Smith's Monthly #24 Page 5

  As John fought to get out of the vision, it slowly changed, fast-forwarded in an odd way, showing him that humanity was gone from around him.

  Except Trudi.

  She stood there, towering over him, surveying the ruin and tragedy around her as if she liked what she saw. She was naked, hands on her hips, nipples hard and thrusting forward.

  Cold wind blew her blonde hair and she didn’t seem to notice. Only the ruin seemed to please her.

  Then John realized he was below her, looking up at her, seeing how she shaved her crotch, how her butt stood out a little more than he had ever noticed before, how she had a dimple on one side of one ass cheek.

  All in color of course.

  Then she looked down at him and smiled that damn perfect smile of hers. As she did the sky cleared, the sun came out, and everything around him suddenly cleared.

  She took a deep breath that did amazing things to her chest, then motioned that he should join her on the hill, climb up to her naked body.

  Right then he woke up screaming.

  Or maybe shouting.

  TWO

  “You all right?” his dad hollered down the hall from the living room. His dad had been unemployed for six months while his mom worked at a bank. She got up early and left for work, his dad stayed up late and watched old movies.

  John was their only child and just sort of stayed out of the way. He had long ago figured out that the only reason they were still together was that he hadn’t gotten out of high school and left yet.

  “I’m fine,” he shouted back. “Just a nightmare.”

  His dad didn’t answer, which was normal at this point.

  John left his bedroom as soon as his erection was down enough to not be noticed through his pajama bottoms, and went to the bathroom down the hall in the three bedroom home. His body was shaking every step of the way as he tried desperately to get the dream out of his head.

  Get the image of naked Trudi out of his mind.

  Only it hadn’t been a dream. He was sure of that. It had been a vision, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t shake the fact that what he had seen was different.

  That it was real.

  It was the future.

  By the time he had gotten his drink of water, peed, and gone back to his room, he knew for a fact that Trudi would cause the end of the world. He was sure of that, as sure as he was about the answer to the last question on a physics test. He just didn’t know how she would end the world.

  Yet.

  So beginning the second month of his senior year at Jericho High, John Divine set out to stop her in any way he could and save the world from all cheerleaders like her.

  As with any good scientist, he knew he first had to study the problem, meaning Trudi, before finding the solution. Since any science geek in high school was basically invisible to the popular groups, he easily followed her, tracking her schedule around school.

  He knew when she was in English, when she went to cheerleading practice, and what her new Volkswagen with a red flower on the door looked like. He had it all written carefully down in notebooks, just as he did his lab experiments, noting every detail because you never knew when one would matter.

  Then, with his dad’s camera, he took a dozen pictures of her at different places around the school and put those in the notebook as well.

  But after a month it was clear to John that nothing in his preliminary study had given him any ideas on how to stop Trudi from ending everything.

  Or even any idea how she might do it.

  Maybe she would become a power-hungry President of the country in thirty years. She had become class president after all. Maybe she would cause a war by saying something stupid at the wrong time in the wrong place. He just didn’t have any idea, yet the vision of her standing there naked haunted him every day.

  He needed to take his study of her to the next level. He needed to know what she did after school, in the morning before school, and on weekends. For all he knew she was part of an alien advance force coming to take over the planet. Granted that had been done to death in movies, but that didn’t make it any less possible.

  He had to find out.

  But taking his research to the next step posed a number of problems, not the least of which were the anti-stalking laws.

  Finally he came up with a solution. From an online security sight he bought a very expensive miniature surveillance camera with short-range broadcast capability. It took a nice chunk out of his college bank account using the debit card for the purchase, but he figured that saving the world was worth it.

  He boosted the camera’s range to over a third of a mile and hid it on the underside of her rearview mirror in her car.

  She couldn’t see it. But the beauty of his positioning of the camera was that it would tell him where she was going, as well as showing her from the waist down if she were in the car. That way if someone else drove her car, he would know it.

  He set up two relays, one near her house and the other near the school, to send the signal from the camera to the computer in his bedroom where he could record it.

  The first three days of the new system she climbed in her car, left school, and just went home, climbing out of the car there and not using it again.

  But on Friday afternoon, after cheerleader practice, he was already home and at his computer watching the feed live when she climbed into her car in the school parking lot and sat there for a minute, turned sideways as if talking to someone.

  Then she did something that he knew for a fact he was going to have even more nightmares about. She raised her butt off her seat, reached under her cheerleading uniform, and pulled off her uniform pants and then her white underwear.

  The vision had been right. She was so vain she shaved everywhere.

  And he had an instant erection.

  THREE

  A man’s hand and arm came across the field of vision of the camera and dove into her crotch like a mouse going for cheese after finishing a maze.

  Her legs went apart and the hand played a piano solo on her key parts.

  John watched as the hand moved, slowly gaining speed.

