Red Thunder

25

2LOOSE LA BECK was a little squirt, barely over five feet tall. He still looked and dressed like a gangbanger, something he never really was, but now he drove a two-year-old Mercedes, possibly the only bright orange Mercedes low-rider in Florida… or the universe, for that matter. There were elaborate murals on the hood and the trunk. The car had a sound system that could peel the paint off a house at one hundred yards.

Now he stood with his hands in his back pockets and looked up at Red Thunder. I’d have to say he looked more than a little dubious.

“I don’t know, dude,” he said. “I ain’t supposed to paint no railroad cars.”

“These aren’t railroad cars now,” I told him. “We cut off the wheels.”

“I don’t know,” he said again. “I painted plenty of railroad cars in my taggin’ days. But I ain’t never painted one standing on end, dig? It changes everything. Screws up the proportions.”

“You can handle it, 2Loose,” Kelly said. “We’ll pay you ten thousand dollars.”

2Loose didn’t quite sneer.

“I couldn’t touch it for no less than twenty grand, friends. 2Loose [281] has come up in the world. Everybody callin’ me an artist now, not a stinkin’ tagger. They put some of my stuff in a museum show, can you dig it?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but how many people see it there? A few thousand? 2Loose, this thing is going to be seen by millions.”

“That don’t matter, I don’t care how many people see it. The boxcars I used to paint, they’d paint ’em over before hardly anybody seen ’em. I don’t care, man. I seen ’em, even in the dark.” He paused a moment, still looking up at the ship. “How you figure millions of people? What is the damn thing, anyway?”

So we fed him the cover story of how this would be a prop in a major motion picture. He was pretty good, acting nonchalant about it, but I could see the hunger growing in his eyes. Hollywood!

“Fifteen thousand,” Kelly said. “My final offer.”

“You got it. When do I start?”

HE AGREED TO come back the day four of us would climb into the contraption and see if it could keep us alive for five days. It was a scary five days.

Who should show up that very evening but Mr. Strickland, old “ferraristud” himself. He came barging into the building like he owned it… well, come to think of it, he did own it, but a landlord’s supposed to knock. He came with his entourage of three, Strickland being the kind of man who hates to be alone. One was his secretary, a former Miss Montana, one was his accountant, and I never did catch what the other one was, except Strickland shouted at him twice while he was there.

There’s no love lost between the two of us, but he’s not the kind who will flat out admit he hates you. No, he stretched out his arm with his big salesman’s grin, and I reluctantly shook his hand, trying to forget all the nasty lies he had told Kelly about me, trying to break us up. When he patted my back I always felt I ought to check to see if he’d left a knife there.

[282] “What are you doing here, Father?” Kelly snarled. “I told you not to come here.”

“Don’t I get a hug and a kiss, Kitten?” Oh, lord, how Kelly hated that nickname.

“Is it your birthday? Is it Christmas? I told you, you get two hugs per year, and after this I’m going to rethink the one on your birthday.”

Strickland laughed, but I think she hurt him a little. I think it’s likely that he did love her, in his way, which was to dominate her life, to make her an extension of himself. But fate had dealt him the wrong daughter. Kelly would never stand for that.

She went back to her office, walking with her back stiff and straight. It fell to me and Dak to give him the grand tour, which was the only way we’d get rid of him.

We just showed him the center section and the air lock, which we couldn’t avoid. The others were full of water bags and air equipment, all of it working, which could raise awkward questions. Another dead giveaway, if anyone noticed, was that a spaceship set would have walls that could be moved so a camera could shoot from farther back.

Strickland didn’t notice, and I breathed a little easier when I could be sure he had swallowed our cover story. Our biggest advantage in preserving our secret was that no sensible person could look at Red Thunder and deduce we were going to fly in it. She was too big, too awkward, and she had no engine.

We got rid of him as soon as we could, and I hurried to Kelly’s office, knowing how badly he could affect her.

I found her on the phone, and she seemed to be doing fine.

“Who’re you calling?”

“Locksmith. I’m changing the locks on all the doors.”

Sounded good to me.

THE NEXT DAY we got another visit from the FBI, Agents Dallas and Lubbock.

