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

Arriving back at Holly Street, our starting point, but too far south to see the truck, I stopped and pulled the walkie-talkie from my backpack. High above, the sudden cackling-caw of a crow leaving the branches of the towering Eucalyptus nearby startled me. I caught sight of it heading west, flapping with its noisy call, and once again I wondered, Why birds, but no other animals, save the disgusting rats? None of our group, not even Jerrick with his analytical mind, had been able to come up with an explanation for the seeming anomaly. For a second or two I watched it flap and glide away to join its companions somewhere.

Back to business. “Peter? You there?” I spoke into the walkie-talkie, expecting an answer within a few seconds. I glanced around, waiting.

Daddy, I would have picked this house with its awesome pool and patio, I thought, grinning, flashing my eyes to the home on the corner near to where I stood. Maybe not. Too close to the noisy street. Yeah, right.

“Peter, pick up. I’m heading back to the truck.”

I waited, but wherever he was, he was probably…too busy? Dead battery. No, we’d checked them before we left the farm. Turned off?

Peter, you idiot!

But no again. He’d been paranoid about separating in our search. Come to think about it, it surprised me that he hadn’t tried to contact me blocks back. His phone was on I was certain. Maybe he’d found something interesting, and had laid his backpack aside when he went to investigate?

I called one more time, quickening my pace north in the direction of the truck.

Long minutes passed, the only sound the soft tapping of my footsteps on the concrete walk. Finally our truck came into view. The keys inside dangled from the ignition switch, the doors were closed. Everything normal in appearance, just the way we’d left it. I left the truck standing there, and turned north, wondering where Peter was by now, and what he’d found that made him…had he abandoned his backpack outside one of the homes and gone in, shotgun raised and at the ready? Which street was he on?

Running east to west, the blocks were long. Wide side yards separated one property from the next, many with tall, thick hedges of shrubbery running front to rear, now beginning to show unkempt and burned out foliage for lack of irrigation or rain this late in the season. He could be anywhere, on any of these streets. Inside one of the homes—in a basement, his backpack dropped on one of the front porches.

We should have stayed together.

Happy ending—Peter galloping down the street, adjusting the straps of his pack, an apologetic look smeared on his face.

Sorry, I should have answered your call, but I…

Of course that little scenario didn’t become reality. I galloped up the first street to the center of the block, raised the crumpling makeshift bullhorn and shouted his name.

The next block. Same routine, same silence after I called. Another block. Two more, the last of which I covered the entire distance of the block to the western end, turned and raced north to Jasmine Avenue in order to head back east toward Holly again. I tried the walkie-talkie in growing desperation.

“Peter, where are you? Pick up.”

Nothing.

Three quarters of the way down the street I saw it—his pack and…oh God, no…his gun lying in the gutter. A hundred different new scenarios flashed in my mind. He’d heard or seen something in the house nearest the abandoned pack and gun, and gone inside to investigate. Our world was all but empty, why not leave his protection in a gutter? Not like Peter to do something like that. Images of the five men on the drive back at the farm, and Mari’s dispatching of them. Mari, gone totally insane after she left us, holed up here? Surprising Peter and blasting him in a billion atoms into eternity? But she hadn’t been insane! A gang of surviving adults…or even kids. They saw the shotgun, sneaked up behind him. Some other un-thought of, but innocent answer to the mystery.

I darted to the hedge between the houses there and tried to think. Peering out, I looked to the gun and pack in the gutter once again. The pack lay on its face, but the shotgun was a few feet away, pointing across the street. Had Peter left them there…I saw in my mind how he’d heard the noise, carefully un-shouldered the pack, and bending down, placed the weapon just as carefully onto the surface of the pack. Kids, frightened by his sudden appearance, and especially by the deadly weapon in his hands.

But the gun was lying a few feet away from the pack, as though it had been knocked from his grasp, not carefully laid down.

He was in trouble, or worse. Which house had the person or persons dragged him into after they knocked him out? That one, beyond the hedge. Decision time. Enter from the front, or the rear? I decided to pad quietly to the rear of the house I stood closest to, along the overgrown shrubbery to the alley, and then into the house next door where he most likely was—alive, I prayed—and go from there. No point in burdening myself with my backpack. I laid it and the useless bullhorn aside, checked the clip of the pistol—full—and set off.

