FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"I'm here to take you to The Other Side," the chicken said, cocking its head toward the thin strip of road.

The man looked around himself, then blankly ahead at the road for a moment. It looked newly paved, and mirages shimmered in the desert heat just above the hot blacktop of the highway that disappeared out of sight in both directions. To either side of it, the parched clay ground baked in the sun like a kiln. There was nothing all around, but this terracotta desert that peeled and cracked like a bad sunburn, and the road. And the chicken.

"Is this a joke?" the man said.

"No," said the chicken, "This is the punchline."

The chicken turned and started walking across the road. The man saw little choice but to follow. He didn't bother questioning its motives.

It crossed slowly, all awkward bony legs and bobbing head, strutting its way across the solid lines painted on the road--no passing allowed. So the man stayed behind, taking one step at a time as the chicken bobbed in front. Slowly and deliberately, one foot at a time, like a bride or a pallbearer. Step. Pause. Step. Pause.

A pool of grit and sand had collected by the edge of the other side of the road. Red clay dust whirled up around their feet as they stepped off the pavement, and settled on the man's canvas running shoes.

"Now what?" he asked.

"Now wait."

"For what?"

"Yes, exactly. Now stick out your thumb."

Uncertainly, he obeyed the chicken and raised his arm, thumb outstretched. He wasn't sure which direction he was facing, and couldn't guess which way the flow of traffic would be when or if it finally came. The sun had been directly overheard for far longer now than he felt like it should have been. Black shadows with hard-edged outlines pooled under his feet. He could feel his scalp beginning to burn, and was quietly thankful his hair felt just a little too long, and might save him from some of the sun. He wondered hopelessly if this highway was even still in use, and how long it had been since the last vehicle passed--long before they'd arrived--and if the drivers here carry water on board, and as time passed while the sun failed to, about other less coherent things. Sweat started to soak his thin cotton shirt and black dots began to dance at the edge of his vision.

"Keep your arm up," the chicken interrupted his thoughts harshly. The man was startled, and looked at the chicken and then his hand, which had sunk absently almost to his side. The sun still sat right over head.

"Sorry," he mumbled, and shook the tingle out of his right arm, then raised his hand again. He wondered blurrily about the mechanics of heat stroke. But the chicken seemed to think this was important, and who could argue with that.

A black square appeared, like a dead pixel, quivering on the horizon in the heat off the road. Its shadow clung underneath it. The man raised both his arms and waved them above his head plaintively as it started to resolve into shapes and colours and became a huge, bullish transport truck, bright blue and chrome, well-maintained. The truck's horn acknowledged him, echoing over the flat, empty desert like a prehistoric roar. The man picked up the chicken under his left arm as the oversize truck got closer and started slowing down to stop. He stepped back from the road and shaded his eyes with a hand, as several tons of shining metal took their considerable time to hove onto the shoulder and stop.

He peered up at the window and windshield, but they were tinted opaque black. Against the shine off that chrome, he thought. The passenger side door swung open and a woman just a little bit too old to be called young anymore looked down at the man from over the seat and smiled brightly.

"Well? Hop in." she called, then leaned back up into the truck. The man climbed up the metal ladder steps into the truck and settled the chicken on his lap. It tucked its head under its wing. She offered him a gallon canteen she kept slung over the headrest of the driver's seat, and he started to gulp back the cool water like he was trying to drink the whole gallon in one swallow.

"Don't down it too fast; you'll just make yourself sick and just throw it all up again," the driver advised, and turned the key in the ignition. The truck shuddered and began to rumble back to life and motion. "I'm Sharon. Sharon Watt," the driver said conversationally. "So. What's your name?"

The man opened his mouth, then closed it again, startled and rather worried. He had no idea what his name was. He hadn't known it earlier, either. It just hadn't seemed odd not knowing until she pointed it out.

"You do have one?"

"I...I'm...Adam. My name is Adam." He thought for a moment. "Freeman. I'm Adam Freeman." It would do. Sharon looked at him curiously.

"Right...thanks. Think I got that, won't need to repeat it for me again."

"Sorry."

"Don't be. You alright?"

"Yeah, I think I'm fine now. It's much cooler in here."

