Forever Twilight, Patrick Sean Lee [christmas read aloud txt] 📗

What Became of Daddy?

 

“Before we get on the freeway, I want to retrace the route Daddy took on his way to and from work,” I said to Peter.

We had driven maybe five miles north from the farm toward Marysville under a clear blue morning sky, passing orange orchards on the left and right, the branches of the trees hanging low with the weight of fruit that would never be picked. The occasional car or truck with their occupants still slumped forward, faces a now-blackened leather.

I’d gone with Daddy only once to his office building in downtown Marysville. I was eight that August. He’d forgotten to place some important paperwork in his briefcase the night before—something he needed so that he could finish work for one of the firm’s clients over the weekend. I was excited, because afterward we would go to Disneyland. Mom was in Minneapolis visiting her older sister, no doubt at that moment standing with Aunt Martha in the kitchen whipping up a newly discovered recipe for gluten-free, organic spinach…or some such horrible thing. She would be gone for a week, and I was happily boarded at the Merovich’s house during the day until Daddy returned like clockwork to pick me up at 5:30 sharp. If Mom had known that we survived on TV dinners and junk food…divorce time.

Instead of catching the freeway a little north of Marysville like Peter and I had done weeks ago, we would stay on the highway until it turned into Grand Avenue, the main artery leading through the city center.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Amelia,” Peter answered. “I mean, should you find him…well, you know. You don’t want to see him if…” He couldn’t find the appropriate words to finish.

After the event eight months earlier, neither Munster and me, nor Peter and me, had returned to my old house. Mom still lay in the kitchen turning to dust. I simply couldn’t gather the courage to go back, drag her out into the back yard, and place her in a proper grave back then. That thought would haunt me until the day I died.

I wanted to find Daddy. I had to know what had happened to him, although I knew well enough. Someday I would gather the courage to find him, take his remains, return to our house, and then bury both him and Mom in the back yard. Today I just wanted to find him, that’s all.

I turned the CD player down a little. The music was too cheerful anyway. Peter slowed to navigate between two cars that had careened sideways the moment the searing light killed the drivers, and then sped up again as the first of the buildings came into view. That first time we’d driven into the city in what seemed like ages ago, he’d stopped not far ahead. The stench of rotting bodies had made it impossible to go any farther. The tangle of cars and trucks was insane. The first real glimpse of the horror that had happened.

It was on my mind during that first trip. Daddy’s office six blocks ahead, and a few blocks south, but back then the thought of asking Peter to go there was driven completely away by the horrific smell, and the need to get away, back into the breeze coursing down from the Santa Ana Mountains behind us. Wherever Daddy was, he would have to stay there undiscovered.

“Please, Peter, go over to Flower Street, and then head west. Maybe we can get through. I think Daddy would have been on his way home there. I just want to see. Please, it won’t take long.”

“It was a mess on Flower, too,” he replied. But he turned left all the same, and drove slowly south. “Charles and Munster and I were on Flower that day we went to the Main Library to scavenge the books.”

“All the same, can you get through? You made it once, and the library is a block farther west than Daddy’s office building. And you wouldn’t have known Daddy’s car anyway. For all you know you drove right past it.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay. I just think you don’t really want to see him. Look at the condition of all these…”

Soon enough we turned right onto Flower, the top of Daddy’s dead office building visible in the distance in the clear morning light. The tangle of cars was infinitely smaller than on Grand, only the remains of one major pileup at a traffic light two blocks ahead. A delivery van tipped over a hundred feet past the light. Spatters of cars and other delivery vehicles dotting the wide street. Decomposed bodies lying everywhere near store and building entrances. A few in the gutters. A child half beneath his mother’s prostrate body, she still grasping a colorful shopping bag in her right hand. The Broadway.

Peter drove slowly, and I scanned every vehicle we came upon. Really, Daddy’s car was nondescript. A 2013 Mazda 3. Light gray. No frills. Sensible to match his public (at least) temperament. I spotted it two blocks away from the office, sitting quietly alone in the middle of the block, pointing straight ahead, undamaged and absolutely forlorn-looking.

“There it is! Speed up!”

Approaching the car, Peter slowed, and then stopped beside it. He stared out the window, not moving, while I flew out the door and ran to the front of Daddy’s car. It had to be his. I recognized the tiny scratch on the front fender that had sent him into a fury when he’d discovered it two years ago.