The family that once resided here must have lived like royalty. A three car garage at the alley. A pool house twenty feet away just inside the stone wall. Lounge chairs and an elegant table with expensive dinnerware resting beneath a heavy canvas covered cabana, drapes of the same fine cloth tied at the center of the four corner posts. All of it probably exactly the same as it had been back on that horrible day last December, except for the rainy beatings the cover had obviously taken over the long winter months behind us. Now it would be the scorching sun that in time would turn it to discolored rags.

A kidney-shaped pool midway into the yard ten feet away, splotted with rotting branches and leaves, and beyond that the covered patio with French doors dead center of the house wall. An overturned plant stand with the withered remnants of the plant a couple of feet away lay on its side. Its matching twin on the left side of the doors, still upright, undisturbed, holding the dead plant securely.

The doors stood ajar.

I saw no activity, and so I whisked to another addition the owners had lavished the broad yard with once upon their time here—an outdoor cooking center several feet to my right. I crouched behind the end of it and was about to survey the house more. Another small shock. The remains of four of the former occupants lay stacked haphazardly atop one another behind the cooking island. The endless death postures! You get used to seeing them, but then again you can’t.

Think quickly, put it all together…someone or ones had entered the house sometime in the past, either murdered, or more likely found the family keeled over dead inside, and hauled them away to a spot where the stench of the bodies would be less severe. But who had done it? Were they still inside? My guess was, yes. As good a place as any to plant your flag. And poor Peter had wandered into their territory.

I watched the house a bit longer, my eyes darting every which way. Windows on the second floor covered. Not a sign of movement anywhere. It was time to find my other half, if he was inside. I raised the pistol and crept around the pool to the slightly-open door, and then took a deep breath and went in.

Another kitchen, much larger than our comfortable kitchen back home, much more finely appointed, too, with chrome-faced appliances on either side of a massive stone-covered island. Cabinetry that surely was constructed by master craftsmen. Many of the ornate doors were hanging open, one of them drooping outward and down off one hinge. What must have been a family room off to my left. Two upholstered, but stained chairs with a small table and lamp between them. A wrap around sofa, a large coffee table with empty tins and water bottles covering it. A massive fireplace and huge flat screen TV on the far wall. Articles of clothing and towels thrown over the backs of the furniture.

Surely not littered and in the condition it was by the previous owners, I thought. Surely occupied by survivors by the looks of it.

I stood apprehensively for a moment, looking at everything, especially the hallway separating the two rooms, and within seconds, what I’d been waiting for…a voice rose, and it was quickly answered by another. A third chimed in.

Children! Somewhere farther into the house, closer to the front. I crept forward, raising the gun, and made my way into the long hallway. I stopped immediately when a fourth voice broke into the conversation—that of an adult.

“There’s no point in keepin’ him around,” the man said. “Did you bring his things in like I told you, Kayla?”

“Nah, forgot I guess.”

“Well, go get ‘em! There might be somethin’ in the backpack we can use…and get that gun!

“He awake yet, Jude?”

“He was groaning pretty bad. Barely moving. I think Kayla hit him too hard,” a young girl’s voice responded.

There followed the shuffling of feet, and the front door opening with a low squeak. I rushed forward, holding the pistol straight ahead of me with both hands.

“Stay right where you are!”

Teenagers! All of them. The one at the door couldn’t have been much older than Lashawna. All of them were dressed in clothes that, although newer-looking, were ripped, and hung badly, as if they’d closed their eyes when they selected them, and they were filthy dirty. Each stopped in their tracks the instant I entered, turning their heads in shock. The oldest—a girl maybe a year or two older than me—shot me an evil look before plunging into the side of the lone adult for protection. He was little taller than her, fat, with a bald head, beady eyes, and a nose that was long and crooked. No doubt at all, he’d been on the losing end of more than a few brawls, it struck me. The clothes he wore were just as filthy, if not as ill-fitting, as the others’ he’d surrounded himself with. At his neck, rising from the collar of his shirt, a red and black tattoo was plainly visible. He raised his hands when he saw the pistol I held pointed at him.

“You at the door. Close it and get back in here. Now!”

The rest of them stared blankly at me, but the man took one step forward and started to speak.

“Stay where you are. Where’s Peter?” I said to him.

“Peter? I don’t know who you’re talkin’ about…”

“Yes you do. The one that was on the street outside. The one you snuck up on and….he’d better not be hurt badly, or I swear I’ll shoot you right between the eyes.”

“He’s okay,” the girl beside him scowled. “We didn’t know who he was or what he wanted.