I was closest to the door when the bell rang, so I went there and saw them on the television screen. My heart skipped a beat… but as I [283] turned the camera, I couldn’t see any SWAT team or uniformed Daytona police. I couldn’t see anyone at all except Dallas and Lubbock. I called Travis and told him who was here. He was at my side within a minute, and everybody else was following him. He smiled at me and opened the door just enough to slip outside. The rest of us clustered around the little television screen.

There wasn’t much to see. Travis did his loud redneck act, and the agents stood rigid as mannequins. Their lips barely moved when they talked.

Then they were getting back into their Feebmobile and driving away. Travis watched them, waved, then came back through the door. He was drenched in sweat. He pulled at his shirt, getting the cool air of the warehouse circulating.

“Man, could I use a drink.” Alicia ran to get him a cold lemonade.

“They’re pissed off, boys and girls,” he said. “They must be, to tell me about it. Whoever’s in charge of the search must be one stubborn cop, because now he’s got his agents going back over old ground.”

“They told you that?” Dak asked.

“Not in so many words. But FBI agents see themselves as an elite. They’re not supposed to have to pound the pavement like beat cops. They were hot-the air conditioner in their car broke down-and they’re tired, and they’re fed up with the FBI and the search for a flying saucer. So they said a few things they normally wouldn’t have. They’re looking into my neighbor now, the Jesus freak. He hasn’t let them in to tour his compound-and why should he? He’s no David Koresh, but he hates guv’mint men.”

“So you think we’re okay?” Kelly asked. Alicia came back with a tall glass of lemonade. Travis drank half of it at once.

“Okay? I won’t feel okay until we’re out of the atmosphere.”

M-DAY MINUS FIVE, and the four of us went up the ramp, into the lock, and sealed it behind us. For the next five days we’d eat, drink, and breathe only what was stored inside Red Thunder. We were all pumped.

[284] We didn’t stay that way too long. There were tests to run, drills to go through. Each of us had to be checked out on getting into a suit and down the ladder to the lock. Then the hours began to stretch. Soon we broke out the Monopoly board there in the systems control deck and began a game we figured would last the whole five days.

We should have known Travis wasn’t going to let us just sit and vegetate, not when there was more training he could hit us with.

At hour thirteen an alarm bell began ringing on every deck, and a voice began intoning, “Pressure breach, Module Two, this is not a drill, this is not a drill.” It was Kelly’s voice, stored in the computer. Somehow, that made it even scarier. We knocked the Monopoly board over scrambling to our assigned stations.

Tank two was my department, so when we got to the center crossroads Dak grabbed the emergency suit from a locker as I leaned in and closed and dogged the outer air-lock hatch. I could hear a whistling sound but didn’t feel any rush of wind. We’d had Red Thunder dogged down tight with an overpressure of one-quarter of an atmosphere for a full week, using the main air lock to enter and leave, and she’d been tight as a drum.

Dak had the emergency suit unzipped and held up in front of him with the zippered side to me, just as we’d practiced a dozen times. This suit was another Russian surplus item Travis had brought back from Star City, not nearly as expensive as the other suits had been. He had bought four of them. It was nothing but a clear plastic bag in the shape of a human being, one size fits all. There was a small oxygen bottle mounted on the chest. The hands were mittens instead of gloves. When you were inside one, you looked like somebody’s dry cleaning, in a plastic wrapper.

The Russians had developed these suits for space stations. The idea was that you could don one in fifteen seconds and then have about thirty minutes to deal with an emergency after you’d lost all cabin air.

Or, if there was nothing you could do about it, and if you weren’t in direct sunlight and being roasted like a chicken wrapped in tinfoil, somebody in a proper suit could carry you to a safe environment. There [285] was a handle right on top where your rescuer could grab you like a caveman dragging his wife by the hair.

I stepped into the suit legs and Dak shoved the thing over me. I turned, and he zipped it. It was uncanny, I knew we were in no danger, we were still right on the ground in Florida, but my imagination was running away with me. My heart was pounding.

“Twenty-six seconds,” Dak shouted. We’d never managed the fifteen seconds the Russians claimed. Alicia was our record holder at nineteen seconds.

