Closer To Heaven, Patrick Sean Lee [best sales books of all time .txt] 📗

had helped me to my feet. That person whose face was the first I saw when I awoke in that bed. That person who was right behind me on the avenue. He was gone, but he had been with me only moments earlier.

“I continued on in that strange dream. It seemed to last forever, but the road ended eventually, and I found myself in a room. No, not a room as we know them. A vast enclosure of some kind, though. Walls that were not walls. They undulated…”

“What does undulated mean?” I had to ask Mr. Baxter.

“They rolled like waves, Amelia. Up and down; in and out. Grey, but with shadows that grew, and then fell as the waves coursed this way and that, with no discernible pattern. Imagine if you can the inside of your stomach when you’ve swallowed a piece of toast, or a banana! Something like that! It was a frightening place. Unlike home. Unlike any place I’d ever been. Foreign…or alien, as it were.

“From one end of the cavernous room one of them entered, although no doorway existed—at least that I could see. And then another, and another, and another. The clouds as you call them. Crinians, I learned not a great time later, and they were coming toward me. Oh, I had seen them before, although I’m certain they hadn’t seen me that day in my office at the university. Had I been able, I would have run, but then, where would I have run to? Into the undulating wall? Better that than… Anyway, I found I was unable to move my feet—OR my arms. I was pinned solid to the cold floor, and they were now nearly upon me.”

“I would have…” What would I have done, I wondered? I was able to run when I saw them in the church. When I turned and there they were, everywhere. “I would have cried!”

“You did, Amelia.”

“Huh?” I answered Mr. Baxter. “But I wasn’t even there.”

“You were, though I didn’t see you enter. Lashawna was with you. Just the two of you, and she was lying on her back. Her eyes were closed and she wasn’t moving, and you were kneeling beside her saying something over and over through your bursts of crying. Something about needles, tubes and…something. Of course this evening I learned what all that meant.

“I was certain I was about to die, or be dissected in some horrible way, and that the two of you were about to suffer a similar fate. One of them separated from its companions and swirled quickly in your direction, like mercury released onto the surface of a slide. I screamed, but no sound came out of my throat. And then the others were upon me, and so I closed my eyes, waiting.

“What became of you I did not know after that moment. The only thing I recall is the rise of some sort of conversation among them—like singing in an odd way. A second later the veil consumed me. I suppose that is the right word—a feeling that I can only describe as oblivion.

“I awoke some time later. How many days had passed? I have no way of knowing. Perhaps only minutes had passed. It was morning. I was lying in the bed where I had fallen asleep, or passed out from malnutrition. I awoke, and I knew instinctively what was required of me. Concerning all of you. Concerning the pockets of survivors strewn about like scattered leaves across our country. I knew that without my help your futures—your very lives—would be in jeopardy. What I did not know was where exactly you were. Unfortunately, neither did Francis.”

Munster jumped to his feet. “Bax, I wish you’d quit-callin’-me-that! I’m Munster, not some dumb girl. How many times I gotta’ tell ya’ that?”

“I’m sorry, Francis. I suppose the name Munster is okay, but in the low German it means monster, and it brings images to mind of a family of misfit ghouls. Those who teased you about the noble name you were given at birth are gone, now. There is a saint whose name was Francis. He is beloved…he was beloved by people the world over, of every faith or non-faith.”

Munster wadded up the empty cracker wrapper. He tossed it off to the side, and then began to leave the room.

“I’m gonna get more crackers. I’m sick of crackers. I want…” And the rest of what he said got lost to me.

“Crackers brings up something very important to us—and it is us, now. We are our family. We must begin to feed ourselves nourishing foods. Fresh vegetables, not canned, although in the short term they will suffice. Vegetables grown in the soil we cultivate. Someday the stocks of canned goods will begin to spoil like everything else, but we will not wait that long. The river is nearby, and in time the water in it will be potable…”

“What’s that?” I asked Mr. Baxter.

“It means drinkable,” Jerrick said.

“I’m not drinkin’ that piss,” Munster said from the kitchen. I put my hand over my mouth and giggled! “My ol’ man said the Santa Ana River’s a sewer!”

“Nature has a way of cleansing itself, Francis. You will drink it someday. Trust me.”

“Your language is terrible!” Lashawna shouted at Munster.

“Who gives a good crap?” he said. “There ain’t nobody but us here to hear it. ‘Sides, what’s wrong with piss? Miss Holy Girl. You and Amelia sittin’ there…” Munster’s voice got all mumbly, and what he said made me wonder if he was angry because neither of us cussed like he always did.

“Language, as well,” Mr. Baxter said. “Aside from Jerrick, who seems to have lived in books—and his spoken words show it—you girls, along with Francis the uncouth, will need to be instructed in the basics. Where you left off when the catastrophe happened. You will have children someday, and they will need your help, not only with fundamental survival skills, but with skills that give living a higher purpose. You will need to be educated. We will not sink into savagery. With what we have at our disposal, we will make our new world more beautiful than the one we lost. And I will help you achieve that before I die. That is the trust given to me when I lay unconscious in their spacecraft.”

