Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [164]
“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,