Free Dwelling by Thomas S. Flowers Page B

stomach balanced against the sink. She inched closer to the window. Nothing. Moving closer still, she breathed loudly. Two sharp yellow eyes glared back at her from the bleakness. Behind the fence, thank God . Unmoving. Unflinching. Safe? Relatively. Regardless, the eyes felt penetrating.
    Luna ran back to the living room, dead-bolted the door, and then threw herself on the overstuffed couch. She buried her head in a pillow, unable to shake those horrible yellow eyes.
    Devil’s eyes .

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER 8
     
     
    MR. STEELE GOES TO WASHINGTON
     
    Johnathan
     
    George Bush International Airport is a pain to navigate. All airports, according to Johnathan, are a big pain in the ass, except for maybe the smaller ones in smaller cities. But not Houston. Oh-no. Houston’s main international airport was expansive, which meant for Johnathan even more area to transverse on foot, from parking, to check-in, to security, to terminal, you could easily walk five miles, if not more. And the worst of it was the security check-point. Passing through that was something he loved the least.
    Even now as he pulled onto John F. Kennedy Boulevard, nightmares of crowded lines with strangers bumping into him and bins and belt conveyors and large X-Ray machines buzzing, scanning, probing, danced behind his eyes. And the worst of it, if the security checkpoint was crowded, the crowd of people waiting would look at him with pitiful glares, ogling his prosthetic leg as he would hobble on his cane through the body-scanner.
    Johnathan recalled flying not that long ago. There had been a little girl holding her mother’s hand. The mother, thirty-something, her attention drawn to the contents of her plastic bin, was checking and double checking her pockets to ensure they were free of any metal. The little girl looked at Johnathan, who stood behind them, waiting like everyone else to walk past the thin, red line. She looked quizzically, then her eyes fell to where his left leg should have been. Her gaze wandered over to the prosthetic plastic-looking leg, shining in the fluorescent glow on the belt conveyor.
    Johnathan could see it all so clearly now. Her eyes wide. Her mouth agape. She pulled at her mother’s PattyBoutik cowl neck blouse top. “ Mommy—mommy, where is that man’s leg? Why? Why is it like that? It looks funny…” And then the mother’s gaze fell distractedly down at Johnathan’s missing leg. Realization dawned in a flood of embarrassment over the poor woman’s face. The mother hushed her girl and pushed her through the checkpoint. Yes, come one, come all. Come and take a look at the freak …Jesus, if I’m lucky, maybe someone nice is working security and will let me get wanded instead having to take my leg off , Johnathan thought, he prayed, he hoped.
    He drove past the Park-n-Ride and pulled into C-terminal parking garage, the one linked with United Airlines, or so the sign said. God knows I’ll probably end up flying out of B-terminal. The Park-n-Ride only cost about ten bucks a week, and the C-terminal parking garage was twenty per day, but it was well worth the extra cost. Johnathan loathed airport shuttles just about as much as going through security. Last time he rode on one, some ballooned nine-year-old boy, mustard stained t-shirt and everything, glared at him unblinkingly. The boy’s father, who just so happened to be sitting next to Johnathan on the shuttle, nudged him and asked, “Lose it in the war?”
    Lose it in the war…? How do you lose a leg? It’s not like I woke up one morning and—BAM! To the man’s credit, Johnathan had been wearing his OIF Veteran hat on that day. The father of the fat simpleton child simply put two and two together, and perhaps thought asking “did ya” was as close to patriotism as he could get. Maybe when they reached wherever they were going, they’d share a story about a wounded veteran they had talked to on an airport shuttle. For Johnathan though, the