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

but together we made it through the thin growth of prickly bushes, and then dove over the edge, rolling down the hillside until a tree halted our progress. I scrambled onto my hands and knees and peered back up. No movement. Dead silent except for the low, strange humming of the Aurora. Maybe they intended only to scare us away?

We watched.

 

Finally, a minute or two later, I began to cry.

I collapsed to the wonderful, glorious, beautiful earth and wept, overflowing with joy and relief, bombarded at the same time by thoughts of what had just happened, and what might easily have resulted because of…because of me.

I lay there emotionally exhausted and brooding. In a flash, Peter was there at my side. When I opened my eyes and wiped the tears away, I saw his smiling face, smudged with dirt, a mean-looking gash on his cheek. I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him over and over.

“Oh Peter, I’ll never, ever, ever do something like that again, I swear it!”

“Yes you will, Amelia. You just can’t help throwing yourself in danger. If you hadn’t gone through the wall, I would have…and maybe you wouldn’t have followed. You got us back. We’re safe. I hope.”

“I don’t see anything…anyone.”

“Shall we go back up? I want to find the markers you stuck in the ground, if they’re still there. It doesn’t look like that wall has moved, but they’ll tell us if we can find them.”

My first instinct told me to grab his hand and rush down the steep slope. Find the car if we could, if it still existed and wasn’t a rusted hulk. My eyes remained locked on the wall above us.

“Well?”

“All right. I don’t think they followed, unless they landed somewhere else.”

He led me by the hand, and we crept back up to the plain where we stopped. Peter squinted right while I looked to our left. He was right. The distance between the Aurora and the forest edge seemed about the same as it had been when we first saw it.

“Do you recognize anything?” I asked.

Without answering, Peter left my side and walked a little distance. He didn’t look toward the wall, rather to the line of trees and coarse shrubs and grasses beyond. He would stop suddenly, scrutinize the forest edge he’d just passed, and then set off again in search of some identifying landmark. When he'd gotten a hundred feet away from where I stood, he came to an abrupt halt once more, turning his head rapidly. He pointed.

"There!”

“What? What do you see?” I ran to his side, following the finger he pointed.

“That stump. See the gnarled portion just below the break? I remember noticing it when we walked by. Just for a second. We came up the rise right down there,” he said pointing ahead of where we stood. “Maybe a few hundred feet or so farther.”

“The sticks! How far away were they?”

“This wall hasn’t moved more than an inch,” he muttered. “I can tell without finding the sticks. The space between the wall and the edge of the plain is the same as I remember it. Either it isn’t creeping outward, or we really were gone for no more than minutes.”

“Or we were gone a lot longer than a few minutes, and Jerrick was lying,” I added.

“Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know…there they are!”

The two broken branches stood soldier-like fifty feet in the distance. Unless my eyes were playing tricks on me, the foot or so between the first and the wall remained. But that could mean we hadn’t been off getting the wits scared out of us on faraway worlds for very long, earth time, anyway, or that we had been away for some time, and the wall wasn’t moving like Jerrick said.

I bypassed the markers at a run, urging Peter to stay beside me.

“We have to get back to the farm. Pray that it’s still there.”

All Quiet On The Eastern Front

 

One thing was obvious to both of us; we’d climbed the mountain early in the morning. The sun was getting close to setting as we stumbled back down. More than just minutes had passed, but that wasn’t the worst of our concerns.

I saw them out of the corner of my eye. To the left and the right of us, white shadows deep in the woods flitting in and out of sight among the thick trees, moving down, pacing our flight. The creatures, dozens strong, followed, but they didn’t interrupt for whatever reason.

At last we dipped down into a shallow ravine running north and south, and then a second or two later we were over the rise, the black and white-striped barrier directly in front of us. The car sat serenely ten feet beyond, waiting for Peter and me. The moment I cleared the barrier and ripped the door open, I glanced back up the steep rise of rocks and trees and bushes. Peter jumped into the driver’s seat without a word, found the key dangling from the ignition and turned it.

An immediate soft roar as the engine came to life. Oh thank you, someone!

“Peter, they’ve stopped. They aren’t following us!”

“That’s comforting. Where the hell did they come from? I didn’t see any of them leaving the wall barrier up there.”

“I don’t know…but why didn’t they attack?”

“Beats me. Who cares right now anyway?”

He rammed the shift lever down a notch into reverse, and then gunned the engine.

“Wait! Stop, I’m going back.”

“You’re crazy, Amelia!”

“No, no. I’m going to find out what they’re up to. Maybe discover exactly what that Aurora is. Stop!”

He hit the brake. “Goddamit, Amelia, you just promised…”

“I know, I know.”

