by C.M. Lanning
Chapter 6: One Sick Dog
The stars were blurring for the 75th time as the driver brought Starla back home toward Earth. His breathing was erratic, and his stomach felt horrible.
Everything was sore for an inexplicable reason. He just needed to get home and get to bed. Bed would make everything better.
“I’ll sleep it off like I always do,” the driver whispered.
Solstice was watching him like a hawk. She could sense all was not well for her friend.
It was stupid really. He had taken one day off to go visit a bartender that he had picked up on Europa once before. She seemed interested in him, and he thought, What the Hell? It couldn’t hurt to take her up on her offer and visit.
He started feeling funny just past Mars. . . and not in a good way. The driver was never one to take drugs, but he was a drinker on occasion. He got free rides from Starlight Taxi, so, that made the perfect designated driver.
As Starla entered the atmosphere and swerved slightly from side to side, she somehow found the highway that led to Lefont. The driver’s dull reaction time actually caused Starla to skid a little on the cement of his driveway. In between wheezing, he stopped Starla, got out, and stood on unsteady legs.
Solstice, ever the faithful red husky, hopped out and walked backwards slowly to lead the driver to the front door of his small townhouse.
His neighbor Travis was out mowing the lawn and saw the driver stumbling. He stopped his mower and walked over to the short metal black fence that separated his yard from the driver’s property.
“You okay, neighbor?”
The driver looked up, forcing his vision to focus for a second. He saw his neighbor with a concerned look on his face. Travis was wearing some sort of jungle explorer outfit.
I’ll never understand that guy, the driver thought.
“I’m good. . . just need to get some sleep,” the driver said, raising his hand slowly to wave.
“If you say so. Want me to have Krickett make some soup and bring it over later?”
“No. . . thanks. Just need. . . snooze,” the driver said, stumbling forward.
His steps from the door to his bed were a blur, but he collapsed on the black futon in his bedroom without even transforming it into a bed.
He coughed as he tried to doze off, but he was burning up.
“Damn. . . air on, set to 68 degrees,” the driver yelled.
He felt his air kick on as he slipped off his red canvas shoes and slowly reached up to pull his earpiece off his head and throw it on the floor. He’d need no disturbances tonight if he was going to work tomorrow.
His stomach just felt more and more nauseous, and his mind refused to quit thinking about random things. . . movies. . . what he’d read in the newspaper earlier in the day. . . details about some of his clients.
His mind wandered aimlessly, Wasn’t there an old man. . . and a tree?
Then, as he wished, his mind stopped, and he passed out.
A falling feeling engulfed the driver as he landed in a pond. He looked around to see where he was as he swam to shore and tried to brush some algae off of him. No one appeared to notice his falling, but the driver had no idea where he was.
Slowly, as though a parting fog lifted from his memory, he realized his exact location. . . the Lieutenant Richard B. Ridick Park in Dallas.
“How the Hell did I get here?”
He looked around. It was a cloudy winter day, which was odd because when the driver fell asleep it was. . . spring?
“Man, I must have been more messed up than I thought when I hit the bed. I don’t even remember getting up, let alone. . . coming to Dallas,” the driver said, scratching his head. His hat was missing, and his keys and wallet were also gone.
His wet shoes squeaked as he walked over toward a large man standing at the shore of an even bigger pond.
Before he made it halfway to the big guy, someone ran right through the driver.
“What the Hell?”
He looked down at himself and touched his stomach. He felt his wet gray long sleeve t-shirt.
The kid running away from him was actually a teen, the driver realized, but that wasn’t what scared him. What scared the driver was he recognized the teen.
“That hat. . . it belongs to my grandfather,” the driver muttered.
His familiar brown pub hat was given to him by the first orphanage he stayed in. They told him it belonged to his grandfather who dropped him off. It was the one thing he kept with him all the time.
Then, he remembered this cold winter day. The adolescent running at the fat man ahead was 16, and the driver knew exactly what was about to happen to the teen.
He watched it unfold as the fat man turned around with one lightning quick motion and stopped the kid from grabbing his wallet. He then flipped the teen over in the grass and went back to his hobby.
“Him and those ducks,” the driver muttered, walking over.
This must be some sort of dream, the driver thought.
He listened to the fat man laugh as the teen growled and held his head in his hands, still not getting up.
“What’d you do that for, you stupid fat man?”
“What’d I do that for? You were trying to steal my wallet you little pissant! You’re lucky I didn’t throw you into the pond with the ducks!”
The two continued to fight, and eventually, the teen settled down as the larger man continued to feed a group of Mallard ducks from the loaf of bread by his feet.
