“Hurry up, it’s getting late. Why the do you even want to go there this late in the day?” I yell to my sister from the bottom of the staircase, and already for us to go swimming. I have my pale blue swimming trunks on and a rolled up towel under my arm. Jingling the keys to the truck in my free hand, I try to urge my sister to speed things up and I hear her heavy steps on the floor above. I know I have her attention now.
I hear her bedroom door open and she comes out in the t-shirt she’s been wearing all day, and her underwear. “I can’t find the top.” She cries out while clenching what I can only guess to be the bottom to her bikini in a hand.
I can see past that cry, her emerald eyes reveal her. Puffing out her cheeks as she comes to the top of the steps I can tell she’s frustrated and watching me as if I would have the answer to her issue and to stop rushing her. But I don’t. Plus it’s fun to pester her. Though I didn’t hide her top, wish I did though, we wouldn’t be going out to the lake if I had hid her suit, doubt she’d want to head there in just her underwear.
“You should have had them ready before you asked if we could go…at least put the bottom on before leaving your room in your panties.”
Her face flushes as she jumps in surprise. Looking down at her partially naked lower half, she gives a shriek before rushing back to her bedroom. “Perv,” she yells back to me and I shake my head as I run my fingers through my black hair, a few strands falling forward to cover my forehead and I try blowing them out of the way to no avail.
“You’re fourteen, get out of that habit will you. Don’t call me a pervert when you’ve been doing that since you’ve been out of dippers!” I shout, walking away from the staircase less I get another glimpse and she begins yelling at me. Looking over my shoulder, back towards the stairs I add, “I’ll be out in the truck, hurry up!”
Leaving the hall and passing the green couch in the living room to the four panel wooden door that leads outside and onto a small stoop. A forest green Toyota pickup truck sits in the driveway. The vehicle is my dad’s and he’s letting me borrow it while he’s taking his annual vacation. Walking across the asphalt and opening the driver side door, I hear the house door open and B comes out in her pink bikini bottoms, but she has a different shirt, a pink tank top. Her long corn color hair flows behind her as she dashes for the truck. She also has a bag under her arm, which probably contains a towel and maybe some snakes and a Frisbee so that we don’t get too bored with swimming.
“Couldn’t find the top?” I ask and she shakes her head as she opens the passenger side door. Both of us hopping in and I look to her before starting up the car, “no more walking around the house in your underwear, okay?”
She sticks her tongue out at me, before retracting it and puffing out her cheeks, “I know pervert…what about you walking around in your boxers in the morning?”
I start the car, then glaring at her with my cold hazel eyes, she flitches, she’s barking up the wrong tree, she knows that is completely different then her, she’s a girl, I’m a guy, guys do that. “You call me that and yet you still do it, how often do we have to remind you of that?” Her face flushes, recovering from the hesitation a moment ago, but she doesn’t reply as I pull down the driveway and onto the road. And thus ending another one of our pointless arguments, well it’s not really pointless because it’s been almost half a year since she turned fourteen, both dad and I have been trying to get her to stop and she has, for the most part, but on occasions such as this, she forgets and does it anyway, at least she was wearing a shirt this time. “Just watch it,” I tell her as a last comment, making my point a last time.
“Okay.” She tells me quietly, I bet she’s wishing I would just switch subjects but it’s not like she’s as young as she used to be. You can tell she’s obviously a girl now, not like a few years back, she looked like a boy with long hair back then but things change, and she doesn’t have that boyish look anymore. Still she’s short, and not that well developed, but puberty has come to her. I let it slip my mind though, I want to have a nice time, and we haven’t been to Oak Leaf Lake in a while.
In silence I drive us, a cooling breeze flowing through the truck’s windows as we drive under the canopy like trees that covers the road with their foliage. The sound of this old rust bucket engine, the rustling of the tress, and the smells of summer calm us and so we begin talking after making it half way to Oak Leaf, a nice small lake that isn’t very big but still has a cozy place for picnickers and a beach for swimmers. Not many people visit the small place but its close and fun to have around.
“Sorry.” She says in a pathetic voice and I know she’s trying to tug at my heart strings, she’s always been like this, I didn’t get my way so I’ll make him feel bad, and it works every time, I can’t stay mad at her for long even though I know she’s toying with me. Reaching a hand over to her, I pat her on the head and she smiles back at me, reassuring the fact that she was toying with me. It doesn’t bother me that she does this because I do the same to her all the time. So we’re even.
Concentrating on the road, I notice a sudden change with the sky, as we take a left at the T in the road and head toward the hidden gravel driveway that’s a bit further up. With the canopy gone, we get the full view of the sky. Hardly any clouds, but from where we are, to our left a red glow, as if the sun is setting, but it’s five, the sun doesn’t set for a few more hours. Maybe a volcano went off somewhere around the world, I’ve heard that ashes from volcanoes get into the atmosphere and can cause the sunset to turn red but is that only near the eruption site...plus we even have those few hours till the sun goes down.
“The sky’s pretty,” my sister mumbles as we take the left down the gravel driveway, we’ll be arriving at Oak Leaf Lake soon.
