Page 8 of Exit Strategy
Afterwards, Arik would come strutting out like King Shit, Lord of the World. Callie would come out later, looking like a scalded lobster. It was the pale skin. It was like that for people who were that pale – they only had the two colors, glacier and lobster – it didn’t mean anything. There had been a lad in the company, skinny ginger kid, and he joked that he put on sunscreen before bed, so he didn’t get moon burn. Or there was the joke about turning the screen brightness on his phone down because he was getting tan lines on his face from the display.
He was a funny kid before a Taliban RPG turned him inside out.
I considered worrying about Callie, she seemed nice enough. If there was a problem, she was always with women from that New Eden group. I hadn’t read any of the New Eden books, but it was mostly like a church, and church women were there for each other.
I actually take that back. I didn’t consider anything; Ididworry about her. But it just wasn’t my place. Not until she said something, and even then?Bloody hell…
Filming ended late and getting the assets from the set back to their mansion up in the hills was an easy task. We scrambled signals, sent false instructions out on the compromised network, and then watched as the paparazzi went chasing after three sedans, while Tomcat and Cardinal left moments afterwards in SUVs.
Once they were away, my shift was over, and I logged out of the network. I wouldn’t be on call again for hours. The house detail at the mansion would take over once they were secure, and in the morning, I would resume my duties. After having listened to Rex lay into his little ginger like she was a Bangkok whore, I needed to get rid of some of that mental noise. I needed to get her out of my mind.
The cure for mental noise was actual noise, and that meant hitting up one of the bars close to the set. There were also two effective methods to stop thinking about a woman – one was to get smashingly drunk, and the other was to pick up another woman for a night.
The first part was easy enough, there were several dozen in walking distance from the studio gates, ranging from dirty dives up to high-end places that offered a dirty-dive chic experience for the Kristal and caviar crowd. I picked the former, a dirty hole-in-the-wall with a shite live band, and a blinking neon sign that screamed topless servers after eleven.
The plan was simple, assault the frontal lobe with high-grade alcohol and provide support with loud music. It was a simple plan.
As for the second option, there was always a chance that I could run into the regular – a shallow needy woman who’s just broken up with her piece of shit boyfriend and is looking for some rebound dick to remind her she was still young and pretty and could have any man she wanted. Being tall, broad-shouldered, thick in the neck, an overly serious expression, and the military tats on my arm drew them like flies to honey.
Most of the time I blew them off.
The cocky arrogant ones who came up to make demands were told to fuck right off with their twatty nonsense. There were some who were given the hard no when they walked up – the ones with the incredibly obvious baggage, signs of hard drug use, or seriously lacking personal hygiene. My personal least favorites were the slightly above-average good-looking ones who would come up, trailing their reluctant partner behind them, wanting me to play the bull for their cuckold fantasy.
Hard pass on that.
On occasion, though, the right one would come along.
Plastic free, natural hair color, thatgirl-next-doorvibe, no outrageous makeup, a few hints that she had more going on in her life than being a barfly. Those were the ones that I would take back to their own places, put their ankles behind their ears, and give them the old two, six, heave until they were shaking.
The main point was that I didn’t look for any of these women. I didn’t hunt for them. There was a whole city full of self-important dude bros with identical haircuts, hunting and chasing everything with a pair of X chromosomes. They reminded me of the feral dogs that I had seen in Afghanistan, and during a brief stint in South Africa. They moved in packs, sniffing out the sick, the weak, the vulnerable, and made them their targets. Women almost instinctively recognized them and avoided them.
I pounded a shot of Jameson, then drank my beer. The rest was listening to the band as it struggled through a few songs and watching a few of the different screens around the place. It was a fucking mess – one had streaming news, another had some sports’ shite playing, another was running vintage cartoons. The place was a madhouse. I was three drinks in when eleven rolled around and the bags and jubblies came out.
Pity.
Some of them should have stayed up. The next time I went out drinking after a day on the set, I would have to pick somewhere else.
None of the wankers in the bar cared too much. There was a lot of wolf whistling and pounding on tables. For a pair of tenners, one of the topless waitresses would come over and give your face a good bap beating.
I wasn’t having any of that.
There was something about just wanting to be left alone that seemed to make people relentless in bothering me. Maybe that was part of the big city, I guessed. Everyone was supposed to be part of the hive, part of the human swarm – whistle at titties, harass women, get in fights with other dude bros whose collars were popped at different angles from your collar. Staying out of it made me a target, of sorts.
The news did catch my eye. I saw the flashy colors and logos. There was the symbol of New Eden, and then it turned into a mushroom cloud. Then, there was a woman with short auburn hair, shaking a fist and shouting wordlessly. The only sound was the reverberating wail of the band, and a waitress hitting me up – twenty for a titty beating or if I wanted another beer. I waved her away with an order for another shot of Jameson and I pulled out my phone.
It didn’t take long to bring up the local news affiliate and link to the story.
FALLOUT Spokeswoman and Founder Marion Tate Puts New Eden on Blast– the headline was scrolling across the screen. I read a little into the story, some bint was going on about how she had been sex trafficked by the New Eden Centre in San Luis Obispo.
It wasn’t a new story, and not the first time that I had seen that woman. She had been in the news a few times, trying to stir up shit against New Eden, but the best she could manage was some topical outrage. Hard to get traction against an organization that was all clean air and electric cars, techno-socialism for everyone. Believing that New Eden was into human trafficking was as laughable as those assholes chasing Bigfoot or the local loons who went tromping off into the marshes looking for the fucking snallygaster.
“Everyone is looking for something to believe in, you know,” a woman said, sliding into the spot next to me at the bar. Her sudden appearance put me on alert. I wasn’t a fan of sudden things.
“Pardon?”
“You know, New Eden, Jesus, Oprah, everyone is looking for something to believe in.” She gestured to the muted screen of the ranting woman next to the mushroom cloud icon, and then my phone. She had looked over my shoulder.
“No atheists in a foxhole,” I replied, a familiar enough expression.
