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

nausea welled up from deep inside me as I stood there. One thought, however, surfaced before I turned to leave. I would return. I would somehow care for this girl even if she never wanted to see me again. I’d bring Charles—so decent and kind and fatherly, unlike the bastard holding his side a few feet away. I’d bring Cynthia. I wouldn’t let Kayla go through this alone. Maybe…maybe she’d finally come to her senses before giving birth, and see her sister for what she really was. Maybe in the presence of actual humanity she’d listen to reason.

I turned and left her there with Celia and Bernie. 

We Were Staying In Paris

 

The driver side door was open, Sammie and Jude piled atop the mountain of supplies Peter and I had jammed onto the rear bench seats. I could hear Sammie’s voice announcing my return, and Jude’s curt reply.

“You think I’m blind, stupid?”

“No…I just…”

Peter sat unresponsive to their little exchange in the passenger seat, his hands folded in his lap, watching me walk down the steps and onto the street with the pistol in my right hand. I reached the truck and swung myself into the driver’s seat, tossing the gun onto the floorboard beneath my feet.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, Munster’s gun had scared me to death. I’d accidentally blown the glove compartment to pieces in the old Flamecar. Lost it entirely and thrown it down in a screaming burst after hearing the bang and seeing the glove compartment explode. After the incident in San Diego, I’d gone to dear crazy Munster and asked him to show me how to use it. He had been delighted at my request, although how and when he’d become such a crack shot I had no way of knowing. Whatever, he could hit a can at sixty or seventy feet away, and after wasting a hundred clips of ammunition, I mastered the art of…killing. Should I have to again.

The world was dangerous these days. There were monsters still alive.

“What did you forget?” Sammie asked in her innocent young voice.

“Nothing, Sammie. Nothing important,” I lied.

“I don’t think I can drive. Sorry,” Peter said after I’d gotten in and reached for the seat belt.

“I know. Peter…you know I love you, right?”

“Of course. Why do you say that?”

“I just want to make sure you know it. I’m going to take care of you…” My thoughts whirled back to Celia and Bernie and Kayla. I’m not leaving her, Kayla had said. At her own peril she had refused to abandon probably the only person left alive that she truly loved. Beside me sat one of the person that I truly loved, and of them, the one I loved the most—far beyond familial affection.

“I feel a little woozy is all, and my head aches monstrous. You’re okay to drive, right?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Try to rest, my love. I’ll have us home in no time.”

So much for the Lashawna-mate mission. So much for searching for Daddy. At least for now.

 

I drove quickly, dodging the carcasses and wrecked or abandoned cars and trucks with their long-dead bodies still inside, listening to Sammie’s ughs and yucks as we passed by each. So young, so much like Mari before she touched the black tower on the front lawn. I wondered about Sammie’s condition. How old had she said she was? Had she even mentioned it? Jude. I feared…well, what must be would be. She would soon join a real family, whatever state she was in.

Peter sat unspeaking beside me, staring rather blankly through the windshield at the winding road ahead. I wanted to drive faster; get him home where we could address his head wound with the serious attention I was unable to provide at that moment. Certainly he had suffered a concussion, but beyond that…Charles or Jerrick would know.

“How far is it?” Sammie asked in one of her many and endless series of questions and observations when I rounded the final turn in the highway.

“Just ahead,” I answered. “If you look out the window next to Jude you can see the roof in a second.”

She climbed over Jude’s lap and pressed her face and palms onto the side window.

“Get off me, you twit!”

“Oh-shut-up,” Sammie said. The rustling continued for a few more seconds until I could see the gate leading in. “Look! There it is, Jude!”

The little spat was short-lived. Jude shoved Sammie off her into the back of Peter’s seat with a grunt, and then she snapped her head sideways and looked out over the trees as I approached the long drive into our farm home.

“Wow…”

I had to stop to open the gate once I’d turned in, the grand old home “remodeled” by the new owners visible more plainly ahead. Sammie oohed and ahhed, bouncing up and down half-atop Jude.

“It’s monster!” she shouted.

I had to laugh. The Flamecar after all these months still hung half into the ditch on the left where we’d abandoned it the first night of our arrival.

It’s Munster.

The sound of the gravel beneath the tires was welcoming, so inviting; the stretch of the long porch with the swing at the end of it. The porch rail the men of our family had painted back in June one sunny, warm day. The low, faraway hum of the generator they’d brought home and connected to the house wiring.

