The carousel buzzed, but I didn’t move. A level thirty-six boss took focus.
Marty, on the other hand, crossed the gray industrial carpet in three long strides to watch the luggage belt grind into action.
I thumbed the touchscreen, tilted my phone, and mumbled less-than-charitable encouragement to the flickering digital characters throwing explosives at each other.
A rumble of thunder.
The crowd groaned in impressive synchronicity as another announcement interrupted the already ubiquitous jazz. I lost the game in the split-second I looked up. At my muttered invective, the woman beside me huffed in disgust and tugged her daughter’s hand as she walked away.
Marty stomped back and slid down the reddish wood-grained column to sit beside me. “Didn’t I tell you this would happen? I told you not to check a bag. This is why.”
“And I thought you’d be a good travel buddy, so let’s say my judgement isn’t great and leave it at that for the week, okay?”
He sighed, shaking off his pout with a toss of his unruly brown curls. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m…” He shrugged.
“I believe ‘being a dick’ will suffice,” I said and put away my phone. There’s a reason they tell you to pack chargers in carry-on luggage, and I, of course, ignored it.
“To be fair, that is kind of my thing.” Marty smirked as he bumped my shoulder.
I bit the inside of my cheek to restrain my grin. “Indeed.”
Thunder vibrated the glass doors to our right, and the night outside flared purple. In front of me, a swaying woman jumped, waking the little boy in pajamas on her shoulder. His thin frame didn’t give away his age, but his bare feet dangled around her waist. He rubbed his eyes and whined as she crossed the baggage claim area to the luggage belt.
“I’m hungry. We should have gotten something in the terminal.”
“Nothing was open.” I ignored the way my stomach grumbled just thinking about food.
“Oh. Right.” Marty pulled his padded duffel bag into his lap and grunted under the weight of the tech inside. “Maybe I still have snacks.”
A wail of terror shattered my nerves, and I couldn’t help but look. The little boy clung to his mother, shaking, his face buried against her shoulder as she murmured to him. Without looking up, he pointed over her shoulder into the baggage claim waiting area.
I leaned my head back against the column, breathing slowly, my eyes closed. Not my kid, not my problem.
My guts clenched with each howl.
“I think I ate everything on the plane.”
I glanced at my friend, my voice raised over the little boy’s cries. “Seriously? You ate everything you packed?”
He shrugged. “I was hungry. You had some, too.”
“I had a granola bar. One.” I struggled to focus through the kid’s cries. Marty’d had enough to feed an army of children for days yet inhaled it all in less than a couple of hours.
“Like I said.” He zipped the bag, thrust it under his skinny legs, and folded his hands across his flat stomach. “You had some.”
“Mommy, it’s the MONSTER!”
My back stiffened.
Monster.
He said “monster.”
The boy’s terrified screams silenced the baggage claim area except for sympathetic murmurs and snorts of frustration. Even as his mother turned, helpless to soothe him, he pointed, tracking a spot out of my line of sight. When she turned, he recoiled and clung to her.
I leaned forward and looped my arms around my bent knees, following the little boy’s trembling arm.
Casual. Be casual. There couldn’t be an actual monster walking through the Louis Armstrong Airport. New Orleans had monsters, and plenty of them, but few were humanoid enough for conventional travel. And few would dare make so cavalier an intrusion into human space. Not here.
My hand drifted to my TSA-approved empty pockets as I turned. People swiveled their limited interest where he pointed, but not for long.
A group of men dressed in similar suits hunched over cell phones between two carousels. They muttered back and forth, nudged and showed devices to each other, but remained oblivious to everything beyond their huddle. One muttered a few words, another nodded, but they all focused on their technology. Behind them, two women overdressed for the airport sneered, glanced at their watches, and rolled their eyes. One snapped her gum and pulled out a mirror to preen. A single young man in shorts, a bright blue polo, and a backpack fidgeted and shuffled his feet as he avoided the crying child.
“You’re on vacation, Cee.”
“Yup,” I said. “That’s why I’m sitting.”
