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

on the drive a few feet below the craft. Before I’d even hit, everyone was on me. Everyone except Lashawna. She raced past me and stopped, looking forlornly up at Jerrick.

“I can’t, sis,” he said. “I’m sorry.

“Mari, are you ready?”

“WHY?”

“He’s going to help them destroy the planet,” I answered her. I bit my tongue.

“You know that isn’t true,” I heard Jerrick say. “We have work to do, and we no longer belong here with the rest of you. We can’t do what we need to do if…that’s just how it is.”

That angered me more than I can say. I pushed Peter off me and turned back to Jerrick.

“That ISN’T how it is, Jerrick! You liar! You—both of you—could stay if you wanted. You’re lying to your own flesh and blood! I don’t know what your fucking work for them is, but it isn’t saving what’s left of humanity.”

Lashawna stood below him all a mess again. Mari skirted around us and glided like a feather in an updraft, up to join her co-conspirator.

I dashed to the steps, the house, and into the music room. I grabbed what I wanted, and then rushed back out. They all peered at me like I had lost my mind. I ran past them, dragging the cello behind me, and then I wound up and pitched it with all my strength at Jerrick. It smashed into the base of the craft, breaking into half a dozen pieces.

“You forgot this, Jerrick! You fucking traitor!”

“Easy, Amelia. Calm down.” Peter.

“You go fuck yourself, too, Peter! You didn’t see what I did!” I went on in a state of mind I don’t think I’d ever experienced before. He grabbed me and hugged me tight, even though I pounded on his strong shoulders and chest.

The creatures far back on the drive whisked forward and slipped silently into the ship. The opening popped closed, and the craft disappeared in a flash of light.

The cello Jerrick had loved lay in ruins atop the gravel.

Invasion

 

Jude helped Lashawna upstairs, away from the noisy gathering in the living room. I was beginning to wonder if she’d ever recover. This time around she was wailing, stumbling uncontrollably over each step. Now that she’d finally found her beloved brother, she knew she’d lost him forever. I was a little better off. A lot better off, actually. I still had Peter. Unlike Lashawna, too, I knew what was up, beyond losing something so dear to me.

Peter had managed to calm me down. My rock, my stabilizing pillar of steadiness.

“I didn’t know you could cuss like that,” he said with a little laugh when he’d gotten me to quit pacing in a rage and sit.

“I’m sorry. It was just the coldness of him. Of Mari. I apologize.”

He held me tightly for a minute, some of that warmth and caring flowing out of him, into me, as Charles and the rest crowded around us, waiting anxiously for me to speak.

They wanted to know every detail of what had happened during those hours of my absence. And so, I related everything.

“The Aurora, Charles. I know what it is, and exactly where it is.”

“What?”

“It’s up in the hills outside Orange. That one. Jerrick said there were hundreds of others scattered across the earth.”

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s…it’s some kind of enclosed field. He didn’t explain the physics of it, but inside, the aliens are remaking the land slowly outward. The bad guys. If I understood him correctly, they’re destroying everything that it took Mother Nature millions of years to create, and re-forming it to suit their vision of a habitable planet. I guess.

“We’re doomed. The other camp—the good guys, I guess—the ones we’ve met, if you call it that, don’t want what remains of us destroyed, but I take it from what Jerrick said that they’re losing the fight.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, where is he when ya’ need him?” Munster spit.

“How long?” Cynthia said.

“I’m not sure. I don’t think Jerrick is either. Not that long is my guess, judging from how big it is, and when it first appeared over the trees.”

They all went silent as they digested the good news.

“We have to do something.” I jerked my head up at Peter.

“Like what?” he said. “Even if we could stop the one in the mountains—and how would we manage that? But even if we could, you said yourself that there are hundreds of others doing the same thing elsewhere. We have no way of getting to them.”

That was pretty obvious.

“Anyone know how to fly a plane?” Munster asked. Seriously, he asked that! We all looked at him. It wasn’t me who was nuts, it was him.

“Well, I mean there’s lots of ‘em sittin’ around. You know. If we could fly one—maybe a jet or somethin’…”

“Hush, Munster,” Cynthia cut him off. I think I saw a tiny smile creep onto her face.

“Well, I certainly couldn’t,” Charles said all serious.

“Crash. Oops, one more of us gone,” Peter offered.

“Okay, okay. So we have no way of getting to anyone else outside our immediate area, if there is anyone else besides those creeps down in San Diego, and Bernie.”

“He knows how to fly.”

Jude’s voice was soft, but clear, breaking the momentary lull in the conversation. She had left Lashawna, and now stood at the top of the stairs on the landing.

I turned my head to her. “He’s probably dead by now. But…what do you mean he can fly? That monster?”

She walked down quietly and stopped beside Charles at the end of the sofa. “He said he used to be a pilot in Vietnam.”

“He did, huh? Between rounds of porkin’ all of ya’?” Munster said with a sneer.

“Shut it, Francis. Let her talk.”