The black tower thirty feet from the house that the invaders had left that had forever changed Mari; that stood ominously watching our entry.

“What’s that?” Jude asked as I turned along the circular end of the drive beneath the porch steps. I cut the engine and peered over at it.

“That is their “gift” to us.” I turned to face the two girls behind me. “And I warn you, don’t get near it, and most important, never touch it. Do you understand?”

“Who’s they?” Sammie asked.

“The invaders. The aliens both of you must have seen. The things that killed all our friends and loved ones.”

“Oh God…them!” Sammie blurted.

“Why can’t we get near it?” Jude inquired. “If it’s a gift…”

“I’ll explain everything later—after you two meet your new family, and then get settled in.”

Sammie threw the door open and jumped out. “It’s really cool!”

Munster was the first out of the house. He stood immobile on the porch deck, one hand on the door for a few seconds, then turned and shouted something inside. Jude and I got out, but Peter remained seated, his hands resting on his knees.

“What the hell?” he shouted, leaping down the steps. Cynthia was next out, followed immediately by Lashawna, and then the rest of my befuddled family. Munster skidded to a stop a few feet in front of me, peering inquisitively over my shoulder at Sammie, then across the truck to Jude. He seemed not to notice Peter locked in his seat.

“What’s this? I thought you and Peter…” He finally noticed his once-nemesis. “What happened? What’s wrong with Peter?”

“It’s a long story. Help me get him inside.”

“Kayla hit him with a bat!” Sammie explained.

“What?”

Cynthia was at the passenger door before the word of exclamation left Munster’s lips. She yanked it open, and Peter slowly turned his face to her.

“Hi sis.”

“Oh God, what happened to you?” she asked rhetorically, on the verge of tears.

He raised a hand to the back of his head and smiled weakly at her. “Just a bonk…a little drowsy…”

“Oh sweet Jesus!”

Charles and Denise arrived right on Cynthia’s heels, ignoring Jude and Sammie entirely for the time being as they edged alongside Cynthia, querying Peter with short questions he was in no condition to reply to.

“Into the house,” Charles announced. Cynthia gently helped her brother out of the truck, swinging one of his arms over her shoulder, with Denise immediately at the other. Their steps forward were tentative, but steady and measured, Peter shuffling along with his head drooping, under their guidance.

Charles followed for a second or two, but then turned and rushed back to my side.

“Explain.”

I glanced at Sammie who ignored the little play of drama around her. She stared at the tower, beginning to shuffle her feet, certainly asking herself what possible danger it possessed that would thwart her from approaching the imposing object brought from another world.

“Don’t,” I said firmly, and then returned to Charles. “We had a slight change of plans.

“This is Sammie, and that,” I said turning my head to Jude, who stood immobile on the far side of the truck, “that’s Jude. We found them…let’s go in, I’ll fill you in with all the details once we get Peter situated.”

Even though I was certain that…well, no I wasn’t at all certain…cautiously confident that the worst effect of the smash of the metal bat on Peter’s head was a concussion coupled with a world class headache, and a wound that someone would more than likely have to stitch closed, I was frightened more than I could admit. We…I…had two new charges standing by the truck, in any case, overwhelmed by events and this new home.

“Jude, let’s get you inside. Sammie, follow us, okay? You’re home. You’re safe.”

“Where on earth did you find them?” Charles asked as we approached the house and walked in. I glanced up at him and smiled under the circumstances.

“We were staying in Paris…”

Lashawn, Meet Jude

 

 

In the living room, I asked Sammie and Jude to stay with Charles and the others until I returned. Taking the steps two at a time, I caught Cynthia and Denise at end of the hallway as they maneuvered Peter into the bedroom. The bedroom of strange happenings and doom. This was where Mari lay for two weeks in her coma before returning in her weird new consciousness. Also the room, and beneath the blankets of the same bed, where Ash had died weeks later. A feeling of deep dread fell over me at the thought of Peter being placed there.

They took Peter in, laying him gently atop the cover despite my objections, turning his head sideways, exposing the blood-matted mess.

“You should have taken him into our room,” I said.

Cynthia turned to me with a look of fire in her eyes. “You shouldn’t have let whoever it was hit him! Damn you, Amelia! I thought you and Peter were going off on your half-baked high adventure to look…God, I can’t believe you sometimes…to look for a mate for Lashawna! A mate! Like she even needs one!”

I went silent after the attack. Had Peter and I not separated, he wouldn’t be lying in his condition in the bed that had consumed little Ash. We