“Why are you feeding those stupid things? What a waste of food,” the teen muttered.
“Should I instead use my food to feed horrible thieves that attempt to rob me of my wallet? Feeding these ducks makes me happy. I feel peaceful. What would I get out of feeding a hungry turd like you?”
The teen’s stomach growled so loud that the driver could hear it clear across the park.
He got up to walk away when the fat man turned and tossed him a slice of bread. The teen caught it and immediately tore it to pieces, wolfing it down.
“I’ll buy you dinner on two conditions, brat.”
The teen hated being called a brat, but his pride was too weak having been starved over the past couple days.
“Name them.”
“You wait patiently and quietly while I finish feeding the ducks, and you have to take back calling me fat,” the man said, turning to the kid.
The driver smirked. This guy had lots of class, even if he was a tightass.
His short black hair and graying stubble were all too familiar to the driver, but the teen was seeing him for the first time.
“What do I call you then? Ugly beard man doesn’t have quite as nice of a ring,” the teen said, laughing.
“You can call me Chris, you weird hat-wearing freak.”
The teen said nothing but kept up the first condition of the bargain while he waited for his meal.
Chris fed the ducks for another five minutes while he emptied his bag of bread. The teen held his end of the bargain and said nothing. He really needed the food.
“I’m impressed. Even a dumb failed thief like you can keep a bargain. Come on, I know a good burger cart. You like bacon cheeseburgers?”
“I like food that keeps me from starving,” the teen shrugged.
The driver watched them disappear as he felt that falling feeling again.
This time, instead of falling into a pond, he fell onto a green carpeted floor.
He moaned and felt his forehead. It was burning up, and even a simple space cab driver like him knew that was bad. Solstice was at his side, licking his face and trying to get him up. He struggled to move, but his body responded sluggishly.
“Where is my. . . earpiece,” the driver muttered softly, feeling on the carpet for it unsuccessfully. He knew he needed to call emergency medical services. He broke into a horrible coughing fit as a little blood dripped down from his lips.
Solstice was done sitting idly by. S
he grabbed the driver’s left pant leg and dragged him slowly out of the bedroom, across the living room, and up to the front door. Then, she began to bark and howl as loud as she could, clawing on the door.
The driver wanted to move, but he passed out yet again.
More falling led to him hitting another pond. This particular pond was in the middle of a road.
He swam to shore, and as he climbed out, a speeding taxi blew right through him.
Angrily, he brushed more algae of his gray long sleeve t-shirt that had previously been dry.
“Aw come on! What, is Dallas just full of ponds or something?”
His angry shouting was silenced by laughter. He looked around the road, and a flying red truck passed right through him.
“Okay. Cars are going to have to stop with the whole ghost thing,” the driver muttered.
Running to the sidewalk, he looked around noting the neon lights that decorated downtown skyscrapers of Dallas. To his right he saw one of the oldest buildings in the city, even if it wasn’t functional anymore. It was a giant yellow lit ball.
It was previously used to celebrate the New Year’s holiday, but people had stopped doing that about 150 years prior to the driver’s birth.
Laughter again caused him to look around. Just up the sidewalk was a metal picnic table outside a food stand of some kind. The stand looked like it had seen better days with a red and yellow umbrella. The small metal hovering box had a tiny grill on top that the driver knew from experience made the best bacon cheeseburgers in the city.
Seated at the table were Chris and the teen.
The driver remembered this night. It was one of the first times he’d had someone genuinely show kindness to him.
One Galaxy Republic regulations on orphanages weren’t too strict. The government wasn’t tyrannical by any means, but there were plenty of homeless kids in the galaxy. It was all the government could do to provide some form of shelter for them. The homes that the teen had been bounced to and from hadn’t been the best places.
He’d been raised by a drug dealer at one point and even a sex trafficker that was using foster kids to rent out to clients. That was the last one the teen ran away from.
Now this Chris guy was engaging him in actual conversation and buying him a meal. The teen began to have a little faith restored in humanity, especially considering he’d previously attempted to rob the guy who bought him dinner.
“Alright, I’ll get us a couple ice cream bars, and we have got to hit the hay. You’re going to have to get up early tomorrow to help work off this meal,” Chris said.
The teen finished his burger and began to fish around in the brown paper bag for any remaining curly fries.
“Give me two ice cream bars, Jeff,” Chris said.
Jeff, a taller middle-aged man in his 40s with gelled spiky hair, reached into the cooled compartment of his food cart and pulled out a couple objects wrapped tightly in foil and plastic.
Chris paid him in cash from his nonstolen wallet and handed one to the teen.
