Iglesia …………Episode 3

Last weeks episode

She palmed the Bio-Scan at the entrance to her Burbclave (she had heard the term was invented by a sci-fi writer way back in the 20th) and they rolled through the gate. Half an hour ago they were in inner city Philadelphia, now they were in a whole other world. Sure it was the cheapest clave around, and built on land of questionable toxic lethality, but it was what she and Paul could afford. Even though she still found it mystifying how the designers thought that making a replica of a London neighborhood in the 1930’s…..just before it got bombed into smoking rubble by Hitler, was a good marketing idea. What with the current state of the world as it was. But it was nice, in  a sort of gruesome way. Plastic brick house fronts that looked almost real, with stoops and plastic street lamps, cobblestones and neatly trimmed green hedges behind black faux cast iron fences, window boxes and London mail boxes and piped in birdsong and all.

As she huled her bags out of the van in front of her house and waved goodbye to Frank, the recorded bird song set her off again and she remembered the last home owners meeting she had gone to a couple of years ago. The one where they had debated for two hours on exactly what sort of birds to have cloned to sing for them. Until someone pointed out that the birds would just fly away and they settled on a recording.

She sighed and palmed the lock on her plastic front door.

Heading down the hall to the wall safe, dragging her bags , she thought about dinner, what they would deem to show her on ‘the news,’ and tried to remember what time Paul’s schedule would bring him home from the research hospital tonight. As she packed her hand gun, her machine pistol, her stun grenades, her tazer, her lock shot, her baton, her hide-out gun, her hide-out knife, her pepper spray, her brass knucks and her handcuffs into the wall safe, she decided on ‘chicken’….and booze… for dinner.

She pulled the tab on her chicken product dinner to heat it and went to the living room to turn on the wall. And she made herself a very tall drink. She retrieved her dinner and the big bottle of Tabasco….thank God for Tabasco, even if it was made in Canada now….and settled in to watch the 25 minutes of celebrity gossip and the five minutes of ‘world events coverage’ that constituted the ‘news’ these days. She finished her drink and dinner …..and promptly fell asleep.

One of the things she hated about being a cop: when Paul wakened her as he opened the front door hours later, her hand was instinctively rooting on her hip for her gun. She let out her breath in a puff. She got up and hugged him, he smelled like hospital, and looked in his tired, tired eyes and realized she wasn’t going to get any tonight. So she just snuggled in hard and didn’t let go.

And then he grabbed her ass….

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(To be continued on Tuesday!)