Charlotte borrowed a business suit from her dead roommate’s closet. Working for the Industry had not required her to own such formal attire—although there had been this one film where she had played the role of a secretary…
She chose something navy and not too far above the knee. Her roommate had been a bit more athletic than she, the definition of a gym-rat who appeared ripped even in her frumpy bed clothes. So the skirt and matching top fit loose on Charlotte. She had inherited a closet full of clothes she would never fit into. After today’s interview this outfit and the rest of her roommate’s wears would be bagged up and dropped off at Good Will.
What she lacked in clothes she would make up for with hair and makeup. She’d always been able to put her face together without much effort. Less was more and it was what had made her such a commodity for the Industry. The ‘I rolled out of bed this way’ look was in—was it ever out? What was the term? “Girl next door?” She had that look. She had it because she knew how to pull it off, somewhat effortlessly. She dusted her face, made up her lips with something pouty and subtle, and lined her eyes with green shadow.
She’d learned to tame the frizz and curls of her red hair back in high school thanks to a rigorous straightening regiment. In high school, frizz had been frowned upon.
She wore her hair up today, felt she looked much more professional. She didn’t need glasses though she owned several pair depending on what look she was going for. She opted not to take the glasses today. She didn’t want to come off as desperate.
Though this was an interview—albeit for a temp agency.
She slipped the glasses into the inside pocket of her blazer as she left her apartment. The half-hour bus ride uptown should hopefully give her enough time to make the pressing decision to wear prescription-less glasses to no doubt the first of many fruitless interviews.
The apartment building was air conditioned—like every building in LA. But the moment she broke the protective seal of the door to the outside world and stepped onto the sidewalk, she was met with a blast of heat that sucked out her breath in a way that the cold never could. She took a moment to recover. Another hot day in LA, and yet it seemed different—unusual.
Words like, Climate Change and Hellscape came to mind. The sun was lost somewhere behind the veil of fog that was a permanent fixture in the Los Angeles skyline.
She made her way down the street to the bus stop—the same bus stop that her roommate had walked to on the day she was killed.
What did they do with buses that killed people? Were they decommissioned, sent to a garbage dump crusher and turned into a tiny cubes?
In reality she guessed the bus had been sprayed down. The bits of bone and gray matter that had once been key components of her roommate’s skull, which had been lodged into the grillwork of the buses front fender, had been blasted clean away. Pressure washed into oblivion into the gutter.
She took her seat on the bus wondering just how many human remains accumulate in the Los Angeles sewers over the years. Was it enough to make a person, a giant, an army of monstrous dead? She wondered if they congealed into one giant mass of desiccated flesh—a Frankenstein’s cadaverous monster that only needed the right amount of magic or science to bring it to life and tear this city apart.
Those were dark thoughts—thoughts that typically never entered her mind.
Where in the world had they come from?
The bus pulled off from the sidewalk and made its way uptown.