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

as well have prayed to the orange orchard.

Ash rarely left Mari’s side while the rest of us went about the business of trying to make a new pitcher out of the shattered pieces of the old. The light on her nightstand shown dully during the days, and burned brightly throughout every evening. A beacon reaching out to the creatures who had disappeared.

Damn them.

I sat in the chair beneath the bedroom window, in turn. Sometimes with Cynthia close by, sometimes with Jack sitting on the edge of the bed cross-legged talking away, telling Mari about the events of the day, or just jabbering.

“They’ll come back, Mari. You’ll see. They’ll know how to wake you up. Hey, you should see what Munster brought home!”

Someone was always with her, someone always watched at the window. Each of us in his own way hoped for a miracle that didn't appear to be forthcoming.

One evening on my watch—it was dead silent outside, except for the distant hum of the generator—with Jack speaking in great animation to Mari, I thought I saw the lifeless little girl smile. When I blinked, though, her face was exactly the same as it had been a second before.

“Jack! Did you see her smile just now?”

“Of course. She always smiles when I tell her something funny.”

Or were both of us imagining things?

In the days that followed, Munster and Peter, and oftentimes with Charles, took the truck and went back to the city’s outlying shopping centers in search of new things we discovered were missing in our little heaven. A huge pump that Charles and Jerrick were certain could be hooked up to the wellhead, and then connected to the main servicing the house. It worked, but only after Munster and Peter engaged in another verbal fight, and lots of leaks along the way. Charles and Jerrick arbitrated. Cynthia was overjoyed, because now she could shower—with the bathroom door locked—albeit a freezing experience.

We needed gas to heat the water tank, and so on one mission the men found a monstrous butane tank, the apparatus to hook it up to the gas main with on the side of the house, and dragged it with chains back home. I think Charles was surprised it hadn’t exploded.

“That was foolish of you, boys. You should have strapped it to a skid.”

“And just how would we have lifted it to get a pallet underneath it?”

“With a forklift,” Jerrick answered.

It seemed nearly an age since Peter had smiled at Munster, but he did after that comment by Jerrick.

“Told you we should have brought him with us.”

“I’ll listen better next time,” Munster said with an agreeing laugh.

In no time we all had hot water, and despite the fact that Eden was as noisy as an industrial plant because of the water pump and generator, no one seemed the least concerned. Much later, on Jerrick’s suggestion, they figured out that with enough pipe and heavy wire, the two machines could be moved behind the garage, inside a building constructed to keep them out of the elements. And quiet.

Mari lay quiet and serene upstairs, and Jerrick noted on Light Day plus three, that very soon she would starve to death unless we figured out how to feed her. Jack, naturally, exploded in grief.

“I’ll feed her with a spoon! Why can’t she just-wake-up? It’s all my fault.”

“You can’t,” Charles tried to console her. “She’d choke to death. I’ll go with Jerrick and Peter back into the city. Downtown. We’ll get IVs and the proper nutrients to keep her alive until…”

Yes? Until Doomsday?

“We’ll go right now.”

I discovered later that it was Jerrick who somehow knew exactly what to retrieve, but I had no idea how he knew. Was there a Braille medical book he’d consulted during the late night hours he spent alone reading in his bedroom?

 

The hours and days rolled onward uneventfully.

We had books. Truckloads of them. One of Charles’ demands. Much to Munster’s chagrin, he had the office stripped of the gun cabinet and its contents, and moved lock stock and barrel out to the garage. The bookshelves emptied of their wealth of trophies. Anything not resembling a book was taken down, and replaced with the classics.

“Latin isn’t a dead language, Munster, and you will master it under my tutelage eventually, and then read Cicero and Ovid.”

“And pigs is gonna’ fly.”

“Pigs are going to fly.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Seed. Charles knew exactly where to look, and what kinds to look for. Fertilizer, and more piping for irrigation. Shovels. Picks. Hammers. All brand new and shiny.

Munster’s Mercedes. A BMW for Peter, I think only to one-up Munster.

 

And then on Light Day plus thirteen, Jack screamed loud enough to wake the dead. So to speak.

“Mari! Mari! Mari!”

 

 

Away and Back Again

 Cynthia and I were in the kitchen when Jack's voice rang out. A piercing scream that surely would have brought the men racing into the house had they been anywhere near.

It was midmorning, cold, but clear outside, seventeen days after the event. Charles, Peter, Munster, and Jerrick were off gathering up a growing larder of essentials and God-knows-what-else that struck their fancy. We didn’t expect them to return until late afternoon, because each trip took them farther and farther north. Munster in his flashy off-the-lot Mercedes wanted to go south toward Camp Pendleton, sixty miles away. A wealth of guns—maybe an artillery piece, his for the taking. No, Charles had said. They would stick close together. And so each afternoon they would return in a convoy of three vehicles, loaded with vegetables that lay in the fields dotting the fertile land between communities, more gasoline, useless electronics, medicines they’d missed on previous forays. And news that everywhere they went, more dead bodies and stench.

