Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [190]
I was beginning to wonder who had the bigger thing for Wisper, son or dad.
I smiled and looked at my rare and exquisite beauty, feeling better than I’d felt at any point since two nights ago when she was holding my penis.
“Here,” Boone said, handing me my comics. “I never intended to keep them. I just wanted to get you away from her.”
“As you can see,” I said, “nothing you or anyone else can do ever will.”
Then something occurred to me.
“How were you planning to destroy the gateway between worlds?” I asked.
He stopped smiling and studied me with a ’bugs are doing trapeze-swings from your nose-hairs’ expression and asked, I believed sincerely, “What are you talking about?”
I returned his confused look. “Washburne said…”
Abruptly, Boone turned and stared intently inside the trunk, as if searching for something that frightened him. He found it. It was a small, silver box with a handle and a thick cable running from it to somewhere inside the main body of the black car. He reached in and tried to pull the thing out by the grip, but instead of coming free, it levered, clicked, lights blinked on, something hummed, and an LCD display ignited with red letters that flashed ‘ACTIVATED’ several times, then scrolled aside to be replaced by a numeric countdown.
Twenty, nineteen, eighteen…
Boone, Wisper, and I reflexively stepped back, our minds racing through options.
“Where would he get something like that?” Boone asked, mostly to himself. “Where would anyone find something like that?”
I was about to shout that everyone should run for their lives, when Morgan called over to us with what I hoped was a solution to our explosive little problem.
“Hey, look!” he said, and everyone turned his way. “This opens!”
He leaned down and showed how the rear window of the advertising truck could be slid to one side so people painted up as Spiderman could more easily get from cab to bed without dangerous, life-threatening maneuvers, and by the time I turned back to the bomb, Washburne was behind the wheel of the limo and racing off toward the dimensional hole.
“Don’t you feel stupid?” Morgan said to me, snidely.
I had underestimated Washburne, expecting him to be beaten, but I should have realized sooner that crazy people never believe themselves to be beaten, or wrong, or crazy. Unfortunately for him, he also didn’t know his father had apparently activated his explosive device.
Dumbfounded, I pulled Wisper, and we ran behind the truck, warning the others to do as we did, just as clouds began to form, thunder to roll, and lightning to strike. I didn’t see the explosion when it happened due to the sudden darkness, rain, fearful cowering and all, but the explosion must have been tremendous.
The advertising truck rocked up on its side, to the point where we feared it might actually roll over on us. But then it creaked, strained, and fell back onto the street, bouncing a few times on burning, flattening tires. The advertising sign it had been pulling didn’t fare quite so well. It was split in half by a rocketing limousine tire, piece of axel, and a section of the trunk. Ripped neatly into two, the pieces groaned over into a small ditch by the side of the road.
Once the sound of bending, shearing metal had died away, and the shuddering of vehicles and earth had receded, I checked to see that everyone was unhurt, then moved around the burning wreckage of our former chase vehicle to find out how bad things might be.
Beyond the truck, the clouds were quickly rolling back, and the brief rain was already drying away to steam in the heat of the afternoon sun. Near the heart of the fading storm, the asphalt of the road had been ripped away, as if scooped by the hand of God Himself—a massive, gaping hole torn deep into the earth and mineral rights territory beneath. As I approached, its depth surprised me, and I half expected to see Mole Man rising out of the smoke, and dust, and fog at the center, ready to take on—first the Fantastic