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

in the next room. We waited and waited. I could see feet! Two pairs of them from under the blanket edge. They…the men…they went into the kitchen, talking to one another and searching for food, too. Finally, they left the way they’d come. Have you seen them?”

“No. We thought we were the only ones alive. We did see the rectory office, though.”

“Oh. Well, anyway, we left that place and then came here. Into the church. We stayed there for a long time, until a while ago we heard this like horribly loud engine outside. I thought those men had come back; that they were driving some Monster Car, going around killing everyone they came across.”

“That was us,” Munster informed her…kindly enough. “An’ we weren’t going around killin’ people. There weren’t none left to kill. We thought.”

“We were lucky to be crouching down a minute ago,” she said with relief.

“He’s a lousy shot,” I said with a little laugh.

“Ya’ think so? Wanna’ find out?”

“Oh shut up, Munster.

“He won’t hurt you. He’s really quite harmless as a matter of fact.”

“No I ain’t.

“Let’s get outta’ this crappy dress shop. I don’t much like dresses, and it’s fuc…shitty crowded in here.”

I let his foul mouth pass for the moment. I agreed with him (silently) about the room being totally too crowded, however. And too dark for my liking.

“There isn’t anyone back in the rectory. We covered the windows…”

“I did,” Munster corrected me.

“He covered the windows. There’s no electricity anymore, but we can light a bunch of candles. It’ll be much nicer. The bed is big enough for you and me, Lashawna. Munster has already offered to stand watch…with his gun. We’ll spend the night there. If they don’t come by morning, we’ll leave and go farther south.”

“I never want to see those men again,” she said.

“I don’t mean just those men.”

“There are other men alive?”

I glanced at Munster. He shrugged. “She don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?” Lashawna asked.

“Come on, we’ll explain what we know back in the rectory,” I said.

 

Bang! You're Dead

I envisioned an angry God—or at least a put-out Saint Andrew—frowning down at Munster from wherever they lived up there.

“Shall I tell Michael to throw a lightning bolt at that foul-mouthed boy, Lord?”

“No, just tell one of the creatures where he’s hiding.”

“What about the others with him?”

 

We left the solitude of the sacristy, back beneath the colonnade, and then into the rectory.

Around the fallen bookcase on the desk. Across shards of broken glass. Over papers and books and magazines littering the floor. Even though I thought we might be safe, my ears were cocked and listening for any sound other than our shoes crunching the debris, and Munster’s constant rambling about how tough and fearless he was. In reality I knew well enough that we were actually in grave danger, still I was strangely happy and relieved.

We entered Father Kenney’s bedroom and settled in. I was amazed at how naturally Jerrick seemed to navigate the room without the assistance of his sister. Lashawna merely released his hand after we’d gotten past the minefield of the office to the door.

“Door, Jerrick. Be careful.” I turned and watched him after setting the candle I was carrying onto the dresser top. Lashawna abandoned him there and went immediately into the kitchen, where I could hear her opening cabinets and rifling through the contents. Jerrick hesitated for only a second, that blank look on his face, raising his arms a little and waving them just once, slowly, in front of him. I was tempted to return to his side and lead him the rest of the way in, but he walked carefully, steadily, between the narrow space between the dresser and the end of the bed like a ship in the narrows on a foggy night, captained by Lord Nelson himself. He easily found the comfy chair beneath the covered window, and then sat down, folding his hands in his lap. Even had I lived in that room for a month, I would have knocked into everything in front of me in the dark.

Munster eyed him throughout all this, and then when Jerrick had gotten himself seated, he said, “I’m goin’ back into the office to look around. Patch up that window. You stay here and…whatever. Find somethin’ to snack on.”

“Suit yourself,” I answered, not really overly concerned where he went, or what he did when he got there. If Munster could be annoyingly abrupt and crude, Jerrick fascinated me. Quiet as a mouse, resigned, even, to the situation he found himself and his sister in. Staring at him, I wondered that if we needed to make a run for it in the future, could he possibly do it? Would he be a liability, and get us all vaporized by ray guns if and when the invaders found us? He seemed content enough, though—the question in my mind was irrelevant for the moment—and so I grabbed the candle and joined Lashawna.

“He sure liked candy,” she quipped as we dug through the pantry side by side.

“He was chubby,” I grinned. “Wonder what became of him. He must not have been anywhere around…I mean his car wasn’t in the garage, you know?”

She shrugged and tossed the large bag of mini-candy bars onto the table across the room.

I told her a little about myself and my family, she responded by painting a small portrait of hers, how she and her parents and Jerrick had been visiting an aunt and uncle here in Marysville yesterday. How the light had blinded her momentarily. How looking up in a daze afterward…discovering pretty much the same as I had.