  Then through the front window John saw two of the other cheerleaders come from the football field area and start toward the parking lot. It took Trudi and the extra hand a few moments longer before they saw the problem.

  The hand yanked back as if scalded by a hot iron, and Trudi quickly slipped on her cheerleader pants, leaving her panties under the seat.

  John had no doubt that the mouse would have a return match with the cheese after the game, but he didn’t plan on watching.

  Suddenly John realized he had the answer to stopping her. Those panties, tucked back under the seat, were how he could stop her.

  In one of his experiments in class, and after class, he had been working on a possible chemical that would break down the molecular structure of synthetic fiber. If he could get that to work, maybe he could figure out a way to embarrass Trudi so much she would never be able to rise to a position of power enough to destroy the world.

  In a few minutes Trudi drove her car home, and then thirty minutes later drove it back to school for the big game, never getting her white panties from under the seat.

  The moment she parked her car in the school lot and got out, John headed for the front room to ask his dad if he could borrow the car for a few minutes. He told his dad he needed it to go back to school for a homework assignment he had left there.

  “Figures,” his dad said, shaking his head while downing a beer. “Friday night and you’re doing homework.”

  “A kid as good-looking as you are should get out of the books once in a while,” his mother said.

  “I know,” John said, ignoring the conversation that had gone on for years now.

  “Dinner’s in forty minutes,” his mother said, handing him the keys.

  “I won’t be that long,” John said, and dashed for the car.

  Twenty minutes later he was
home with Trudi’s underwear stuffed in his pocket.

  The next Monday he was back in the chemistry lab doing experiments on a tiny patch of cloth cut from near the seat area of the panties.

  Things after that settled into a routine for a few months. He studied her movements, watched the hand grab for cheese a number of times, and worked in the lab. As far as his professor was concerned, he was working on a way to make the molecular bonds in clothing stronger, to make clothes last longer. His professor followed his progress closely, astounded that he could do the work he was doing.

  It was in January, on a late evening session in the lab, that he finally hit on the chemical compound he had been looking for. It was colorless, and easily contained by glass.

  The beauty of his find was that when one diluted drop was put against a piece of the cloth, nothing happened.

  But when a certain frequency of sound was directed at the treated cloth, the cloth broke apart and completely vanished in less than thirty seconds.

  John could barely contain himself he was so excited. Even his mom noticed at dinner and asked him why he was so happy suddenly. He’d told her a good grade in a tough class and she nodded and patted him on the shoulder. His dad had only shaken his head.

  John knew he was a disappointment to his father. His dad had wanted a jock, a football player with a mouse hand. Instead he’d gotten a geek kid with a computer and a desire to save the world. Maybe someday John would make him proud.

  Or at least make him rich.

  FOUR

  For the next two weeks John repeated his experiment in private, making sure it actually worked the way he wanted it to. His teacher thought he was still stuck and hadn’t made a breakthrough. John figured there was no point in having any way to trace what was going to happen to Trudi back to him.

  After that he worked on his plan to really embarrass her, and end all chance of her causing the end of the world.

  First he studied Trudi’s home, thinking he might get his “Cloth Away” as he was calling it, into her laundry room, but soon tossed that idea out. Her parents were security freaks and her mom was always home. No chance of getting his new chemical in there.

  So instead he studied the city’s water supply and discovered that it would be easy to get his harmless, tasteless, odorless chemical into it. Even with the higher security these days, only one old guard sat in a truck near the fenced off lake. John could come down out of the trees on the other side of the lake, duck under the fence and simply put his chemical into the water.

  He spent a week doing the calculations on how much he would need, then another week making the ten gallons of Cloth Away.

  Then he studied the city’s water supply, calculating how long it would take for the water with Cloth Away in it to get through the system and to Trudi’s home. Then adding three extra days to give her time to do some laundry, he figured out the exact night and went up to the inlet area of the supply from the lake and casually dumped his stuff into the water.

  Seven days later, much to the pleasant surprise of his father, he went to a basketball game, making sure to wear only clothing that hadn’t been washed in the last few days.

  He sat just off to the edge of the student section, and got there early enough that he was only one seat off the floor level.

  Trudi and the other cheerleaders led the students in a few yells as they arrived, but mostly just huddled off to one side and talked and laughed, sometimes staring at the basketball players.

  John tried not to stare at her, tried not to let the vision of the end of the world fade from his thoughts.

  Around him the stands had filled. They were playing a team from sixty miles away, and most of the fans across the court were from there. That was good, because the frequency of sound he needed to make Trudi’s uniform drop away would be hard to exactly control.

  Finally, John could wait no longer. Trudi had been bouncing up and down along the sidelines during every timeout, and as the coach again called one, the cheerleaders took the court.

  John eased the battery-powered horn out of his pocket, and with a deep breath, clicked it on, sending the silent ultrasonic sound across the court at the bouncing cheerleaders.

