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

building housing dead attorneys, and a mortuary, which I thought ironic. There was no “OUT OF BUSINESS” sign nailed to the closed door. Two blocks of residential homes, and then another row of small shops and businesses. I saw it then. A wide entrance and parking lot beyond packed with vehicles, and the familiar sign standing proudly near the street, “Home Depot”.

“Where are we?” Jerrick asked, his arms spread to brace himself as Peter turned in.

“More Saving, more doing,” I replied with a chuckle.

Peter brought the truck to a stop right outside the huge entryway into the warehouse-like interior. Munster, I’m sure, would have driven straight in, crashing into the tall, steel racks. Surprisingly, the air wasn’t altogether foul, given the number of dead people littering the building, but even so, I wondered if in my occasional visit to this store I’d missed the department containing gas masks or respirators. Surely, at least, this mega-hardware chain carried respirators.

I helped Jerrick out, took hold of his hand, and when we joined Peter and Munster, I asked Peter which of the ten thousand items available for our pleasure we were looking for.

“Generators. The biggest and most powerful they carry.”

“Yeah, and walkie-talkies,” Munster added.

“That’s Radio Shack.”

“Oh, right. Next stop.”

“Seed…and respirators,” I said.

“A windmill to pump water.”

“Yeah, sure,” Peter said to Munster.

“A Braille library,” Jerrick said.

“Next trip,” Peter answered.

We split up, Peter and irascible Munster heading for the aisle most likely holding gas generators, Jerrick and I off to the paint section to find gas masks.

“Even if they find a generator large enough to power some of the circuits in the house, we’ll still need gasoline to power it,” he said.

“One bridge at a time. One of them will figure out how to get that,” I replied.

From far away I heard Munster’s loud voice echo off the walls, “It stinks to high heavens in here!”

“Not as bad…” and Peter’s softer voice died away.

Half an hour later we finished carting our bounty back outside to the truck. Five shopping carts filled to overflowing with free merchandise, and one flatbed cart with our new generator. Most of the stuff we’d never use, but since it was ours for the taking, we loaded it up.

Munster was grinning. “In a way I’m glad everyone but us is dead. Think of it, we’re millionaires.”

“You’re sick, Munster Gardella,” I scoffed and poked at his side.

“He’s right, though,” Peter said. “What’s left in the world is ours for the taking.”

The final item, the generator, went up into the bed with a lot of grunting. Jerrick and I followed. On my hands and knees I read the brand and power output to him once we’d gotten it safely situated, and I inquired if he knew how to hook it up. I knew there must be a way, but mechanical things totally confused me.

Not my father. Most of the time, anyway...when he wasn’t angry or frustrated. He was just short of talented when it came to working on our car, fixing a squeaky door hinge, even repairing the toaster.

“Waste not, want not,” was his motto.

I thought back five or six years to the day Mom was off shopping, it was lunchtime, and we were fending for ourselves in her absence. A challenge arose, and he wasn’t going to let it get the best of him.

We were both hungry, so he decided to fix us soup. Pretty simple task unless the pop-up tab breaks and you have to open the lid another way. He’d rummaged through every drawer in the kitchen looking for the can opener, cussing a little at Mom’s habit of not putting things back in their proper place when she’d finished using them. He couldn’t find it, and I could see his temperature rising, so I got out of his way. He rattled the bottom of the can on the counter for a second or two, thinking, and then grabbed a steak knife and started jabbing it into the lid over and over. That didn’t work very well, so he threw the steak knife across the room and stomped off to the garage with the soup can. That’s where he worked, often successfully, on those difficult projects. I followed him. He put the can on his workbench, and then grabbed a huge screwdriver and a hammer, and started poking holes at an angle in the top, with better results than he’d achieved with the steak knife, but not enough. He had a mean scowl on his face after a while of doing that, and his tongue stuck out a little between his teeth. That effort wasn’t working, of course, so he threw the screwdriver away and turned the can on its side. I ran behind a stack of old tires and peeked over the top, because I knew what was going to happen next, and it did. He lifted the hammer over his head, with the claws pointing down, and then he hit the can.

I ran after that happened, and stayed far away from him until Mom came home, found the can opener in the pantry, and handed it to him.

“The PANTRY?”

Walking toward the master bedroom and its shower, he stripped off his soup-splattered pants and shirt, and turned back to Mom. “Need I ask if the clothes hamper is in the bathroom?” She gave him a dirty look.

He calmed down later. I ate crackers and cheese. He went hungry, defeated by a can of soup.

Jerrick answered me. “It’s simple. These kinds of generators are used to provide electricity to, say, power tools or appliances in the absence of grid power. You know, a temporary power outage, or even the total lack of service, like at a construction project. Someone building a home out in the boonies. You just plug the cords in, start it up, and presto! Power.”

