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

though she were the only living soul in the room.

“I have to leave, Lashawna. It’s okay, don’t…”

“No!”

“I have to, darling.” With that, he gently moved her aside, kissed her forehead, and then began walking across the living room toward the front door. Lashawna let out a banshee wail. Jude was at her side before Jerrick had taken two steps.

“You asshole!” she screamed at him.

Jerrick didn’t look back.

 

Dream A Little Dream

 

Disbelief.

Shock.

One day Jerrick is gregarious, consumed with love for his sister, and a pillar in our existence. The next he leaves on their bidding the same way Mari did. Unlike the young girl, he wasn’t mentally distant in his change. The sweetness of him that evening; how he looked at each of us, especially Lashawna—who once again went over the edge despite Jude’s constant attempts to hold her steady. What would he become?

Munster continued to offer his opinion that the aliens meant us no harm. After all, they’d given Jerrick the greatest of gifts. Secretly I think he was toying with the idea to lay cases of dynamite around the base of the tower and light the fuse. That would be more like Munster. God knows, though, if he did something like that it would only piss them off. And then what would happen to us?

It was the tower, though. We all agreed on that. We also agreed in our somber discussions to stay far away from it, and if it called, not to answer. What we didn’t know was whether it had beckoned Mari and Jerrick to begin with. Simple childish curiosity in Mari’s case, probably. No demonic invitation required. But Jerrick. Maybe the thought of seeing for the first time drew him to it. Maybe their thoughts invaded his head. Would you like to see this world as the others do? We hadn’t had the time to ask why he went to it.

“Cover it. I’ll make a trip to town and find heavy canvas tarps,” Peter offered a few days after Jerrick had walked down the drive, and out through the gate.

Charles scoffed. “I don’t think that would blind it…excuse me, ‘Shawna.”

“What’s happening out there? What have they been doing all this time while we sit here contented?” I posed. Two of our community called out…to meet somewhere, for some unknown reason. Others alive, and maybe among them candidates for a new race, set aside, with immense powers. A growing community of half-humans that would eventually change from disinterest in the scores who weathered the initial attack, to outright hostility toward the rest of us. Dots of abhorrent aberrations across the nation and the world that would, in time, be called together for the aliens’ purposes.

We were so parochial in our thinking.

It was on Charles’ pointed suggestion that we leave Jerrick’s fate alone and focus with new resolve on the matters at hand. Our education topping the list. Anything, I guessed, to break the moroseness that had overcome us. Munster groaned. Denise was overjoyed. And so we rose earlier and hit the books. An additional hour each morning before we were dismissed to attend to our various chores around the farm.

Why would we need Latin or Greek if a marauding band suddenly appeared with rifles and knives? What good would algebra do for our futures? Could history teach us how to prepare for the final alien assault?

“Knowledge is power.”

“My gun and my car are power!” Munster answered Charles, laughing.

“You’ll learn how to spell and write a sentence, or else you’ll find a different bedroom, dolt,” Cynthia informed him with an elbow in his ribs.

“Cynthia. C-I-N-T…T-H-I-A.”

“That’s it. You’re out.”

He applied himself more diligently…and of course he was allowed to remain in their bedroom. Proof. Men might once have thought they ruled the world, but they were wrong. All they ruled, simply put, was the twisted ability to invent instruments of mass destruction, and use them to war on one another. Women, on the other hand, knew very well where their collective brains resided, and how to use that power to its best advantage in the end.

 

We worked in the orchard and garden, and studied more or less in pairs each day. Peter and I. Charles, and not so oddly, Denise. Munster and beautiful Cynthia, with Sammie constantly following at their heels like a shadow. Lashawna and Jude—forever disappearing after classes each morning, kind of to my delight. Lashawna’s sullen demeanor following Jerrick’s flight gradually began to disintegrate against the more powerful avalanche of affection and cheerfulness of Jude. Still, at the bottom of everyone’s thoughts dwelt two nagging thoughts; what would tomorrow bring, and who would be next?

One evening at the dinner table Charles addressed the problem of security once again. The reason was, Lashawna and Jude swore that they caught a glimpse of a figure at the south end of the farm, skulking along the fence wire on the adjacent property.

“I looked twice,” Jude said, “but whoever it was had disappeared by the time I blinked and looked again.”

“It was a man,” Lashawna said. “I’m sure it was a man.”

“What color?” Munster quipped.

“What difference does that make?” Cynthia said.

“Well, maybe it was Jerrick come back, or…”

“Oh, shut up.”

“It wasn’t my brother.”

