The woman watches the Burger Shak through the adjoining alley. She studies its constantly recalibrating panes and estimates the number of blob-like bodies inside as upwards of thirty. A number out of proportion to the cars parked near its front. Snub-nosed coupes, all of them, down on the haunches of knuckled fenders, they appear to her as newly whelped pups come to suckle. It is a thought that makes her smile, cracking the thick white makeup over her lips. The carless patrons there have probably walked over for a post-coital snack, their vehicles hidden in some other, poorly lit parking lot, further away from the Milk District.
A car pulls into the Burger Shak’s parking lot. The woman collects a cellphone from her pocket and finds the application on its face that brings up a pair of holographic binoculars. Backing into the dark of a near wall, she watches as a man gets out and approaches the restaurant’s entrance. Tall with glasses and curly, chin-length hair, he pauses beneath the rooftop angel, waiting as almost everyone does for her neon to shift. It’s not even sexual anymore. Just etiquette.
Each Burger Shak in the country has a neon version of The Crowe Corporation’s mascot above its entrance, tailored to the micro-culture of its location. In areas polled as conservative, the Travel Angel’s hemline (always a dress or a skirt, never pants) falls beneath the knee, and her blonde hair is pulled back. One thick, curling lock left to free fall over a temple.
In the Milk District, the angel’s signature mane is a bed-head cloud of lemon yellow, and, every third pose, the glass tubing between her thighs, made visible by a flown-up skirt, goes pink. Only after the tips of the Travel Angel’s wings extend, both legs going wide to show off that suggestive bit of neon, is the man’s homage paid, and he disappears inside.
The woman steps out of the shadowed alcove, revealing a black mask over her eyes and nose. Its thick, tarry latex sweeps upward and, with no obvious seam, becomes a many-toothed mohawk of the same coal-black color. The lower half of the woman’s face is covered in a thick, white coat of plaster-like makeup that ends just beneath her jaw.
Head down, the teeth of her mohawk like a blade, she proceeds towards the alley, boots grinding against sidewalks that have been salted. An acoustic heads up to the girls sitting in clear cubicles above lengths of cracked cement.
The woman passes beneath the many signs announcing, Heaven sold by the quarter hour, eyes on the peekaboo strip of reflective material some enterprising pimp has affixed to the far edge of the walk. In it, she can see the girls above her bathed in pale red light. Some lift for her as she goes, revealing nooks and crannies and round swatches of flesh. Some call out to her through a starburst of holes drilled into the plexiglass, put there to incite then negotiate.
As the woman passes the last cube before the alley, the prostitute inside it bangs on her see-through wall. “You going to Burger Shak?” she asks.
The mohawked woman doesn’t stop.
“Bring me something to eat, would you?” the prostitute calls after her.
The alley just a few boot strikes away, the woman walks faster.
“I haven’t eaten in two days!” the prostitute shouts through the holes of her cube, adding in a softer voice, “I’m not pretty like the others. I don’t get that much business.”
The mohawked woman stops. She turns and looks at the young woman assigned to the last cube. The one nearest the alley and furthest from the janes and johns shopping for sex nearer the Milk District’s center. Even from several strides away, the woman can see the girl’s moon-cratered face. How she’s trained her long hair around everything pocked, leaving just a round set of lips on display.
The woman reaches inside her jacket and walks back to the girl’s cube, something pinched between index finger and thumb.
“This had better go towards food,” she says and drops the item through one of the prostitute’s negotiating holes.
As the mohawked woman turns and walks towards the alley, the girl drops to her knees and searches for whatever her prize. She finds it against the floor’s edge and comes up with it in the cradle of a trembling palm. A single pill. Small and round and kelly green.
Reseating her black leather jacket on wide shoulders, the woman steps into an empty half-lot connecting the Milk District to the Burger Shak. Picking her way through clumps of overgrown weeds and mounded trash, she studies the restaurant’s silver windows as she approaches, each one recalibrating as the people behind them move. Once she’s to the patch of asphalt nearest the restaurant’s front, she reads the silver script on both presenting doors. Burgers this way! on one, and, Don’t let the door hit ya’ where the good Lord split ya’! on the other.
