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

pedal quickly, and we lurched forward like a rifle bullet—straight forward toward the store entrance curb!

“Munster!”

He didn’t lift his foot off the accelerator as he turned the wheel as fast as he could. I closed my eyes and pushed myself farther back in the seat, and I felt the wheels slam into, and then bounce over the curb ten feet from the front door. The blink of an eye! I heard a terrific crash when the front of the car smashed over the newsstands. Then, another bump when we made it back onto the asphalt and toward the street.

I forced my eyes open. We weren’t headed toward the street, but instead, right for one of the gas pumps!

“Oh God!”

Munster didn’t utter a sound. He was concentrating for all he was worth, trying to figure out just how to make the beast we were in do what he wanted it to. After lots of practice and lots of collisions with curbs and dead cars, and the gas pump, he’d finally master the art of driving, but at that moment I prayed a lot and kept my eyes squeezed shut.

There was a loud WHOOMP! When the sparks from the collision ignited the gas in the wrecked pump, and just like in the movies I’d seen many times, a fantastic fireball erupted. A red-orange angry genie released from his bottle.

If the creatures couldn’t see the fireball, I knew they had to have at least heard all the crashing and the screeching of the tires.

Munster somehow managed to make it onto the street, and after several more clunks and crashes against cars ahead of us, he finally got the flame car to obey and go pretty much straight. And he sped up.

I looked back. The creatures had appeared way back on Ashton, and half a dozen of them were coming in our direction.

“Munster, they're right behind us!”

Munster raised himself a little off the seat, which made his foot press down harder on the accelerator, which made the car go faster. But not straighter.

“Get the gun outta’ my waistband. Shoot ‘em.”

I bounced around in my seat, scared out of my wits. The handle of his gun was right there. I’d never even held one, let alone tried to point it and shoot something.

“I can’t!”

“Do it!”

“How?”

“Just grab it. Roll the window down, point it back at ‘em and pull the trigger! Do it!”

“Ohhhh…” But I pulled the gun out of his pants and wheeled around to lower the window. I was absolutely unfamiliar with guns, and accidentally put too much pressure on the trigger as I fidgeted with the window button. There was a horrible, loud bang when the bullet came out and smashed into the glove compartment. What was left of the small door flew open. Papers and other things inside came flying out. I dropped the gun and screamed.

Munster lost control again for a second. We sideswiped another car. He got angry.

“Amelia! Pick it up and shoot them, not us!”

“I can’t. I can’t.”

And so the gun remained on the floorboard at my feet, and Munster cursed my cowardice because of that. I didn’t think he could go any faster, but I was wrong there. He did, and I was nearly as frightened that we’d crash into a pole, or head-on into another car, as I was of the things chasing us.

I have to admit, my then-only friend was smart, even back then. We began to pull ahead of the creatures. More and more as the seconds ticked by. When we’d finally gotten several blocks ahead of them, Munster surprised me, and hopefully, I thought, the things chasing us. Crowley Street. He slowed a little when we got there, spun the wheel, and we screeched around the corner. Up onto some dead person’s lawn we flew, over some bushes, and then back onto the street.

Down Crowley, me screaming at him to slow down. This went on for three or four blocks, then around the corner onto Jasmine Street, and south once again at what seemed a hundred miles an hour. The engine roaring, and Munster whooping it up.

“I got it, I got it! This ain’t so hard. We lost ‘em!”

I was as happy as him in a terrified way, because he was right. They were nowhere to be seen, at least for the time being.

About a mile down Jasmine the spire of a church came into view on my side of the street. Munster slowed down, then succeeded in pulling over to the curb without banging over it.

The Cathedral of Saint Andrew. He bounced up against the curb in front, and then pushed the lever forward into park.

Our New...Home?

The Cathedral of Saint Andrew was the church my mother and father and I attended every Sunday morning. It was very ancient, well over fifty years-old at least. Red brick. Very tall, with two bell towers in the top that used to ring each Sunday. Big, heavy doors with black iron straps opened outward onto the wide, deep concrete top step. On either side of the entrance, tall stained glass windows—four of them—allowed sunlight to enter on a sunny morning, strewn with every color of the rainbow. When I was ten, I imagined that this was really the home of God here on Earth. Of Saint Andrew, whoever he was, too. It was beautiful and so very peaceful.

“I wouldn’t bother to look here if I was them,” Munster said after a few seconds. “Gotta’ get my car off the street, though…”

How would he know where they’d bother to look, I wondered? They didn’t appear to have eyes, they didn’t move as fast as a spider for their size. In fact, for all I knew they were as dumb as a pile of rocks. But, blind as bats, slow as slugs crossing a driveway, and stupid as empty boxes, they’d managed to kill everyone except my brilliant new friend, and stupider me.

