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

circuit and set off alarms.”

“That’s stupid,” Peter harrumphed. “Any idiot would notice the wire. Besides, who says an invader would even use the drive when he or they came snooping around?”

“Land mines,” offered Munster.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Why not?” he spit at Cynthia. “We’d know where they was buried.”

“And where do you think we’d find these land mines?”

“Pendleton.”

“Knowing you, you’d blow yourself to kingdom come setting them up.”

“So then, what do we do?”

“We’re back to square one,” Charles said calmly. Of all of us, he was the one with the straightest, most rational mind. This time, though, he seemed lost for answers, or a clear path to take. Crazy or otherwise, Munster was correct, the ugly truth hit me for the hundredth time. We were not alone. Whether the alien invaders had simply missed a hundred or a thousand, or ten thousand humans when they decimated our kind, or simply left them to make our lives hell, was up for debate. Further, they might not be hanging around to protect us, if they even cared.

“You said they came after the men appeared. I have to believe that from what I know of them—the tower outside, the fact that they seem peaceful enough around us…I mean, they came when you were in trouble, Amelia….”

“I didn’t actually see them. It was different, like a tornado or something. And it was Mari…” I bit my tongue.

“Mari what?” Peter followed.

“Nothing. I don’t know. It all happened so fast, and I was lying dazed on my back. Just a swirling mess of rocks and gravel, and the monsters disappearing when she walked out of it.”

“You and your crazy notion that Mari is one of them now,” Peter scoffed. I looked over at him defensively, but I knew I couldn’t say anything else concerning what I knew to be the truth.

“The wire across the entry road down by the gate. For now, that’s our best option. No land mines,” Charles ended, smiling at Munster. “Do we have wire, Peter?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t even know what kind we need, or how to hook it all up.”

“I’m headed for Pendleton first thing tomorrow morning. They’ll have what we need down there.”

“Get some gas masks,” Lashawna said sourly. “Getting that telescope out of the store through the stench nearly killed me.”

“Telescope? That’s the last thing we need right now! And we don’t need gas masks…at least not me. I’m never going back to town.”

“Ah, the telescope. Let’s get it out and set up,” Charles said cheerily, obviously trying to take the edge off the conversation. Even so, it struck me as weird, his sudden change of demeanor. He glanced over his shoulder, out the kitchen window over the sink. “It will be dark soon enough. Pray that the night is clear.”

“You want to look at the stars?” I asked, dumbfounded.

He said nothing for a second or two, his eyes focused elsewhere. “They’re up there.”

“So what? We all know that! We need to figure out what to do to stay alive, not look for…for spacemen!” I said.

“How many ships are orbiting the planet. Do they have shuttle craft coming and going? I want to know. And I want to see Mars and Venus and the galaxies beyond ours. Education, young ones. Exploration from the comfort and safety of our own front yard,” he answered, walking around the table toward the hall.

“And I thought Munster was the only crazy person here,” I shot at his back. “And we’re not safe, here or anywhere else!” Munster took offense at my comment.

“Hey, if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even be here, Amelia. You guys have fun with Chuck’s new toy. Tomorrow I go to Pendleton, and then on down to San Diego to scope out the city and see if anyone’s alive. Hit the airport…Jerrick, you know how ta’ start a jet?”

“Like I said, Munster,” Cynthia said, shaking her head, smiling.

I had no interest in the telescope. Well, yes I did in a way. Daddy, being an astronaut (I laughed inwardly—Munster almost bought the story way back when), the stars and space had always possessed a certain interest for me. But, there were more important, vital things to concern ourselves with right then. I let the men get up and go outside to unload it from the back of the truck, and headed up to check on Ash.

And Mari.

 

First View

“How is he?”

Mari looked over at me. “The same. How are you?”

“The same, except that I survived. Do you understand that in human terms?”

“What do you mean ‘human terms’ ?”

“Just what it sounds like. Which Mari am I talking to?”

Mari shook her head in frustration as she rose from the chair. There was no childlike grief apparent over the condition of her once-playmate. Just a dry, clinical observation. In fact it struck me that I was talking to an adult in a child’s body. Her reaction was more what I might have expected from Cynthia or Peter or Charles had they not known the little boy, and had her position at Ash’s bedside been replaced by one of theirs. She lowered her eyes, fidgeting with her fingernails for a second or two, and then looked up at me.

“I don’t know if Ash will make it,” she said with a defeated sigh. “He needs medical help—a real doctor. They are silent when I ask them to come to him. I certainly don’t have the power to help him myself.”

Welcome to the new and glorious earth.

