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

in front of her. The children moaned and began to stomp up the stairs, but they obeyed her command. She turned to Lashawna, who by then was near to tears. “Peter’s right. Let’s go. You can watch better from the front bedroom anyway.”

I left her and Cynthia; raced past the kids, and dashed down the long hall to the bedroom where Jack had stationed herself at the window. Looking out, I could see Jerrick moving up the gravel entry road, waving both hands forward and sideways ahead of himself, twenty or thirty paces along in the treacherous journey without the guidance of his sister. Peter had reached the front gate, busying himself trying to swing its iron body back to cover the road in. A few seconds later Lashawna burst in. She raced across the floor and pushed Jack out of the way so that she could see her brother when he stumbled and fell.

But, he didn’t.

At the gate, three-quarters shut and stuck, Peter was beside himself, turning sideways and back every other second. I know he wanted to abandon the sightless boy who could “hear” visions, whose senses were so different than ours. He might have been shouting at Jerrick, but from where we stood at the closed window, it was impossible to detect any sounds other than Lashawna’s groaning.

Jerrick continued on. Peter waited impatiently.

Suddenly out of nowhere, our worst nightmare. A shadow coursed across the house from above in the morning sunlight, moving slowly toward the main road, and when it reached the spot directly above Jerrick, it came to a stop.

Lashawna screamed. My heart fell to my feet when we peered upward and saw the thing that had created the shadow.

 

 

 

A Black Scourge Descends

 

It hovered. There was no sound other than all of us inside the bedroom screaming, but I couldn’t help but notice Jerrick’s head twist sideways to cock an ear straight up.

The next series of events seemed like scenes in a movie running in super-fast motion.

Munster appeared at the gate, squeezing through in a flash movement. He was looking up. So was Peter, frozen in shock. Jerrick was taking little steps sideways and backward. Forward again. I know he somehow knew what had come to a stop right above him. Munster shook off his dumbfounded confusion, leaving Peter, whose mouth had dropped in horror, to stand and stare. Just like that, though, Peter was off and running. Both of them, toward helpless Jerrick. Half a second passed, and then maybe the worst of the two evils appeared in this horror show.

They were above us—above Jerrick and the two boys running in his direction—and that’s when a man in khaki trousers made his entrance with great difficulty, but with equally great determination. When he managed to scrunch himself through the gate, I could see him start to wave his arms frantically, but I couldn’t make out what he was yelling at the three boys.

Munster glanced over his shoulder, and then somehow quickened his pace. Peter did the same.

It was Munster who reached Jerrick first, only breaking stride enough to grab Jerrick’s arm and yank him along beside him. Peter rushed to Jerrick’s other side and clamped onto the other arm. Lashawna screamed one last time, and then she was out the door, heading down the hall to help rescue her brother.

Jerrick, in the firm grip of Peter and Munster, ran. Strangely jerky steps, but he was forced to move his legs probably quicker than he’d ever done in his life.

The man in the khaki pants caught up to them, unhindered by the weight of anything—other than his fear of the horrible black craft, one of them, directly overhead this time, instead of far away over the downtown part of the city. It was huge—I gauged it to be as long as a city block, and half that length in height—with what I can only describe as appendages poking out at odd angles and sizes from its body. Also, it was solid, unlike even a dense cloud, but every second or two I was certain that I could see flashes of light erupting from deep inside.

As Lashawna came into view thirty feet in front of the steps below, I waited with my hands covering my mouth for a death ray to burst in a flash of light and incinerate all of them. Nothing happened. Just silence of a sort, until a few seconds later I could hear what sounded like an army breaking in down on the main floor. Garbled voices. Commands that were contradictory.

“Upstairs!”

“No! To the cellar!”

“I’ll shoot your ass, mister!”

“Don’t do it! Calm down, boy.”

Calm down? With a spaceship outside? Munster with his gun ready to shoot his last bullet into the man? A man! An adult who’d somehow discovered us, and who’d been on his way to kill us all!

“Cynthia! Get down here!”

I stayed put, terrified to leave the window and the vision of the ghastly alien craft outside. Cynthia had both children by their hands, moving like lightning to follow Peter’s command. My heart sank as I stood frozen, staring out at it. There were no running lights like those on invading alien ships in the movies. No windows, or seams on its underside where one would expect to see a ramp lower to the earth when it landed. No little gun nozzles. Just a big broiling mass hanging menacingly like a monstrous beached and bloated whale fifty feet off the ground.

