Red Thunder

“She’s bleeding! She’s bleeding!” Dak shouted, and swam to her as best he could with all the debris in his way. Travis was ru

“Call a doctor! Call nine-one-one!” Dak was shouting. Travis had her in his arms and was examining her face.

“It’s okay, Dak,” Alicia called out. “I’m not hurt bad.”

Dak pulled himself out and ran to her, and hugged her.

“Just a bloody nose,” Travis said. “I don’t think it’s broken.” Then he turned away from the two and looked bleakly at the ground. It was easy to see he was kicking himself for the dumb stunt he just pulled. Well, he ought to, I thought. But we got lucky, like I said. If that bubble, which must have been five hundred feet across, had been only three feet above us when it vanished, and the air all around us had instantly rushed in to fill the vacuum…

That’s what it was, of course. That’s what Jubal and I had seen just at the moment it became too late to do anything about it. If squeezing a bubble compressed the air that was trapped inside, then expanding one with only a golf ball’s worth of air inside to the size of the Goodyear blimp was going to make one hell of a good vacuum.

Travis had been thrown against the brick barbecue and managed to hang on until the wind died. Just about everything else in the backyard lighter than Jubal or the picnic table had been swept into the air, most of it coming down in the pool. All five of us landed in the pool… another stroke of luck, I realized, that the pool had been filled the day before. I had come down headfirst, from at least twenty feet in the air…

TRAVIS’S HOUSE HAD three full bathrooms, all of them with big showers. Kelly and I took one. It wasn’t until I got there that I began to feel any pain. Excitement desensitizes you, I think, pumps some good chemicals in your blood so you can keep functioning, injured, until you’re away from danger.

Then the chemicals go away, and you start to hurt.

I had my pants unzipped and was starting to pull them down when I felt a sharp stab in my side.

[110] “I think I may have cracked a rib,” I said. My shirt was torn on my left side, and there was some blood. Kelly carefully lifted the shirt and we looked at a rough scrape there at the bottom of my rib cage. The flesh around it was already a big purplish-yellow bruise. Kelly pressed gently above the bruise.

“Does it hurt when I do this?”

“It would if you pressed any harder.” She moved her hand below the bruise.

“How about this?”

“Yes.” I looked at her face, soaking wet, hair tangled with some dried leaves stuck in it, looking intently at my bruised side. Her shirt was open and her nipples crinkled from the water and the air conditioning, which Travis liked to keep set around the North Pole. She looked up and smiled. She reached down into my pants.

“How about this? Hurt?” she asked.

“Hurt me,” I said. Then we were kissing, and trying to wriggle out of our wet clothes at the same time. Wet jeans are the worst, and Kelly’s were pretty tight even when they were dry. It didn’t help that pretty soon we were laughing, then I’d gasp from a pain in my side and we’d try to be careful, and start laughing again. She was shivering, too, wet and cold. Finally we made it into the shower stall and turned on the hot water and made love there, she being careful not to touch my side, me not really caring.

We managed to get each other all soapy before one thing led to another again, and by the time that wave had crested we’d used up all Travis’s hot water.

“What are we going to wear?” she asked as we got out.

“Towels, I guess,” I said. “I’ll go see if Travis has anything.”

I wrapped a big towel around me. When I opened the door there was a pile of clean clothing there on the floor. I brought it in and held things up, one at a time. Two pairs of Bermuda shorts in Travis’s size, and two of Jubal’s tentlike Hawaiian shirts.

“Who gets the hula girls, and who gets the surfer dudes?” I asked her.

“Surfer dudes for me, dude,” she said, and I tossed the shirt to her.

[111] The shorts were a few inches too wide for me. The other pair were a tad tight in the hips and loose in the waist for Kelly. Both of us were almost swallowed by the shirts.

I heard a clothes dryer, found it at the end of the hall, and tossed our clothes in with Dak’s and Alicia’s, then found our way to the living room.

Alicia had a Band-Aid on her nose where it had been cut slightly, but it wasn’t broken. If any of us had been hit much harder than I had been by the picnic table we surely would have had some broken bones, but Alicia had hurt herself coming up beneath the table, not while we swirled through the air. Jubal and Kelly and Travis and Dak hadn’t been hurt at all.

“We got lucky,” Travis said. “I’m very sorry, ladies and gents, I didn’t know what sort of tiger’s tail I was twisting. My apologies.”

“It’s okay, Trav,” Dak said.

“No, it’s not okay. It’s not okay at all. I’m going to have to ask you all to just go home today. I don’t want anybody else around while me and Jubal sit down and figure out just what we’ve got here.”

“We aren’t afraid, Travis,” Kelly said, surprising me. She looked at the rest of us. “Well, we aren’t, are we?”

“Not me,” Dak said.

“I am afraid,” Travis said. “Not of blowing up my own old ass, but of hurting one of you children. I couldn’t live with that.”

“You couldn’t if we were children, which we are not,” Alicia said. “It’s Jubal’s gizmo. What do you think, Jubal?”

Everybody looked at him, and Jubal seemed to shrink.

“Oh, cher … I don’ know, me… I mean…” Alicia realized a decision like that was far beyond the man’s capabilities. She put her arm around his shoulder and whispered something in his ear, which seemed to cheer him up. He gri

“Jubal will go with his family, like always,” Travis said, not unkindly. “You can all come back tomorrow, and I’ll fill you in on what we’ve found out.”

“That’s cool,” Dak said. “Come on, folks, let’s hit the road before the morning rush hour starts.”

[112] “Not for another thirty minutes or so,” Alicia said, looking at her watch, which seemed to have survived the dunking.

“What, you like traffic, babe?” Dak asked her.

“No, I like my own dry clothes. I’m not going to be seen in public in Jubal’s shirt and Travis’s pants. I got my reputation to consider.”

12

I’D BEEN FALLING behind on my work at the Blast-Off, so I tore through piled-up chores that morning as well as I could with a bruised rib. I had the noon-to-six shift that day. I really should have taken Mom’s six-to-midnight, too, as she had covered for me twice that week… but I couldn’t. I fell asleep twice in the desk chair behind the reservation computer as it was.

At six, Kelly pulled into the lot at the wheel of a sexy little red Corvette. In addition to having the bitchin’est new cars in town, Strickland Mercedes gets the best trade-ins. Sometimes Kelly decides to test drive them for a day or two. What a hard life she has.

She hurried into the office. I could see she was as excited as me to get back to Rancho Broussard and see what Travis had found out. But Mom was there, too, so time had to be made for a hug and a kiss and a short chat. Mom approves of Kelly. Aside from being beautiful and rich, Kelly has been known to help us with some chores she has probably never had to do at her own house. How could a mother possibly object? So she pecked Kelly on the cheek and watched us climb into the red death machine, and waved as we pulled out of the lot.