Deadly Sky (ePub), The Read Online Free Page B

day-clar?’ one asked, and laughed when Darryl and his mother looked blank.
    A taxi took them through streets with signs in French and English, brightly painted buses, trees with big green leaves. The houses had all their windows and doors wide open, and the sun cast hard black shadows across the ground.
    Their hotel was … a hotel. Darryl felt disappointed; he’d half-expected a thatched roof. But as they unpacked in their tiny connecting rooms, his mother called out ‘Listen, Da’. Darryl heard it: the thud and swish of waves. It sounded just a few metres away.
    It was. As soon as they had showered and changed (My legs are so
white!
Darryl thought as he put on his shorts), they headed outside, along the shell path with the sign reading
PLAGE / BEACH.
Thirty steps and the Pacific Ocean lay in front of them, blue and glittering. Back home in New Zealand, we might still have the fire going! Darryl marvelled.
    They ate sandwiches of thick, different-tasting bread in the hotel restaurant. Darryl kept yawning. ‘Nothing like sitting on a plane doing nothing for nine hours to tire you out,’ smiled Mrs Davis. ‘I might have a nap after this. You too, love?’
    Darryl shrugged. He hadn’t come to Tahiti to have a nap! But he did feel pretty tired, so when they’d eaten, and his mother was in her room, he lay down also, pulled out his father’s postcard, and opened
Deadly Cloud
once more. The first French nuclear tests atMururoa were bombs hung from giant balloons, about 1500 metres up. Only part of the fireball touched the ground, so less radioactive material was sucked up into the air. Then came tests with bombs placed on barges floating in the lagoon, and …
    He half-heard a thud as the book hit the floor. He heard nothing else till his mother’s voice started calling: ‘Darryl? Wake up, love. We’ve slept almost four hours. It’s nearly time for lunch!’
    ‘We should try a local café or something,’ Mrs Davis said. Darryl nodded. ‘Yeah.’ But they still felt so sleepy, they got no further than the hotel restaurant. This time it was fish, rice, yellow vegetables like kumara.
    They ate and yawned some more. A smiling woman with an explosion of black hair that had big white flowers tucked into it laughed as she cleared away their plates. ‘You tired from plane, huh? You go sleep.’
    They did. Darryl got into bed, picked up his book again. Outside, waves murmured on the beach. His father’s first postcard from Australia showed a blue sea, too. It made Darryl remember a day at Mission Bay beach when he was little; his parents and him and Grandad Davis all wandering along the sand.
    ‘I used to dream of a beach like this all the time I wasin that Jap POW camp,’ Grandad was telling Darryl’s father. ‘I knew the moment that first bomb went off that I’d get to see the real thing again. There’d been all these rumours about prisoners being executed if the Americans and our boys tried to invade, but they wouldn’t need to invade now. Those bombs saved a lot of our lads.’
    Darryl’s dad squeezed Grandad Davis’s arm. ‘I know, Dad.’ Then he scooped up his son, rushed to the water’s edge, and pretended to throw him into the water, while Darryl’s mother and grandfather laughed and cheered. Darryl lay now, picturing that day as he sank into sleep.
    Lines of shining yellow light angled across his bed. His room had wooden shutters instead of curtains, and the sun glowed through them. Where was— Oh yeah! Tahiti!
    He lay and listened. The sea. Strange-sounding birds having an argument. A dog telling them to shut up. Do dogs here bark in French? Darryl wondered.
    He creaked out of bed and picked up his watch: 7.22 a.m. School holidays, and he was up before nine o’clock! None of his friends would believe it. There wasn’t any sound from his mother’s room; she must still be asleep.
    No, there was a note on the floor outside his room:
Gone to beach. Back soon.
Darryl looked at himself in the