The woman climbs the restaurant’s stairs and indulges a spare glance at the neon angel above her. In her current incarnation, the mascot’s yellow hair is spread, corona-like, around her head, and the tubing between her thighs is still covered by a line of blue neon trim. Not pausing for its next shift, the woman finds the clasping brooch of a chatelaine affixed to her belt. Hanging from the fixture’s silver, buckle-like brooch are a half-dozen silver chains from which various-sized silver boxes or fluid, mesh pouches hang.
The woman finds the chain ending in a case the size and shape of a cigarette box. Using solely the one hand, she flips open its top and upturns a stack of identification cards into a palm. She slides one randomly from its center and, clasping the card between two knuckles, puts the rest away.
The woman pushes through the restaurant’s front door and steps into a narrow foyer, fifteen feet long and half that wide. At the end of the holding pen is another door on which the words, Almost There! have been printed in flowery, luminescent script.
As the exterior door closes behind her, filling the space with a delicate, latching sound, the already dimmed foyer lights go out. The only thing visible is a holographic galaxy of stars above her. A little something to quell the nerves of customers that don’t like dark, confined spaces.
“Welcome to Burger Shak!” a woman’s voice announces as a holograph of the Travel Angel appears at the foyer’s far end. “Yet another business brought to you by The Crowe Corporation, your cradle-to-grave companion on this journey called life.”
“Jesus,” the woman mumbles.
Immediately, the Travel Angel’s eyes focus in on hers. “There are a few new items on our menu I’d like to take a moment to tell you about,” the hologram continues, blinking slowly.
Unlike her representative on the building’s roof, this Travel Angel is a photo-real match of her human counterpart done up in her one-size-fits-all-markets garb and makeup. Her long, blonde hair hangs in loose waves around her shoulders, and, over her tall, slightly muscular body, she wears a sleeveless white shift that’s been cinched around the waist. The Angel’s wings hang, retracted, behind her, and over her wide-cheeked, blue-eyed face she wears just enough makeup to allow for the greatest possible interpretation of age, ranging from her late-twenties to her late-forties.
“Before placing your order, let me tell you about some of our specials,” the Travel Angel continues.
As the hologram speaks, the woman collects a small mirror from one of the chatelaine’s silver pouches and holds it beneath the faux starlight. While the Travel Angel informs her about Burger Shak’s new peach tea, the woman tends to a smudge in the white makeup over her jaw and pulls lightly on her black skullcap, shifting a few of her mohawk’s spikes back into line.
“...and, last but not least,” the Travel Angel finishes as the woman puts her mirror away, “we’re happy to announce that Burger Shak’s Famous Hot Fudge Brownie is back. With or without nuts.”
Intuiting the end of the pitch, the woman approaches the hologram, her random ID held out.
“To enter, please place your Crowe Corporation Card here,” the Travel Angel says, holding up a palm that morphs, taking the form of a square box with a vertical slot in its center.
The woman inserts the card into the holographic reader. As its information is processed, the Travel Angel’s eyes lock into a fixed stare, the blue of her pupils roiling until the processing is over and some core threshold has been met.
“Welcome back, Rick San Angelis!” the Travel Angel announces, smiling at the woman before adding in quick, corporate speak, “Please note that The Crowe Corporation is not responsible for any direct or ancillary difficulties you or your loved ones may experience as a result of your meal or any of the bonus items you may choose.”
The hologram cocks her head and, as if activating a lever, the second door clicks open and a wave of restaurant noise flows in.
“Don’t forget to bring your wife, Mary San Angelis, her favorite,” the angel adds. “The number two with a large Diet C-Corp Soda.”
The woman pushes open the door and steps through. All the seating area in the Burger Shak’s main dining room is positioned around its perimeter. In its center are staggered lines full of haggard people. Customers too poor to afford C-Corp’s drug of the century. A good half of them carry some sign of the disease on them. Some, in surgical scars where divots of flesh have been taken, or in peekaboo bits of skin where radiation grids have been tattooed. Some of the waiting customers are missing limbs. Some wear patches over their eyes or wigs on their hair-free heads. Some heft oxygen tanks behind them on drag-along carts, the attached tubes mustached between their noses and upper lips. Despite their prevalence or, more likely, because of it, nobody stares.
For over two decades now, cancer has been as ubiquitous as the flu. And, if you have the money or position to afford the cure, is now far less deadly.