I twisted the valve on the oxygen bottle and the suit blew up until I looked like the Michelin Man. I put one foot into the air lock, then the other foot, and crouched, the air-lock chamber being only four feet in diameter. Dak closed the hatch behind me, and I heard him latch it tight. I slammed the cycle button with one hand, and in a moment the green light came on, signaling that pressure was equalized inside the lock and on the other side. The pressure gauge was reading about 1.20 atmospheres, when it should have been 1.25. Temperature was seventy-five Fahrenheit, exactly where it should be.

I opened the inner lock, swung out onto the ladder. There was a locker there, and I opened it and got a pack of sticky patches and a smoke generator. I broke the generator and held it steady. The smoke drifted down, slowly, so down the ladder I went. I followed the smoke all the way to the bottom of the tank, the whistling getting louder as I descended past the big tanks of pressurized air. I reached the water bladder and stood on the bottom deck. Beneath was our gray-water tank. The smoke was moving more rapidly now, swirling around until it found the breach. I got on my knees.

The hole was perfectly round. Somebody had drilled it.

A cigarette camera lens poked through the hole. Faintly, from outside the ship, I heard Travis’s voice.

“I make it three minutes and fifteen seconds,” he said. “Some of you might actually have lived.”

I shoved the camera back, heard Travis laugh. I took the patch I’d brought and peeled the backing off the sticky side. It was made of hard [286] rubber, about the same flexibility as a car tire but more resistant to heat and cold. The patch stuck in place. It was only an emergency measure, we had better patches and the tools to apply them, and I’d do that as soon as I caught my breath.

I tried to be angry at Travis, but what was the point? The systems test was the perfect time to throw real-world problems at us, things we’d drilled on using computer simulations. But no simulation could really duplicate the real world.

And did he ever throw problems at us. There were a hundred practical jokes hidden in Red Thunder now, a whoopee cushion under every seat, so to speak. Travis could activate them from outside and watch us with the cameras that covered every inch of the ship’s interior except the staterooms and heads.

So we got too hot and had to fix it, got cold enough that frost formed on the walls and we could see our breath, and we fixed that. We fixed problems, large and small, about once every three or four hours the entire time we were there. It was exhausting.

But we fixed them. We fixed every one of them.

THEN, ON THE fourth day of the test, twenty-four hours to go, trouble came at us from an entirely unexpected direction. “Like it always does,” as Travis never tired of reminding us.

The phone rang. I picked it up, and it was Travis.

“Y’all have to come out now,” he said. “I just got a call from your mother-”

“My… what’s wrong? Is she-”

“She’s fine, Manny. But we got trouble. We all need to be together to talk it over. Come on out, leave all systems running, we should handle this in an hour or so.”

We met Travis at the bottom of the ramp. He wouldn’t discuss the problem, just told us all to pile into the Hummer, and he took off for the motel.

Everybody was gathered in room 101 when we got there. Mom, Maria, Caleb, Salty, Grace, Billy… and somebody I’d never seen [287] before, sitting on a chair at the far end of the room. He was short and chubby, red-faced, mostly bald. He wore a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt and it was soaking. He was smoking a cigarette and he didn’t look happy.

“You!” Kelly shouted as soon as she saw him.

“In the flesh, Kitten,” the guy said, with a mean smile.

Mom had handed Travis a business card when we arrived. It said:

SEAMUS LAWRENCE

“Seamus the Shamus”

Private Detective

There were phone, fax, and e-mail numbers in the lower left corner.

“He’s a private detective,” Kelly told us. “My father has had him tailing me, off and on, since I was fourteen. Goddamn you, Lawrence!”

“Is that any way to talk to an old friend?” He was trying to be glib, but he had to be intimidated by the hostile faces pressing in on him. He took a puff on his cigarette and looked around for an ashtray, shrugged, knocked the ash off onto the floor. I moved over closer to Mom. She was holding her.22 target pistol at her side.

“Is that a bullet hole in his shirt?” I asked her. He must have heard me.

“She shot at me!” he said, and he couldn’t quite keep the fear out of his voice.

“If I’d shot at you, Mister Private Dick, I’d of hit you. I shot at that parrot’s eye. I can put a round through your eye, too, if you give me any more trouble.”

He looked down and sure enough, the bullet had gone through a loose fold of cloth, precisely through the eye of a red and blue macaw. This evidence of her accuracy didn’t seem to reassure him… and it shouldn’t have. Mom was capable of putting a real, nonlethal but very painful hurtin’ on him with that little popgun.