More overlapping, confused comments outside the room. I couldn’t pry myself away from the window because I expected the spaceship to slowly lower itself to the gravel road, see a ramp come down…and then see hoards of hideous creatures swirl out and head for our once-safe house.

Shouting outside the bedroom. Cynthia came running back in. “Amelia, get away from there! We have to run!”

I couldn’t. That is, not until I saw the spaceship rise, slowly at first, then tip sideways as though it was banking into the wind, and suddenly streak northeast faster than one of the bullets leaving Munster’s gun.

“Oh my God…”

Cynthia was on me before it disappeared far up in the sky. She yanked me away from the window and dragged me out of the bedroom.

We were sunk!

Everyone but Cynthia and I were gathered at the foot of the staircase. Peter stood near Jack. Jack was trying to get the children to stop crying. Munster was five feet away from the adult, both hands outstretched, holding the gun at the guy’s chest.

“It’s gone!” I screamed. “It left!”

Cynthia and I reached the steps, jumping down them two at a time. Peter and everyone else except Munster looked up at us.

“They’ll be back. Count on it,” Peter snorted.

“DON’T move,” Munster said when the man started to lower his upraised arms.

“Please. Lower the weapon, young man. I’m on your side.” He emphasized his request by taking a step backward slowly—as though that would help him if Munster decided to pull the trigger—and pleadingly brought his upraised hands forward. The palms were blotted with blisters. Purplish-black. Painful to look at. I could only imagine how they must feel.

Munster didn’t flinch, nor did he answer the stranger standing there among us. Peter wheeled across the space separating himself and itchy-finger Munster. He shot his arm over Munster’s and spoke. “Wait. He doesn’t look like he has a weapon. Let him talk.

“Cynthia, go find some rope or wire. If what he says sounds like bull, we’ll tie him up, and then decide if we let Munster shoot him.” He looked hard at Munster.

“Yeah, s’okay by me,” Munster said.

“Start talking, mister, and it had better be good. Who the hell are you?”

Cynthia began to leave the living room, but hesitated the moment the stranger began to explain who he was and how he’d come to be among us. His hands might be blistered, but there was something about his face and voice that belied evil. No cunning in his deep-set eyes that could be masked with a smile like that of the man back at the rectory. In fact a visible well of sadness dwelt in them. His mouth was broad, and his lips that moved slowly were chapped, as though whoever he was, he’d just staggered out of a desert. A softness in his speech, and a choice of words that even at my young age told me he was educated.

“I escaped their grasp,” he began.

Mr. Charles Baxter

“Yeah, yeah, you escaped. Sure. What’s your name for the second time?”

“My name is Charles Schultz Baxter. Please don’t laugh.”

At what? Until he explained his mother’s devotion to a comic strip creator I’d barely ever heard of, there was no humor regarding a name he’d been stuck with. My middle name is Bronte. No doubt my mother loved Wuthering Heights. Not my fault.

I watched the man, and I listened, my eyes bouncing back and forth from him to Peter to Munster. As the guy spoke, Munster slowly lowered his gun. Peter, on the other hand—his eyes remained narrowed. I don’t think he bought the story, not entirely, anyway.

“I am a teacher…or I was at least. Monroe Middle School back in Marysville. Eighth Grade.” His eyes clouded over suddenly, and he stumbled to a halt momentarily.

“They’re all gone. Fifty innocent children, about your ages,” he said glancing at me, and then Cynthia.

“I was in high school before all this hell broke loose,” Cynthia informed him. Mr. Baxter forced a weak, apologetic smile.

“Forgive me. You don’t strike me as being quite old enough.”

That was true, thinking back to those first days with her. Still, from my perspective, anyone in a grade higher than mine seemed to be so mature. So older. She was a few inches taller than me, but she’d cut her auburn hair short, which, along with her small nose and carefree blue eyes made her look much younger.

“Well, I am.”

“What are your names?” he said leaving the narrative. Peter glared at him.

“I asked you who you are,” he snapped. He stepped closer to Mr. Baxter and put a finger on his chest. “No questions, got it?

“Munster,” he said taking a sideways step, “if he makes a move, blast him.”

Munster shot Peter a confused look, but he didn’t raise the gun he held.

“Oh no!” Jack cried out, raising her hands to cover her eyes. Ash and Mari standing beside her whimpered, and Mari hid her face in Jack’s side.

“Don’t do it,” Jerrick said calmly, coming to life. “He isn’t one of them. He’s scared, just like we are.”

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