“All I need is video games and some electricity to run the Xbox or Wii,” Munster yelled.

“All you need is an education, Francis, and you shall have it.”

I liked that. Kind of. Mr. Baxter reminded me of our school principle. Mr. Laird was tall, with a little pot belly, like Mr. Baxter had. He had a moustache, though, and Mr. Baxter didn’t. He used to always say, “And you shall this,” and “You shall that.”

Munster was banging around in our kitchen, and I just sat there waiting for Mr. Baxter to tell us more about what happened to him after he threw up and then had his dream, which he’d said Lashawna and me were in, but we weren’t really there. That’s when Munster’s locked bedroom came to me.

“Mr. Baxter?”

“Yes?” he said.

“You locked Munster’s other bedroom upstairs and wouldn’t let him go in. Why did you do that? What’s in that room?”

Mr. Baxter smiled at me before he answered.

“I don’t know precisely, Amelia. She came to me a day or two after I awakened, no longer so sick that I wanted to die. The same lady, as you call her, who probably visited you. The same lady who you thought was chasing you when you ran into Francis’ kitchen. She is one of those who took pity on us and endeavored to help correct the mistake her people had made—and who were getting ready to leave. She bore a gift for us. Something she commanded me, though, not to open or tamper with until the sun had risen and set 3,623 times. That’s ten years, Amelia! I asked her what it might be, but she repeated merely what she’d just said, adding that it should be kept locked up safely.”

“It’s a bomb!” Munster said. He was coming back into the bedroom with a box of Cracker Jacks he’d found in the pantry, and he laughed. Then he sat back down between Lashawna and me, almost in my lap!

“What does the present look like?” Lashawna asked. “I mean its wrapper. Does it have a bow?” She poked Munster in the ribs. “Or does it tick?”

Munster didn’t laugh this time because he was busy stuffing Cracker Jacks in his mouth. But I knew he wasn’t mad anymore because he was smiling big, chewing on the Cracker Jacks, and his teeth showed through his big smile.

“It’s about the size of an old mainframe computer, Lashawna. It is very heavy—I pondered trying to scoot it across the floor in the bedroom after they whisked it upstairs one afternoon when Francis had left in his hideously colored car, but I was instructed not to touch it, nor allow anyone else to touch it.”

“He likes my car,” Munster said with his mouth half-full of Cracker Jacks. He was smiling again, and his teeth showed again.

“There is no wrapping on it. No bows, either. It isn’t metal, but its surface is hard from the looks of it, the same as steel. It is ebony-colored, and shines like a polished granite countertop. As far as I could tell, it has no door. No lock itself. It simply looks like a tall, narrow black box. I haven’t a clue what’s inside it, nor why I was told not to open it for so many risings and settings of our sun.”

“Do you have the key?” I asked him.

“There is no key, honey.”

“Then how would you open it? And if it can’t be opened, why did you lock the door? How will we get into it after ten whole years? The present, I mean. Why did they put it upstairs, too? They could have left it in Munster’s living room! Or out on the front porch!”

Mr. Baxter laughed because I’d been talking so fast.

“That’s a lot of questions, Amelia dear. But, I don’t know. Perhaps the lady reasoned that were it left anywhere else, you-know-who would eventually disobey me and tamper with it. Perhaps one of you in a moment of curiosity.”

“She shoulda’ stuck it in a bank vault, then. I can get in that bedroom anytime I want. I could bust the door down with a sledgehammer, or climb up a ladder and bust the window, then go in. If I wanted. I think it’s a bomb, Bax. I won’t touch no bomb, so you can go ahead an’ unlock the door. I don’t give a sh...”

“Watch your language, Francis,” Mr. Baxter interrupted him before he finished saying that word.

“It is something precious—and it doesn’t tick, Francis—something that for the time being perhaps is of no use to us. I don’t know. In ten years time, though, we shall all find out. That is all I know.”

“Maybe it’s filled with McDonald’s Big Macs and fries! THAT would be cool,” Munster said.

“You are an idiot, Munster,” Lashawna said. “I think it’s a book telling us how to raise the dead,” she said dreamily.

I thought that was so nice, but it probably wasn’t either of those things. If it was a book about how to raise the dead, then she could have just given it to us, or else brought everyone back to life herself. It was something else. But what, I wondered?

“They haven’t left, Mr. Baxter,” I said. “When do you think they’ll go?”

“Yes, I know they’re still here. Some of them. Those who vowed to help us, anyway. I suspect they are…but I don’t know, dear. I just don’t know.”

“Can we talk to them? Maybe tomorrow?” I said.

“If they wish to talk. But let us get some rest, now. It must be getting late. I’m tired. You need your sleep, all of you. Munster and I will go back to his house, and then in the morning we