Black Boots

In a large white room with no walls, no floor, and air so still and stale it felt canned, twenty-four people sat staring at eachother, all terrified and stunned. Each sat in the chair they'd been sitting in when the flash occurred that nearly burned their eyes and somehow put them in this room that appeared to have no defined boundaries around it. Urine trickled from the chairs of at least seven people, dripping down into the white nothingness below them.

A young woman in her 20's with multiple piercings in each ear and a pair of black shiny boots on her feet craned her neck to look down below, tentatively lowering one foot in an attempt to find the floor, only to find none there. Her toes dipped up and down as if testing the temperature of a pool, convinced that a floor must somehow be there. But still, there was none. It was as though they were all suspended in mid-air by unseen strings in the middle of what could only be identified as completely empty space.

"Hello?" she finally said, her voice shaking, "can any of you hear me?" In her own head, her voice sounded tinny, as though it were crackling through a bad telephone connection. Several people waved in her direction, but most remained motionless with fear, their eyes darting back and forth. One man who appeared to be in his sixties or seventies made a series of gesticular motions and nearly fell from his chair. He caught himself and the chair wobbled slightly but kept its place. He looked at the black-booted girl with fear in his wrinkled eyes.

"Miss¦Miss¦Do you know where we are?" the Old Man said, startled by the crackling and static in his voice.

"We're in the middle of nowhere, as far as I can tell." Black Boots replied, slowly looking around at the people immediately surrounding her.

A boy who looked to be about ten years old sat still in his chair, taking in his surroundings with silent wonder. A scantily clad woman in red lingerie crossed her legs self-consciously and flung her hair around to cover her breasts. A teenage boy with glasses taped together at the nose stared at the woman lustily despite their current predicament, and crossed his hands in his lap to hide the erection growing in his sweatpants. Suddenly the smaller boy looked at Black Boots, licking and moving his lips in preparation to speak for what seemed to her like an eternity.

"We've been abducted." he finally said, nodding his head slowly up and down, "The way our voices sound, all crackly, that's from their communications systems."

"Abducted? What are you talking about?" Black Boots shot back, not in the mood to be scared out of her wits by a child.

"Aliens," the boy said, "we've been abducted by aliens...this must be their holding cell." He shifted in his seat, and tilted his head as though trying to detect some unheard communication. His hair was short, blonde and spiked, and he wore a t-shirt depicting a bizarre cartoon battle between two fictional warriors. The older boy with the erection lost his concentration and looked at Alien Boy.

"We haven't been abducted by aliens, you little nutcase." Erection Boy said, pushing down on his crotch, trying desperately to hide the contents of his pants "We're in a time warp."

"And what exactly is a time warp?" Black Boots asked, still dipping her feet down periodically, looking for the floor that wasn't there.

"It's like a space that has no time, or that sucks you into another level of time. Either way, it's not our normal time." His erection remained like a guard at Buckingham, straight up and unflinching. Black Boots looked at his crotch as he strained to hide it from her.

"What makes you such an expert, you little hornball? Men are so typical." She shook her head with disgust, folding her arms to emphasize her displeasure. Erection Boy displayed immediate offense to her remarks.

"Define a 'typical' man." he demanded.

"A little shit like you who gets hard when the wind blows and thinks he knows everything." Black Boots shot back, still looking at his crotch, trying to suppress a burst of laughter.

"Listen you pierced freak, I'm not hard because the wind is blowing¦incase you haven't noticed, there is no wind here. I'm hard because of this voluptuous, near-naked beauty sitting next to me." Erection Boy smiled awkwardly and looked at The Lady in Red with longing. The woman crossed her legs the other way, and desperately tried to find more hair on her head with which to cover her mountainous breasts. Alien Boy was now looking at the Lady in Red as well, especially focusing on her legs with great interest.

"Red naked lady, where do you think we are?" Alien Boy asked her, swinging his legs now rapidly back and forth, rocking his chair on the invisible axis that held them all suspended. The Lady in Red looked surprised that someone had directly addressed her, having been so absorbed in her fear and embarrassment that she hadn't been paying much attention to anything except the white space around her and the ogling eyes of Erection Boy.

"I'm not sure really," she began, "I'm too distracted by this little pimp." She motioned towards Erection Boy, who looked down quickly as his face turned redder than her underwear. Black Boots, somewhat relieved to have another woman to speak to, but remaining defensive, turned around in her seat.

