Dreams of Shadows, Patrick Sean Lee [best historical fiction books of all time TXT] 📗

that I hadn’t noticed in the past days after the destruction of life here. Birds.

Why hadn’t they been killed like the scores of dogs Munster had run over, or the cats lying everywhere with tongues clenched between grisly death smiles?

A selective slaughter. Just in Marysville. Or California. Or the United States. That didn’t seem possible, though. If you’re going to swoop in and decimate the population and animals, why not get them all? Why leave birds? Why spare monsters like those men at the rectory? Or any of the rest of us for that matter?

Or Charles.

“We can’t do anything for now,” I heard Charles’ say. “She’ll either come out of it, or remain…sleeping. She isn’t burnt or injured in any way that I can see.” He reached across the bed and placed a comforting hand on Cynthia’s shoulder. “Stay here and watch if you like. Be with her. Peter and Munster and I have work to do.”

“Like what?” Munster asked.

“Like getting the hot-rod out of the ditch, and then driving it back into Marysville.”

“For what reason?” Peter said.

Charles didn’t explain at first. He left the bedside and walked toward the door. “There are some things we need to gather up and bring home.”

“You don’t have to bother with Munster’s car. Mr. Conklin’s truck is in the garage behind the house,” Cynthia said looking over at Charles. “ I don’t know where the keys are, but it’s there.”

“Excellent.”

“What are we gonna’ get...Chuck?” Munster asked as he walked across the floor toward his shotgun.

“A generator capable of providing enough electricity to service the house for starters. Gasoline. Non-perishable foodstuffs. Seeds. Fertilizer.

“Books.”

The last item on his list he said in an emphatic tone of voice, bringing his eyes to bare on Munster, who nearly dropped the gun when he heard the word.

“BOOKS? I don’t need no stupid books!”

Jerrick smiled at his comment and said, “I think perhaps you’d benefit from them.

“I’d like to go with you, sir,” he added, turning his head a little toward Charles and the doorway he couldn’t see.

“Why?” Muster shot at him. “You can’t see a damned thing, and you’ll just slow us down. Books. Crap.”

“Quiet, Munster. He can go.”

“Can I go too?” I asked.

Instead of answering me, Charles addressed Cynthia. “What do you think? I say she stays here with you and the girls and Ash.”

Munster, of course, reacted immediately. “If she don’t go, I don’t go.”

“She can’t help us,” Peter said. “Better she stay here and help Cynthia…and watch the road.”

“Why? ‘Spose she sees a bunch of ‘em come charging in. What’s she gonna’ do, scream out the window an’ hope we can hear her in town? She don’t get to go, I don’t go,” he added again.

Thank you, Munster.

“I’ll be ok. She can go with you,” Cynthia said.

So, it was settled. I’d be part of the expedition back into Marysville. We followed Charles out into the hall. Munster just couldn’t help himself. He growled at Jerrick who had grabbed hold of his hoodie sleeve, and was half-stumbling along behind him. “You ride in the bed, Jerrick. Keep your eyes open back there.”

“Very funny,” Jerrick jabbed back at him.

“I’ll sit with you, Jerrick,” I said. “Munster, you are so incredibly mean. Did I ever tell you that?”

“I ain’t mean, I’m just practical. Come to think of it, you oughta’ stay here with Cynthia. You, too, blind boy.”

We argued our way down the hall, down the stairs, and then through the kitchen door toward the big garage.

When we finally found books, I vowed to take hold of the biggest one I could lay my hands on and smack Munster hard on the head with it. Sometimes I loved him for being there when I was so scared and needed a friend, but that nasty side of him…maybe we could find a magical book that would change his attitude. If anyone could force him to read it.

Peter and Charles opened the two gigantic sliding doors into what I thought was in no way a garage. At least it bore little resemblance to Daddy’s little two-car garage at my old house. This place was twice as big as our entire house back in Marysville. Just as Cynthia had said, Mr. Conklin’s truck stood quiet, just a few feet inside the shadowy interior. Munster wanted to drive, but Peter nixed that notion, thankfully. I helped Jerrick find the truck bed while Munster railed at Peter, and side by side we crawled forward and sat down beneath the rear window.

“Do you know anything about generators?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“What about seeds?”

“Some, but not a lot,” he said.

“Food.”

“I like wholesome food. Or, I used to.”

“Me too. I hope we can find a store with stuff other than Spam or peanut butter.”

“I’m sure we will. No canned broccoli, though.”

“How would you know if Mrs. Conklin canned broccoli?”

“Lawshawna told me,” he said, laughing.

Peter backed out of the garage, wheeled sharply onto the wide drive, and we were off. Once outside the gate—that Munster was forced to open with a lot of cussing and growling—I resumed our conversation, fairly certain that Peter wouldn’t run over a dead body, or crash into a ditch or tree.

