Chapter 17
Sharon: Ice, Ice, Baby
About 6,000 feet over New York, Northern Air Flight #256, bound for JFK Airport, has a slight problem. It’s not a problem anyone notices and even if they did, they might not care about. A block of ice, accompanied by several smaller chunks of ice, is about to drop from the plane; not an ordinary block of ice, but what’s known as blue ice - a mixture of human waste and liquid disinfectant. The ice is remnants of the passengers and crew of Flight #256 who couldn’t make the three-hour flight from Canada without holding in their piss and shit. There’s a slight leak in the lavatory waste tank. The waste and Tidy Bowl run outside the plane, where it freezes in the high altitude. As the plane nears JFK and lowers its altitude, the ice warms up just enough to break off from the jet. If anyone had been looking outside the plane at that particular point in time, they would have had a Twilight Zone moment as they saw a shadow that looked very much like a human reach out a shadow arm and help break the ice off the plane.
As the airplane passes over Greener Valley, which lies right in the flight path to JFK, a shower of blue ice falls from the sky. There are varying sizes of chunks; one is the size of a small television. The rest are about the size of toddler’s head.
Sharon Weiss – Shana Cummings to some – has opened the sunroof of her limousine. She’s on the phone with her boyfriend/manager/pornographer Bradley.
“How weird. We’ve just turned off the exit to Greener Valley and it’s warm out here.”
“So?” Having not grown up in Greener Valley, Brad has no idea how odd it is to see a blue sky and feel the warm sun on Winter Festival day.
“It always snows on this day, Brad. Every single year. It has never not snowed. This is fucked up.”
“Jesus. It’s only weather. And, you know, global warming and shit.” Bradley is not the most eloquent man in the world.
“Yea, global warming. That’s it.”
The limo pulls into Greener Valley proper. Sharon smiles as they approach the town sign, knowing that the “happiest place on earth” is going to get its comeuppance very shortly. She doesn’t even know if they deserve this comeuppance, but once she got started on her plans to humiliate Curtis in turn for his threatening her life, she got on a roll. She took every slight real or imagined that happened to her from grade school on, she took all the insults and name calling that happened after she became a porn star, she took all the jealousy and pettiness that came her way and balled it all up into a little fist of rage that led her to be heading into the town center, ready to unleash her tits, her ass and her dirty little secrets on this horrid little town.
But someone might have beaten her to it.
“What the…slow down. No, stop.” The driver slams on the brakes just as they reach the town sign. Sharon has hefted herself up through the limo’s sunroof up to her breasts, which rest on the car’s roof like they’re on display. She reads the sign. “Happiest Place on Earth!” has a black X spray drawn over it. Scrawled in red marker above the X is “THIS IS TOWN IS SO FUCKED.”
Sharon gasps. Things aren’t right. Things are going off track. She drops back into the limo and takes a swig of the first thing she grabs from the bar. Gin. It will do. She takes another swig, then takes a deep breath. She needs to regain her composure and pull this off exactly the way she imagined it. She lets the gin settle over her nerves. Then she lifts herself back through the sunroof to read the sign again.
Bang. Thud. Bang. Another thud.
Sharon sees the blue ice falling on the roof of the car but can’t quite comprehend what’s going on. At first she thinks it’s snow or hail but that thought doesn’t reconcile with the sunny sky and warm air. The ice has come down hard enough to dent the roof. One large piece crashes down onto the driver’s side and Sharon hears an “Oh fu…” as it lands. She looks up, tilts her head all the way back to see where these blue chunks could be coming from. She looks straight into the path of a television sized chunk of ice that’s bearing down on her. She wants to move, wants to scream but something that appears to be the shadow of a man holds her arms down on the roof. Her mind is reeling. How can this be happening? The ice. The shadow. She looks from one to the other, everything happening in slow motion, the block of blue coming toward her head, the black shadow of a man holding her down with surprising strength. She’s going to die. She knows this; she feels it so sure and so strong. The shadow man lifts one hand and presses it against her right breast.
“Sharon. Sharon Weiss.” She can’t see the shadow thing smiling but she knows it is. She knows this as sure as she knows she’s about to die painfully. It’s a wicked smile fraught with soul-sucking evil. She tries to look into the thing’s face but sees only darkness.
Her last thought right before the block of blue ice smashes her head in is what the fuck.