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

away for a while.” I stuffed the gun behind the seat, and then surprised myself. I turned to her, took hold of her cheeks, and kissed them.

“We’ll be fine. We’ll be back. Peter and I need to do something. The gun’s just for protection. Don’t worry.”

I turned and climbed into the passenger seat, and pulled the door closed.

“Peter?” Cynthia said, peering through the open window, across at her brother.

“It’s okay. Just stay here and hold down the fort until we get back. Love ya’, sis.”

“But…?”

Of course Charles had by then joined her, starting up with his battery of questions. Francis quickly crossed the drive and latched onto Cyn’s hand. Peter started the engine, and without another word of explanation, we made our way down the gravel drive toward the gates, leaving Munster to fill them in with his deplorable English.

San Diego de Alcala

 

It was a shot in the dark. I wanted to head north toward Los Angeles, but Peter was against that. Too many bodies. Too many crashed and stalled cars and trucks clogging the freeways. Besides, he admitted to me, he never liked Los Angeles for reasons he couldn’t really put his finger on.

“Two million or so rats in a decayed cage.”

“There are lots of other cities in between,” I said.

“Don’t care much for them, either.”

“If we’re looking for people who might have survived, our odds of finding them increase with size.”

“San Diego is south, and it’s big. Prettier, too.”

"Whatever."

We had dodged Marysville, picking up the west bound freeway a little north and east of the city that would take us to the major north-south 5 freeway. The air was clear, with the sun well behind us, warming up the morning, throwing heat down in an invisible blanket that would further speed up the decomposition of the millions of the unfortunates caught in the burst of light at Christmas. By now the incredible stench had dissipated, bodily bacteria and vermin having done a gruesome amount of work. Bodies lay where they had fallen. Corpses in discolored holiday clothes, faces and hands little more than leather.

I had only been away from the farm on two occasions, even so the magnitude of horror still struck me as hard as it did on those trips away from the serenity of the farm. I had yet to travel on one of the several freeways coursing across the landscape like huge arteries. It shocked me, the number of vehicles trapped forever in tangled masses of metal. Semi-trucks jackknifed, turned on their sides in unnatural directions when the drivers died. Entire lanes all but impassable amid the wrecks. Peter picked his way through them. Around them, sometimes—more often than not—at a crawl.

From my place at the window I saw the engine of an airliner that had crashed to the earth lying a hundred feet away from the twisted and broken remains of the rest of the wing and airframe, a graveyard of bodies scattered nearby the blackened fuselage, face up, face down, contorted. Burned. None of them had noticed the reception that had greeted them that fateful afternoon when the plane struck the earth. I prayed.

We passed community after community slowly, heading south, until we got through San Clemente where the number of stalled and wrecked vehicles thinned. Peter accelerated through the still-virgin landscape north of the Marine base, the ocean on our right serene and majestic, the same as it had been before our European ancestors began arriving centuries before.

“I never thought of it, Peter. There must have been hundreds or thousands of submarines! Do you think the men and women in them could have survived?” I said, turning to him.

He glanced over at me quickly, then suddenly slowed as we came to the crest of a hill without answering. I turned my head. Two hundred feet ahead of us another semi truck had tumbled onto its side and straddled the lanes, blocking our advance as effectively as a military barricade.

“Crap!"

“Now what?”

We stopped fifty feet ahead of the stricken semi and climbed out. Two hundred feet away, the beautiful sound of waves crashing onto the shore was the only sound. There was something so eternal and peaceful about it, continual and clock-like in this wrecked world. An offshore breeze ruffled my hair, and carried the fragrant odor of wildflowers on its way across the freeway to the mighty Pacific.

The cab, laying on its side, was no more than two feet from the sturdy median fence. At the opposite end, the rear of the trailer rested perhaps ten feet from the edge of the shoulder, but one door lay open on the pavement like a ramp. We didn’t bother with the cab—whoever was inside…I didn’t want to see his remains. Together we walked to the rear where we stood for a second or two looking.

Inside, boxes with Sanyo printed in bold letters were scattered in disarray. Another snapshot. Never to change until time turned them to dust years in the future.

“Is our TV a Sanyo?” I asked Peter jokingly.

“Samsung I think. Jesus, how do we get around this?”

Farther down the endless ribbon of highway, many other cars and a few trucks stood motionless, huge empty spaces separating them. In the distance I could see the turbine domes of the decommissioned San Onofre nuclear power plant, and wondered about radiation. Had the men in charge cleansed the cores before the aliens arrived to shut all humanity down? Were we already suffering from radiation sickness and didn’t even realize it? Too late to wonder, we’d find out quickly enough now.

“We could leave our faithful old truck here…go down there and take one of those,” I said pointing. I saw his eyes shift south.