  At the woman who would end the world.

  Suddenly it became clear that he had miscalculated a little with the intensity of the sound from the horn.

  The cheerleaders uniforms all sort of crumbled, dropped to the floor, and vanished, leaving the stunned girls screaming and covering themselves.

  Around him John heard others shouting and screaming as the ultra-sonic sound from his horn bounced off the walls of the gym and came back and hit everyone in the home team stands.

  Amazing how many people had done laundry in the last few days.

  John instantly turned off the horn and hid it in his jacket, but the damage was done.

  The very overweight woman sitting beside him lost her dress and underwear. Just about everyone in the stands around and behind him found themselves suddenly and completely nude.

  People of all ages and sizes.

  It was not a pretty sight.

  Panic set in as people shouted and screamed and tried to cover themselves and run for the doors at the same time.

  The visiting team and fans just stared in shock as even the home team basketball uniforms vanished.

  John was pushed hard from behind and tumbled head-over-heels onto the gym floor, banging his elbow and head. He just lay there, on his back, eyes closed, trying not to think about what he had done.

  A couple people accidentally kicked him with their bare feet in the stampede for the doors.

  He never opened his eyes. It would have been too painful to watch the damage. It hadn’t been Trudi that had ended the world, it had been him and his horn.

  Finally the screaming and panic were over, ending almost as quickly as it had come, leaving only a low level of talking and uncomfortable laughing of the visiting team.

  He finally got the courage to open his eyes.

  People were still moving in all directions and Trudi was standing over him, completely nude and not seeming to care.

  It was the same image as in his vision.

  Around them the game, the world of high school Friday night basketball had ended

  And just like in his vision, there she stood.

  She bent down and extended him a hand to help him to his feet. “You all right, John?”

  “I think-think so,” he said, stunned that she knew his name.

  “Good,” she said, nodding. “You took a nasty fall there.”

  He rubbed the back of his head and laughed. “Yeah, I did. But I’ll live.”

  Then he realized he was talking to Trudi, the woman he hated, the woman who he had thought was going to end the world in his vision. And she was nude, just as his vision had said she would be.

  He quickly slipped off his coat and helped her put it on. The coat was long enough to cover just about everything.

  “No point in getting too cold,” he said.

  She laughed as around them dozens and dozens of the remaining nude people who hadn’t stampeded into the cold winter night were slowly getting covered back up by helpful people.

  “Thanks,” she said, zipping up the coat to make sure everything stayed covered. Then she felt the large horn and battery pack in the front pocket of the coat.

  “What’s this?’ she asked, squeezing the hard horn from the outside of the coat and winking at him. “You happy to see me or something?”

  “Always,” he said, smiling at her.

  “I know,” she said, “considering you followed me around school for a month and then put a camera in my car.”

  In all his life John had never been so surprised, so shocked. How could she have known? He glanced around the basketball court where a hundred people still milled trying to figure out what to do next.

  All he wanted was to run and run hard, maybe leave town. Maybe leave the country.

  Why hadn’t she r
eported him? Did she know that he had watched her and the football player’s mouse hand? He could feel his face turning red.

  “How did I know?” she asked, laughing at what must have been a shocked look on his face. “You’re not the only one who’s going to MIT next year, you know.”

  Now he was really shocked.

  Trudi at MIT? She was a cheerleader. He hadn’t heard she had gotten into MIT. He hadn’t even given it a thought. How closed minded had he been?

  The answer to that question was easy: Very.

  “What I want to know,” she said, holding onto his arm clearly to make sure he didn’t run, “is how you managed all this?”

  “Chemical breakdown of molecules,” he said, “triggered by sound.”

  She patted the horn in the pocket of the coat she was wearing. “Brilliant. And you put the chemical into the city water supply, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Brilliant again,” she said.

  Then she laughed the most beautiful laugh he had ever heard. “Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me. I haven’t had this much fun in a long, long time.”

  “Thanks,” he said, looking into her blue eyes and realizing that there really was a depth in there, a person with a real brain and a real sense of humor. “But to be honest it worked a little better than I had hoped.”

  “Only aiming at the cheerleaders, huh?”

  She looked at him, smiling.

  “Of course,” he said, his tension of her knowing what he had done easing. “Actually, you more than the others?”

  “Wanted to embarrass me, huh?”

  “That, and see you naked,” he said, finally admitting to himself the real drive behind his idea, planted by his vision.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?” he asked.

  “Well what did you think of me naked?”

  “Perfect,” he said, smiling at her. “Worth every minute of the end of the world.”

  “Seems to me the world is just beginning,” she said, smiling up at him. “How about you walk me to my car and drive me home to get some clothes? Then over a pizza that you’re going to buy me I want to hear every detail of this crazy idea.”