The woman proceeds down the lanes’ center aisle, her eyes on the single ordering station spread across the restaurant’s opposite end. Not stopping for protests or slow movers, she treads on oxygen lines, uncouples couples joined at the hips, and looses leads from patients’ monitoring machines, leaving a trail of beeping alerts in her wake.
At the front of the Stage Three line, she stops to assess the six overhead directional signs that divide the long counter according to customers’ status. The sign hung above the far left line reads Cancer-Free/Stage One. The one hung above the far right reads simply, T, with Terminal in small print beneath.
As the customers behind her move slightly away, the woman checks the time on her watch. Still some yet to kill, she eyeballs the customer ahead of her, not yet through his order. A round, sweaty man with a thick neck and oily bits of hair matted against his skull, he taps a finger against the cleft in his pocketed chin while studying the overhead menu.
“I don’t know,” the man prevaricates, turning to smile at something on the front wall. “It’s all so good.”
The woman turns to follow the man’s gaze. Positioned between the in and out doors is a life-sized poster of the Travel Angel, one eye winking, one upturned hand holding a tray of food.
Another C-Corp fanatic, marching off to the slaughter, the woman thinks, looking back at the man. Another asshole happily oblivious that he’s the fatted calf.
“Sir?” the attendant prods. “Your order, please?”
Wistful, the man looks back up at the many options. “I’m thinking the number three,” he says. “No. Make that the number four. Uber-sized, please.”
As the attendant taps long fingers against the counter’s inset ordering pad, his eyes flit across the man’s tropical shirt and the dark, half-moons of sweat beneath either sleeve. “And for your drink, sir?” he asks, grimacing.
The customer thinks about it for a beat, re-reading the options posted above the attendant’s head. When he doesn’t answer, the mohawked woman checks her watch.
“Sir?” The attendant turns the salutation into a tone. “Your drink?”
“Pepper Ade,” the customer responds. “Uber-sized with light ice.”
The attendant reaches over his head and pulls down a microphone on a wire. “I need a number four on lane three with a Pepper Ade, light ice. Uber-sized, please.” He releases the mic which floats up and away, and looks at the man. “And what would you like for your credit today, sir?”
The customer removes a rag from his pants’ pocket and uses it to wipe a sheen of gray sweat from his brow. “Can I see the choices board, please?”
Frowning, the attendant presses another button and a miniature hologram of the Travel Angel appears on the counter. She sashays back and forth across it, leaving a Times New Roman version of the vocalized choices in her wake.
“Your options today, Mr. McGrudy,” the Travel Angel says, winking up at the man, “are two radiation credits, one chemo credit, or one world famous Burger Shak hot fudge brownie. With or without nuts.” The hologram stops at the edge of the partitioned counter and walks back over the breadcrumb trail of choices.
“Sir,” the attendant prods, arms coupled over the loose hammock of his chest. “Your preferred credit?”
The customer continues to watch the angel as she walks, hips rising and falling. Each turn showing off the contrast between her large breasts and trim, if not narrow, waist.
The attendant hits a button and the angel and her choices disappear. “Would you like a consult, sir?” he asks, looking pointedly at the customer who looks away.
“I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“We at The Crowe Corporation’s Burger Shak are committed to providing our customers as delicious and nutritious an experience as we’re able to provide, see?” the young man reels off. “So, if you can tell me what kind of cancer you’re experiencing today, sir, I can make a suggestion as regards your credit.”
The man leans over the counter to whisper his answer, “Pancreatic.”
“Pancreatic,” the attendant repeats. “You’re telling me you’ve got pancreatic cancer?”
Looking around, the man bobs his head. “Yes.”
“Damed Ts, always sneaking in the stage lines,” the attendant grumbles beneath his breath while punching in the man’s order. “You’re getting the hot fudge brownie, with nuts,” he announces, holding out a palm, long fingers waving. “That’s forty-seven dollars and twenty-five cents.”
“But, if I’m getting the brownie...” the customer begins.
The attendant reaches out and grabs the man’s keychain from his hand. He runs the attached C-Corp fob over a silver dot on the station’s partition and hands it back again. “Same price, sir,” he says. “Sign the waiver, please.”
A holographic signature box appears where the miniature Travel Angel had just been. As the man leans over to read the paragraph of tiny legalese beneath it, the timer of the mohawked woman’s watch goes off. She slaps it silent and walks towards the dull-eyed customer, spinning him away by the loose tail of his palm-treed shirt.