“Books, then. You can’t know much about them.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“But you can’t see to read them! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that like Munster did, but he was probably right.”

“Who says I can’t read?”

“Well…you can’t see is all.”

He held up his hands, fingers spread. “Of course I can see.” Then Jerrick brought them to my face, and gently let them course across my cheeks, my eyes, my nose and mouth.

“You’re very pretty.”

I blushed, but I was certain he couldn’t see that.

“Thank you.” What else could I say?

We passed those places that looked so different in the light of the morning, that took on a totally new face when viewed from the opposite direction we’d traveled the night before. Now and again Peter swerved right or left to miss a body, which time after time caused Jerrick’s shoulder to bump hard into mine, or mine into his. In a strange way that comforted me. It also made my heart race just a little. In time, I supposed because he was tired of being jostled about, he draped an arm over my shoulder and held me a little tighter to his side, and Peter drove on.

Several miles into the trip when Peter had dodged something lying in the road, I asked Jerrick again if he knew why birds had escaped being killed. They were animals, after all.

“I don’t know. Maybe because they live in trees, and not in houses.”

I laughed at that silly explanation. The blinding light certainly struck the trees as well as everything else in its path. It made no sense that animals with wings instead of arms and legs and paws had been exempted. He squeezed my arm with his long fingers and laughed himself.

“We don’t know that every other thing that breathes really was destroyed. Well, so many other creatures, anyway. Those two men made it for some reason. And Mr. Baxter. One thing is for certain; in time we’ll probably find out how many others escaped, at least in Marysville, but maybe we’ll never discover just why.”

That brought chills to my body. I snuggled a tiny bit closer to him, and wondered if in a crisis he could do anything at all to protect me or anyone else. If and when we found books in Marysville, his magical ability to read them seemed pointless in this new and frightening existence.

Half an hour later we turned onto Grand Avenue, the main street running east and west through Marysville, and an unending vista of destruction infinitely worse than the scattered-by-comparison death scenes farther out in the neighborhoods surrounding the heart of the city.

A Strange Utopia

 

I exhaled loudly with a groan.

I had raised myself a little so that I could better see what was passing by beyond the truck’s bed when Peter had first begun to ease off the accelerator, and the buildings had slowly begun to grow in height.

“Oh-my-God…”

“What is it?” Jerrick asked. “Where are we? What do you see?”

“It’s terrible!”

I threw Jerrick’s arm off me and stood. I’d seen cars and trucks with dead bodies hanging out, or slumped over the steering wheels on every street near my old home, but this was a thousand times worse.

The attack had taken place in the late afternoon. The downtown district had been teeming with last minute Holiday shoppers, and the traffic had been heavy. That was apparent. All along the avenue men and women and children had dropped like stones the instant the invaders struck us. Grand Avenue was now nearly impassable because of the quagmire of vehicles locked forever in a lifeless traffic jam. But it wasn’t so much the death I saw that so shocked me, rather the magnitude of it.

Grand Avenue ran in a straight line, and if the aliens in their mad cruelty had destroyed life, they hadn’t thought, or cared, to bring nature to its knees. An offshore breeze floated toward the sea twenty miles to the west. It took with it some of the stench of rotting bodies, but its ability to scour all of it was met, and then conquered, by the sheer volume of corpses. Had this befallen us in August or September, the months when heat was at its zenith and the air was dead…I couldn’t conceive of having gotten anywhere near this stone and glass canyon during those months.

“I smell it,” Jerrick finally said. “How many?”

I gagged. “God. God. The entire city. Everyone.”

Peter slowed to a stop, and then both he and Munster threw open the doors. They jumped out, their hands pulling at their jacket bottoms, drawing them over their noses, and Peter announced his intention to leave. Were we okay? Sick? His questions were muffled, as if his voice was rising from beneath the earth.

“We’re okay. Oh Peter, get us out of here!”

“Had to check,” he said. He bent his head a little and gazed through the cab's open doors, over at Munster who was throwing up in the gutter. “Get back in, Munster!”

I saw no alien beings, no vicious adults prowling the streets, just rotting bodies blocking every building entrance and every sidewalk for as far as I could see. A hideous open graveyard that I couldn’t for some reason take my eyes off of.

Peter gunned the engine and backed up. The truck turned, and we left the way we’d come, thankfully into the breezes off the mountains and desert beyond. Visions of Los Angeles to the north, or Chicago and New York to the east—all the great American cities with a hundred or thousand times as many dead bodies clogging the thoroughfares brought home the real tragedy of the event. It hadn’t fully hit me until that moment.

Peter raced east, swerving to miss abandoned cars and the occasional bodies we passed, but when we approached Madison Street, he wheeled left. At first I had no idea why he’d turned. I stood, bracing my feet on the bed, and stretching my hands out atop the hood of the cab. The wind threw my hair backward, and thank God the rank smell of bodies had been left miles behind. We passed a gas station, a low, squat