Kaylee’s Lament

Part Three

“Kaylee? Kaylee-boo? Can I come in?”

The voice was Zoe’s, about a thousand times the volume it should have been. Kaylee moaned in agony and pulled a pillow over her head. She tried to shout Cheeng jeen, but nothing particularly intelligible came out.

“I’m going to take that as a ‘yes’,” Zoe said, and came down the latter into her bunk. “You okay, hon?”

“I will be if you’ll tell your gorram husband to quit whipping us around so much!” Kaylee said miserably. “I’m gonna puke for certain if he does that again!”

“Kaylee?” Zoe said gently, a trace of humor in her voice. “Kaylee, we’re still on the ground. We ain’t even flyin’.”

Kaylee let out a truly vile string of profanity in Mandarin, stopping only when her head couldn’t take it anymore. Zoe smiled and took a plastic container out of the bag she carried. “Thought you might be in bad shape. Here,” she offered, holding out a small vial of black liquid. “Take this. Don’t taste it or smell it, just take it.”

“What’s in it?” she asked suspiciously.

“You don’t even want to know, trust me. But it works, and works quick. Do it!” Kaylee pulled the stopper off and poured the contents as directly into her stomache as she could. She did trust Zoe. She was a survivor of a thousand of these kinds of hangovers. The few drops that did hit her tongue on the way down almost made her puke by themselves – revolting, and oily to boot. She looked up in distress, and Zoe handed her a canteen of cool water. The engineer gulped it gratefully. Then Zoe pressed a few pills into her hand and she popped them into her mouth and chased it without question.

Three agonizing minutes later, she let out a tremendous, foul-tasting belch. But she felt better, and her headache started to recede. “Thanks, Aunt Zoie,” she smiled weakly. “I guess you heard about last night . . .”

“You could say that. My idiot husband climbs into bed in the middle of the night, smelling like cheap incense, cigar smoke, blood and beer, and is feeling