Grand & Humble Read Online Free PDF Page A

and he definitely smelled the ocean, but there didn’t seem to be any water. How had he come to be in this place anyway? It was like he had just appeared here, as if in a dream.
    And why was he bracing himself? Why had he been so certain there was a blow coming?
    There were people near him, a man and woman in their late twenties. They definitely weren’t dressed for the beach. He was wearing a tuxedo, and she was wearing an elegant black dress. They were hurrying away from Manny, up the sand, and he couldn’t seetheir faces. But they looked familiar somehow.
    “Manny?” a voice said from behind.
    It was his dad. He was dressed as a lifeguard—in red shorts and a white T-shirt that read “Lifeguard,” even with a whistle around his neck.
    “Dad?” Manny said. “Why are you dressed like that?” His dad wasn’t a lifeguard; he worked as a paralegal.
    “It doesn’t matter,” his dad said. “Come on, let’s eat.” He gestured toward a table in the sand. It had been set with a crisp white tablecloth, crystal goblets, and silver serving dishes. It looked nothing like a table his dad would set. It looked like a table that the man in the tuxedo and the woman in the dress would eat at. Why had his dad taken their table?
    “This doesn’t look right,” Manny said. “I don’t think we should be here.”
    “Why not?” his dad said, smiling. “Sit. Eat.” He guided Manny toward the table and set him down—firmly—into one of the two chairs. “Now eat.”
    “But, Dad—”
    The plate in front of Manny was covered with a lustrous silver lid. His dad lifted it. But it wasn’t food on the plate underneath; it was a pair of broken wire-rim glasses. The frames were bent and twisted, the lenses shattered.
    “Dad?” Manny said, confused. “What is this?”
    “What?” his dad said innocently. “Eat.” He poured something from a decanter into Manny’s crystal goblet; it looked and smelled like gasoline. “And drink.”
    “But I can’t eat or drink that!” Manny said.
    His dad didn’t answer. He wasn’t listening. He was staring over at the area where the ocean should have been, a blank expression on his face.
    “Dad?” Manny said. “What is it?”
    His dad turned to him and smiled again, but this time it was an unfamiliar grin—dark, unsettling. The instant Manny registered that smile, a shadow fell over them both, like something had blotted out the sun. Manny felt a rumble, heard a roar that grew louder by the second.
    He glanced up. It wasn’t just the sun that had been blotted out. It was the entire sky.
    Blotted out the sky? What could blot out the sky?
    Then he knew. “Tidal wave!” he shouted. That’s why there hadn’t been any ocean—it had all been sucked out into the massive wave! “We need to get out of here! We need to run! ”
    He glanced up at his dad again, but now his father’s face was all in shadows. Even so, and even over the roar of the wave, Manny could tell that his dad was laughing.
    And then the wave crashed down on top of them.
    At the instant of impact, Manny woke up. He sat up in bed. He was soaking wet, but not from any wave. From sweat.
     
    Manny shuffled into the kitchen feeling like the Mummy—the shambling, lethargic mummy from the original movies in the 1930s, not the agile, computer-animated one from the crappy remakes.
    “Well,” his dad said, seated at the table, looking up from his newspaper. “You look like hell.”
    “Uh-huh,” Manny said, pouring a cup of tea from a pot on the counter. It had been a good four hours since he’d woken up from the nightmare—of course he hadn’t been able to get back to sleep—but it still felt weird to be with his dad. The strangest thing about the dream was how out of character his dad had acted. Now it felt like one of those movie scenes when the character thinks he’s awake, but is really still in the nightmare. Manny almost expected his dad to leap up from the table brandishing the knife from Psycho