“How old are you?” I asked after a few minutes.

“Fourteen. Jerrick is fifteen. You?”

“Fifteen, too. I don’t know how old Munster is. Seven or eight,” I said with a laugh.

“You’re very pretty. Did you have a boyfriend?”

“Thank you. So are you.” And the tiny girl was, the light throwing shadows across her glistening, amber face. “No one at the moment. Certainly not Captain Kirk back there with his gun and an attitude.”

We continued our conversation; discovered a full bag of potato chips and some Cokes. I was laying the sodas onto the table when I glanced at the door across the room. The handle was turning. It stopped briefly, and then whoever was on the other side turned it more rapidly, rattling it. There followed the sound of a body putting a shoulder against it. I froze. Lashawna continued with snips of chatter back at the pantry, unaware of anything out of the ordinary.

“Hey in there,” a deep, gravely voice broke through the covered window. “Anyone alive in there?”

Lawshawna heard it and wheeled around in shock. A frighteningly long silence descended. I turned and put a finger to my lips, and then tip-toed to the door. Just as I was about to put an ear to the glass, it shattered. I screamed and leapt backward two or three steps. A hand holding the longest knife I’d ever seen began raking the spikes and sharp splinters of the broken window out of the way.

Munster, where are you?

He had the gun, and…suddenly a face poked through the bottom corner of the window opening. Lashawna screamed. I stood like a statue as the man’s leering eyes caught sight of me, five feet away, my rear locked against the barrier of the table.

“Unlock it, missy. We just want some food.” He waited for my reaction, and then withdrew his head and began searching for the deadbolt with a dirty hand.

The counter a step or two away. I dashed over to it, and started frantically opening each to find a knife; anything to stab at his hand with before he disengaged the lock.

Butter knives, forks that looked as though they would bend if I even touched them! Spoons. I slammed the first drawer shut. Atop the counter in the anemic glow of the single candle I saw it. The knife holder. I yanked the longest one out and turned back to the door.

He’d found the deadbolt latch, and was turning it! Lashawna was beside herself screaming through hands covering her face. Adrenalin raced through my body as I positioned the knife, stepping forward, readying it to stab the hand.

“Get back, Amelia!” Munster’s voice. He had finally arrived, and stood legs spread, both hands grasping the pistol, pointing it directly at the window in the door.

I wheeled my head around, and on seeing him there, threw myself up against the counter I’d just left. The next second seemed like time had been compressed into infinite nothingness.

The door began to swing in an inch, and then the sound of the gun. The flash of light. I winced and shut my eyes as tightly as I could. Beyond Lashawna’s continued screaming, coming out in bursts, there was no other sound, save that of a body collapsing on the stoop outside the door.

Munster had a strangely shocked, but determined look on his face. He stood quietly, his hands shaking, for half a second, and then he ran to the door and pulled it open. What we saw surprised us. Munster raised the gun once again.

“Don’t shoot! Please…”

A second man lay half beneath the one who had been trying to get in. He pleaded for his life, struggling to push his dead companion off him. Dead the filthy guy must have been, because blood was still spurting from a tiny hole in his forehead, streams coursing down across one eye onto his cheek.

Munster aimed down at him, but thankfully didn’t shoot again. The second man was petrified, but he finally managed to push his friend’s body aside. He scrambled to his feet, raising his hands high, continuing his pleas for mercy.

“We was just hungry, kid. Honest injun! We wasn’t gonna’ hurt nobody. Ray was just hunting for food, I swear it!”

“You got two seconds to turn and get outta’ here before I put a bullet in you,” Munster growled. “If I ever see you again, I swear I’ll shoot. Move it!”

My dear Munster! He did it. I thought back to what he’d said the day before when he first showed me the pistol proudly. There ain’t no laws no more, and if there ain’t no laws, and nobody to arrest me, I don’t have to put up with some jock an’ his friends beatin’ up on me. They’re dead meat, though, if they’re still alive and I see ‘em.” Not Harry out there, but just as dead.

No laws. Frighteningly real, now. My next thought, as Lashawna eased to my side with a groan, was, we’d found two other survivors in Lashawna and her brother…and two more, intent, not on raiding the refrigerator, but doing much worse. How many others might there be, and how many of them were armed? Suddenly I loathed this insane new world more than ever.

The man outside, his hands still shot skyward, began to slowly back up toward the wall.

“It was you guys that busted up the office back there, wasn’t it,” Munster said to him.

“Office? I don’t know nuthin’ about no office. No, kid, we was just lookin’ for food like I said. It wasn’t us.”

Probably a lie. It didn’t matter at all, now. He continued to ease his way back until he bumped into the