"The Girl in the High Tower" - Chapter 1

(EDIT — Now with an illustration by the fabulous @hefty_cuties !)

A knock at the door. It hardly ever happened, but it was about time.

Roger put his game on pause and sprung up from the couch. The UPS guy was waiting on the other side of the door, a large box perched on the ground next to him. A few beeps and a messy electronic signature later, and Roger closed the door and walked the large parcel over to the coffee table of his apartment. 

A few minutes later, the goods were unpacked. A small black box, adorned with four propellers; a remote control unit no too unlike a remote-controlled car Roger had when he was a kid; a booklet of instructions; a CD of software (not that Roger had any place to put a CD).

He looked at his watch. Four hours, he thought. That’s about as much time as it would take for the batteries to get a complete charge. He had used a drone like this before, enough to know that when the batteries got dangerously low, the unit would power down and begin a slow descent toward the ground. Or, in Rogers case, into the pond in the park close to his apartment. He owned his friend some serious cash for that accident. 

It would be dark by then, by the time he pulled it off the charger and headed to the roof of his building. Definitely after sunset. Originally, he had the idea in his mind that this would be a daytime exploration. But nighttime, Roger thought. That might actually work better.

After plugging in the box, he went back to his game. His heart, at this point wasn’t into it though. He thumbed the controls, pulled the triggers, but was unable to rid himself of the anticipation that coursed through every vein in his body. It had been weeks now, and the stinging curiosity he felt was at the forefront of his mind, now more than ever. Especially since that curiosity was so close to being satisfied. He cast a glance at the battery indicator on the side of the drone: 3 dots out of eight were illuminated. Patience, he thought. Patience.

But patience wouldn’t come. He switched off the console, and walked to the fridge to crack open a beer before returning to the couch to lie down and stare at the ceiling. 

His mind shifted around to the last several weeks. Scattered instances that were now interwoven with one another, but all orbiting an obsession that he couldn’t shake. The genesis? A chance encounter. His apartment building, while decently maintained, was very small — dwarfed by the modern, glass-and-steel tower next door that had been erected only a year before. He didn’t miss the endless sound of construction that vibrated through the walls, he knew that much.

But that night... It was a warm evening, late enough so he was among one of the only people on a street that was bustling at any other time of day. Roger was returning from the corner bodega with a bag of groceries. But something was… off. Odd. Out of place. Of course, he had seen many people move in; the adjacent building had only been open for a few months, and there was no shortage of moving vans depositing myriad people’s possessions into the newly constructed units. Normally, he paid these deliveries no mind. Except for one. 

A white panel van. Windowless. It pulled up to the curb, directly in front of the skyscraper’s front door, and switched its headlights off. Roger watched from a safe distance, hidden in the shadows, as two men in blue jumpsuits exited the vehicle and slid the curb-side door open. He remembered the mechanical whirr as a hydraulic platform steadily eased itself out of the wide door.  And what he saw next became seared into his memory. 

A wide-bodied wheelchair presented itself from the recesses of the van, and lowered, slowly, to the ground. It’s passenger, from what Roger could tell, was a young woman with auburn hair, tied into a long ponytail that draped lightly over her shoulder. Her face was slender and her lips her pursed expectantly, as if she was anticipating something unpleasant over the horizon. She stared straight ahead, though a pair of oversized sunglasses — a particularly strange fashion accessory, given the hour of night. Roger was surprised, with the sensory overload before him, that this aspect was among the first he noticed. 

But this observation was quickly overtaken by another — one that took active thought to decipher and left him utterly bewildered. Below this woman’s neck, a large sheet of blue cloth covered an enormous mound that overflowed the confines of her lap, extending to and slightly over the arms of the wide-bodied wheelchair. What was stranger, this mound appeared to be secured to the chair by a pair of wide straps that stretched horizontally across the front of the load, pressing deeply into it. Below this blue concealment, a pair of bare, skinny legs were visible from the knees down, with her small, slippered feet placed on a pair of footrests. 

As the chair lowered to the ground, the woman reached her petite arms over the tops of this mound, as if she were doing the best she could to keep it from escaping her; or, like the strap, doing her part to keep the load in place as best she could. With an air of rehearsed practice, her arms spread out and to the sides, on level with her chin, sinking slightly into whatever was concealed beneath the blue sheet. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but Roger could have sworn that he noticed a muscle tense at the young woman’s dainty jawline. 

Roger stared intently, blinking heavily once or twice as he tried to decipher the image before him. He was 30 feet away, at least, but the bright lights of the apartment building’s overhang illuminated everything clearly enough. He thanked himself for remembering his glasses.