Pretty basic. Sort of.

“But how will we plug an entire house into this thing?”

“There should be an adaptor provided with the generator—and an instruction manual showing how and where to connect it to the service panel at the house.”

That meant Munster was out when it came time to hook the thing up. Either that or we risked sending the house up in a ball of flame. Maybe Peter or Charles.

We needed gas for our new machine, so Peter pulled into a station. Munster had had a little experience in that department—just knock over the pump. But that method was like Daddy’s ordeal with the soup can. I trusted that Peter would find a way to get the gas up from the tanks below the asphalt, seeing that there was no way to turn the pumps on without electricity.

I left Jerrick to sit and advise us, and jumped out of the truck to join Peter and Munster who were standing near our pump. Munster was scratching his head.

“But we don’t have a long hose—or any hose for that matter,” he was saying to Peter.

“Go look in the service bays. They had to wash the ground once in a while to clean up the spilled gas and crap that accumulated.”

“Yeah, yeah. Be right back.” Munster dashed off to the open overhead doors and disappeared inside.

“Amelia, go back to the truck and grab a couple of the red plastic gas cans, and take them over to that car,” he said pointing to a sleek, new BMW stranded forever two pumps over. I ran back to the rear of the truck and retrieved two of the fours containers he and Munster had gathered.

“What’s up?” Jerrick asked.

“Peter wants gas cans.”

“Ah.”

By the time I returned, Munster was on his way out of the station’s service bays, dragging a long garden hose behind him. He stopped when he got to the car, and then hacked the fittings off both ends. In the meantime, Peter had opened the car’s gas cap cover. Munster jabbed the hose in, but it was too big to clear the pipe leading down to the tank.

“Crap. Now what?” he said.

Peter thought the problem through for a second or two. “Guess we can go back to Home Depot and find a smaller hose.”

“Wait a minute!” Munster said. “All we gotta’ do is open the lid coverin’ the tanks over there and stick the hose way down in."

“You’re a genius, Gardella. Go back in and see if there’s some kind of wrench or tool to get the cap off. Hustle up, it’s getting late.” Munster ran off again.

“Wait, how will we…on no, not me.”

Jerrick had gotten tired of sitting by himself, and had managed to join Peter and me.

“What’s the plan?”

“Amelia’s going to siphon some gas from the underground tanks,” Peter said, laughing.

“I am NOT!”

“I’ll do it,” Jerrick offered.

So it was decided. Jerrick would get a mouthful of gas, but if Munster’s theory was correct, we’d soon have plenty of gas, and then be on our way home.

Nothing about our new life in that strange Utopia was simple, though.

Wake Up, Mari

Nothing was exactly simple for Munster. He couldn’t find the tank cover removal tool, but he did find a long, round, pointed pry bar and a sledge hammer.

“I’m bettin’ this thing screws on, so all we have to do is bang it counter-clockwise with this here thing,” he said raising the pry bar, “an’ when it loosens, just screw it off.”

“What about sparks?” Jerrick noted.

“You and Amelia had better get over by the street and wait,” Peter said immediately.

“What about you?” I asked him.

“I guess genius and I are living on borrowed time anyway.

“Munster, you hold the bar tight. Pray there aren’t any sparks when I hit it.”

I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of seeing my friends become part of a fiery explosion, but I knew it would be useless to argue for a bit more thought concerning the dilemma facing us, so I led Jerrick far away. I waited at the street with fingers crossed. Munster positioned the steel spike into a notch of the cap. Peter raised the hammer, hesitated, and then brought it down onto the bar’s end with great force.

 

I gathered a bottle of water ten minutes later while Peter and Munster filled the two cans, and handed it to Jerrick who was spitting, a foul look on his face.

“Thank you, Jerrick. Are you ok?”

“Yes, I’ll live.”

“Bring those other cans over here, Amelia,” Peter called out. A stream of gas ran freely from the end of the hose Munster held, but who cared? If that tank drained, there were a thousand others in a thousand other gas stations.

They filled the other containers, dropped the hose, and a minute later we left, a stream of gasoline flowing behind us into the gutter. Gazing back at it, I wished in that moment that I had a match, just to see the whole station go up in flames. I smiled. Living without adults watching everything you did had its benefits. Munster must have read my mind. He had a certain ability that way, you know. Before we'd gotten more than thirty feet away on the street, I saw the passenger window lower, and an entire box of lit stick matches come flying out, landing like an angry torch in the gutter. Peter was cursing at Munster, but it was exciting to see the stream of gas catch, and how it trailed quickly