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

real world. Not this morning, though.

Ignoring Jerrick’s pleading for me to wait, to not be foolish, I ran across this plain with its sky of unbroken white in my snow-blinded state. Behind me I heard his heartbeat, and the soft scuffling of a hundred pairs of feet close on his heels. Small voices.

“You must stop her, Jerrick.”

“She’s going to escape. She’ll fall!”

“Where is Mari?”

“She’ll return.”

“Too late! Too late!”

“Stop her!”

I came to a door. Not a door, some sort of opening outlined in rippling shadows. I stopped, only for a heartbeat, but long enough. I felt Jerrick’s long fingers grab my arm.

“You can’t go through, Amelia. It’s a very long drop. Don’t do it.”

Hah! I saw the entrance to this alien prison, standing with Peter not more than fifty feet away. I saw it! Five feet? Six feet off the ground? I prepared to yank his fingers off me, take the few remaining steps, and then leap. Once in the light outside I could easily bend my knees, gauge the distance down in less than a nanosecond, hit and roll.

Jerrick’s grip was vice-like. No matter how I struggled, how hard I tried to break free, he held me back. The others quickly edged themselves between me and freedom.

“I have to find Peter! Let loose of me, Jerrick, goddamn you!”

A strange and ominous visage suddenly appeared to our right as the words left my mouth. Jerrick eased his hold on me. The children shot their eyes upward at it. One of the creatures, tall as a lightpole. It lowered a hand, or what might have been a hand, onto the shoulder of the child nearest it. Comfortingly, like Daddy would have done had I gotten too close to the pit at the edge of the lions’ den at the zoo so long ago. She smiled up at it, that hideous thing, and leaned her cheek into the vapor that was its arm.

I followed the arm up to its face. This one, I thanked God, had not shot the snakes of tentacles from its head…and it had features. Dim, deep eyes. Lips of a sort that actually moved ever so slightly, but that didn’t utter sounds. The eyes moved from the young girl, across to me and stopped.

“Let me pass,” I asked. “I want to leave.”

It said nothing. No surprise, they never do. It simply stared down at me. I knew it understood, though. I sensed it, anyway, because it slowly, slowly shook its head sideways. No.

“Oh please, whatever you are, I have to…”

The creature brought his other arm to my shoulder, letting it come to rest gently. I cringed. Felt the coldness of its fingers as it turned my body around to face the way I’d just come. Jerrick had stepped back. He was smiling.

“Jerrick?”

“You can’t leave. Not just yet. You see, you’re in the Thermosphere—two hundred miles, give or take a few, above the planet. I don’t think you’d survive the fall.” He laughed after saying that, shades of the old Jerrick. “Follow me back. I can explain a few things to you after you calm down.”

He stopped and looked up for a second or two at the creature. Smiled again.

“They aren’t dead, or even injured. She says they’re safe.”

She?

Goodbye Earth

 

Her hand pressing ice-like against my back, I followed Jerrick. The group of children darted to and fro beside and in front of us. Jerrick remained silent until we’d gone far beyond where I believed we’d started from.

I couldn’t shake the thought that I’d somehow been taken two hundred miles above the Earth’s surface as I plodded along helplessly a foot behind him. I couldn’t fathom that among the invaders there were hes and shes. I took some comfort, though, that Jerrick had promised to explain “a few things.” Well, I’d demanded that of Mari, but in my wildest dreams I didn’t expect to be whisked to…to the mothership?

What a dreary place. Still, Jerrick had implied that I’d be allowed to return to my home. Eventually. I walked amidst childish laughter and a strange gaiety, and the shoosh! of the thing following close behind. In time my heart stopped racing. My rattled nerves calmed.

Peter and the others were safe and uninjured. For the moment, that was all that mattered.

“This way,” Jerrick finally announced after what seemed like hours of walking through white. He turned left. An opening like the one we’d just been in front of broke the plainness of a wall that wasn’t a wall. It shimmered. He stepped through. I followed, not into the emptier void of space, but into a room. An actual room, with brightly colored walls. A floor of wood with a soft, mauve carpet. A ceiling that, at least with a stool, I could reach up and touch. A dozen beds at the far end stacked atop each other, with gleaming frames and ladders attached to the ends. Comfortable looking chairs. A desk with books neatly stacked at its rear; sheets of paper and pencils on the top, another chair tucked beneath its surface to my right. A few round shaped instruments scattered about that reflected the light coming from some point, or points, I couldn’t determine.

A huge screen, like one in a movie theater, but smaller, attached to the wall to the left. Black, like every other one back on Earth. Pillows of red and blue and yellow scattered on the floor in front of it.

I was entering this odd community of hijacked, half-humans’ home away from home. At long last, time to ask and then listen to Jerrick’s tale.