“That’s all I know,” Jude replied. “And no, Munster. Sometimes he could be decent.”

Jude was an oddity to me. The girl who hated Bernie-Beast for what he’d done to her, to Celia who couldn’t see the world—or the dead world—for that pedophile. No doubt to innocent, good natured Sammie, although the few times Cynthia or I had gently questioned her, she merely dropped her eyes.

Jude hated Bernie, and yet not deeply enough to abandon him completely. Maybe it was Celia. For her sake. On the other hand, it could have been that she loved life desperately enough to just put up with him, because life as she’d always known it had suddenly changed into a nightmare that she’d find the courage to endure until she could somehow awaken back into a rational world. One kind of like ours. Lashawna was probably the only one among us who knew the true depths of Jude’s thoughts.

So, we go back to visit that snake, try to explain to him that the alien plan was complete annihilation of life on our planet; that we’d only been given a temporary reprieve after the incomplete first phase ended. That unlike in fairytales the bad guys would eventually win the day.

Bernie, I’m sorry I tried to kill you. Would you fly Peter and me up to Los Angeles or San Francisco or Seattle. We want to find out…

What was your name again? No matter. Can we talk about it in the bedroom?

I’d aim better the next time I shot him.

For the moment, everyone seemed excited about the prospect of getting Bernie to ferry one or two of us high over the land, especially Munster, whose idea it was to drop bombs on the aliens’ camps, like the soldiers did in World War One. Toss them out of the windows, right down through the center of the curtain. I sobered them up.

“It seems to me that our number one priority is to stop the creatures in our neighborhood. Not go out again searching for other humans. Not yet.”

The conversation stopped immediately.

“Stop them how?” Charles.

Good question.

They all stared at me and waited for my grand idea. I didn’t have one. Well, yes I did, sort of.

“Two or three of us have to go over to Orange. Sneak inside that Aurora curtain and see what’s making it scour the land clean. Destroy it…without getting caught.”

“You’re insane,” Denise scoffed.

“Shall we just wait here, then, until they finally tire of putting up with us? That Aurora is spreading out, Denise. I heard Jerrick clearly enough when he explained its purpose. I saw it, and I saw hundreds of others. It’s spreading! How much time do you think we have?”

“But you also said Jerrick told you half of them don’t want to continue murdering our kind. Maybe we ask them to help us.”

“Fat chance of that succeeding.”

“Jerrick, then.”

“He’s like this zombie now,” I answered Cynthia.

“Mari?”

“She’s worse, remember?”

I could feel the frustration growing, like the walls quickly closing in on us, eventually to squeeze our lives into bloody pulps.

“Who wants to volunteer to try to get through the curtain? Not me,” Munster said. “I say we bomb it.”

“Oh shut up, Francis.”

“Well, we can’t just sit here doing nothing. Whatever we do, we have to move quickly. I’ll go, even if its by myself. If I die, at least I’ll have died trying.”

“Like hell you will,” Peter said.

“You have dynamite, right Munster? Load my backpack up with it.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, WAIT A MINUTE! Good God, let’s think this through,” Charles demanded. Good old logical Charles. I hoped he had a better idea. Honestly, I could see myself getting incinerated when I stepped into the Aurora. A bug flying into one of those electric bug zappers hanging beneath the patio cover.

Come on, Charles. Denise. Anybody. Come up with something better!

Little Sammie had been quiet all this time. She finally offered a suggestion. Half of it was great. The other half—the how-to accomplish it—sent me into a rage.

“I can talk Bernie into going instead of one of us. He told me he’d shot lots of people in that war. I know how to get him to do whatever I…”

“NO you won’t!” Jude shot at her. “He’s out! You’re staying put right here.”

So he had raped Sammie.

“I’m going back to kill that son-of-a-bitch!” I cursed.

“Stop! We’re going nowhere with this arguing. It’s close to dinnertime. Let’s eat, calm down, and put our heads together. There must be a way to solve the problem,” Charles exclaimed. And saved Bernie’s worthless ass for awhile.

 

Darkness fell as we sat at the kitchen table throwing out mostly useless ideas, all of which Charles and Denise nixed. Munster kept extolling the virtues of his low-tech plan; a plane loaded with bombs. Cynthia kept smacking him. Sammie was serious about going back to that hellhole I’d rescued her from and “convincing” Bernie—if he was still alive—to make a midnight raid on the curtain to see if he could survive that. I was all for that very last part, but Charles immediately put his arm around her shoulder and kissed her forehead.

“Not going to happen, hon. Jude is right. You’re staying here.”

“What about the tower?” Peter asked out of the blue.

“What about it?” Charles said.

“It’s a gift, right? I mean they said it was. True, it’s a dangerous one, but…well, what’s inside it, and how do we get it to open?

“They told you…how did they put it? It would reveal itself when the time was right. Isn’t that what they communicated to you, Charles?”

“Not in those exact words, but yes.”

“What better time than now? Amelia, is