Thunder: A Nap Lapkin Story (part 5 of 6)

The waitress approaching Nap and Sam at their table did not fully comprehend how close she was to a 30% tip. If she was able to clear the plates and ask them about dessert without spilling anything on them or bursting out with unprovoked profanity, it looked to Nap like she was going to make it. If anyone in the surrounding area actually cared, there would have been some suspense building. But nobody did so there wasn’t.

“Did you know that bowling dates back to 3200 BC in Egypt?” asked Nap between mouthfuls of meatloaf. “It does, I’ve been doing some homework on it, the Roman Empire engaged in it and in 400 AD the Germans played it as a ritual to cleanse their sins.”

Sam swallowed the last of her salad and began to digest what Nap was saying. In addition to the salad of course. Double-digesting, trickier than it looks. “Cleanse their sins?” she asked.

“Yeah, apparently the pins, or kegels as they were called, represented unbelievers, so they would knock them down with rocks.”

“Kegels… like a woman’s pelvic muscles?” asked Sam with a small snort of surprise.

“Even back then a woman’s private parts were associated with sin” laughed Nap.

“I’m doing my kegel exercises right now” announced the grinning waitress, who had snuck back into earshot.

Nap was unsure how to score this. Did it drop her into the teens or propel her into the rarified air of 31%?

Agent Samantha Brook went right to sleep when she finally reached her hotel room, it had been a big day, and fell immediately into a dream. In it she was a child again and her mother was holding her. She could hear the rain against the window and felt an overwhelming sense of security nestled in her mother’s bosom. Her mother was stroking her face and singing a lullaby to her.

Although it wasn’t a lullaby, it was part of an old Bob Seger song.

Felt the lightning, yeah

And I waited on the thunder

Waited on the thunder

I woke last night to the sound of thunder

How far off, I sat and wondered

Suddenly there was an intense bright light at the window and then the room began to melt away. Her mother turned to ash as the little girl she was started to scream. She woke up sweating and disoriented.

Seconds later there was a loud banging on her door. It was Nap.

“Get dressed! We’ve got to go. Something is happening at the bowling pin”

It wasn’t so much fear that gripped Agent Brook as an existential dread. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Whatever it was, she didn’t like it.

On the other hand, Nap was fiddling with the radio stations trying to find a good song to listen to, seemingly without a care in the world. There weren’t exactly a lot of options and he was about to switch it off when he heard Bob Seger’s voice. “That’s what I’m talking about” he said and turned it up.

The sound of Night Moves filled the air as they sped towards the pin.

When you’re a jaded, battle-hardened agent with the background of Nap Lapkin, and you hear that there is something going on at the site of possibly-extraterrestrial/possibly-supernatural site you’re expecting something out of Close Encounters, Independence Day or the ending of Cabin in the Woods.

That was not the case.

Instead everything looked the same as their previous visit except for a large black spherical object that hung in the sky above the pin. Nap craned his head up to look at it, feeling disappointed that it did not appear that any heroics were in order.

Standing next to him was someone feeling the exact opposite. She stared at the object in the sky as if it were much more Cabin in the Woods than Close Encounters.

She leaned into Nap and asked “Are you a religious man?”

He just smiled and said “I never touch the stuff.”

She thought about trying to capture what she was feeling with some witty comment or analogy but was interrupted by someone punching her in the face.

She unceremoniously dropped to the ground and when she finally looked up she saw a tall, statuesque woman with fiery red hair standing over her.

“Stay down bitch” the woman advised.

Nap saw Madonna standing over the new agent and smiled broadly. “Madonna! You flew all this way just to punch her in the face? Awww. That’s so nice” he beamed.

For her part, Sam was quite willing to stay down. She had heard a lot of crazy stories about Nap Lapkin, but she’d heard an equal number about Madonna Axion and she wanted no part of whatever would happen if she decided to try and stand back up.

Madonna whirled to face Nap. “And you!” she screamed, sticking her finger on the tip of his nose and then exerting an entire flights-worth, including a two hour layover, of anger.

“Ow” said Nap.

“Holy shit!” (or some variation on the theme) said everybody else in the area. Loudly. An enormous hand was suddenly protruding from a cloud and reaching for the black sphere. And yes, the hand did bear a slight similarity to Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Except it was wearing a bowling glove.

“This can’t be good” noted Nap, his nose still throbbing.