Four days earlier, Peter had returned with an armload of high-powered walkie-talkies and a box of batteries to power them. The home receiver stood in its cradle on the counter, and the moment Jack cried out, Cynthia snatched it up on the run.

Either Mari had died, or else she’d awakened. That much was certain to me. The men needed to be informed and told to return, whichever was the case.

The three of us scrambled up the stairs. Cynthia hit the doorway first, and one step inside, she stopped dead in her tracks. I pushed her aside, flying in around her with warring feelings of anxiety and joy. Ash was nowhere to be seen, probably outside playing, weary of the hopeless vigil at his best friend’s bedside. Jack was on her hands and knees, straddling the legs of Mari—who, it was plain to see, was sitting upright, smiling.

None of us, save perhaps Jack, had seen it. I tripped on the edge of the rug as I ran to the right side of the bed, amid the shouts and exclamations of joy erupting. Gathering myself up, my eyes fell to the window in front of me. Outside I saw two creatures swirling slowly a few feet away from the black cylinder, appendages stretched and touching.

They’d returned. Mari had been delivered from the darkness of her comatose state. One plus one still equaled two. The only reasonable explanation; they’d done it.

I couldn’t comprehend their rationale, if reason as I understood it was even part of their mental makeup. Destroy humanity except for the few of us, and then come to the aid of a stricken child who had unwittingly disobeyed a command that none of us, except Charles, was even aware had been given. To what end this deadly game of theirs?

I pushed these thoughts aside, and left the creatures out there to watch, or whatever they were up to. They had simply returned and brought our Mari back to life. That was the only thing important and pertinent for now.

The chrome stand holding Mari’s life-giving liquid nutrients was still beside her on the other side of the bed, the clear tube dangling down to the needle Peter had inserted into her arm last week. She peered down at it with the most curious look in her eyes, and then lifted her arm to inspect the lifeline.

“It’s okay, Mari. You had an accident, and that’s how we had to feed you. Just like nurses would have done at the hospital,” I said.

“She’s awake,” I heard Cynthia say into the walkie-talkie pressed to the side of her face.

The receiver squawked once, and then Charles’ voice rang out as if it had left the mouth of a bullhorn. “Awake? Did I hear you correctly?”

Another low squawk. “Yes. Just now. Where are you?”

“Newport Beach. We’ll be home in fifteen minutes.

“Fellas…” and then the walkie-talkie went silent.

Mari had yet to utter an answer to the questions thrown at her one after another.

“How do you feel?”

“Can you remember anything?”

“Are you in any pain?”

The little girl just kept looking from Jack to me to Cynthia, who had walked excitedly to the bedside, and back after each glance to the tube and adhesive covering the needle. Very purposefully, she removed the tape, and then pulled the needle out, laying it gently onto the covers beside her.

Despite the look of total cognizance in Mari’s eyes, Lashawna tried to explain her silence. “She’s still groggy.” Somehow I couldn’t buy that. I waited for Mari to say something, but she simply sat there smiling for several minutes, and then finally threw the covers aside and swung her legs off the mattress.

“My regular clothes, please,” she said as she stood on shaking legs, grasping the nightshirt material with her hands, peering oddly at the folds between her fingers.

It had been nearly two weeks since Mari collapsed in front of the black cylinder out in the yard. Later, when the men had left the bedroom, Cynthia and I had pulled a nightshirt from the closet, undressed the unconscious girl, and then redressed her. As though Mari would simply sleep througout the coming evening, and then bounce back to life, refreshed and ready to go.

She waited patiently for us to retrieve the clothes she’d worn that day, and when we handed them to her, she put them on…the same as any of us would have done after a good night’s sleep. But her face was expressionless, and her tone of voice was strangely more...mature. Not that of the ebullient chatterbox I’d come to enjoy so much before she fell. Not alien like one of the creatures had invaded her head, or taken over her mind, either. Simply the voice of a different Mari.

I glanced at Cynthia to gauge her reaction. Her eyes were narrowed in suspicion or confusion, or both, her brow creased. She glanced back at me, biting her upper lip. “Something happened. This isn’t Mari,” she mouthed. Mari turned to Cynthia at the unspoken comment.

“I am Mari! Why would you say I wasn’t?” A simpler voice suddenly. Eyes wide and questioning. A six year-old, hurt…or someone acting like one.

Cynthia abandoned her doubt immediately, choosing to see the little girl as she’d always been before, I guessed. Choosing to want to see Mari as the child she physically and emotionally should naturally be. I watched with not a small  degree of apprehension as Cynthia darted to her and took her into her arms. Mari threw her arms around mother-Cynthia’s waist and buried her head into her chest.

“I don’t know what happened. I don’t! Was