Nothing about the nervous man seemed remarkable, yet he stood out more than I did in my torn heavy metal band t-shirt, tight black jeans, Doc Martens, and the cobalt blue streaks in my hair. The TSA agent in Atlanta had waved me through without a second look, but this squirrelly dude’d warrant a pat-down, at least. Figuratively, I’d seen him a thousand times, this average, early thirty-something, upper-middle class American guy. From the cut of his shorts to his shabby-chic loafers, he might have been coming from or headed to some lake vacation.
“Stop staring at him, then.”
“I’m not,” I said. He looked like a former frat boy, tanned, blond, his muscled arms contradicting the hint of a beer belly under his cotton polo. “He doesn’t even see me.”
He couldn’t. Too busy watching the inconsolable child.
The boy peered over his mother’s shoulder, “monster” the only recognizable word among his shrill, incomprehensible syllables.
The man winced and ran a hand through his short hair, his mouth twitching as his gaze hesitated on the doors.
Marty snorted, shifting his bag and looping the strap across his chest. “You’re about to cause a scene and get us kicked out, aren’t you?”
“Nope.”
“I can’t be on the no-fly list, Cee. I’ve got places to go, and so do you,” Marty continued.
Frat boy-man sucked in his stomach and wove through the crowd, hands up to avoid contact as he side-stepped unobservant people in his path with the extreme caution of a germaphobe. Every few steps, he glanced over his shoulder.
Until his eyes met mine.
The carousel buzzed again, announcing the arrival of chaos.
Frat boy-man stumbled into a thick, forty-something man in a suit, both hands splayed across his back and jostling him against his neighbor. The older man dropped his phone. Frat boy-man didn’t acknowledge or apologize, only jerked his hands back and hurried away.
The man in the suit blinked. His younger neighbor emerged from his technology haze and met the older man’s blank stare as he crumpled to the floor. The younger man’s mouth opened in comical surprise, his phone teetering in his fingers. Another from their group repeated a foreign-sounding word and knelt beside the fallen man, shaking his limp shoulder. As other members of the group noticed, their commingled voices buzzed, punctuated by occasional panicked cries.
The little boy’s voice carried above the ruckus. “Don’t let the monster get me, Mommy!”
I stood. Slow. Intentional.
Frat boy-man hesitated and turned, far enough away to avoid implication, but his nonchalant curiosity couldn’t conceal him. Especially from me.
A woman yelled for 9-1-1 in heavily accented English and dropped to the fallen man’s side.
Marty sprang to his feet.
I stepped around the column, losing sight of frat boy-man for a moment as he navigated the crowd. He emerged from the clot of people milling around baggage claim and stared me down before dashing out the glass doors toward ground transportation. “Come on.” I snatched Marty’s hand and dragged him as I ran.
The doors opened with a hiss and a hydraulic sigh of humid Louisiana air. My skin instantly slicked with sweat, wisps of hair sticking to my face.
Few people waited on the damp concrete sidewalks and fewer vehicles passed. LED signs flashed warnings, alerts, and I ignored them all. Yellow-orange overhead lights buzzed louder than the bugs swarming around them. No evidence of frat boy-man or his hurried passage.
“He couldn’t have disappeared.”
“But he did,” I said with a sigh. “Weren’t you just reminding me I’m on vacation?”
“Yeah, but I’d rather kill a little time hunting than have you brood over every Hurricane and cup of étouffée.” He shifted the weight of his bag. “Do you see him?”
“No.” I scanned one direction, then the other.
“Why’d the kid call him a monster? He looked normal to me.”
“Don’t know.” The tinted glass made baggage claim shadowy and cavernous. Two brawny men in dark uniforms, EMT printed across their shoulders, parted the crowd. “Know of any humanoid monster that causes incapacitation with their touch?”
“Dude, you are asking the wrong person. You’ll have to call her.”
I restrained the groan to an inward cringe. Arranging temporary coverage for my absence had been an ordeal, but even suggesting I wasn’t doing all the relaxing I’d said I desperately needed would probably cause an issue. She, Sister Betty, would be…perturbed. At best. “I’m supposed to be on vacation,” I said. Ignored luggage chugged along the carousel as the EMTs worked on the fallen man.
“Yup. But you won’t be until you report this.”
And probably not even then. First the report, then debriefing with in-town contacts, following up on the guy being lifted onto the waiting gurney. I’d come to let go of responsibility, but the burden was already heavier than before I left. “Let’s get my bag and get out of here. It’s going to be an early morning.”