Rocket Science by Jay Lake

Author:Jay Lake [Lake, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, Adventure, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780974657363
Google: 1lIkAAAACAAJ
Amazon: 0974657360
Publisher: Fairwood Press
Published: 2005-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

I was warm and comfortable, except for a whopping headache. The glow I could see even through my closed eyes must be the sun. I moved my hands to discover that I was under a quilt, in a bed. I had been asleep. Opening my eyes, I studied the room around me.

I was in Floyd’s room, at his parent’s house.

He’d had the same printed wallpaper of jumping trout as long as I’d known him — since we were both small boys. The fish were almost lost under the sloppy-built pine shelves that crowded the room. Sloppy, not because Floyd didn’t have the skills, but because he didn’t bother to take the time to do more than was absolutely necessary. When I built furniture, it was going to last.

We were different like that, he and I.

The room pointed up some of our other differences as well. Football trophies, a cracked bat from the regional playoffs our junior year, a nice rod-and-reel rig he’d won in drawing at a sporting goods store in Wichita. Just a few books, lurid pulps with bug-eyed monsters on the cover, amid piles of comics. Some of the comics looked fresh. Floyd had never been serious before, no reason to think he’d start now.

And I could swear I saw a brassiere peeking out from behind a model sailing ship. That reminded me of Midge, which made me blush all over again.

Looking outside to judge the angle of the sun, I figured it was late afternoon. I remembered the fight at the barn. I hadn’t lasted very long afterward, I guess, but I couldn’t possibly have slept all night and all day. This must still be Sunday. I threw back the covers and tried to stand up.

I seemed to have developed a bad tendency to stagger to the left, which at least put the banging dead weight on my good leg. I managed to make it to the dressing table, where I gripped the cold marble top and looked at myself in the mirror. I was wearing a pair of Floyd’s pajamas, and I looked like I had recently won a bar fight.

It would have been my first. Heck, it was my first.

“Hey, Vernon old buddy,” I asked myself, “how are you doing?”

“Eh?” said a voice from the window.

It didn’t sound like the unseen voice of my aircraft. I felt a momentary surge of panic. Where was the radio handset? I looked around, then realized that Floyd would have known exactly what it was, and taken good care of it.

“Who’s there?” I called.

A grizzled face poked in from the open window. It was an old man, outside on the porch roof. With his close-cropped iron gray hair and deep-set wrinkles, he looked like he might have been chewing tobacco before Mr. Bellamy was born, but his eyes were ice chips — clear, cold and hard. “Random Garrett, son.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” I replied automatically. “My name’s Vernon Dunham.”

Random smiled, though the expression never got past his lips.

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