Big Trouble

The airport air smells of musty tropical rot, and it's filled with the sounds of various languages—Spanish, predominantly, but also English, Creole, German, French, Italian, and, perhaps most distinct of all, Cruise Ship Passenger. The cruisers just arriving are usually wearing brand-new cruisewear. They follow in groups close behind cruise-line employees holding signs displaying cruise-line names; they tell each other what other cruises they have been on, and they laugh loudly whenever anybody makes a joke—which somebody does every forty-five seconds—about how much they're going to drink, gamble, or buy. The cruisers heading home are more subdued—tired, sunburned, hungover, and bloated from eating eleven times per day, whether they were hungry or not, because ... it's all included! Some of the women have had their hair braided and beaded, a style that looks fine on young Caribbean girls, but on most women over sixteen looks comical or outright hideous. Some passengers are clutching badly mass-produced "folk art"—large, unattractive, nonfunctional sticks are popular—and a great many of them are lugging boxes containing the ultimate cruise-ship passenger trophy: discount booze! Never mind that they spent thousands of dollars to take this vacation: They're thrilled to have saved as much as ten dollars a bottle on scotch and brandy and liqueurs that they will never actually drink, but which they lug through miles of airports, on and off various planes, so that when they get back home they can haul it out and display it proudly to visitors in the months and years to come ("We got this for twenty-three-fifty in the Virgin Islands! Guess what it costs here!").

On the night that Snake and his party walked in with a nuclear bomb, the airport was even more chaotic than usual. There was bad weather in Chicago, which of course meant that virtually every flight in the western hemisphere, including space shuttle launches, had been delayed. And now some airlines were noticing a problem getting clearance for outgoing flights to push back, although the control tower was not saying why. Most airline ticket counters had sprouted long lines of pissed-off passengers shoving to get to the counter so they could argue fruitlessly with pissed-off airline employees. Police had already been summoned to arrest one returning cruise passenger who had threatened a ticket agent with his souvenir stick.

Eddie came through the airport door first, followed by Puggy, lugging the suitcase, and then Snake, who had one hand under the sweatshirt and the other holding Jenny's arm. Like Eddie and Puggy, Snake had never been inside MIA before, and for a moment, when he saw the roiling mob, he thought about turning and running. But then he squeezed his gun, his wand, and the moment passed. He was not going back to scamming dimes.

"Where we goin' ?" asked Eddie, staring at the airport scene. He had never felt less like he belonged somewhere, and Eddie was the kind of person who never felt he belonged anywhere.

"That way," said Snake, pointing, pretty much randomly, toward a line of ticket counters. He jabbed the barrel of the sweatshirt-swathed gun into Puggy's back and said, "You stay close, punk. You don't go one step farther away from me'n you are now."

They moved slowly through the crowd—first Eddie, then Puggy lugging the suitcase, followed closely by Snake, who limped next to Jenny, who shuffled her feet and stared ahead, zombie-like. The first airline they came to had a name Snake did not understand and a sign listing departures for cities that Snake had never heard of; everyone at the counter was talking in Spanish. Snake jerked his head to indicate to Eddie that he should move ahead. They went past a half dozen more airlines that Snake found incomprehensible, then came to a small counter with a half dozen people waiting in line for a lone agent. Over the counter was an orange sign that said:

AIR IMPACT!

You're Gateway to the Bahamas

Sheduled Departures Daily

Snake felt a good-vibe jolt. The Bahamas! He motioned Eddie to get in line. They shuffled forward, Snake keeping his grip on Jenny and periodically letting Puggy feel the gun in his back. In ten minutes, they were standing in front of the agent.