Dreams of Shadows - Patrick Sean Lee (ebook reader browser .TXT) 📗

A small boy is playing down by the creek that runs through Marysville. I can see his body between the trees and bushes in intermittent flashes each time he rises like a little pop-up toy and moves farther down the stream. Something in the water has grabbed his interest, because he remains rooted to the path alongside the rushing water for only a second or two, and then he’s off again. His hair is red, and with every movement wildish strands become silver-gold in the morning sunlight dancing off it. He’s carrying a stick in his right hand, and he jabs it into the water each time he stops.

I don’t know him, although I should. I’ve met every living soul in Marysville. Many of the dead, too, before we buried them. Those we knew intimately—our fathers and mothers and friends, long ago given back to the rich, black comfort of the earth. Those we didn’t know who lay for months and months rotting because there were so many that we finally gave up trying…

I am no longer saddened by those thousands of other souls I never had the opportunity to meet. They’re just gone.

The boy stops again and jabs the stick out as far as he can stretch. He pulls it back in a whisking motion, and then reaches out again. Whatever it is that interests him so much must be just beyond his reach. But, he’s persistent, as children can be.

I’m worried that he’ll fall into the water, running high in this month of April, fed by tiny streams far away in the Santa Ana Mountains to the east. It was a wet winter. On the highest peaks there are pockets of snow still visible. I lower the basket I carry onto the path and begin to move quietly in his direction. I don’t want to startle him.

If only I were one of them…if I were, I’d simply whoosh as silently as the wind to his side, and there I’d protect him with my arms of smoky substance. Perhaps I’d ease the object of his interest closer to the bank.

Perhaps I’d simply let him fall and be taken away in the rush of water.

Even after all these years we still don’t know precisely who they are, or why they came and did what they did. Only that many still remain. They watch. That is all we know for certain.

I’ve lost sight of the little red-haired boy, but I hear the splash. Now I am running as fast as I can. He was born only days before the calamity struck, I'm positive, judging from his size, and if they won’t help him, I must. He is innocent after all. Surely they must know this, but this morning they are nowhere to be seen.

Maybe they don’t care. Maybe they never did. They just wanted us gone, but we refused to leave.

December 23rd, 2017

Jason had just left that afternoon. We’d been watching TV together in my bedroom. Looking back, I find it so ironic. Aftermath, a series about a bunch of teenage kids who somehow survive a worldwide catastrophe. It was kind of lame, but I liked the lead character—a girl about my age. Mom was in the kitchen. She didn’t care, or at least she never worried about Jason being in the bedroom alone with me. He was openly gay, you see, and add to that the fact that he attended church with his mom and dad and little sister every Sunday…well, she trusted him. Daddy was a little more suspicious. I remember a year earlier when Jason first started coming over. Daddy showed him his gun collection, of all things. Jas and I laughed about it later.

It was raining. Jason had been sitting on the floor at the end of my bed, right below the TV on my dresser. He got bored watching Phoebe fight off a pack of zombies, I guess, and so he finally stood up and left. I’d been texting back and forth with Anna Merovich, my best friend at Marysville High, lying on my stomach on the bed, just over Jason’s head all the while. I set Anna aside on the cover, and followed him out of the room.

“Later dude,” Jason said as he pulled the front door inward. He started cussing right away. He hadn’t thought about bringing an umbrella, even a jacket. I watched him jump off the porch into the rain, and through the downpour until I lost sight of him three doors up the street. Mom walked out of the kitchen holding a spatula in her right hand right then. I guess she’d heard him cuss.

“He’ll be soaked crazy by the time he gets home. And half-frozen,” she said kind of indifferently. Well, yeah. It’s December, Mom.

“Does his mother cook?” she asked. But before I even processed the dumb question, she’d turned and gone back into the kitchen.

How should I know?

My mother was a cooking freak. I could smell some weird new cookie concoction she’d been busy with all afternoon. Two days before Christmas. There must have been a hundred plastic containers and gay-looking tins piled up all over the place. Platters of them sitting everywhere. Gifts for all the neighbors. Gifts for relatives and teachers and the mailman. Christmas crap to make me gain weight, but I wasn’t going to fall for that. Not me.

She turned and went back to her business after I laughed and shook my head.