I was out the door in a flash, but walked tentatively back along the pavement toward the barrier. The creatures didn’t move at first. The moment I stepped around the barrier, however, one after another they slid away through the trees like ghosts.

What?

It seemed pointless to try following them. After standing there clueless for a moment, I turned and walked back to the Mercedes. Peter leaned across the console and pushed the door open wider.

“Let’s just get out of here,” he said. “See if the farm is still in the 21st century. Hurry up, get in!”

I glanced behind me one more time, then jumped in beside him. Of course I knew he was right. As usual.

The trip back seemed infinitely slower than when we came on the same route a few hours earlier. Or days or weeks—or God forbid, years. I couldn’t get it out of my head, that we’d maybe messed up space and time by leaping through the weird cloud. Still, the wall seemed not to have moved an inch. The dead cars and trucks on the freeway and along the highway south to the farm appeared no different than when we’d started. The dead bodies seemed no more disintegrated.

Nothing about our new existence would surprise me, however. We sped on.

“We should call them, Peter. Let them know…where’s the walkie-talkie?”

He looked at me sheepishly. “I think it got away from me when I jumped into barrier. Everything happened so fast.”

“Charles is probably fit to be tied.”

“If he’s still around,” Peter added.

 

We arrived at the gate a little later. It was shut, which hit me as normal, and so I left the car to unlatch it and push it inward. Not far up the drive, the Flamecar sat half in, and half out of the ditch. I couldn’t see the first floor over the low rise, but the top of the black tower was just the same as when we’d left.

The moment I pushed the gate open, Peter drove in, and then stopped for me. When I’d gotten in, he spun the tires, kicking gravel up, and a few seconds later we came screeching to a halt below the steps.

I heaved a giant sigh of relief. The front door opened just as Peter and I leapt out of the Mercedes, and, not surprisingly, Munster shot out with one of his pistols in his right hand, all smiling. Sammie and Cynthia were right on his heels, and then Charles, followed in a mad cattle rush by everyone else…even Bernie.

There was a cacophony of shouting and squealing as they jumped down the steps, but it was Munster’s comment that made me shiver.

“Goddam’ you guys! We did a memorial service for ya’! Jesus, where ya’ been?”

I glanced at Peter. I know he was thinking the same thing that I was. How long? What else had happened in our absence? Clearly, Bernie had mended. Someone had even trimmed his greasy hair and washed it.

Kayla. Her stomach. She looked as though she’d swallowed a watermelon. She stayed on the porch, and she was smiling.

“Hi guys,” I said. “We made it home.”

“What in blazes happened?” Charles asked sternly when he arrived, pushing past Cynthia and Sammie. “It’s been weeks! Cyn and Munster found the car, but couldn’t find a trace of either of you.”

Question half answered. Weeks, but how many?

He held up Peter’s lost walkie-talkie. “We found this outside that damned cloud wall…whatever it is. What happened?”

Peter’s jaw dropped. It would take some getting used to to process all of this.

“How long, Charles? How long were we gone,” I asked.

“Three months! Good Lord, we thought you were dead, or worse.”

“Didja’ go inside that thing, Amelia?” Sammie asked. “What’s it like? Didja’ go in?” she repeated.

“Can we go into the house? I think I need to sit down for a minute. This is too weird,” I answered everyone’s spoken and unspoken questions.

We gathered in the living room, Peter sitting as close to me as my skin. Between the two of us we related as clearly as we could the events that over the course of only a few minutes we’d experienced. The important part of the story hit Charles and Cynthia and Denise especially hard.

“Not more than…what, Peter? An hour. No, much less, right? Minutes.”

“Yes, we went in, but we stayed wherever we’d been taken only long enough to freak out and backtrack. Couldn’t have been more than a minute or two.”

“And like I said, wherever it was, we were worlds apart. I landed in a desert.”

“I came rolling to a stop in like South America, or Europe.”

Charles glanced quickly at Denise questioningly, and then back to the two of us.

“That barrier,” I tried to explain, “isn’t what Jerrick told us it was. ALL those Auroras I saw when I was with him in the ship in orbit,” I said pointing up. “They use them somehow to travel around the galaxy, or the universe.”

“Wowwww…” Sammie.

“Why, I wonder?” Charles said. “I mean, we’ve all seen the mothership up there. You were in some sort of smaller craft with Jerrick. From the looks of that Aurora—if that’s what they use to get around the galaxy—not even the smaller ship could fit inside it, let alone that monster mothership. How did they get those things here?”

I looked at Peter, as if he could answer that puzzling question. He simply shook his head and shrugged.

“Jerrick knows,” Lashawna joined in.

“Or Jerrick knows only what they told him,” Peter said.

“Or for whatever reason or reasons, he knows everything and he lied,” I said.

Lashawna, of course, took offense to my little addition. “Jerrick would never lie! If he told