Shadows Read Online Free PDF

know? Maybe Arnie had heartburn.
    “Can I do yours?” said Jill. “You know I’ll do it better.”
    “Yes please,” I said. “Thanks.”



CHAPTER 2
    I PHONED MOM THE NEXT DAY AFTER WE WERE already most of the way to Longiron. (In a house with five guys who were all machineheads, there were always spare cars.) My excuse was that you didn’t ring the honeymoon couple early in the morning but I should have gone home first and taken Mongo for a walk. But I was having trouble with the Mrs. Val concept and Mongo did occasionally miss his morning walk (now that he was a calm, mature adult dog) and all that meant was that I’d have to pick up the back yard as well as the sidewalk. And we’d work extra-hard on herding at the shelter this afternoon to make up. He probably wouldn’t do any worse indoors than eat a curtain. He was still kind of a perpetual mouth machine. I didn’t like the kitchen curtains much anyway.
    The noise the car was making (some cars were past saving, even by Jill’s brothers) was a good excuse to keep the conversation short. Mom sounded a little distracted, which was fine, and she agreed to give Mongo breakfast, and she and Val were going out in the afternoon, which was finer, because they wouldn’t be there when I got back. The reprieve was only for a few hours, but I’d take what I could get.
    The silverbugs were even more amazing than they’d been in June. A big outbreak takes a while to reach its peak and the army posts observers to calculate when that’s going to be because that’s when they want to take it out. The big zapper was just rolling off its flatbed transport when we arrived. The area had been cordoned off with the orange-striped rope that meant “cobey units” to the rest of us—that and the big orange cobey logo on trucks and uniforms. But there were quite a few people already in an advanced state of hilarity, which was probably the result of stamping too many silverbugs. I recognized several kids from our class . . . including Eddie. Which was probably why Jill parked on the far side of the green.
    A mob of silverbugs tends to like an open space, which they’ll fill up like a gigantic swarm of glittering silver bees. Longiron had a town green with a bandstand and a wishing well at one end and a softball field taking up most of the rest. The silverbugs were curled up, or maybe I mean spread out, over about three-quarters of the available area, hanging in the air like a kind of self-perpetuating firework only a lot more confusing. I couldn’t look at a big silverbug display for long or I started getting sick and dizzy, but that first thirty seconds of staring was exhilarating in a way that was almost frightening—your mood rushed upward with the swirl of the silverbugs, and you felt like you were about to be told the ultimate secret of the universe, or at least how to fly by turning your feet into rocket blasters. “Come on,” said Jill. “Don’t sit here. I’ll protect you,” meaning she wouldn’t let me step on any bugs. Reluctantly I climbed out of the car, but I was having a kind of f-word moment myself, which was that Jill’s was bothering her.
    We made our way slowly toward the orange rope. There were other cars and other people, but they were mostly (sober) grown-ups on this side. The bug center was toward the other end of the green from us—silverbugs like open areas, but they always collect off center. They were looking rather galactic today, with long, slowly spinning arms like your science textbook’s artist’s conception of the Milky Way. But the way the light reflected off them made me start to forget which way was up and which way was down. . . .
    I looked away. There was a tree and I put my hand on it. I was seeing a kind of after-image, like a tiny checkerboard, where the black squares were pinholes into nowhere. “I think I’d better go back to the car,” I said.
    “I’ve seen enough too,” said Jill.
    “You okay?” I said.