“What work will I be doing tomorrow?”
“You’ll be going to get some registration identity documents from the Central Bureau of Identities, applying for your Small Class Ship Operator’s License, and then filling out paperwork for me to become my employee,” Chris said.
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a manager at a hub for Starlight Taxi. I need a new driver pretty bad, and you’re going to be that driver. You can start driving at age 16, start making a living, and then start saving up for a place of your own so you don’t have to sleep on my couch,” Chris said, finishing his dessert and wiping his mouth with a red and yellow napkin.
“Why go through all the trouble for me?”
“I need a driver, and you need a future. It works out,” Chris said.
“What if I don’t want to be a cab driver?”
“Then run, either now, or after my sweet wife Nancy gets you set up on the couch for the night and goes to bed. You can go another couple days trying unsuccessfully to steal from people and starve to death before the weekend. It’s your choice. I just figured you might be smart enough to have the desire to live,” Chris said, nonchalantly.
Nice way to put it for a street kid, asshole, the driver thought, mouthing word for word what Chris had said from memory.
The next few years wouldn’t be easy for the teen, but Chris would ride his ass into a success story.
The teen would spend the next 25 years driving a cab, eventually earning a diploma from a school system he had long given up on. He would grow into a responsible adult who didn’t make much money but always paid his bills on time and had a place to live.
“Sometimes I forget how much I owe the old man,” the driver muttered.
As Chris led the teen home and they faded from view, the driver began to fall once more.
“Not again!”
This time, he felt a weight on his legs and heard beeping machinery. His eyes slowly opened, and the bright light made his head throb.
Something sharp was in his arm, and there was a thin blanket covering him.
As his eyes slowly adjusted, he saw that Solstice was laying on his legs napping. She must have heard his breathing pick up. She looked and saw her owner awake and excitedly crawled up to lick his cheek.
“Okay, okay, I get it. You’re happy I’m not dead. Down girl,” the driver muttered, feeling the effects of cotton mouth.
“Do I dare ask where I am?”
He looked around and noticed the IV in his arm. It was a small private room with a curtain pulled back revealing a door to the bathroom and a small TV hanging from the ceiling.
“Southeast Mercy Hospital near downtown Lefont,” a woman said.
The driver looked over and saw a familiar sight walking into his hospital room.
“Karmen! What are you doing here?”
The tall woman stood before him wearing a very simple and short velvet dress. The driver didn’t realize this the last time he’d seen the bartender from Europa.
There was no design on the low-cut red velvet dress. It simply outlined her figure and went down to her thighs.
I need to wake up in hospitals more often, the driver thought.
“Well, I saw you leaving the bar from Europa, and I assumed you’d come to find me and weren’t successful. So, I got in another cab and followed you back. We were a few minutes behind you when we got to Earth due to traffic, but once we landed outside your home, I heard your dog howling and barking like mad. I called for help, and here you are,” she explained.
Last time he saw her, she had purple hair, a tattoo above her right eye, and a pierced nose. Now, she didn’t have any of those things. Her long hair was now dark red.
“Thanks for. . . saving me. Um, one question. . . what happened to your. . . bartender look?”
“Oh. I had optics implanted in my hair. It can change colors in a few minutes. The tattoo and piercing were fake. I just look that way because the roughnecks who frequent the bar don’t like the punk look. It keeps most of them away from me except for when they want more booze.”
“Huh,” the driver said.
“Huh?”
“Oh, nothing. You just look so. . .,” the driver couldn’t finish his sentence.
“Normal? It’s okay, Mr. Scared To Hurt My Feelings, you can admit you like me better this way,” she said, walking over and petting Solstice.
The red husky didn’t appear to like her too much, but it tolerated another person being close to the driver. Solstice understood that this girl had saved her friend’s life.
“Any idea what it was that put me in this bed?”
“A rare parasite known as Yupke Larvae,” a woman in a white coat said, walking in. She was a young Hispanic girl with short curly brown hair. She had a rich accent, but it was still easy to understand her.
“Parasite?”
“Yes. I don’t know where you
picked it up, but I’m the physician that diagnosed and treated you right away, ultimately saving your life. I’m Dr. Espinoza,” she said, checking the see-through tablet computer at the foot of his bed and tapping different parts of the screen to get updated data.
“Well thank you. . . was I really that bad off?”
Another voice entered the room, this one the least attractive of all.
“He got the parasite from a ship stop vending machine sandwich. The idiot isn’t exactly the healthiest eater,” Chris said, slapping the sandwich wrapper down on a table to the driver’s right.