“Unbelievable! Some gosh-damned miscreant did this. Look, Carol, look at where it is. THAT was not done by a car door, it’s too high on the fender! Someone did this maliciously!”

“Oh John, it’s hardly noticeable.”

Daddy could be unbelievable. But there the tiny scratch was. I’d found him. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes for a second, dreading the thought of seeing him at long last. I walked the few steps forward toward the door. He must have slumped over across the console when he died. The second I peered though the dusty window, though, my head reeled.

There was no one inside. But how could that be? I blinked, and then opened the door. Looked into the rear seat. Leaned in for no apparent reason. I remained there for the longest time, trying to put together some explanation that made sense, but I could make no sense of it at all. Someone had to have dragged him out and carried him off. But why? To what end? And who? Every other car and truck we’d passed had a rotted driver still exactly where they’d been the moment they died.

I turned, finally, and shot at Peter who had opened the door on his side of the truck. He was gaping at me.

“Peter, he’s not here! What…what could have happened to his body? Where is he?”

As if I’d somehow been mistaken, Peter left the truck and walked the few feet to my side to have a look for himself. He scoured the interior, and then looked into my face with a blank look.

“Weird.” He stepped to the rear door, opened it, and made certain that Daddy hadn’t somehow gotten himself onto the floorboard there. Useless. That would have been an impossibility. “Maybe he didn’t die?”

“I…he…but if that’s true…oh Peter, then he’s alive! He must be alive, and if that’s true, he must be somewhere around here, or in Marysville! Maybe he survived like we did, and began to walk…but why wouldn’t he have driven? Peter, it makes no sense.”

Peter scratched his head. “I don’t know, Amelia. The point is, he’s not here. I know what you’re thinking, but we should get out of here. Get to the freeway and…”

“Absolutely not! We’re looking for survivors, and Daddy had to have survived! We have to look for him!”

It was pointless for Peter to argue with me, and he knew it. I closed the driver door and bolted to my place inside the truck.

I heard him mutter something about “wrong age…”

“Come on, we’re going to his office!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Despair and Hope

 

Despair and Hope

 

Two blocks. No need to park in the underground structure. We left the truck in the middle of the street and walked the fifty feet to the entrance.

It was eerily reminiscent of the hotel we’d been to in San Diego, less the dead arrivals and porter lying outside. I pulled the glass door open and we stepped through into a miasma of dead bodies and semi-darkness. Men in suits lying like cattle struck down by lightning. Women in business attire. All of them obviously on their way out when it happened, thoughts of Christmas and families abruptly dashed that afternoon. We made our way around and over them, inured to the carnage by then. Both Peter and I knew it was useless to try the elevator to the right of the receptionist’s desk, and so we walked to the stairway entrance leading to the upper floors. Daddy’s firm’s offices were on 4. The moment the heavy steel door closed behind us, we found ourselves in total darkness. I grasped the handrail and carefully reached forward with a foot to find the first step.

“Just a second,“ Peter said. He made his way back to the door, opened it, and then disappeared out into the foyer. A moment later he returned, opened the door, and called for me to hold it while he dragged a body against it to act as a grisly door stop.

“There, that should give us some light.”

Looking up between the stair runs, it was like peering into a sealed box only two flights up. “Not much. I totally didn’t think about the lack of windows in a stairwell. Maybe I should run back to the truck and grab the flashlight. Wait here.”

Half a minute later I was back with a bright beacon to illuminate the dismal staircase, and moments after that, we opened the door into the carpeted hallway of 4. Left and right the familiar darkness, save for a glow spilling from two opened doors off to our right. The farthest away was Daddy’s office. Holding the flashlight in my outstretched hand, I glanced at Peter and then took a deep breath and stepped off slowly. Stunned by the sudden beam of light, a rat scurried with a squeak into the first open office.

“Oh God! Did you see it?” I hate the loathsome creatures! How many more were nested in the building, still gnawing on the remains of men and women who once laughed and cried and sang? “I didn’t bring the gun. Did you think to…”

“No. Relax, they won’t attack. They’re scavengers. Which office was your dad’s?”

I pointed, scrunched my lips, and began the trip again, this time hugging the wall and closed doors on my right. Why hadn’t I thought to grab the pistol or the shotgun from behind the seat?

Thoughts of my father sitting inside at his desk with his skeletal head lowered in his skeletal hands, lost in despair. Foolish thoughts. Why would he have returned here instead