"Excuse me, but why the hell are you out in public wearing lingerie in the first place?" she asked, motioning towards Alien Boy as if to imply she were corrupting his virgin eyeballs.

"Why am I in public?" The Lady in Red shot back, caught off guard, "What do you mean public? I just got out of the shower!"

"Yeah, where are you getting 'in public' from?" Erection Boy said, trying to make a valiant effort at defending his lady, "I thought we didn't know where we were?"

"Well, there are at least twenty of us here" Black Boots replied, "to me that qualifies as a public assembly."

"But I told you, I just got out of the shower, in my own home!" The Lady in Red repeated, "If this is a public assembly, then everybody get the hell out of my house!"

"This doesn't exactly look like your love shack, lady, and none of us is going anywhere until we figure out what's going on." Black Boots replied. She slowly shifted her body and knelt up in her chair, careful not to fall into the white nothingness surrounding her.

"Hey!" she yelled to the motionless people who hadn't spoken yet, "Does anybody know where the hell we are?" Three people slowly looked in her direction, and one, a middle-aged looking woman who appeared to be of Asian descent, stammered with great effort to answer Black Boots' question.

"We...I was just...it was so sudden..." she was moving her hand in front of her face, as if to indicate something that had just been there. "I was at...at my desk...my computer was on...my computer and...white, white, there's just white..." She began shaking violently, grabbing at her hair and rocking back and forth in her chair in a state of panic. Alien Boy, who had been paying rapt attention, was the first to guess what would happen next.

"She's going to fall right out of her chair...I don't think the aliens are going to like that very much." he said, looking back and forth between Black Boots, The Lady in Red and Erection Boy. The Crazy Asian Woman continued to rock her chair violently and looked at the others with horror as she first started to fall from it. But as she completed the fall, much to everyone's surprise, she landed on her feet, visible only from the waist up, her legs lost in the white haze.

"I knew there had to be a floor!" Black Boots yelled, half of her angry that she hadn't had the guts to dip her toes down further, and the other half thrilled at the discovery. She and the others all looked at each other, and slowly slid off their chairs. They all, like The Crazy Asian Woman, fell about two feet before hitting the still unseen floor. Alien Boy was visible only from his shoulders up. Black Boots went to comfort The Crazy Asian Woman, and brought her over to talk with everyone else. Some of the people in the room, noticing the developments around them, also got up from their chairs, leaving about seven people still frozen with fear, shock, or both. Erection Boy, who had been unusually quiet in these last few minutes, approached The Crazy Asian Woman.

"You said you were sitting at your computer?" he asked, with a concerned, concentrated look on his face.

"Yes," she answered, "I was chatting. I was in a chat room and then there was this blinding white flash...that's why it took me so long to move because I couldn't see you, and I was so scared because I was blind and did not know where I was...it is just now coming back...my eyes...thank Goodness!"

"I was sitting at my computer, in a chat room too..." Erection Boy said, "What room were you in?" The Crazy Asian Lady paused and looked down at the unseen floor.

"Addiction and Recovery..." she said quietly, only just now noticing the crackling, tinny quality to her voice. Black Boots stared at both of them with confusion and wonder on her face as the realization settled in.

"Me too..." she said. "Son of a bitch."

"Count me in too," The Lady in Red said, no longer so concerned with her breasts, since Erection Boy was no longer focusing on them.

They all became silent, looking at eachother, and those previously silent nodded slowly in affirmation that they too, had been chatting in Addiction and Recovery. Alien Boy had been talking to The Lady in Red about his mother's increasing heroin problem, asking for adult advice. He now looked at her and smiled gratefully, realizing who she was. Everyone in the room slowly began to seek out and acknowledge those they had been chatting with.

It was then that Black Boots suddenly recognized Erection Boy as the acid addict nerd she had just been talking to about her own battle with cocaine. They had been talking to eachother for hours...the confused and angry girl trying to become a sober woman, and the dorky, depressed kid with taped glasses and the desire to make it to eighteen alive.

She stepped forward and extended a hand.

"Jason, give me the gun."

He looked at her for a long moment, then took the gun out from the crotch of his sweatpants where he had been hiding it, and placed it in her hand. She opened the chamber, and let all five bullets drop soundlessly into the white space they stood in.