“He’ll survive,” I shouted after her.

But he wouldn’t for very much longer. Nor would she.

I walked back into my bedroom and grabbed my phone, and then wandered back out to the living room, debating which to turn on first; the Christmas lights, or the big flat screen Daddy had bought last month. The TV was easier. I clicked the remote, and then plopped onto the couch and resumed texting Anna.

hey what’s up? sorry jason was here.

I waited for her to text me back, curled my legs up on the couch. Grabbed the remote again and changed the channel to find something other than news. Out in the kitchen, Mom was humming a Christmas song. I checked to see if Anna had replied. It was 4:39, and Daddy would come rolling into the garage by 5:00. Like punctually at 5:00. He was an accountant, and lived the religious life of “everything in proper order.” Every “i” dotted, every second accounted for. The last really clear thing I remember thinking was that Mom had better be cooking dinner instead of cookies, and it had better be on the table by exactly 5:15. If it wasn’t…

The intense burst of light shocked me. I mean really intense, like a million flashbulbs had popped all at the same time, right outside the window across the room. But there wasn’t an explosion, even a sound, except for the spatula Mom had had in her hand hitting the floor, and then a clump when her body followed.

The TV went black. The lights in the room didn’t even crackle, they just poofed off. I sat there blinking for a second or two.

Mom?

I got up, threw the phone aside, and raced into the kitchen. I freaked! She lay on her back with one leg bent awkwardly sideways, and her arms spread out as though she’d tried to break her fall. The spatula was a few inches away from her right hand, and the oven door was open.

“Mom!”

She didn’t move. I ran across to her and hit my knees.

"Mom?” I shook her, but there was no response. I put an ear to her chest, and then my hand. Nothing. Nothing.

“Oh God, let her be alive. Let her just be in a coma or...” But people in comas breathe a little, don’t they? Their hearts still beat? I shook her some more, and then kissed her over and over, begging her to wake up. She didn’t. I stayed there beside her for several agonizing minutes, crying, losing it more and more with each second that ticked by.

It was already dark as a tomb outside. The rain kept banging on the roof, but my heart had stopped pounding so fiercely by then. I left her there and ran back into the living room. Daddy would be home soon. What time was it? I picked the phone up off the floor and looked at the screen. Black. I shook it stupidly, like that would wake it up, and then tried to reboot it. That didn’t work, and so I threw it aside again. The Christmas lights. I crawled behind the tree and jiggled the plug, pushed the button on the power strip over and over, and finally gave up.

I started to return to the kitchen, but my mind was throwing commands at me that were contradictory; worse than jangled. I tried the wall switches instead. Click, click, click. Useless.

I cursed, stumbling across the room to the mantle, found the candle lighter there and clicked it. The clock hanging above the polished surface said 4:39, the very same minute that the phone had said when I first threw it down. But I knew at least five minutes had passed.

Daddy, get home. Help me!

Whatever that light was, it had to have been the cause. I rushed to the front door and yanked it open. I didn’t know what to expect when I landed out on the porch. Would all of the houses up and down the street be incinerated? All the trees turned to blackened ghosts? But everything seemed so normal as I stood there looking right and left and up at the angry black-gray sky. One thing caught my eye, though. Not normal. At the end of the block, three houses down, an SUV sat all cock-eyed with the engine idling, its right front fender smashed into the Rainey’s Mazda at the curb. Why hadn’t I heard the collision?

I glanced back into our house, and then turned and leapt down the steps and headed through the rain to the SUV. I expected…what did I expect? To see some person inside, shaking his head? Like, What happened? He wasn’t moving. Whoever he was, he was leaning against the door, slumped forward against the steering wheel. I pulled the door open. He tilted slowly, and then fell out onto the street. I screamed and jumped up and down in horror when he hit. I left him there. Across the hood I could see the Rainey’s house. The windows were all black. The same at the Joslin’s next door. The Jackson’s. Our house. Every house on both sides of the street. Panic set in, because if they were all dead; if this guy lying on the street, and who’d been driving peacefully along, was dead, what might have happened to Daddy?

No, no, no. Whatever happened, it happened only on our block, or at the very worst, in our neighborhood.

Daddy never came home that night.