“There’s a parking lot right around the corner. Daddy always went in there,” I said.

“Yeah…no, no good. If they come by they’ll spot my car in a flash.”

His car. Inherited from some dead guy. Smashed fenders and noisy as a rocket on the launch pad. But, okay. Munster’s…Flamecar.

“What about Father’s garage? It’s behind the church. Maybe we can hide it in there.”

Munster smiled at me. “You ain’t so dumb after all.”

He pulled away from the curb, turned the corner, and drove slowly, finally, into the garage driveway.

“Okay, Amelia, get out an’ see if the doors are unlocked.”

“What if Father Kenney’s car is inside?”

“Then we’ll push it out an’ I’ll pull my car in. Hustle up.”

“Your car? It’s half mine. I helped you steal it.”

Munster turned up his nose. “How the hell is it stealing when everyone but us is dead? An’ you weren’t much help anyway. Pick up that gun an’ give it to me before you get out.”

“Well, your car or mine or ours, it won’t be around for long the way you drive, Munster.”

“Just get out an’ do what I told ya’. They could be comin’ down the street right now for Chrissake. You always gotta’ argue with me?”

“Quit cussing, Munster. This is a church, and when have I argued with you?”

“It’s a fuc…a driveway! Just get out. Jesus!”

Whatever. I did like he told me, just to stay out of a fight….and because I knew deep down that he was right. The creatures might be coming right down the street any minute. Even a deaf person could hear the roar of the Flamecar’s engine.

Thankfully, the doors were unlocked, and so I pulled them open. Father Kenney’s car wasn’t inside. I turned with a huge smile on my face, and Munster almost ran over me when he came flying in, banging into the boxes at the back of the garage.

“Gotta’ get that brake figured out better,” he muttered as he got out.

“You almost killed me, Munster!”

“Yeah, but I didn’t. Let’s get the doors shut.”

And so, we were safe, finally. Maybe only for a minute, or an hour, but I was thankful. And thankful, too, that Munster hadn’t gotten us killed in a fiery wreck.

After we closed the doors Munster picked up a broom and shoved it through the handles so that no one could pull them open from the outside. I felt as though we’d locked ourselves into a tomb. Two small, square windows were on either side of the garage, both draped over with heavy curtains that prevented light from entering.

“This is creepy,” I said.

“Door’s over…” He cursed again when he tripped on something ahead of him. “…here. Goddam, didn’t that shithead guy ever clean this place up?”

“THAT guy was a priest. Watch your mouth.”

“Yeah, right. Shithead priest. That better?”

“You’re impossible. Just find the door.”

The priest. His name was Father Kenney, and I’d known him, though not well. His yard was surprisingly large, surrounded on three sides by a tall stone wall for privacy. As we stood just outside the door facing the rectory, I glanced around. To our left in the center of the yard stood a wooden gazebo with steps leading up to the surface, raised three feet or so off the lawn surrounding it. A shingled roof supported by six posts kept the hot summer sun out, and in the wet winter months protected the interior from rain. Beyond that, in a corner where two of the walls met, there was a small garden, and in the back of it stood a statue of Mary with her hands reaching out, a light blue, solid veil covering her head.

Munster left me for a moment and dashed to the wall that looked out onto Jasmine Street. He pulled himself up until his eyes and nose were just above the top of it. He surveyed the outside world for only a second or two, then dropped back down and walked through the flowerbed to the rear door of Father’s rectory.

After trying to turn the knob over and over, he finally turned to me and said, “It’s locked.”

Not waiting for a response—I mean, what was I supposed to say?—he left the door stoop and walked around the corner of the house. Three or four seconds later I heard a crash when the brick he’d found went through a window.

Munster’s key to every house.

Another moment passed until I heard the lock rattle and click, and then he appeared when the door swung in.

“Welcome to our new home.” He had this big Munster-grin plastered on his face. I could see a bank of white cabinets beyond him. He was standing in the kitchen. “Hope the TV here works!”

“I hope the toilet works. I have to go the bathroom.”

“Down the hall an’ to the left. Don’t bet on it flushin’. Make sure ya’ try though, otherwise we’ll have ta’ take our dumps outside somewhere.”

Munster could be so disgusting, I was learning quickly.

After I’d finished—and no, the flusher didn’t release any water (which at the time I didn’t find odd)—I returned the way I’d come. Off the kitchen was the untidy priest’s bedroom. A smallish area with his unmade bed to the right. On the far side of it, a window. Munster was busy taping the curtains to the wall on one side when I stepped through the doorway. At the end of the bed