Jay Lake and the Last Temple of the Monkey King by Ken Scholes Read Free Book Online Page B

flew his little red sports car up I-5. The freeway, devoid of cars and lights during that long stretch between Vader and Centralia, stretched out gray and grim before him. The faintest buzzing tickled his ears and he swatted at it before realizing it came from somewhere above and behind him. He craned his neck and saw nothing, craned it again and saw—
    Before he could react, the naked man landed on top of him, a sharpened spoon in his fist. “Taste the steel death of my kansai-bujido, Lion Lover,” the bald man said as his battery powered hanglider sailed on without him to crash into a highway overpass.
    “I don’t think so,” Jay said, struggling to keep both the man’s spoon and his nudity at bay. He hit the brakes with both feet and threw the car into a skid that carried him to the shoulder of the road with one hand while slapping at the intruder with his other.
    The man fell back over the seat and Jay drove an elbow into his side as he worked the buckle on his seat belt and spilled onto the ground. “What the hell is your problem?” he shouted.
    The man laughed and leaped from the car to face him, waving his spoon. “Jay Lake must die,” he snarled.
    Striking a Clown Fu pose he’d invented last year at Carlos and Juan’s Exquisite Science Fiction Con-o-Rama Resort and Nude Tunnel Tours during a drinking contest with David Levine and Hal Duncan, Jay touched the tip of his nose with his thumb. “Wagga wagga wagga,” he said, in his most menacing tone.
    Then, taking advantage of a man who stood with his feet too far apart, he planted his shoe into the offered target, leaped back into his car and sped into the night.
     
    A drunken clown with a chainsaw pointed Jay towards Mundy Loss road on the outskirts of Bradley, Washington. Twenty miles from the base of Mount Rainier, the town was alive with square-dancing, log-rolling and tree-topping at the annual Bradley Loggers Circus. The logging chicks with their heavy boots, full breasts and red suspenders caught his eye but when he saw the dwarves in their checkered shirts and straw hats, he floored it and headed out of town to find the road he’d missed. The sun rose behind him, pink and melodramatic.
    He followed Mundy Loss past houses and into the deep forests of the Cascade foothills. When he saw the orange and black mailbox, he took a hard right onto a winding gravel road.
    Finally, when the evergreens threatened to scratch the paint from his car, Jay stopped and turned off the engine. Not far ahead, a rooster crowed and he heard the twang of a banjo being tuned.
    Grabbing up his satchel, he wrestled his way over the door of his car to land in a bed of ferns wedged between two pines. He extricated himself and found his way back to the road, sure-footed in the sandals and tie-dye socks the aliens had sent him for his last birthday. He moved in silence, breathing just the way the Yogi had taught him. “You must be the wind,” the ancient Yogi had told him. It was the last time Jay ever fell for the age-old
pull my finger
routine.
    Still, now, those powers served him well as he crept up to the edge of a junk-littered clearing. In the early morning light, he saw a rusting double-wide in a sea of car parts, old refrigerators and stacked tires. Leaning against the trailer’s wooden skirting was an orange and black bicycle and sitting on one of four decks of varying construction was a giant of a man picking on a tiny banjo. The song struck Jay as familiar and he finally placed it—
The Sound of Silence
, only played faster, more upbeat, with a bluegrass twang to the notes. Jay watched from the shadow of the evergreens that ringed the yard and as the large man started singing, chickens and ducks toddled out into to peck for their breakfast.
    Jay waited until the song was finished and walked into the clearing, willing nonchalance into his approach. “Hey there,” he called out.
    The large man’s head came up. He smiled behind his tangled, red beard. “My oh