What the heck is that in her lap, he wondered, his eyebrows furrowing into confusion. His mind tried to register the most logical options. He recalled helping his family bag some leaves at their country home last fall, and the oversized plastic bags they used to haul the debris away. He imagined that such bags could be stuffed with laundry? Some immense amount of clothing? It didn’t make any sense. That would be such a weird way to get your clothes into your new apartment, and —

When the van’s hydraulic lift made contact with the sidewalk, Roger’s heart stopped. His eyes widened as his breath bated in his lungs. No. There is no fucking way.

But there also wasn’t any other way to explain the wave-like quake that radiated across the top of this mound, under the young woman’s arms. The lift made contact with the pavement a bit harder than she had anticipated, it appeared, and he saw her upper body tugged along as inertia demanded itself. He faintly heard one of the men mutter to her, but the young woman appeared not to respond. She only hunched her neck forward, her expression stern even behind the oversized sunglasses.

It wasn’t a mound. Not a singular one, anyway. It wasn’t a pair of oversized bags, filled with laundry. It wasn’t an odd way to move housewares into a new apartment.

This carefully concealed burden was a part of this woman’s body. And given how slender she appeared from this distance, it wasn’t simply fat. This overwhelming presence yielded only one explanation: those were breasts.

Roger felt heat build up under his collar, and a prickling sensation at the back of his neck. His mind flashed to the carefully cultivated archive on his hard drive — an encyclopaedic collection of images and videos, medical reports and personal anecdotes, dirty videos and news broadcasts alike, all revolving around women with exceptionally large chests. It was a secret passion he had harboured for as long as he could remember, and at this point, he thought he had seen it all, from pre-reduction recordings on Youtube to grainy, censored videos in languages he couldn’t understand. But he was certain: he had never seen breasts as large as the ones affixed to the body of this mysterious, stern-faced woman. Not by a mile.

As the larger of the two men began to wheel the chair into the front entrance of the building, Roger moved slightly, leaning in to get a closer look, but trying desperately not to draw attention to himself. In doing so, however, he involuntarily clenched the grocery bag he was carrying closer to his body, setting of a crinkling staccato of a Doritos bag within. The sound was magnified by his estimation, and was, even at this distance, not unnoticed by the woman in the chair.

In that last moment before the chair disappeared into the alcove of the building’s entrance, the woman snapped her head to the left, turning it to face Roger directly. Even though the sunglasses hid half her face, he could tell that her brows shot skyward with widening eyes. Her intention was clear: she had carefully staged this late-night drop-off to avoid any attention whatsoever. And in noticing him, she realised that her plan had been foiled. A momentary tinge of guilt crossed Roger’s mind, and he silently chastised himself for his blunder. He felt, for some reason, that this encounter would have been better had it remained stealthy. But none of that overshadowed the wonder that still filled his lungs. He felt his blood pump again.

Since that night, Roger had committed to a campaign of discovery; one, he had only recently begun to determine, may have been bordering into obsession. During his efforts, he had obtained a floor plan of the building from the management of the building’s office. He had put a series of inquiries in as casual a way that he could muster, eventually spending $200 to bribe, of all people, one of the building’s custodians into giving away a unit number of interest. He had discovered the name of the person to whom this unit was registered, and as best he could determine, it belonged to a semi-reclusive Russian oligarch. He wasn’t sure if that information was helpful, or meant nothing. Just another piece of the puzzle. 

His newfound madness even involved his disguising himself as a courier, charged with delivering an expensive arrangement of flowers to the unit in question (a hefty investment in itself). The person who answered the door only served to deepen the mystery — a tall woman in a nurse’s uniform who insisted (quite forcefully as he recalled) that the flowers did not belong to them, that deliveries were not accepted, and that he should leave, before slamming in the door in his face. Enough to pique his curiosity that much more. 

After allowing himself to drift asleep for a short while, Roger shot awake on the couch, noticing that it had become dark outside. He checked his watch — only 6:30. He glanced over to his newest investment, the drone, plugged into the wall, and saw that its indicator lights were all illuminated. The unit was fully charged. With a stretch, Roger finished the last of the lukewarm beer on the coffee table and stood up.

It was time to go to the roof. 

To be continued...

(Author's note: I hope you like this first chapter. I'm still getting back to the others in progress, but this one was burning in my mind for a while now, and it was getting to a point where I had to get it down on paper before I could dive back into the already-in-progress stuff. I think it would be fun to turn this into a tale of mystery and obsession, so I'm looking forward to hearing if you enjoy this first part.)

(Also, yeah… I’m not the best at graphic design, as this title image can attest. Always willing to suggestions, and heck, it would be so much fun if I could I dunno… draw. But I'd like to do stuff like this with my stories more going forward. Hope it's fun.)

(One more thing... I think I might change this $12 tier level to "fiction," since I'm currently writing different stories at the same time. Just seems like a good umbrella, but I wanted to give you a heads up in case it presents anything differently. :-) )