"Good. Well, Adam Freeman, pretty soon we'll be hitting this truck stop up ahead, and I'll be stopping there to fill up the tank and such-like. You can get your bearings, clean yourself up, and decide where you wanna go from there. Keep riding with me, or head out on your own."

Adam looked down at the chicken in his lap.

"Is that where I'm going?"

The chicken looked up, annoyed to be awake, and clucked shrilly. Adam was surprised, then confused, and watched it suspiciously. The chicken only stared at him dumbly through black glassy eyes, its head on one side. Sharon glanced away from the road to look at Adam again, this time with serious concern.

"Must have been pretty hot out there for you today. You make sure you rinse off in good cold water when you go to wash up, if we don't get this heat off your brain I'll see you certifiable."

Adam nodded and stared distantly out the passenger-side window. On the distant edge of the cracked clay desert that formed the horizon, the sun was finally setting.

When Sharon's blue big-rig growled and sighed into the gravel lot in front of the truck stop, Adam had to look hard out his window into the darkness to see why they'd stopped. There were no other trucks there, and Sharon had parked on the far side of the lot from a small, low building. A lantern hanging on a post supporting the roof over the front porch provided the only light. Adam could only just see the building's outline.

Sharon unfolded a stiff, black sheet of vinyl, and propped it up in front of the windshield, as a blind keeping passing lights from shining into the truck cab.

"I'm gonna gather some trash around the cab I gotta throw out. Hamburger wrappers from lunch earlier, that kinda stuff. You need to get yourself taken care of, so don't wait for me. You just go inside the store there and ask for the bathroom," she clapped him on the shoulder and smiled, "Tell 'em you came with Sharon. I stop here with guests all the time."

Adam nodded and hopped out of the truck, the chicken squawking indignantly under one arm. He looked up and the moon was barely visible, a thin, narrow slice, like a clipped fingernail. The constellations were indistinguishable in the confusion of stars, like the faces of strangers blurring together in a crowd. It seemed like there were too many of them. His breath hung foggy in the cold desert night.

Rough gravel crunched underfoot as he approached the store porch. His sneakers scuff scattered clumps of scraggy weeds clambering for air out of the edges of tire ruts. The wind was cold through his shirt. The details of the building began to resolve to clarity in the lantern light. It was a long, low shack made of weathered grey wooden siding, its shingles sliding from their places like loose teeth. Behind it, a circle of old fence posts leaned drunkenly, supporting the crossbeams around a penned-off field with water troughs and hay bales. Adam could just barely hear the sounds of sleeping animals, grunting and shifting their weight around the stalls from a row of three small out-buildings along the field's far side. The store had steps out front, made from two stacks of cinder blocks with boards across them. They led up to the deck of the front porch across the full front of the building, complete with wooden rocking chairs and a small card table. The front door was carved wood coated in polished red lacquer. It creaked back and forth slightly on old hinges in the light night-time breeze. Adam pressed a hand against the frosted glass windows set in the door, and it swung inward easily, a hazy yellow light pouring out.

A blonde woman a bit older than Sharon looked up from a book she was reading, sitting on her bar-stool behind the counter by the register. The yellow light was from a bare bulb in a socket that dangled guiltily in the middle of the room. The hum of refrigerators came from the back storage space, and the smell of stale beer and truck-stop sandwiches came from a dusty freezer case against the far wall. The blonde woman glanced back down at the book for a moment, scanning the text with a finger, then back up. She eyed Adam curiously. Somewhere in the store, a tinny, metallic whine wheedled out of a radio, so distorted by interference that the song was unrecognizable.

"Yessir?" the blonde said tiredly. Adam caught himself and mentally shook himself awake.

"I'm just looking for a bathroom. I came with--"

"Sharon, I presume. It's always Sharon. As to the bathroom," she continued, "It's for paying customers only. But, tell you what...I'll take that chicken. Got a few out back, and could use another. Give you a couple coins and everything."

He looked confused at first. He'd actually forgotten about the chicken. It had gone quiet as soon as he got out of the truck.

"Yes. Please, take him. Her. It." Adam put the chicken on the counter, and pushed it towards the woman. The woman took the chicken, hands confidently around the wings and the thicker part of its body at the breast. She turned without another word and walked out the back door.

Adam looked up at the alleged 'jackalope' heads on plaques near the ceiling behind the counter. The aisles behind him were stocked seemingly at random, with things like Cheetohs and Pop-Tarts along side some very serious-looking knives and guns. There was everything from children's toys to electronics to beer to jewelry.

