Read Online Koko Takes a Holiday by Kieran Shea - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Kieran Shea
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for a quarter pouch of crinkle-flake and the dealer’s sleepy eyes drift clear for the transaction. He holds up three fingers as the price. Koko nods and takes out her credits. The dealer takes the credits, and with a smile he hands over a black plastic baggie bundled with a red pig-tail ribbon.
Once upstairs and in her room, Koko is nearly bowled over by the sharp, acrid stink of chlorine disinfectant masked pathetically with a crisp haze of lime. As described on the registration display in the lobby, the view from the room’s smudged window does tunnel down onto the barge’s casino, and, parting the thin blinds, Koko stands still for a moment.
A few hours ago she’d been asleep with Archimedes without a care, and now this. This. On the run and on her own, her confidence shaken. For a moment Koko recalls all her recruitment trips to Melbourne and Perth, when she found Archimedes and the rest of his giddy mates bopping around the discotheques. Those hot nights when she worked him through his boywhore tryouts and found Arch knew how to please a woman in all the right ways.
The stress of her predicament finally starts to catch up with her. She shivers in the chilly recycled air and thinks about The Sixty. Pines for it, actually. All the space, light, and pore-drenching warmth. Images of Archimedes’ blown-apart corpse and her bar aflame rush back, and Koko has to steady herself.
She pushes back the bitterness.
No time to feel sorry for yourself, Koko. No time for thinking like that at all.
Koko inspects the room’s touted mini-bar basket and discovers some rolling skins along with some arousal lubricants, an assortment of tiny bottles of cut-rate alcohol, and a Jacob’s ladder of antibiotic condoms. The package of rolling skins is Second Free Zone micro, cherry-flavored and emblazoned with scrolling advertisements for oxygenized supplements. Koko flips the package and snaps out a couple of papers. Crushing some of her newly purchased crinkle-flake into the skin’s fold, she rolls a tight, sedative smoke to even out her nerves.
She pats her pockets and looks around. Keeping with the lowbrow nature of Wonderwall, no free laser sticks are about to spark her spliff to life, and she hangs her head. Great, more of her crappy luck on the wane.
She rolls a few more smokes for later and drops the unlit spliffs on the night table next to the bed. Then she snatches a couple of bottles of generic beauty from the mini-bar basket and—
crack-crack
—pours the two vials of knockoff booze straight down her throat to avoid the cheap taste. Her esophagus protests the liquor’s burn, but the sudden warmth in her belly helps a bit. Koko kicks off her heavy boots and strips out of the rest of her clothes.
Entering the bathroom, she takes a thin white towel from the rack and takes a good look at her body in the wall mirror behind the sink. Her piercings, the slight cellulite dimples just off the curve of her snugged panties, the tattoo of scrolled flames slashed up and down her inner right arm. Just past a slight sheen of alcohol fat, she still has some of the hammered definition left to her stomach, and she’s grateful her small breasts aren’t losing their youthful lift just yet.
After removing the rings and studs from all her piercings and placing them on the edge of the sink, Koko considers the two major scars on her body: a mottled star on the right side where a rib poked through and a sash of pink tissue on her upper left shoulder. The second scar was her first major wound from action. Caught the full, brunt force of a rebounding mortar pulse on deployment in some godforsaken North African ghetto, back when she was all gung-ho and keen to bring the hammer down on de-civ militants. She can’t recall how or where the rib wound happened or even when. 2510? Or was it 2513? The later year sounds right, but where was it? So much proxy-nation and de-civ craziness the years blur. The rib wound might have happened during a
Once upstairs and in her room, Koko is nearly bowled over by the sharp, acrid stink of chlorine disinfectant masked pathetically with a crisp haze of lime. As described on the registration display in the lobby, the view from the room’s smudged window does tunnel down onto the barge’s casino, and, parting the thin blinds, Koko stands still for a moment.
A few hours ago she’d been asleep with Archimedes without a care, and now this. This. On the run and on her own, her confidence shaken. For a moment Koko recalls all her recruitment trips to Melbourne and Perth, when she found Archimedes and the rest of his giddy mates bopping around the discotheques. Those hot nights when she worked him through his boywhore tryouts and found Arch knew how to please a woman in all the right ways.
The stress of her predicament finally starts to catch up with her. She shivers in the chilly recycled air and thinks about The Sixty. Pines for it, actually. All the space, light, and pore-drenching warmth. Images of Archimedes’ blown-apart corpse and her bar aflame rush back, and Koko has to steady herself.
She pushes back the bitterness.
No time to feel sorry for yourself, Koko. No time for thinking like that at all.
Koko inspects the room’s touted mini-bar basket and discovers some rolling skins along with some arousal lubricants, an assortment of tiny bottles of cut-rate alcohol, and a Jacob’s ladder of antibiotic condoms. The package of rolling skins is Second Free Zone micro, cherry-flavored and emblazoned with scrolling advertisements for oxygenized supplements. Koko flips the package and snaps out a couple of papers. Crushing some of her newly purchased crinkle-flake into the skin’s fold, she rolls a tight, sedative smoke to even out her nerves.
She pats her pockets and looks around. Keeping with the lowbrow nature of Wonderwall, no free laser sticks are about to spark her spliff to life, and she hangs her head. Great, more of her crappy luck on the wane.
She rolls a few more smokes for later and drops the unlit spliffs on the night table next to the bed. Then she snatches a couple of bottles of generic beauty from the mini-bar basket and—
crack-crack
—pours the two vials of knockoff booze straight down her throat to avoid the cheap taste. Her esophagus protests the liquor’s burn, but the sudden warmth in her belly helps a bit. Koko kicks off her heavy boots and strips out of the rest of her clothes.
Entering the bathroom, she takes a thin white towel from the rack and takes a good look at her body in the wall mirror behind the sink. Her piercings, the slight cellulite dimples just off the curve of her snugged panties, the tattoo of scrolled flames slashed up and down her inner right arm. Just past a slight sheen of alcohol fat, she still has some of the hammered definition left to her stomach, and she’s grateful her small breasts aren’t losing their youthful lift just yet.
After removing the rings and studs from all her piercings and placing them on the edge of the sink, Koko considers the two major scars on her body: a mottled star on the right side where a rib poked through and a sash of pink tissue on her upper left shoulder. The second scar was her first major wound from action. Caught the full, brunt force of a rebounding mortar pulse on deployment in some godforsaken North African ghetto, back when she was all gung-ho and keen to bring the hammer down on de-civ militants. She can’t recall how or where the rib wound happened or even when. 2510? Or was it 2513? The later year sounds right, but where was it? So much proxy-nation and de-civ craziness the years blur. The rib wound might have happened during a
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