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Long story short, Janet should not have had that much to drink last night. Her alarm screamed in time with the throbbing in her head and it was right then that she knew, today was not going to be her day.
It wasn’t even an hour after her shift started that her suspicions were confirmed.
“Sir?” The man in the middle of placing a half full disposable water bottle on the conveyor belt didn’t seem to hear her. “Sir, you have to dump out all your liquids.” Really, how had he missed the three separate signs throughout the line? People were fascinatingly infuriating sometimes. “There’s a can right there.”
The illiterate and possibly deaf fool continued to place his belongings in the provided bins, none the wiser to Janet’s plight. The 6’4 (if he stood up straight; the slouch took off a few inches), scarecrow of a man standing beside him, however, looked up. Seeing the barely contained glare being shot roughly in his direction, the taller man turned and tapped his companion on the shoulder.
“Ryan, I think she’s talking to you.”
Ryan, (apparently), snapped his head up and darted his eyes around, taking a little longer than reasonable to meet her eyes. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
A particularly strong throb in her temple made her eye twitch. She pointed to the crumpled bottle, now two feet to Ryan’s left. “You need to dump that.”
He followed her finger, brows furrowed as if he couldn’t possibly imagine what she was talking about. The belt moved again and the bottle wobbled on its uneven bottom. “Oh. That. Uh…”
The scarecrow pulled a hand down his tired face before letting his glasses fall back onto the tip of his nose. “I told you this would happen.”
“Shut up, Shane.” The now named Shane put his hands up in surrender and bent down to take off his boots. Ryan turned back to her. “So, I can’t actually dump that.”
“It’s the law.”
“Ok, I know that you have to say that, but that’s my holy water and I can’t dump it.”
Huh. He didn’t really look like a religious nut but you couldn’t always tell with these things. “It doesn’t matter. We can’t allow outside liquids on the aircraft.”
“But-” Before he could start working himself up, Shane nudged him with his shoulder.
“Hey, it’s fine. You can get more when we get there.”
Ryan looked just about ready to stomp his feet. “But Father Thomas blessed this for me. And I don’t know how easy it is to just get some holy water.”
“It’s not exactly a rare element, Ryan,” Shane said with the weariness of someone who’s been through this type of argument more than he would like. “It’s just water some dude said words over. Kansas has both water and dudes.”
The people in line behind the two seemed to be familiar with the situation and started moving around the blockade the arguing pair had created.
“What if we don’t have time?” At this point, Ryan had picked up the item of contention and was holding it protectively to his chest. “We’re not even there for two days.”
“Devon will make time. Right Devon?”
A small blond woman pulled her phone out of her pocket and placed it into a bin with her shoes. “Please don’t drag me into this.”
“I’m not going in there without my holy water.” Squeezing the bottle with a small crunch , Ryan turned to face Janet again. “Can’t you guys just, like, test it or something? To see if there’s anything dangerous in it?”
Janet closed her eyes and took a long, deep breath. You need this job, you need this job, if you punch this man you will lose this job. “We don’t have those kinds of tests, and there’s not exactly a chemistry lab in the building.”
“There isn’t?” Shane interrupted, but a sharp glare had him returning to help his companions (friends? coworkers? supervisors? Who knows) with their bags.
“If it meant that much to you, you should have checked it.”
Ryan at least looked a little shamed. “I was scared it would open or leak and get my clothes all wet.”
Shane leaned back into the conversation. “Then you’d have holy clothes. Think about it, Ryan! It would be the ultimate shield! No demon could get you then.”
What the fuck what the fuck what the fuuuuuck
“Hey, do you think that when you dump the holy water in the can, it’ll make everything else holy?” Shane prompted. The last of their group stepped by and muttered something that sounded like, “Forbidden Holy Potion.”
“I’m not dumping my holy water!”
“Yes you are.”
“No, I’m not doing it.”
“Ryan, you’re gonna make us miss our flight. And if we miss our flight, the ghosts win.”
What the fuck.
“Are you admitting that ghosts are real?”
Shane let out the auditory embodiment of Janet’s morning in the form of a long-suffering sigh. “You know what, if that’s what it takes to get your ass moving, I don’t care anymore. Just please dump out the water so I can go find some coffee.”