“Listen up!” the woman shouts, jumping onto the counter.
She swings back the edge of her black leather jacket and pulls a short-barreled pistol from its holster. When she turns to address the station’s attendant, she finds him already off and running. Nothing more than a thin figure in her peripheral vision, pushing through the Employees Only door.
The woman turns and looks out at the dispersing crowd, each customer on a straight line to the nearest exit. She holds up the gun and shoots a bullet into the ceiling’s acoustic tiles. Like a salvo, the sound invites a dozen of her comrades. They erupt into the dining room from fore and aft, guns in hand, their features similarly obscured by black mohawks and black and white makeup. They push the fleeing customers and employees ahead of them, through the velvet-roped stanchions that topple to the floor. Into the middle of the queueing area.
One of the woman’s comrades, a wide-shouldered man with a square jaw, whistles from his position near the front doors. As soon as the woman finds him, he flashes her a four minute count. The woman nods and turns her attention to the crowd, its members, gone quiet in their circular, largely self-imposed pen.
Eyes scanning the frenetic group, the woman finds the tall, curly-haired man she’d watched earlier. He’s standing in the circle’s center, observing the chaos around him through a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that make his brown eyes appear huge.
The mohawked woman turns to a different member of her group, a short woman standing near the ordering station. “That’s him.” She nods at the tall, bespectacled man.
Immediately, her petite comrade starts towards him.
The woman strides to the center of the ordering station. “Listen up!” she shouts at the crowd in a steel-and-grit voice.
The room falls silent as all eyes go to her.
“Rules first!” she bellows. “Do not attempt to dial 911! Do not attempt to remove a weapon from your purse, pocket, or person! Do not attempt to run! Any questions?”
Individual heads shake their collective reply. No.
“Good.” The woman motions towards a few dangling purses and bulging pockets. “Pull out your cellphones and hold them up now.”
The group explodes into a frenzy of movement as its members comply. With the clatter of hard plastic hitting tile as a few are dropped, arms rise up from the crowd like periscopes, cellphones at their ends.
“We have access to this location’s records, which means we already know everything there is to know about each and every one of you,” the woman says. “Now here’s what’s going to happen. You are to videotape this encounter then post a video of it by midnight tonight, or we’ll be paying you a less friendly visit at your homes or places of work tomorrow. Now turn on those Goddamned cameras and start recording.”
The crowd’s arms go down then come back up again, becoming a small sea of red eyes pointed the woman’s way.
“My name is Emeritus Locshaw,” she announces, watching as the tall man is extracted from the crowd. “I, along with the rest of my crew, represent the Illuminaughty.” She pauses, waiting to continue until the man is brought closer. “That’s spelled N, A, U, G, Haitch...” She watches as the man’s eyes widen. “T, Y.”
The woman drops to her knees and motions for the man to come closer. When he hedges, her short compatriot gives him a shove.
“You must be wondering why we’ve singled you out, Mr. Quint,” the woman whispers into the whorl of his turned ear. “That answer is coming. Bear with us.”
She pats the man on the shoulder and stands, turning her attention back to the crowd.
“The reason we’ve interrupted your late night dose of carcinogens is to try and restart that vestigial part of your brains that used to recognize shit from truth.” The woman looks around, taking dubious stock of the faces turned her way. “Truth is, if I thought the lot of you consisted solely of those happily marching off to the slaughter, I’d wash my hands of the whole thing.”
The woman’s black eyes catch on a girl snugged up against a woman, presumably her mother. Twelve, maybe thirteen-years old, the pubescent girl wears a shirt gone too tight through the chest and pants chosen to accommodate freshly bloomed hips, its too-big waist, ruffled beneath a belt.
“If it was just the lot of you who stood to be done in by your own laziness,” the woman continues, black eyes slashing across the mother’s face, “we wouldn’t be here, waving around guns in an attempt to save you from yourselves. But here’s the problem. You people keep making new people. Then you raise them on a diet of willful blindness and conformity, ensuring that another generation will suffer the same fate as you. And that,” the woman’s gaze returns to the girl standing next to her mother, “I can not abide.”
The square-jawed man near the entrance steps forward and flashes the remaining time. Three minutes.