It was a little too quiet for a while, alone with the chorus of electric humming, but the shop owner returned a few minutes later, without the chicken, and dropped the promised coins on the counter. They were both huge, as coins go, and in the relatively limited capacity that Adam could tell, solid gold. One of them Adam recognized as a Spanish dubloon, or at least looked like what he imagined when he pictured a dubloon. The other coin he couldn't even hazard a guess. It was almost three inches across and had writing in some other language inlaid in bronze. The profile of an unfamiliar stern-faced man wearing some kind of officer's cap was printed on one side, and an ornate decorative vase on the other. He shrugged and took the two coins, shoving them in the pocket of his jeans.

"Bathroom?"

"Go out the back door and turn to your right. Here's the key." she said, giving him a long, square wooden dowel about an inch across with a single key on a keyring attached to one end. It was about the length of his forearm. Adam excused himself out the back door.

He passed the corral and the animal sheds, feeling a barnyard's worth of glassy eyes observing him curiously. On his right, an oil lamp hung from the back wall of the shop, illuminating the sign for the unisex bathroom. He turned a sharp right, unlocked the bathroom, then locked himself inside and started to collect himself. He turned on the sink and ran the water cold, then splashed it over his face and down his neck until it soaked through his shirt. "A cowboy shower" his mother used to call this when she took him camping as a young kid: when you soak enough to cool down and feel a bit cleaner, mostly just the face and hands, without really washing yourself.

Adam leaned over the edge of the sink thoughtfully, and with a deep breath stuck his head under the cold running water and remained there until his breath ran out, enjoying the relief from the dry of the desert, and the grit leaving his skin. His hair flicked water over his shoulders and across the mirror as he snapped upright at the waist. He wiped the water from his eyes, and ran his fingers front to back through his hair.

Carefully studying his face in the mirror, not sure whether he actually recognized it or just knew that he should, Adam searched the inside of his own head for memories, like a tongue probing a sore tooth. There were a couple of things, but nothing helpful. It was all simple, daily things, spread over his whole life to that point: his mother on that camping trip, the deer he saw in his back yard very early in the morning on his eighth birthday, the colour of his first car and of his first girlfriend's favourite hoodie slung across the back of the passenger seat, the number of roommates he'd had in college, a long thin gravel road bordered on both sides with dense stands of pines competing shoulder-to-shoulder for space, and the sudden circle of his car's headlights on--

Adam inhaled sharply. He'd hit a sharp point and could remember nothing else. The tongue had found the cavity in the tooth, and recoiled at the pain of touching it. He shook his head, flinging water from his hair again, and dried around his eyes with the heel of his hand.

Above the sink was a mirror. It was scuffed, vandalized (Lucy evidently hearts Mike, he observed layered over the other scrawls in red nail polish), and cracking at the corners. Adam took stock of his unfamiliar reflection. Blue eyes and black hair, shaggy around the ears and back of the neck. Tall. Broad in the shoulders and lean, with plain clothes on the cheap side.

He started digging through the pockets of his jeans, dumping the contents on the counter between the sink and the paper towel dispenser to his left. First there were the two coins from the blonde woman, of course. Then a brittle black plastic comb. He had a handkerchief in his back pocket, about half of it covered in motor oil stains. A number of crumpled receipts followed, mostly for food and gas stations, and one for a car rental. It was badly creased, and the phone number and address were unreadable. He'd never heard of the business name before. Patting himself down once more, he found one last thing: a room key, with a number and address tag on it. Whether it went to a house, apartment, hotel, boarding house room, or shed, Adam couldn't guess. He gathered it all back up and put it back in his pockets, then picked up the wooden bar holding the bathroom key, and went back into the store, passing under the wet light of the oil lamp.

Sharon was inside, talking with the blonde woman like old friends. They didn't see Adam enter, and he stood still for a moment observing them from behind the corner of the ice machine by the door.

"I know, Steph, but did he seem OK when you were talking to him?" Sharon said, "He wasn't making much sense when I found him."

