Minecraft Gamer Chases a Porn Star

And then he befriended a kid who was kind to him when there was no one else to talk to. He became protective of her in video games and later when she grew up and took up choices he didn't agree with, he was protective of her outside in the real world best he could.

"Do you have your ID on you?" he asked after finishing the story.

"Uh.. yeah. But why? Where are we going, Peter?" I wondered.

He grinned. "Ever been on a cargo plane before, kid?"

Before long we were at a military checkpoint of some kind. I had my ID out but Peter flashed his badge at the guard and they let us in without looking at it. As he drove around the road blocks, my jaw dropped as I realized we were passing Airforce One. The President's plane! We must've been at Andrews. He soon parked at what looked like a small airport building, left his gun behind and escorted me inside carrying my bags for me. Armed guards inside made both of us go through the metal detector and they had to check Peter twice with a wand. They moved it slowly over his head and as the realization hit me that he had a metal plate in his skull, he winked at me with his one eye.

I had so many questions for Peter, but he left me alone in the waiting room and went to talk to someone in uniform. Think he was talking to a pilot. There were what looked like three families also waiting like me, and another half dozen individuals. Nearly everyone was dressed in pixelated fatigues - not what they looked like in movies - and each person had two or three bags size of a riding lawnmower with them. But waiting for what, I didn't know. Is this how military families traveled?

Within a few minutes the pilot came out toward us, raised three fingers and said "FEW." Two people got up dragging their immense luggage and then Peter motioned for me to come with him.

"Peter, where are we going?" I asked him desperately.

"We? I'm not going anywhere," he replied calmly.

"FEW AFB," one of the older airmen who got up told me. His fatigues looked different from others'.

"FEW?" I asked in confusion.

He laughed and yelled back, "Cheyenne, kid. Francis E. Warren Air Force Base."

Peter settled me in the middle of the cargo plane. I never answered his question, but, no, this was my first time in one. It looked positively medieval. It was just a big-assed cylinder with crates of cargo in the middle of it, tied down by webbing and ratcheting tie-downs everywhere. The walls, or rather shell around the plane was surrounded by another layer of cargo webbing. Peter motioned for me to sit in what looked like a seat made of the same material. It was uncomfortable. He pointed at the cargo in the middle of the plane.

"See those? You watch and if you see any lines go slack or anything shift, you tell someone right away. Yell, don't speak. Better yet, you don't get squished, you got me?"

I nodded.

He looked at an imaginary point in the distance, looking at something that didn't exist, and murmured, "Happens exceedingly rare, but it does happen." He was silent for a minute, still looking around, then finally turned to me.

"This is where I leave you kid. You'll have to make your own way through Wyoming. Don't worry about your uncle, he'll be very busy for a few months."

"I'm still not sure what happened tonight. Is he going to come after me?"

"Nah, I don't think so. He had no reason to stop you, for one. Or the jurisdiction. He's just a dipshit yokel. But last time this happened, it took years for the court to rule on the issue of bringing a gun on our grounds. It's technically policed by the Park Service, but you don't need to know about that. Even if he squirms out of this, he's probably sure to lose his job while all that goes through the paces because it takes forever, and we made sure to process him."

Peter looked around, seemingly at nothing, and continued, "The car will throw him off and I bet he's not smart enough to investigate property records in middle of nowhere. Good thing you stopped where you did, that thirty mile stretch. Got lucky I guess." He shrugged laconically.

"Peter, who are you?"

At that question he winked at me for the last time and walked away with his scary grin stuck on his face, and I noticed he now had a very pronounced limp in his step. The plane took off shortly thereafter and I felt like I shed a coat made of my old skin. It felt refreshing.

That, and I froze my ass off by the time we flew into Wyoming, realizing very early on that I'd needed to buy winter clothes as soon as we landed. The cargo plane was painfully slow, and too noisy for me to fall asleep. One of the other passengers noticed me squirming somewhere over Iowa and handed me his empty Gatorade bottle for which I was very grateful. He told me we were lucky because it was a direct flight. He said sometimes pilots would take detours through Australia or Turkey for like no reason, and I didn't think he was joking. What would I do once I got to Cheyenne, I wondered?

After dawn we landed, and I nervously walked off following everyone else, certain I never should have been allowed to board this plane. Sooner I got away, the better. It looked like another small airport with a circular drop-off zone, but no gates or armed guards outside. Just as I was crossing the zebra stripes heading toward a bus stop wondering what I'll do next, I noticed a cute girl sitting on the tailgate of a brand-new truck in a parking spot right in front of me. It had Nevada plates and still had dealer's stickers on it. Incongruously, there was a blue porta potty strapped to the back of the truck. She was smiling and waving at me.

"Shirley?!" I blurted out, barely a car length away. My brain was scrambling to recognize her and failing because it had never attached a place to her image and it was confusing.

She smiled at me and said "meow," and I then remembered her real name was Cat. Guess Bear was wrong for once, as both of her names were fake. In fact, she never told me either name so I just betrayed myself, but that was now well beyond trying to explain.

"What are you doing here?" I asked, walking toward her.

She was smiling and in that moment I thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world. She cocked her head and replied, "Heard ya skipped town and I thought you might wanna ride so I bought a truck."

The universe had collapsed on me again and I was trying to reconcile its differences, "You bought a truck?" ... "But..."

She pointed at the porta potty. "And for the record, I am NOT ok with smelling your shit in a composting toilet, so I brought this bad boy with us until we can install a septic tank." Her voice now had a hint of a twang. Was she originally a country girl?

Shaking my head, I repeated, "With us?"

"Yes, with us. We'll make a floating island, right, like in Minecraft? And we'll right-click chickens with stalks of wheat?" She laughed at that. Her accent was delightful, and I realized that the happy girl in the picture I saw that day - the picture that made me fall in love with her was absolutely real. Ignoring all the noise in it, her real self broke through and captured me, and that was the exact same girl I was seeing in person now.

This beautiful girl was crazy. She dropped her own life and joined me, a stranger, in my foolish adventure, and she made it better before it even started. I nearly cried from joy, and I imagined annoyed Bear scoffing somewhere had he seen us or knew what was going through my head.

She invited me over by opening her hands and my bags fell on the ground on the zebra stripes. An annoyed guy honked at them blocking his way, but no one cared so he drove around them. We kissed and her legs wrapped around my body, and I tasted her lips and saw her in my mind as the same pixelated girl with a flower in her hair. I knew things were finally just right.

"Ever fucked in a truck before?" she asked me.

Prior to that day, I hadn't.