She stared unblinking at me until I acknowledged defeat by shifting my eyes away. She turned, then, and resumed her place in the chair beside the bed. The scuffling of feet and muted voices outside made her lift her head toward the closed window.

“They’re busy guys, aren’t they? I wonder what new toy they’ve brought home?” she commented blandly, pushing the fold of the curtain aside.

“It’s a telescope,” I said walking over to see for myself. “Charles’ latest thing. He wants to look up at…the stars.” I watched for a moment as he and Peter pushed and pulled a huge box from the front of the truck bed to the rear. Jerrick and Lashawna stood on the drive nearby; Jerrick motionless, but Lashawna scuffling her feet here and there, as though fighting the urge to jump into the bed and help them. I couldn’t see where Munster, Jack, or Cynthia were—if they were even with the group.

“They want to find the ships,” Mari said.

That stopped me. “The ships? As in plural?”

“As in four,” she answered.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I saw them. One of them, anyway." She shifted her eyes up to meet mine. "Does that surprise you, Amelia?”

I thought about the comment, the inevitability of the answer. “No, not really. How did you see it?” Somehow I knew her next answer wouldn’t surprise me either, but I expected her to say that she dreamed she saw it in her unconscious state.

Shock.

“I went there with them. Well, actually they took me.”

“You’re joking. You were here all the time. One of us was with you every second that you were out.”

Mari smiled, that’s all. And then she turned back to look through the window.

“Still, it’s true. Would you like to hear what the ships look like inside? What kinds of creatures inhabit them?”

Yes. No. Yes. I’d seen them. We all had. What other kinds could there be? Others with real bodies, perhaps? Nevertheless, hearing about the inside of one of their vessels oddly intrigued me.

“What do they look like?”

“They being the creatures inside?”

“Well, yes. Them, too.”

She began the short version of what I suspected would be a very long description, and even lengthier story.

 

“It’s a beauty, isn’t it?” Charles gushed much later when night had fallen and the temperature quickly followed.

Save for Jack who was sitting in the upstairs bedroom at the window, we had all gathered on the front lawn around the huge telescope after dinner. The only one among us who wasn’t drooling over it, wanting to put an eye to the eyepiece, was Jerrick. He held his excitement in, but just the same as me, I knew he wanted to have a look, in his mind’s eye, at least. It was an impressive instrument, “Meade” printed in white on the cylindrical body, and I was sure that before the fall of mankind, none of us could have afforded it in a hundred lifetimes.

The stars that shown brightly overhead were magnificent that and every night since Los Angeles, San Diego, and the hundreds of other communities between them had gone dark. No more light pollution. Its absence had resurrected the glorious white blanket we’d always known as The Milky Way, but had never seen firsthand with the naked eye.

Peter held a skymap and gave the coordinates to Charles so that he could find and focus in on objects of interest. Mars close by. Venus below it near the horizon. I had expected somehow to be able to see land features, especially on Mars, our near neighbor, but I was disappointed. It was simply a large reddish circle. I wondered what the attraction to sitting outside on a freezing cold night to view a big red dot had been to amateur stargazers? The moon was nice, but still, huge craters quickly became boring to look at. Charles seemed ecstatic, however, and lectured on its history, which most of us knew about anyway. Except maybe Munster.

Mari should have known very little about any of this at her age, but she showed a visible interest, if not excitement, as we each in turn peered through the lens. Half an hour into the session, I was returning to the house to find a heavier coat to wear. Mari followed and caught my elbow at the bottom porch step.

“Have them turn the telescope there,” she said, pointing to a spot above two of the tallest trees in the orchard, six rows in from the drive. “That’s where you’ll all see what you’ve been wondering about. It’s more or less stationary, as if it was tethered to the earth by a pole.”

I forgot the heavy coat for the moment. Seeing them, or at least one of the four crafts that had brought them into our orbit, sent chills up my spine that a hundred jackets would have no effect on, and so I began my return to the group.

“Not a word about how you know where to look,” Mari instructed me after I’d gotten only a step away. “Tell them it’s a hunch. You saw a flash of light. I’m cold. I’m going inside.”

How long would this charade last? Was there a reason that made sense why Mari did not want to be exposed? I had to believe she wasn’t in league with the aliens, plotting some greater catastrophe. That made no sense. Whoever they were, they knew we were alive, and once again it hit me that they could have wiped us out in the blink of an eye had they wanted to. And Mari had…what had she actually done to the men who’d attacked us. Whatever, she’d saved our lives.

What, Mari? What is this secrecy all about?

I came to Charles’ side. Munster was squinting into the lens. The others among them were making small talk, except Jerrick.