"He'll be fine," Steph said confidently. Her elbow was propped on the book she was reading, and she rested her chin on the palm of that hand. It was a playful gesture, that made her suddenly seem younger, like talking to Sharon took her back in time. Steph's hair was blond turning platinum, put up with a lot of hairspray. Sharon's thin, fine hair was auburn--just beginning to salt-and-pepper--and cut very short, tucked up under a baseball cap. Steph wore floral prints with ornately painted nails in black and white art deco-like patterns. Sharon wore red flannel and plain blue denim. She leaned on both elbows on the counter in front of Steph, crossing her arms between them.

"He was fine," Steph said confidently, "You worry too much. He should be back any minute. And I cut him a deal."

Adam took that as his cue. He coughed lightly, and Sharon and Steph both turned their heads to him, a little sharply. The metallic clank of the keys echoed around the store as he dropped them back on the counter.

"Uh, hey..." he said, and it hung in the air for a moment like a strange smell, "Am I interrupting something?"

"Nah, we just didn't see you there. Anyways, I gotta get going," Sharon said. She turned back to Steph and smiled at her warmly. "See y'later, sugar. I'll be back by tomorrow night."

"And I'll be waitin'." Steph chirped, smiling back. Sharon leaned over the counter, and kissed Steph lightly on the lips. "You get outta here now, or you'll never leave."

Sharon stole another quick kiss and headed back out the truck, beckoning Adam to follow. He hastily followed her out the door, nodding good-bye to Steph, who didn't notice him. Her eyes were already back on her book, with its unmarked charcoal-grey cover. Without taking her gaze off the page, she flipped open a key-chain knife and began to slice into a pomegranate.

"What'd you decide?" Sharon asked him, as he caught up with her on the way to the truck.

"Decide?" Adam asked hesitantly.

"Yeah." Sharon said, opening the driver's side door, turning on the power in the cab, and unlocking the passenger side. "You know what they say: nobody rides for free. If you're staying on with me much longer, I'm gonna need ya to pony up."

"Where are you going?" Adam asked. He glanced through the window as he pulled the door shut, into the endless badland night, and reflected that it didn't matter very much.

"There's a city up ahead, Linn Borough, and the warehouse is there. I should be there dropping off this load by tomorrow afternoon." Sharon gestured behind herself towards the trailer of the big rig.

"Then I guess I'm going to Linn Borough." Adam reached into his pocket and took out the two strange coins he'd gotten from Steph. "This is the closest thing I have to money."

"I know," Sharon said with a knowing smile, "It'll do just fine." She took the two coins from Adam, and threw them in the glove compartment with a number of other coins. An even number. The glove box shut with a click, and Sharon yawned.

"I've gotta get to sleep if I'm gonna get to Linn Borough on time tomorrow. There's only the one bed back there," she said, pointing behind her with her thumb. Adam looked behind the seats for the first time, and noticed a small bunk with a locked cabinet above it. A hotplate sat on top of a mini-fridge behind the driver's seat, and a TV and VCR sat on the floor behind the passenger seat. All them were plugged into a powerbar that was plugged precariously into a single outlet on the floor between them.

"Don't let me intrude," Adam quickly supplied.

"It wouldn't be too much of a bother, if you wanted to share the bunk tonight, and I promise there wouldn't be nothing happening." Sharon glanced back at the light from the window in the door of Steph's store. "You're not exactly my type."

"No, no, it's fine. I'll sleep here in the passenger seat."

"Well, suit yourself. That seat reclines, at any rate, so you can lay back comfortable. Pull the top lever under your seat on the right side. The top lever, mind. The second will move the whole seat backwards and knock over my TV."

Without another word, Sharon went into the back of the cab and dropped herself into the bunk. Adam pulled the top lever beside him, and pressed back on the seat. The hinges dropped loosely and the seat fell back into a sleeping position. A few moments passed in silence, before a thought occurred to Adam, and he rifled in his pocket for that room key.

"Hey, Sharon?"

"Hm?" came a sleepy murmur from behind him.

"Do you know where..." he looked at the key in the beam of soft yellow light through the driver's side window. "...37 Morten Street is?"

"Number 37 itself doesn't ring any bells," Sharon muttered, "But Morten Street is in downtown Linn Borough."

Adam frowned at the key. Having nowhere else to go, he'd go to this room. Room 7, at 37 Morten Street. His room, presumably, or at least had been at some point. And he'd find out what sort of man was Adam Freeman.