We arrive at the end of the gravel driveway and enter a rugged parking lot that’s within viewing distance of the small lake that we’ll be swimming in. This was going to be a park according to my dad, but because of erosion from removing the tress a huge sinkhole formed and found it’s way to an underground spring, which filled the hole almost overnight. Since work was postponed for a week, they had come back to a clouded pool. Some talk later it was decided to removed the debris from the sinkhole and keep it as a lake, or pond, it’s between the two because of its size. It’s not a great fishing lake or anything; it’s just a weird accident that the town kept instead of fixing. The park is now on the other side of the woods, to the south of here and it’s great for hiking and plenty of wild life to see.
B stumbles out of the truck and heads for the lake to set up her towel on the beach and before I even get to the beach she has already jumped in. Running, I attempt a cannon ball next to her, but my cannon ball is botched because of how flat the land is and my misjudging of the distances to the drop from entering the craterlike lake. My first steps on the sandy beach are fine but by the time I hit the water, I’ve already met with the drop off.
I’m immediately submerged and disoriented as I open my eyes. All I can see are B’s legs off to my right, she’s just treading water and it confuses me as I see the surface of the lake beginning to redden like the sky was earlier—the water feels hotter, as if boiling. Breaking the surface behind B, I gasp for air to fill my lungs, but soon I fall silent as both of us stare at the sky…and what looks like a bus sized object on fire heading our way.
For a moment’s hesitation, I watch the giant object in the sky, as if in slow motion, I can see individual flames come and go vanishing within the rest of its burning multitude. Swimming toward shore I’m thinking we need to get out of the lake as soon as possible, but when I reach the beach I glance back to see B is still in the lake.
“Beatrice, get over here!” She doesn’t blink or even move, she just treads water, her eyes engulfed by the giant fireball that’s coming our way, turning I try to judge the distance, but it’s impossible, with something that large and coming head on, and so fast, it would take a high speed camera just to judge, but my whole world has already slowed, everything is in slow motion now. Every moment feeling longer than it actually is. I’ve heard about this ability before, when humans are in danger everything slows—this is definitely one of those times…
Now a rumbling sound...no it was already here as soon as I came to the surface, no, even before that…why didn’t we notice that thing, it’s so massive. But maybe B just didn’t hear me. I don’t have time to worry about that. Glancing one last time I can see some of the trees way off in the distances getting engulfed as the fireball comes closer and closer to the ground and us. Only for a moment, but I believe it’s something man made, not some asteroid, something on it catches my attention through the inferno. Something tells me the darkness within that fireball looks familiar, like an image I saw in a textbook once.
Shaking my head I forget the thought and dive back in, I need to get B out of here and now! The water’s ever hotter than before, is that fireball boiling the water?
Swimming as fast as I can to her, then sucking in a breath of hot air before going underwater, I place an arm around her waist and hold her close as she begins struggling. I don’t pay much attention to how I bring her to shore cause my mind is already in a panic, but I’m guessing she must have swallowed a lot of the water because once we are on the beach I feel her stomach churn against my arm, and before I can set her down—not that I would at a time like this—she pukes. The rumbling of what sounds like a hurricane of jets picks up and I can actually feel my face, my body heating up because of the flames spewing off of that fireball.
Once off the beach I dart to the right, deciding our best chance is to be out of the path, but only do I decide that when I end up tripping over some roots, and in that brief moment I sacrifice myself by getting my sister under me as we land. She screams as she hits the ground hard, as do I. And I tumble in such a way that my back is toward the heat and that B is under me and I shield her as much as possible. The end result is this is going to be catastrophic either way, but I want to give my sister her best chance of surviving this.
She’s not facing me but I can tell she’s crying, her faint voice echoing in my ears. Wrapping my arms around her, I hold her tight as I hear the loud crash that comes with such a large object falling from the sky. She begins screaming, and soon I can hear her and only her as the sound of the crashing object dies and then all I can hear are the soft pops as fire burning behind us, as well as what sounds like hissing—the water must be boiling—and cracking of tree branches.
Relative silences follows with B calming to a sob. I’m alive…
Relieved, my sight hazy, I let go of B and collapse on top of her, I feel so weak after that burst of energy. But in my haze I can still hear my sister’s weak crying and I force myself to stand. Shaken, I try to grasp the situation now. Did we live? Looking back at the lake I see boiling water, and from where the object came down, a line of destruction of burning trees and grass. Smoke filling the air and we have ourselves a regular forest fire, but even that seems weak because of the fog coming from the boiling lake, I can barely even make out the outline to my dad’s truck on the other side of the crash trail.
Then a red light flashes from the silhouette of the truck, the light glimmers in the fog, which makes it seem bigger then what it is, like a ghost. But just as soon as light appears it vanishes, like a dying star, one moment there, the next, gone.
“Take me home!” B screams at me and I turn to look at her. Her eyes filled with tears and her chest heaving as if she were hyperventilating, but she’s not, she’s just terrified shitless and so am I, what the hell just happened to us?
“Right,” I say to her, weakly, picking her up and she wraps an arm around my neck and chest, holding on tightly. I glance backwards but that red flash I saw lingers in my mind, while the hissing of the boiling water continues to echo in my ears. Wanting to forget about all this I get onto the gravel driveway and I walk B and I to the main road. Then home, the whole way she clings to me, crying into my shoulder.
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