Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms (62 page)

Barney was standing beside some woman’s car, absently cleaning her windshield and charming the pants off her. Which was pretty easy given that she was already bare-assed naked.

Wisper, Morgan, Sophie, River, Wendy, and I raced past him and scooted around the edge of the station office toward the impounded automobiles, one of which was still the Duesenberg.

“Hey!’ Barney yelled, as we ignored him and the sights and sounds of angry, naked teenagers approached. “What the hell?”

Not looking back, I raced to my aunt’s car and I pulled the keys from my pants as the others dove into their seats.

“You have the keys?” Wendy said in a voice that sounded not unlike the raptors hunting their prey in Jurassic Park.

“Oh,” I said, trying to think fast and nearly hurting myself. “Didn’t I…em…you know…mention that?”

“No,” Wendy said, scalding me with the hot oil of her voice. “You did
not
…em…mention that. All this time I could have had access to my clothes, my things, my comics…”

“You have comics?” River asked. Wendy stopped seething and softened with River’s obvious enthusiasm, and she turned to him, almost girlishly.

“I make my own,” Wendy said. “Self-published.”

“Oh, my God. That is so awesome,” River said. “I’ve always wanted to self-publish. I have this idea for my own version of the XMen, except instead of mutants, they’re sewer people…”

Catching sight of the approaching wall of flesh heading our way, with Barney now in the lead, I leaped behind the wheel, jammed the key in the ignition and cranked it.

The engine turned over on the first try.

I shifted the thing into gear, and floored it just as Barney and some of the faster teens came skidding, flailing, and flopping down on top of us.

The greasy gas station attendant bounded onto the running board as the others continued the chase, and his pet python smacked me in the side of the head a few times as I drove wildly through an oil can display, and sent the cylindrical containers flying everywhere. The naked, lady customer he’d been seducing had to dive into her car to avoid being run over as I sailed through the fill-up area, heading for the street.

Barney managed to grab me around the neck and jerked me from my seat, as if removing the driver of a fast-moving automobile careening insanely was somehow a
good
idea. We were just about to missile into a tree—which seemed to thrill Barney to no end—when River stood up (seatbelts!) and smashed my naked assailant right in the face.

Stunned, in several ways, Barney let go of my neck, but recovered quickly enough to grab tightly to the side of the car before falling to certain, skin-abrading doom on the quickly passing pavement below. Before he could get hold of me again, I accelerated into some oncoming traffic and scraped him off the Duesenberg with a lot of screaming on his part, but a minimum of additional fuss on mine.

Innee, and outey passoo defeather a cat!
Or whatever.

I chuckled to myself as I imagined Barney would be feeling that one for several days. Nights and weekends too. Man is a truly terrible beast deep down inside, and will often laugh at the misfortune of those with larger penises. At least until our girlfriends give us the evil eye, as Wisper did now, and we make like we were just coughing.

After a moment of some genuine pretend-hacking, I turned and looked back at River in amazement. River, for his part, was looking at Wisper, almost embarrassed, and said nothing for quite a while.

“You love him,” he said simply, finally answering her unasked question, then shrugged and felt the need to add. “Why...?” He sort of shuddered and shook his head, then without another word, sat down again beside Waboombas.

Wisper and I absorbed that, then smiled at one another, and as we raced down the road, over the river and through the woods, she asked me—reasonably—where we were going.

“To the comics convention,” I said.

“All
right!
” Morgan cheered.

“Just one problem,” I said, looking at Wisper. “How do we get back to my dimension?”

We’d been sitting for several minutes, parked on the road a few feet from the place where Morgan, Wendy, and I had passed through the freak lightning storm on the way into town. The Duesenberg sputtered and steamed, not likely able to take us more than a few hundred more feet or so. But hopefully, that would be enough.

The air still seemed alive with energy, the hair stood up on the nape of my neck, and probably everyone else’s too. I looked at Morgan, and he seemed ready to jump out of his skin. Sophie was smiling and excited. The whole thing was like one growing, expanding adventure to her that just kept getting better and better.

“You’re saying,” Sophie asked, entirely too enthusiastically. “If we drive down this road, lightning will strike, and we’ll enter another dimension?”

What about being struck by lightning could in any way ever be considered appealing?

“More or less,” Wisper answered her.

“How?” I asked. “Why?”

“I have no idea,” Wisper said softly, staring at the empty space before us with more than a bit of fear. “We live not far from here—my family—and one day I noticed an old car driving this way. This road doesn’t get much use since they put in the 108, so I watched the car go, wondering what it was doing here. It had your Uncle Pjuter in it— though I didn’t know he was your uncle at the time—and he was just tooling along happily when suddenly there’s rain, clouds, and lightning, and suddenly Pjuter, the car—everything—just vanished. It scared the living shit out of me. There’d always been rumors about ghosts and things, down here, and I thought I’d seen one. Then one day I notice Pjuter in his store downtown, and I realized something else was going on. So I watched him leave that night, put on clothes, hop into this old car of his…”

“This Duesenberg,” I said.

“Yeah,” she answered. “He jumped in and drove off, and I followed him and watched him vanish again, right about there.”

She pointed to a dark spot on the asphalt.

“So the day before Washburne and I are supposed to get married…”

“What?” I asked, stunned.

“Yeah,” she said. “I didn’t want to, but someone…” she scowled in the direction of River, who rolled his eyes and ignored her “
…
kept pushing me, and convinced me it was a good idea. I knew I couldn’t go through with it, so I planned an out. Since there was nowhere in this world I could hide from him and his money, I thought about this place and where it might lead. I confronted your uncle and made him tell me what this spot was all about, and he explained how he’d found the opening, or whatever, years ago, and now went back and forth all the time.”

“He just drives through?” I asked.

“In a car that’s at least sixty years old,” she said—then seeing my expression, “Why? Neither of us knows. So I bought myself an old Rambler, filled it with food and gas, gathered my things and drove up here. It took me a while to work up the courage, but eventually…”

“You got through.”

“Found some clothes. Got a job… ”

“You didn’t even bring
clothes
?”

“Your uncle mentioned I’d need them, but somehow it slipped my mind.”

“You started with
nothing
?”
I asked, my mind totally blown, and drifting down the street I might add.

“It
is
possible
, Corky.”

I stared at her, dumbfounded. I couldn’t imagine. But perhaps I needed to. Or perhaps I needed to do a lot
more
than imagine.

I looked at the others and got mixed reactions.

“Let’s do it,” Wendy said gamely.

“What if it fails when we’re in the middle and cuts us in half?” Morgan whined.

Sophie just smiled broadly and nodded.

River also said nothing and simply stared, absently. He seemed not to be listening, his glazed eyes looking off into space, as if he was lost in a world of his own. I wondered what he must be thinking, what horrors were coursing through his mind, when I noticed Waboombas moving her hand slightly in his lap, still with a firm grip on his ample, and now swollen, personal handle.

Ah. So his mind was preoccupied with the horror of the absentminded hand job. His expression now made perfect sense.

Behind us rose the sounds of approaching sirens and rubber tires squealing over asphalt, and I knew the decision had now been made for us.

I pressed down on the gas and, complaining all the way, the Duesenberg moved forward, slowly, to be gradually enveloped by clouds, lightning, and thunder that flowed purposefully out of nowhere. Morgan whimpered, Sophie squealed in delight, Waboombas laughed, and River turned pale, shuddering violently. Suddenly Wisper’s brother cried out, and I couldn’t tell if he’d finally realized what was happening or simply given the back seat of Helena’s car a new stain.

Either way, it didn’t matter. The result was the same.

We were gone from Earth Two.