Haphephobia

Chapter 34

The drive to wherever William was trying to take us ended up lasting a lot longer than I had expected.

Though we had set out early in the morning, it wasn't until about ten o'clock that we all made our first stop at a gas station. As fast as it took to fill up the tank, we all relieved ourselves at the toilets-- Ava and I with a certain amount of difficulty-- and purchased some food and a drink. Then we were off again, down a highway. Past the cows and the fields and the asphalt and.... well, that was about it.

At some point, however, Ava and I must finally have fallen asleep. Once somebody had shouted in our ears to wake up and get out, I realized it was about six in the evening and we'd finally reached our destination. Leaving my trash in the car half from childish spite and half from laziness, I jumped from the van and grabbed Ava's hands to help her out of it as well. Her hands shook as I held them, and her frame slumped over weakly until I could wrap her arm around my shoulder, barely holding her up.

It was only then that I took a look around. The van had ambled away down an old asphalt side road, around a corner and out of sight. It had left us at what appeared to me like a small military camp. There were tall metal fences lined on the tops with barbed wire, and the only entrance was a big gate in the center front of the fence. One man, dressed in reflective clothes-- my guess was for safety if he also watched at night and the sun would soon set-- stood at the entrance, right next to a keypad that was mounted to an electric system connected to the fence. 

William walked up to the man guarding the gate and talked animatedly with him for a few moments. The exchange was short but odd. Odd, in that the man seemed very anxious suddenly at seeing the four of us standing there, yet perfectly willing to listen to what William was telling him. I couldn't hear anything they were saying aside from the occasional useless snippet of the conversation. 

As soon as they had finished talking, the man-- whom I had only just noticed carried a significantly large-looking gun clipped to his belt-- turned away towards the keypad. He sheltered the screen with his hands and typed in the combination. As soon as he'd finished and tapped a small green button, a grating sounds rent through the air and the big lock on the gate started to pull back. Then the grating morphed into more of a high pitched, nails-on-chalkboard screeching sound which opened the gate entirely. Once it had stopped, William beckoned us forward, and Stevie, Ava and I followed him inside. I was wary of the gate guard staring blankly at us, is complete silence, as we passed. 

What was this place?

Ava and I limped together in Stevie and William's wake as he led us across a large expanse of black asphalt. It was marked here and there with lines of white paint, though I wasn't sure what they were for or what they meant. At the back of the black top was a one story, though significantly sized sand-coloured building with wide double doors and no handle that I could see. 

In retrospect, I think that had I not already witnessed a house with shifting scales, a hand implant with a computer database, and a room with Google Maps in the walls, I would have been more shocked to watch as William stood in front of the doors, was scanned in a blue light, and then walked forward to phase through the doors and into the building.

However, it still took me a moment to really take in what I had seen before Stevie chuckled lightly.

"Yes, he really did just walk right through the door. It's a pretty cool bit of science, really. Once the scanners confirm the person's DNA sequence matches what they have in their database, the molecular density of the material used to build the door lessens and you can literally walk right through it as though it were nothing but a harmless gas. However, once the door solidifies again, it becomes as thick and heavy as a foot-deep block of ice. The material is newly engineered; we're the only people to have any. Our people do great work." Stevie said.