“He came in an hour ago,” she told us, “handed me that silly card, and said we had to talk about some people was planning to go into outer space.”

“Unbelievable!” Travis said.

[288] “Said to get Kelly here, pronto. Said for a hundred grand-that’s what he said, ‘a hundred grand’-somebody’s daddy didn’t have to find out about it.”

“After all these years, you’d sell out my father?” Kelly sounded scandalized.

“He’s sort of pissed,” Lawrence said, defensively. “On account of I ain’t been able to dig up dirt on your sp-… on your boyfriend there.”

“It was real smart of you not to finish that word, Mr. Lawrence,” Mom said, and you could feel the tension in her trigger finger when she said it. Lawrence sure felt it; he couldn’t take his eyes off the gun, slapping dangerously against Mom’s thigh.

“Unbelievable,” Travis said again.

“What do you mean, Travis?” Alicia asked.

“Unbelievable anybody could be so stupid!” He looked around at us. “Don’t you see it? Your dad got a tour of Red Thunder just a few days ago, and the thought never entered his mind that it could fly. Because your dad is smart, whatever else he is. He knows a spaceship has to have a big, big engine to take off. Anybody with any sense takes a look at Red Thunder, they know instantly it couldn’t be a real spaceship. Hell, I could have given those FBI agents the tour, and they’d never have guessed, either.”

“But it can fly,” Dak pointed out.

“Exactly! But to believe it can fly, you have to either postulate an entirely new technology, or be so stupid, be so totally clueless as to how things work… it’s beautiful when you think of it. He’s so dumb he stumbled onto the truth.”

“Hey,” Lawrence said, but it was halfhearted.

“I got a rule,” Travis said. “I’ve never had to use it so far in my life, but I think it’s a good rule. Never pay ransoms or blackmail.”

“I like that rule, too,” Mom said.

Travis had his back to the prisoner, and we all saw him wink.

“Then I guess we gotta kill him.”

For a moment I thought he’d gone too far, the guy looked like he might have a heart attack. He started babbling about how he’d go away, [289] forever, forget about the whole thing, he’d leave town, he’d leave the state. He’d do anything.

We all watched him until he ran down.

“Maybe we don’t have to, Travis,” Caleb said. “All we gotta do is hold his sorry ass for twenty-four hours, then what can he do?”

“That’s kidnapping!” Lawrence said, then realized what the alternative was. He babbled again about how he’d be happy to stay here, he wouldn’t cause any trouble.

Travis went outside and everybody but Caleb followed him. Kelly spoke first.

“Travis, he’s a drunk, he… oh, sorry.”

“No offense taken. I was thinking the same thing. Get him liquored up. Alicia, you got anything in that drug cabinet we could use as a Mickey Finn?”

“A what?”

“Something to knock him out for a while.”

“Oh, sure. No problem.”

“Okay. Caleb can watch him. He won’t need a gun, Betty, Caleb could take that pathetic loser apart with his bare hands. Give him all the booze he can drink, pop some pills in it. Dump him in an alley someplace, later. What’s he gonna do? It’ll be his word against all of us.”

“That’s what we’ll do, Travis,” she said. “He really burned me up. No way I was going to let the likes of him stop y’all.”

“Mom!” I said.

“You know I’d be happier if you didn’t go, Manny. But not this way.”

I gave her a big hug.

AND SO WE returned to the warehouse, with one more night and a day to spend inside. 2Loose had erected scaffolds around the ship and hung tarps around it.

We climbed the ramp and sealed the outer air-lock door, cycled the lock, entered the ship interior. The Monopoly game was as we’d left it. [290] Other than our cans of Coke having grown warm, it was as if we’d never been gone.

TRAVIS DIDN’T THROW us any more emergencies.

“I feel dirty,” he told us over the phone. “It’s so easy to humiliate a man, especially when he’s down. So easy. I’m not proud of it.”

“That’s something,” Dak said. “You don’t take pleasure in it.”

“But I did, when it was happening.”

“So did I,” Kelly said. “Anyway, it had to be done.”

“Jubal wants to know if he can stay with y’all for a while,” Travis said.

“What, he has to ask?” Alicia said. “Send him in.”

So Jubal joined the Monopoly game for an hour. He seemed unusually quiet, sweating a lot, very nervous. I hoped it was just opening night jitters, anticipation. I know I was feeling it. He couldn’t be worried about the trip. Could he?