The woman nods and looks back at the crowd. “We’re keeping this stop on our Meet and Greet campaign to two topics. The first being C-Corp’s Travel Angel.”
The woman reaches over the counter’s divider and collects a cardboard cut-out of the Travel Angel from a neighboring station.
“Most of you love this woman,” she says, holding the cardboard angel above her head. “Every poll in the nation ranks C-Corp’s Travel Angel as second only to Jesus Christ on the popularity scale. Any product or service she gets behind, you line up to consume. When you need a sympathetic ear, are seeking spiritual guidance, have questions about your health, you call her on C-Corp’s concierge line and pour out your hearts to her. You entrust your family’s deepest secrets to her. You allow her to make cornerstone decisions for not just you, but your kids. What you people are giving to this corporate construct is nothing less than access to your most pertinent information, or, rather, you give it to some telemarketer who’s been taught to speak like her. Which is something most of you, being of sound mind, if not body, already know, but do anyway. My question, which should be yours, as well, is why?”
The woman dropkicks the cardboard angel off the ordering station and onto the floor. It slides across the slick tiles and lands at the tall man’s feet.
“All of you trust this glorified mascot for the same reason you flock to anything with the C-Corp name on it,” the woman continues. “You prefer the ease of illusion to a hard reality, even when it’s killing you.”
The woman points the red sights of her gun across the crowd who scramble to get out of their way. The wobbling red dots find their mark on the poster of the Travel Angel hung between the entrance and exit doors. They move from the tips of the angel’s crossed wings to the winged tray of Burger Shak food floating next to her.
“This is no savior,” the woman says, her gun’s red sights painting an infinity sign across the angel’s face. “This woman is the specter of death dolled up in a pushup bra and a pair of wings. And this tagline....” She pauses to move her sights to the words printed just beneath the angel’s image, Your cradle-to-grave companion on this journey called life. “This should terrify you!” she growls. ”Not have you lining up to run like lemmings off the nearest fucking cliff!”
The woman takes a deep breath, exhaling loudly through her nostrils. “End of lesson one,” she says, rolling her neck. “On to lesson two, which goes as such: The Crowe Corporation is killing you. Slowly and lucratively. We’ll have hard evidence to show you soon enough, but, in the meantime, I’m asking you to stop using their products and services.”
The woman returns the gun to her holster and looks out at the crowd.
“Pop quiz, people,” she announces. “The Travel Angel is not only no Christ come down from the cross, she’s the specter of...?”
The crowd mumbles their collective answer, “Death.”
“Very good.” The woman nods. “And, second, whose products and services do you swear to quit using?”
Again, the crowd answers in roughly the same cadence, “The Crowe Corporation’s.”
“Excellent.” The woman motions towards the circle of raised cellphones. “You can stop filming now.”
All cellphones are put away.
One arm goes back up.
The woman sees it and motions the young man closer. “What is it you want to say?” she asks him.
The man takes a scant step towards her. “How?” he asks in a trembling voice. “C-Corp makes everything. They own everything. Our gas. Our light. Our medicine. Our food.”
The woman stares at the young man, a there-and-gone smile dancing on her lips. “It will be hard,” she says. “C-Corp has cornered many...no, most markets. But it’s possible. It’s necessary if you want to live out from under Cyrus Crowe’s thumb.” She looks out at the others who’ve all gone still as stone. “If we don’t find a way to extract ourselves from The Crowe Corporation, we’ll never be healthy. We’ll never be free. Not really.”
Head down, the young man slides back into the crowd.
The woman steps to the front of the counter and motions the tall man back over. This time, he comes of his accord.
“Do you have anyone sick at home?” she asks him.
The man shakes his head. “No.”
“I’m sorry to spring it on you this way, Mr. Quint, but we’ve identified you as a member of a hacker group calling themselves Haitch,” she tells him. “You have a skill we very much need right now so, at least temporarily, you’re being drafted into the Illuminaughty.”
Before the man can respond, the woman nods at two of her members who take hold of him and lead him away. She stands and finds her wide-shouldered compatriot near the front, one finger signaling a hasty exit.
“Remember, my name is Emeritus Locshaw and we are the Illuminaughty!” the woman shouts, following the rest of her group towards the Employees Only door. “Videos up no later than midnight!” she calls out just before backing through it.