“Was he alone? Was he armed that you could see?” Charles asked soberly.

“It all happened so fast. I don’t think he had a weapon, and I’m pretty certain he was scoping us out alone. Right, ‘Shawna?”

“Yes. The second we raised our heads and looked over at him, he took off into the trees over there.”

“Why didn’t you come back and tell us?” asked Charles.

Their faces blushed, and they turned their heads to one another. Lashawna shrugged.

“I mean, we could have been wrong…seeing something that really wasn’t there.”

“Yeah,” agreed Jude. “It happened…so fast.”

Charles’ brow dropped. I could see what he must have been thinking about that answer. He let it pass and turned to Peter.

“What do you think, Peter? The trip-wire suggestion? Do you think we could do it?”

“We can try. First thing tomorrow Amelia and I can hustle into town and scavenge up some light wire and a bell or something, and another generator, I suppose.”

“Cynthia and me’ll go with ya’. We’ll take the car. Before classes,” he added. Cynthia, maybe worn out with Virgil and Ovid, offered no objection.

 

I dreamt the strangest dream that night. Daddy was there walking along a weird dirt road with Jerrick and Mari and one of the alien beings. No one seemed to be the least bit out of sorts at first, although Jerrick was scolding Daddy for being so obsessed with a clock he had in his hand. His eyes sparkled, shooting out electric-like in arcs. Jerrick’s. Daddy was fiddling with the hands, trying to move them backward, mumbling something about being late again; that if he could just get the hands to move, everything would be alright.

Jerrick lost interest in him suddenly, and turned to Mari. She had no interest in either of them; was embracing the creature in an awfully amorous way as I saw it. I remember thinking as I lingered along behind all of them that it was not only dangerous, but silly of her to do that. The alien eyed her passively, stroking her hair with its gross, amorphous hands. Her arms met at its midsection and passed completely through the cloudy shape of it, and her face disappeared into its torso.

“It doesn’t care for you the way I do, Mari,” Jerrick said to her. “Besides, it has a ray gun.”

Mari released her hold on the creature with its shimmering nothingness of a body, and turned angrily. She pointed a finger at Daddy.

“He’s the one with the ray gun, and he’s going to kill all of us if he can, but he can’t because the unwelcome one doesn’t even know how to aim it.”

Jerrick turned back to Daddy, and I followed his gaze. It was true. The clock was gone, and in its place in Daddy’s hands was a pistol-looking weapon, aimed at the sky, firing multi-colored bursts of light that wound outward wildly as he struggled to lower it at Jerrick and Mari and the creature behind her.

The creature’s eyes lit up more brightly, and it spoke in a voice like rolling thunder. “We shall take him with us into the ship, and then lock him up before we leave.”

“But you can’t talk!” I finally blurted. It paid no attention to my presence, and neither did Jerrick or Mari. The alien moved right through Mari, and then Jerrick who had begun to clap his hands. It flew over Daddy like a giant wave and started to swirl around and around. A dark, broiling cloud. The ray gun shot out from the mess just like debris cast out of a tornado, and then what was once Daddy flew upward like a stretched mass, into the sky where his remains disappeared.

Charles appeared, Boom! Just that quickly, looking up and shaking his head sadly—and Munster right next to him holding a wooden case with both hands, the word DYNAMITE printed on it in bold red letters.

“That stuff won’t do you any good,” the creature spat. At which Munster yanked a fuse from his back pocket, and jammed it into the top of the explosives’ case. He reached back into the pocket where the fuse had been and pulled out a lighter.

“We’ll just see about that, you fuckin’ bastard!” Munster said with a laugh as he lit the fuse.

“Francis! How many times have I told you to clean up your mouth!”

Cynthia was nowhere to be seen, but her scolding voice was clear as a bell. I turned because I knew once the flame hit the contents of the crate I’d be blown to kingdom come.

“I knew you’d do it, Munster! Get us all killed eventually.”

It was too late by the time I spoke those words, and it was stupid of me to even say them. The most horrendous explosion hit me in the back. I was knocked forward in a blast of dirt and smoke and fire.

And then I woke.

“You were screaming!” Peter’s voice. He lay beside me, his arms locked around me. “A nightmare? You’re safe and sound, now. I’m here, my love.”

I threw my shaking arms around him and held him as tightly as I could.

“Do you think Munster is alive?” I asked.

“What?”

Plan Of Action

 

I had never put much credence in dreams and nightmares as portents, but I couldn’t shake the one I had that night. You know the deal; you wake up, your mind flashing back to