Red Thunder by John Varley

waved at us as we sprayed some gravel around and zoomed out onto the highway.
    I looked over at Dak and he was tapping one side of his helmet with
one finger. I didn't get it. He did it again, and then pointed at my
helmet and said something, but I couldn't hear him over the roar of the
bike engines. I was about to shout that to him, when I felt the helmet
where he was pointing. There was a knob there, which I turned.
    "Can you hear me now?"
    I turned the knob a little more.
    "Cool," I told him, flipping out the little built-in mike.
    "Only the best for the jerk owns these things. I may have fibbed a
little when I told him I needed a couple more days to finish up. Can
you dig it? Two radical rides like this, one for him and one for his
girlfriend. And a radio so he can coo sweet nothings into her ears."
    I glanced down at the tank of my bike, which was an electric pink. I
guess that explained the Day-Glo peach color of my helmet. Well, at
least it didn't have any adorable kittens or bluebirds or stuff like
that painted on it.
     
    WE GOT OUT of town fast, leaving the carloads of
tempting, reddening Yankee-girl flesh and cold Florida beer behind us.
We took smaller and smaller roads, pretty soon roaring down dirt
trails. We spooked two possums, three deer, and a skunk. We missed the
deer and the skunk missed us. It's getting so you can't go anywhere
without running into deer, sometimes literally. They say there's about
forty million deer in the country now. They're getting to be a real
nuisance, and it seems every year there's fewer people into hunting
them. Me, if I never taste another venison steak it'd be too soon. Mom
freezes enough every hunting season to carry us for six months. "Free
meat," she says, and who can argue with her?
    It was a grand day to be alive.
    I didn't really tip to where we were going until we went past the
backwoods Baptists, or peckerwood Pentecostals, whichever they were,
that I remembered from that night when we took the drunk astronaut
home. There was a freshly painted sign out among the dozens of others:
     
    THE LORD DON'T BLESS GOVERMENT MEN!
"INFERNAL" REVENOOERS NOT WELCOM!
     
    "I guess spray cans of paint don't have spellcheckers," I told Dak. He laughed. "So what are we doing out here? Studying?"
    "We could do that, yeah, we could."
    I doubted it. But I followed him off the road and down the long
driveway until we could see the house and outlying structures. What
you'd call a compound, I guess, except it wasn't fenced or anything.
    It looked a lot different in the daylight. With most of the outdoor
pole lights burned out there had been a sinister aspect to it,
everything in deep shadows and only a few stars visible overhead
through the skinny pine trees. Now it looked unremarkable, much like a
thousand other backwoods Florida ranches, maybe a little more
prosperous than most.
    One thing that hadn't been there when we arrived that night a week
ago was Alicia, sitting in a canvas lounge chair in shorts, halter top,
and big sunglasses, grinning at the surprised look on Dak's face.
    "What you doing here, girl?" he wanted to know.
    "What are you talking about? I go where I want to go, you know that."
    "Yeah, but—"
    "When I found out you were coming out here I figured I'd better see
what kind of game you were running on this man, keep your fool ass out
of trouble."
    "Game? I ain't runnin'... how'd you know I was coming out here?"
    "What, you were going to 'surprise' me?"
    Dak looked a little sheepish, glanced at me, and I took the hint.
Let them work it out, I didn't need to listen in on this. I casually
strolled over in the direction of the swimming pool, but I couldn't
help glancing back at them, and I couldn't help smiling. Dak runs to
about six and a half feet. Alicia is about five-two, light brown with
pale blue eyes, what an old slave owner would have called a mulatto and
these days we call mixed-race. So why is it that when they argue, it's
Alicia standing there with her head thrown