“Or we could try to close this door. I don’t relish the thought of packing all our stuff half a mile away. What do you say?”

I shifted my eyes down at the ramp/door. It looked heavy. We were traveling light, with only the gun, ammunition, and a backpack apiece. A first-aid kit. No problem to…Peter had loaded some water, an extra five-gallon can of gas, sleeping bags while I’d been gathering up the weapon. Not exactly traveling light. He eyed me.

“Well?”

“Okay, it’s worth a try.”

I got on one side of the door’s end, Peter got on the other.

 

Ten minutes later we were off again. As we passed the dead power plant, I gazed over at it one last time. It was too bad that some brilliant nuclear scientist or engineer hadn’t devised a leak detector with a peculiar, strong smell like someone had done for natural gas, or a bright flashing pulse of light that warned of radiation, and ran on huge batteries. Could the nasty visitors from galaxies far away have sealed the core for our benefit, maybe? Useless thinking. We drove on.

Silence surrounded us. Dead quiet. No movement anywhere as we approached the city, at least from our vantage point on the freeway, except for the occasional startled takeoff of birds. Mile after silent mile.

“Why birds, and not dogs and cats and other animals?” I asked Peter when we had gotten deep into the outskirts of the city.

“Who knows?” he said. Peter kept his eyes forward, and slowed to maneuver around the growing clog of vehicles. “It’s so fucking weird, isn’t it? Marysville and the coastal towns surrounding it are one thing, but this…”

Yes, this. Mass death. Tens of thousands of victims back home, but here…How big was San Diego? Two million people? A million and a half? And here we were, entering the open graveyard. Over the past months the thought of something like this had been abstract, existing only in imagined images. Now it took on the mantle of reality, and the scope of destruction was truly shocking. Playing the odds, how many, if any, survivors might there be? I couldn’t imagine that if a dozen or more had been spared back home, how many beyond that number would there be in a huge city of this size? Further, the thought struck me—and not for the first time—how many would be scared, confused, in despair, or men and women descended into savagery?

Charles and Lashawna. That was why I'd decided to venture out in search of living souls. To find suitable companions for them. Maybe that was idiotic of me.

But here we were.

In the distance the spires of high rise buildings began to emerge. A cluster of office towers and hotels. Peter saw them.

“Shall we start there? Where would you go if you were the only one left?”

“Depends on where I was when it happened. We could spend eternity scouring all the neighborhoods. Yes, downtown is as good as anyplace else.”

I remember vividly. Peter turned to me and smiled. “Not such a bad idea.”

We exited the freeway, drove carefully past the first of the buildings for several long blocks, and then stopped. To our right, a huge parking lot with its patchwork of abandoned cars buffered the view of the harbor, yet the conning tower of the USS Midway loomed high into the sky just beyond it. On our right, the entrance to a grand hotel. We sat for a moment until Peter finally opened the door and stepped out of the truck.

"This one, I guess."

Why not?

Dead doormen, a few unlucky visitors nearby them at the entrance. The absence of the horrid odor I smelled when we’d first driven into Marysville months ago. Thank God. Whoever they’d once been, these victims were now barely recognizable as flesh and bone, covered by their discolored clothing.

I grabbed the gun anyway, and joined Peter, veering wide around a woman and what must have been her husband once upon a happier time. The doorman close by, lying half-atop the luggage they’d brought. Vacation cut short. Afternoon duties ended abruptly. We entered the lobby through the revolving door, the squishing sound of its rubber seals on the cylindrical metal framework breaking the silence, alerting the ghosts and cockroaches of our presence. Every step we took echoed eerily back at us, reminding me of Saint Andrew’s Cathedral in miniature. I turned my head left and right and skyward, taking in the once-magnificence of the place in quick glances. A few bodies on one of the lounge sofas off to the right near the dusty windows, tumbled over against one another. A small dog on a leash beneath them on the cold marble floor lying on its side. A magazine dropped. I imagined that moment in December, looking at them. The flash of light searing through the windows. She reacting in pain and surprise. A bolt of lightening racing down the leash frying the dog. Did it yelp as it died?

We stopped at the reception desk. I didn’t need to glance over the top. No doubt a body or two or three lay on the floor on the other side, not smiling or frowning. Not anything. Just dead.

“Should we sign in?” Peter joked, and his words echoed almost thunderously, even though he’d spoken softly.

“I think we should find the dining room, or the kitchen. If I’d survived…” I said, my comment trailing off.

“Restroom first,” he said. “I have to pee.”

So did I. “Okay, meet you back here in five minutes. If you see anything…”

“I know, scream bloody murder.”

“Or hallelujah,” I said.

I pushed the door