The two stood there in silence for long enough that Janet was considering calling in backup, but finally Ryan dropped his head. “Promise you’ll help me find a priest when we get there?”
“I promise I will try to find someone to chant over your water bottle. Can we go now?”
Ryan shuffled over to one of the cans and reverently poured the contents of his crinkly water bottle inside. (“I think it has to be at least 50% holy water, so it depends on how much is already in there.” “Why do you know this?” “I take my job very seriously, Shane.”)
Finally, blessedly, they were making their way through the scanner, Shane herding his friend in front of him. She could deal with the tired businessman and frazzled parents for the rest of the day, she could make it to the end of the shift, she could do this.
“What the fuck?” The quiet voice caused Janet to turn and look at her friend Tate, (friend was generous but hey, she had to take what she could get), who was staring wide-eyed at the crappy computer monitor in front of him.
What now? Janet took the couple steps to the right so she could lean over Tate’s shoulder and glance at the screen. Against her will, she felt her mouth drop open and her eyes widen. There, in the middle of Shane’s gangly outline, was a weird dark smudge. It looked to be about the size of a basketball and oddly oblong.
“Do you have any idea what that is?” Tate mumbled to her.
“Not a clue.” Janet stood up and looked over to where Shane was collecting his stuff. “Um, excuse me? Sir? Uh, Shane?” The man looked up with a sigh, clearly trying to be polite but also very much done with standing around in security. Preach . “Sorry, but could we have you go through again?”
Shane seemed to slouch even more, but he obediently kicked off his unlaced boots and stepped back into the scanner when directed. The new kid waved him back out and he went back to collecting his things. Janet looked down at the screen where the new scan appeared.
What. The. Fuck.
The smudge was still there, but it was darker this time, and… there was no denying it, there was a definite humanoid shape to it.
“That’s creepy, right?”
Janet just nodded. After another second, she stepped over to where they had the extra scanners and grabbed the hand-held metal detector. “Sorry for the inconvenience, sir, but could I have you step over here?”
“Geez, Shane, what did you do?”
“Fuck if I know. You guys start heading to the gate, just make sure you grab me some coffee on the way.” With some general nods and mumbles of agreement, the small group started heading towards their gate while Shane stood there, looking tired. “Can we make this quick?”
“I’ll go as fast as I can.”
It took not quite ten minutes to go through every single type of test they had. They even did a pat-down twice , once by Janet and once by Tate. Not a single one showed anything out of the ordinary. Janet looked to her coworker, who just gave her a helpless shrug and shake of his head. “Well, everything looks normal. Thanks for your patience, you’re free to go.” Shane simply nodded, grabbed his bag, and lumbered in the direction the others had gone. Janet watched him go until he eventually blended into the crowd.
After an actual eternity, Janet’s break rolled around and she booked it to the break room. Giving a quick look around, she pulled out her phone to look at the picture she’d secretly taken of Shane’s scan. The longer she looked at it, the creepier it got. It had to be a fluke, right? Maybe there was something on his shirt, or he had some kind of weird medical condition.
Out of curiosity, Janet flipped through some of the photo filters, just to see if it made any difference.
She nearly dropped her phone.
Down the hall, someone stuck their head out of the small kitchen attached to the break room. “Hey, you ok?”
Janet tried to control her trembling as she quickly shoved her phone away. “Uh, yeah. Why?”
Her coworker’s brow scrunched. “Huh. Thought I heard a scream.”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry, I almost dropped my phone, that’s all.”
They nodded sagely. “Ah, gotcha. That is scary.” Watching blond hair disappear around the corner, Janet tried to wipe the image on her phone from her mind. She hadn’t been expecting anything, really. Maybe just something to help explain the shadow. Technology could be weird like that.
She was not expecting one of the filters to reveal two beady eyes and a smile full of sharp teeth, smack dab in the middle of the humanoid shadow’s head.
She might as well call in sick now, because tomorrow’s hangover would make today’s feel like a relaxing massage. There was no way she was sleeping tonight without a bottle of whiskey in her stomach and every light in the apartment turned as bright as it could go.