We slept, we woke up, and we sweated out the last hours until six P.M., when we swung the door open and came down the ramp. Mom was there, and Jubal, and Grace, and Salty, and Maria, and Sam. There was a big flat cake with a little model of the ship standing on it, and the logo of Red Thunder spelled out in red icing. Maria, who had baked it, cut it and we all had a piece.

“Where’d you get the model?” I asked.

“Oh, we got ten thousand of ’em,” Mom said. “Didn’t Kelly tell you? We’re going to merchandise the hell out of this trip.” I looked at Kelly.

“Well, I’ve got to have something to keep me busy while y’all are gone, okay?”

“Fine with me, Kelly,” I said.

Then 2Loose gave us a tour of his masterwork. All the scaffolding and canvas had come down while we slept, and his masterpiece rose high in the air before us.

He had rendered the Six Days of Creation, from Genesis.

The first tank depicted the dividing of the light from the darkness, and I had almost been prophetic. God wasn’t in a low-rider, he was [291] doing a wheelie on a big Harley, and the Light was coming out of one tailpipe and the Darkness from the other. Shapes loomed in the big white and black clouds.

Tank two, the creation of the Firmament, which means Heaven, I think. How would a Cuban/French-Canadian maniac render Heaven? With lots of gold and lots of blue, and angels partying to boom boxes on Miami Beach.

On the third day God separated the waters from the dry land. Raging seas, towering mountains. “Let the Earth bring forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit after his kind…” He showed all that, and in the foreground was a brightly colored jungle.

Tank four, the creation of the sun, the moon, and the stars. That may have been the most gorgeous panel of the six, stars whirling and exploding, the sun high above all.

Fifth day, creation of animals. Great whales, winged fowl, plus a lot of animals Noah must have forgotten to bring along on the ark.

And on the sixth day… created He the crew of the Red Thunder. That’s right, the six of us-2Loose not knowing Kelly wasn’t going, not knowing, in fact, that any of us were going, but one look at the last picture and you knew some vibe from our crazy little ship had touched his artist’s heart and told him the truth.

We were standing together, smiling, wearing our brown leather bomber jackets. Travis in the back, a hand on Kelly’s and Alicia’s shoulders, Jubal in a place of honor down in front of us.

“My goodness,” Alicia said. “This is really… something.”

“Do y’all like it?” 2Loose asked anxiously.

“You done good, amigo,” Travis said, slapping him on the back.

“We got our money’s worth,” Kelly said.

“What, you paid for this?” Travis asked.

“Shut up, Travis. It was my money, okay?”

Then it came time for somebody to smash a bottle of champagne over her… well, she’d have to sit in a cherry-picker to hit Red Thunder’s bow, so we settled for one of the landing struts.

Travis handed the bottle to Kelly, who looked surprised. But she took it.

[292] “I christen thee, Red Thunder,” she said, and choked up. She cleared her throat. “Bless all who sail in her.” She swung the bottle, hard, and we all applauded.

“And I think that’ll be my exit line, my friends,” she said. “I won’t be at the launch in the morning. I don’t think I could stand it.”

My throat was burning as I tried to hold back the tears. No one had anything to say, but Mom put her arms around Kelly and hugged her tight. Jubal went to her and hugged her, too. Then Kelly came to me, and we kissed. Her eyes were full of tears, which she blinked away.

“Come back,” she said.

“I will.”

And she turned and headed for the door, never looking back, just raising one hand in a small wave as she left.

The three of us were glaring at Travis, and he looked back at us defiantly.

“Okay, I’m the bad guy. What was I to do? You all heard my reasons.”

“Nothing, Travis, nothing,” Mom said. “You did what you had to do.”

I was still far from sure of that. And about 49 percent of me wanted to run after her, tell her I wasn’t going unless she went… but I didn’t think she’d respect me for it. I had to take her at her word, and she had said go.

“Now everybody get some sleep,” Travis said. “Bright and early tomorrow morning we lift off. Nothing short of a hurricane’s going to stop us now.”

I’d grown so superstitious about the project that I actually checked the weather report, though it was too early in the year for hurricanes. Sure enough, none was in sight.

And I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep that night.

But I slept.