say. "Like if you got your eggs to go."
"Well, I like to know where I'm going before I try to get there. It's a mistake to try to execute a plan before you've thought of one, in my experience."
You exhale. This is going nowhere. Do you have any ideas?
You exit the airport. The sun is brighter. The air smells salty and feels wider, somehow. You wander for a few hours, and eventually find a seedy motel. You spend time inspecting the premises, and find no security cameras. You check in using cash.
You get to your room and start getting organized. Your stolen cards are too dangerous to use; you're not going to reach Adelaide on those. You pick up the phone and dial the front desk. "I want to play poker," you say. "Something informal."
Eventually, the guy stops recommending casinos and steers you toward an upper room of a nearby bar. It turns out to be middle-aged men in expensive suits, friendly and patronizing while you lose the first two hundred dollars, smiling over their single-malt whiskeys and advancing theories about creative ways to cover your losses. By then you have a queen under your left thigh and a king and an eight under your right. It's been three years since you've done this kind of thing, and a more attentive audience would have caught you. At one point, you try to feed a jack into your sleeve and miss so badly that the card lands on the table. You tense to run, but they only laugh and one man says, "That's enough grog for you." The man has red cheeks and is divorced, although he doesn't know it yet. "Sorry," you say, and put the card back in your hand.
You take him for twenty-eight hundred in the final round, going all in. His face turns incredibly red, like a balloon. No one is smiling now. The game's operator appraoches the table, but you don't need to be told; you gather your winnings, thank them, and when you reach the street, run as fast as you can back to your motel. Now you have your Adelaide money.
~
From Adelaide it's a bus ride, the world outside draining green until it's the color of snakeskin. The air-conditioning barely works and you keep being woken bu little trickles of sweat. There's only one other passenger, a woman with skin like coral who nods off before you're even out of the city and sleeps like she's dead. You wriggle around in your seat, seeking escape from your own body heat.
Eventually you open an eye to a passing sign: BROKEN HILL, POP. 10,100. One corner is missing and the rest is peppered with gunshot. It flares in the afternoon sun, leaning drunkenly out of the baked red earth. You sit up and see a gas station, abandoned, and a tin structure with no windows that is you don't know what, also abandoned. A flat, sagging house with a dirt yard full of disemboweled cars. You glimpse a tall iron structure, vaguely Soviet, but it's on the other side of the bus and you can't see it properly. A thin dog scratches in the dirt. Another low store, this one advertising CHEAP PARTS, although for what you don't know. The windows of the stores on either side are blank. Everything is widely spaced, the center of its own little wasteland, and why not, because, you're quickly realizing, that's all there is out here: land, land, and land. You pass signs that say SULPHIDE ST and CHLORIDE ST, because they'd named their streets after minerals, apparently, and the bus turns onto OXIDE ST and begins to slow. You see a sign that says CITY CENTER and think, You've got to be kidding me. When you step off it's into burning air, the heat crawling into your nostrils and down your throat, and they haven't updated that population sign in a long time, like maybe twenty years, because there might be ten thousand flies here but not people. Definitely not people. You're standing at a crossroads; the streets are single lanes in each direction but still as wide as highways. There are a handful of buildings like they've fallen from above. The sky feels oppressively low, as if it's pressing down, combining with the blasted earth below to crush this town to nothing, and it makes you feel as if you're expanding, like your insides want to crawl out of your body like supposedly happens in space, where there's nothing to hold you in. "Home," you say. It's supposed to be funny, but you feel like crying until you die.
~
The waitress brings food and coffee and instructs you to enjoy. You watch Eliot spread a napkin across his lap, pick up his cutlery, and begin to dissect his eggs. He pops bacon into his mouth and chews.
"Go on," Eliot says through bacon. "Eat."
You pick up your knife and begin to push food around. It's beyond you how Eliot can shoot people dead and fly all night and then tuck into a hearty breakfast. It's wrong. Because Eliot knew those people he shot at the ranch, including a woman he shot dead, Jane Austen, and you shouldn't have an appetite after something like that. It suggests to you that Eliot really is psychopathic - not the crazy, voices-told-me-to-kill way, but actually, medically psychopathic, in the sense of lacking the ability to feel anything. But even this bothers you less than the way in which Eliot is eating, which is with quick, purposeful movements, his eyes sectioning up the plate for maximum efficiency. This is wrong because Eliot hasn't slept since you've met him. He should be exhausted.
"This is even better than I expected," Eliot says. He points at your plate with his knife. "You need to eat."
You eat without enthusiasm. Your bacon tastes like nothing. Like a dead animal, fried. Your eggs, aborted chickens.
"I'll say this for the Midwest," Eliot says. "They know how to do a breakfast."
You poke a bacon strip with your fork. In its rufescent flesh you see the man you shot on the overturned pickup. The way he folded up. You put down your cutlery.
"Are you all right?" No concern in Eliot's voice of course. It's just a question. An inquiry after facts. You rise and totter to the rear of the diner. You find a single, dirty toilet, lower yourself to your knees, and vomit. When you're done, you sit back against the wall, eyes closed, sweat popping all over your body. You decide to stay here awhile. You're safe in a bathroom. It's a four-by-six cubicle of sanctuary, for as long as you want.
When you can no longer believe this, you wash and reenter the diner. A man in a trucker cap with hollow cheeks and serial killer glasses eyes you over hash browns. You can read his face clearly: he thinks you were doing drugs. The waitress is sneaking looks at you, too. And there's a red-cheeked man wedged into a booth seat, who is watching a burbling TV bolted into the ceiling corner but wasn't a moment ago. You feel an urge to explain yourself. It's not what you think. I've just had a really rough day.. But that would be crazy. You'll convince no one.
You shuffle back to the booth. Eliot has finished his own breakfast and switched plates with you. "Hey," he says. "Order more. I'm paying."
"Are you?
"Well, no," says Eliot. "But you know what I mean."
You sit.
"You could use the protein," says Eliot, chewing.
"What's your plan?"
"Hmm?"
"These people, they're going to find us again, aren't they? They're looking for us right now."
"No doubt."
"So we need a plan."
Eliot nods. "True."
"Do you have one?"
"No."
"You don't?"
"I have a short-term plan," Eliot says. "I plan to finish your eggs." You say nothing. "Food is important. I'm serious about the protein."
"Do you have a plan or not?"
"No."
"Shouldn't you, I don't know, be concerned about that?"
"I am concerned about that."
"You don't look concerned."
"Would it make you feel better if I were sweating? Running to the bathroom to blow my cookies? It shouldn't. A panic state is not helpful to good decision making."
"It would make me feel better if we were moving," you say. "Like if you got your eggs to go."
"Well, I like to know where I'm going before I try to get there. It's a mistake to try to execute a plan before you've thought of one, in my experience."
You exhale. This is going nowhere. Do you have any ideas?