“You went through my garbage? I’m a little disturbed and slightly violated,” the driver muttered.
“You were almost dead, you idiot! I told you to take better care of yourself and watch what you eat!”
The driver hated getting health advice from Chris, but in the past decade or so, he’d lost enough weight to be considered healthy again. He was still a big boy, but he was down to about 200 pounds now thanks to leg weights he wore everywhere he went.
“Fine. No more ship stop sandwiches,” the driver said.
Chris’ mouth was wide open at hearing the driver’s words.
“That’s it? No arguing?”
The driver, in light of some memories coming to the forefront of his mind, decided to cut Chris some slack.
“That’s it,” the driver said.
Chris was speechless and said nothing for several minutes
The driver saw a small glass with ice water in it to his left. He reached for it and took a drink.
“Drink slow. You’ve been out for about a week now,” Dr. Espinoza said.
The driver’s eyes widened “A week?”
“Yes. You came in last Friday, and today is the following Friday. It took your body quite a while to recover from being severely dehydrated by the parasite. That’s what it does to you. Often it isn’t caught soon enough and kills its host. You’re lucky your dog and girlfriend were looking out for you.”
“Whoa whoa whoa-”
“Honey, why don’t you calm down,” Karmen said, running her fingers through his hair.
The doctor’s ear piece buzzed, and she excused herself from the room.
Chris walked over and handed the driver his pub hat. The driver put it on and instantly felt a little better. He’d been missing something since he woke up, but he didn’t know exactly what the item was.
“I’ll leave you and your girlfriend to it then,” Chris said, turning to go.
“Thanks, Chris,” the driver said somewhat quietly, causing him to turn around and raise an eyebrow.
“Did you have attitude surgery while you were in here?”
“No. . . you know, I just was remembering Dallas as of late and decided to cut you a little slack for the time being,” the driver said, taking another small drink of water.
“Oh. . . well okay then. See you Monday,” Chris said.
“Oh damn! My vacation time!”
“Relax. You had five sick days to use, and you hadn’t taken any sick time off yet this year, so, you’re fine,” Chris said.
“I thought we only got two sick days?”
Chris sighed and slapped his forehead.
“That policy was changed a few months back when the Department of Labor Standards issued Starlight Taxi a written warning and a fine for violating sick day policy. All workers with at least five years under their belt get five sick days. Geez, you really don’t read the weekly memos I send out, do you?”
“Sorry. I’ll read them from now on,” the driver said.
Chris shook his head and left muttering, “He needs to have near-death experiences more often if he’s this nice afterwards.”
Now that Karmen and the driver were alone, except for Solstice, he looked at her and squinted.
“Girlfriend?”
“Relax. It was the only way they’d let me in the room with you,” she said, running her fingers through his hair again.
“We haven’t even been on a date together,” the driver said.
“Well, you went to Europa to ask me on a date. . . you just nearly died before you could get to the asking part,” Karmen said, walking over to her purse that she’d put down when she entered the room.
“How do you know I went to Europa to ask you out?”
“Really? Are we seriously going to do this elementary school ‘check the yes box if you have a crush on me’ crap? You’re in your 40s. Act like it, grow a pair, and accept that you owe me a nice dinner and some form of entertainment,” Karmen said.
Geez. She’s direct, the driver thought to himself.
“Okay. . . a date. . . whenever I get out of here,” the driver said.
“Dr. Espinoza told me earlier in the week that you could leave 24 hours after regaining consciousness, assuming your body was done rehydrating.
I’m kind of creeped out that she knows more about my diagnosis and condition than I do, the driver thought.
“Have you been here all week?”
“Chris stepped in to relieve me, but the two of us didn’t really leave your side. I only just got back though,” she said, still rummaging around in her big red purse.
The driver heard paper rattling somewhat, and he wondered what she was up to.
“Thanks for staying. Where did you get back from?”
She walked over with a brown paper bag and put it on the table next to the driver.
“I went to Dallas at Chris’ suggestion to get you some dinner on the off chance you woke up tonight,” Karmen said.
The driver recognized the scent inside the brown paper bag.
“You didn’t. . . Jeff’s?”
“Chris mentioned you were a fanatic about that place,” Karmen said, handing him a bacon cheeseburger wrapped in foil.
“Okay, maybe two dates,” the driver said, unwrapping his burger.
Solstice started to inch her way toward the treat, but the driver’s growling stopped her, and she retreated to the foot of the bed.
He tore off a tiny piece and tossed it down at her. She caught it in her mouth, and then the driver went to town on his burger, thankful for Solstice, Karmen, and even Chris.