Nothing But Blue Skies by Tom Holt Read Free Book Online Page B

fury against the elements. It demonstrated that he wasn’t alone, that there were other weathermen out there, perched on the far shores of cyberspace, who’d been pushed even further than he had, to the point where they’d obviously dropped clean off the edge. Comparing them with himself was the most comforting activity he’d indulged in for years; indeed, just looking at the unmitigated drivel they’d come out with scattered the clouds of his anger (Freudian metaphor; so what?) and replaced the furious glare with a broad grin. As the old saying went: too many kooks spoil the wrath.
    After an untroubled night’s sleep soothed by dreams of blue skies, Gordon woke up with only a token hangover, which a pot of strong coffee and a pint of orange juice soon dissipated entirely, allowing him to go to work for the first time in as long as he could remember without a goblin chain-gang quarrying the insides of his skull. And, although his postbag was as full as ever and the warm, fine day he’d forecasted was riven at frequent intervals by inexplicable electric storms, somehow none of it seemed to matter quite as much as it usually did; indeed, when he picked up an evening newspaper on his way out of the office and saw the headline ENGLAND SAVED BY RAIN on the sports page, he felt a tiny glow of pride.
    Accordingly, he didn’t stop off for a drink on his way home, and the regulars at the Cat’s Whiskers were forced to set their watches by the TV news instead. It felt distinctly odd going to bed sober, but not entirely unpleasant. All in all, it had been a better than average day, and although he certainly wouldn’t have described himself as happy - if only because he was way-wise enough to know that in the Really Accurate Oxford English Dictionary , ‘happy’ is defined as a divine dialect term meaning asking for trouble, and that admitting happiness even in private is effectively the same as twiddling a catnip mouse directly under Fate’s nose - he had to concede in all fairness that he was rather less unhappy than he’d been for some time.
    Gordon woke up at two a.m. with a blinding headache and various other symptoms consistent with acute alcohol deficiency. Fortuitously, he had a bottle or two of homoeopathic medicine about the place, and was able to prescribe himself a suitable dose; but he was realistic enough to accept that he wasn’t going to be able to squeeze any more sleep out of that night. That meant he needed something to do for the next few hours.
    The silly website, he suddenly thought, the one with the dragons; nothing like a little goofball comedy to help pass the time. He turned on the computer, waded through the preliminary garbage, and clicked on a promising-looking link headed The Phantom Menace .
    The page took a long time to load, as if it wasn’t happy about being woken up in the early hours of the morning. When it finally came through, however, Gordon was disappointed. The only thing on the screen was a big picture of a dragon, one of those Chinese New Year efforts, framed by the cross-hairs of an optical sight, and underneath, the words PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE, in eerily flickering blue and gold lettering. This struck Gordon as marginally too obsessive to be funny - up till then he’d still had a vague, lingering suspicion that it was all a very delicate and subtle spoof - and he was about to get rid of it when the picture disintegrated and re-formed as something rather more humanoid: a black-and-white mugshot of someone who looked like a fusion of God (as depicted by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel), Big Brother and Colonel Sanders.
    Gordon was staring at this striking image and wondering why the words underneath hadn’t changed when it too dissolved into a bee-swarm of pixels and came back together again as a large goldfish.
    Gordon blinked three times. In an earlier, less jaded phase of his life (Marilyn, who to the