Jerrick stepped to the right and then stopped, five feet in. The kids scattered, half a dozen of them dashing past the beds…and through another opening that materialized only seconds before they reached it. I saw a glint of green on the other side. When the last one bounced through, the opening disappeared. I looked over at Jerrick inquisitively.

“One of many,” he said casually. “I’ll take you through a little later. First, though, make yourself comfortable.” He pointed to a chair with a thick cushion and fat arms. I walked across the room halfway and sat, not taking my eyes off him.

Without waiting for me to unload a hundred questions— chief among them: how many souls were left on earth, and why did these things do what they did?—he began, as though he’d read my mind.

“They’re from a star quite close, universal distances considered. Farther out along the Milky Way’s Perseus spiral arm.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“About 6,000 light years away.”

“So, why did they come here? Why did they destroy everyone?”

“Not everyone, obviously.”

“You know what I mean.”

“It’s a little complicated…”

“Oh Jerrick, please!”

“…they have said this, though. There are two factions, nearly equally divided in numbers. The first you saw shortly after the cleansing began, descending in landing craft for the mop-up phase. Millions of them across the face of the earth, searching out the hundreds of thousands—like us—who survived the initial purge. A big project, even for them. But at the heart of it, pretty basic, and what you might suspect; they have no regard for humans. No desire to interact with what they consider a planet occupied by bugs—for lack of a better word. Just do away with all of us.”

I tried to digest this in light of our encounters with them at the farm. Whoever those creatures were, ugly as they were, they weren’t exactly hostile. Toward our small group anyway.

“Two factions?”

“Yes, fortunately for us. The second faction views you and I and a few others differently. Oh, they don’t—never did—object to getting rid of the bulk of humanity. In fact they assisted, and continue to do so. I mean, consider it from their perspective for a moment. Petty, stupid creatures we are as a whole. Viruses that prey on each other. It’s the old story. We mean nothing to faction one, and we’re in their way.”

“In their way for what?”

“Take a guess.”

I didn’t have to guess much.

“But what does this ’beneficent’ group see in those of us who’ve survived, who they allowed to live? How many of us are there?

“Where’s my father? Did they spare him? No, I know he’s alive, Jerrick, no matter if he’s among the selected or not. Is he here? Tell me!”

“Your father? I have no idea. They—those among them who have an interest in us as a species—haven’t shown me everything, you know.”

“Shown you? What do you mean?”

He left me and walked to the screen on the far wall, raised his hand and touched the surface with his fingers, tapping it twice. It lit up, or more accurately opened like a window giving an incredible view of the blackness of space, and the blue arc of Earth taking up three-quarters of the screen. North and South America, blankets of cloud hanging over Brazil, wisps and tendrils hanging like sleeping snakes across Mexico and the Southwest.

The Aurora…or Auroras! Hundreds of them dotting the landscapes. I jumped to my feet and rushed across the room to where he stood. I stared through the barrier in astonishment; first, that I was really in orbit—or hanging fixed as if this craft were tethered to the Western Hemisphere, but more shockingly, with a jaw-dropping realization, that the Aurora I’d seen somewhere north of the farm was not a single phenomena. I turned to Jerrick.

“Can you focus the picture to close up? Like to where we are…or were…in Marysville? The farm? I want to see what that curtain of colored lights is. Exactly where it is in relation to the farm.”

“Which is it? The farm or Marysville? I can pinpoint anything.”

For a few seconds I didn’t answer, my eyes darting across the wide vista, counting the dazzling, colorful draperies of light. They shimmered everywhere, yet the distances between them could easily have been hundreds of miles from my perspective so far above my planet.

Without waiting for my reply, Jerrick touched the screen again, and the view began to narrow. I plunged downward with it, holding my breath as we fell slowly to the continental U.S., then the Midwest—over the ripple and rise of the Rockies to the Sierras, California, and then the Pacific.

“Pan back!”

A moving picture of Southern California baking in the sun, with its maze of freeways, wrecked cars and trucks. Vague jumbles of the tops of homes surrounded by trees coming into view, just as if I were gazing out the window of a passenger jet at thirty-five thousand feet.

An Aurora to the east, just over the front range of the Santa Ana Mountains, slipping out of view as the lens narrowed.

“Stop!”

Jerrick quickly raised his hand, palm nearly onto the screen. The vista stabilized.

“Go east and up a little.”

He moved his hand slowly.

“There! Ohmagod, where’s that thing at? Go back west slowly.”

He moved the camera. We crawled slug-like west, until the mountains began to fade into the dots of houses, and then into a community packed with rooftops. Fetid-water swimming pools. Another freeway.

“Stop! Let me see that freeway sign. There! Move in.” My heart dropped as the image plummeted. Suddenly I was in Daddy’s car looking out the windshield, stalled amidst a parking lot of silent vehicles and skeletons.

“Hold it here.”

The overpass sign of green and white. Clearly legible were the words,

                           55 North