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

The Flamecar and Saint Andrew's

His face was buried in my hair, his mouth so close to my left ear that he could have bitten it if he'd wanted. I tasted wet grass, twisted my face sideways and tried to spit.

“What? What do you see!” I mumbled out of the corner of my mouth.

“Shut up. I dunno’ what it is…” He stopped and raised his head, looking through the open spaces between the branches for a second or two, and then plopped back down on me.

“Don’t say nuthin’. Crap. Don’t move. I don’t know what it is, but it ain’t human.”

I jerked and squirmed. “Get off me! What do you mean it isn’t human?” I whispered angrily. It wasn’t easy to force him off, because despite his size he was surprisingly strong. After another couple of seconds, though, he finally gave in and rolled off, then onto his knees beside me, sticking his head into the branches once more.

“Shh!”

I rolled over, got to my knees, and joined him there, pushing the rough branches wider apart. I stared silently for a second or two, and at first I didn’t see it—that is, until it moved. Three houses down, on the parking beside a tree, a gangly, iridescent shape twirled its upper torso slowly. It had been facing the street, but now it was facing us. It could have been a very tall human, in a way, except for the lack of skin or hair, and the fact that it was so emaciated looking. I saw no arms for a brief, few seconds. It might have been that its entire body melted so well into the thick brown background of the tree, nearly invisible again when it stopped moving, but finally a long appendage that hung nearly to the grass broke the air, and raised itself. A lone, spiky finger unfurled from its end, and came to rest on the top-center of its featureless face, as if the creature was a scholar, concentrating on some lofty thought. There it remained, unmoving.

Munster reacted by yanking his head free of the brush and spinning onto his rear, his hands slamming onto the ground on either side of him. I knew without asking that he was thinking the same thing I was—how to escape.

I kept one eye on it, trembling, waiting for the thing to step away from its anchor of the tree and set off in our direction, the other on Munster sitting there with his eyes wide open, staring blankly at Anna’s house ten yards away. Just when I was ready to bolt, he bounded forward onto hands and knees, and pointed to the walkway leading to the rear of Anna’s property. The thick hedge our heads had been in extended unbroken all the way back; our only avenue of escape.

I took one last look through the branches at the creature, and then followed my new friend as quietly and quickly as I could.

Three-quarters of the way down the sopping wet sidewalk, Munster rose to his feet and made a mad dash through the puddles of water toward the fence at the alley. I cringed and cursed him underbreath for being so stupid. Unless the creature out front was blind as a bat, and deaf as a box, it had to have seen him, or in the very least, heard him. I had no choice, and I didn’t look back when I got to my feet and ran noisily after him.

He hit the fence at a dead run, and catapulted over it. He turned with a fluid movement when he landed, and motioned excitedly for me to run faster. I wasn’t as adept at the steeple chase routine as he was. It took me two tries to scale the waist-high rail. I made it, at last, ripping a massive hole in the jeans I’d only worn twice in the process. I landed on my back with a bone-jarring clunk.

Munster was whispering louder, now, urging me in a panic to get to my feet, all the while scanning the open space of the walkway behind us.

“Goddamit, hurry it up!” He grabbed the collar of my T and jerked.

“All right! I’m coming! Where is it?”

“No idea. It ain’t here yet, though. Jesus, it’s ugly.”

We scooted along the fence in the direction of Ashton. The wrong way! It was down there somewhere on Pine. It couldn’t have helped noticing our noisy retreat—if it could hear. We needed to run in the opposite direction.

“Munster! That way,” I said pointing toward Laurel Avenue fifty or sixty yards away.

“No, no, no. You never run away from someone chasin’ ya’, you backtrack an' go toward it, once you shake it off your tail. Don’t you watch movies?”

He tugged me along, explaining in clipped sentences the theory of evading the law, or Harry Pendragon and his gang of bullies. I didn’t argue the point. I prayed that his plan would work, anyway.

“But what if there’s more of them down this way? What if they’d been watching me when I was on Ashton?”

“We’ll find out. I’m right, though. I know how cops and stuff think. Trust me.”

Stuff? Cops, maybe—Munster was probably a juvenile delinquent from way back—but the thing out there was definitely not a cop, chasing him down in his squad car. It landed in the category of “stuff”, however. That much was certain.

He ran, we both ran. Passing each of the houses I glanced between them, expecting to see it, and worse, expecting it to catch sight of us. The End. If it spotted us, with legs the length of a stop sign, it would be on us before we got ten more feet.

An ancient detached garage sat a few feet in from the alley at the last house. Munster darted to its corner, pressed himself against it, and then slowly poked his head around it. A few seconds passed. He turned quickly, surveyed the distance behind us, and then spoke.

“I don’t see nuthin’. Maybe it didn’t see us back there. Let’s get crackin’.”

“Hah! You can bet it heard you!”

“Shut up. How do you know it can even hear?”

I didn’t, like I said, and I hoped whatever it was, it was blind as well. Probably not, though. My heart sank.

We snuck along another fence bordering the property—a dilapidated wooden-staked barrier. At the end of it he halted once again and peered up Pine.

“Shit, I don’t see it.”

“What now?”

He clenched and unclenched his fingers.

“Follow me.” With that he slowly crept away, south down the sidewalk until he arrived at the gutter, at which point he rose up and flew off again as fast as he could run. He didn’t look back to see if I was following. I did follow him as fast as I could run, though not nearly as athletically as he. Maybe sometime before Harry and his boys started beating on him, Munster had been on the school track team. If not—highly likely—he should have been.

Juniper. Magnolia. Oak. Birch—my street. Neither of us slowed. Had I been leading the way, I would have turned right and gone up one of those avenues. On Ashton, we were in plain sight if the creature was following.

He went straight ahead, defying all good sense. Three more familiar streets whizzed by until Munster veered left and shot across Ashton. On the other side stood the Arco, its convenience store at the rear. I’d been to the store a hundred times before the world went to hell, but that morning...

Four rows of pumps. All but one of them had cars at each station. Each with a driver either splayed out on the pavement nearby, or else inside, quite dead, and uncaring about our intrusion through their graveyard. Munster was the first to the glass door leading into the store. A body lay half in, half out. He wrenched the door all the way open, and then stepped on the poor dead man’s back as he entered. Disgusting.

I couldn’t help but notice, as I carefully swung the door open again, and with great care stepped across the guy’s body, the flies crawling all over his downturned face. Whipping in and out of the unprotected areas where his purplish skin was visible. I flashed to Mom’s body back home. To Daddy’s somewhere out there, God only knew where.

I forced the heartbreaking thoughts out of my mind. Held onto the door for a moment, and looked back up Ashton. Oh no. No, no, no! What I saw made me stumble backward.

Far in the distance in the bright blue sky I saw scores of them. Not like the creature we’d seen on Pine. Infinitely bigger. Dark, though, these spinning shapes that were suddenly appearing. An army dropping down, spreading east and west, moving silently across Marysville. I was certain my eyes weren’t deceiving me when I saw the same types of creatures we’d seen earlier zipping out of each of them, descending gracefully until they lost themselves in the tops of the trees and downtown buildings farther in the distance, bolts of more blinding light coming from the dark tornados every second or two.

Oh-my-God! That’s what happened yesterday!

“Munster! Look! Hurry! Oh God, we’ve got to get out of here!”

He dashed back to my side and looked out, standing frozen for a second or two.

“Ho-ly SHIT!”

Grabbing hold of my hand, he jerked me over the body and headed toward the nearest island. He hesitated for only a heartbeat. On either side of the pump sat a car. One, a late model packed with dead bodies, the other the strangest, ugliest car I’d ever seen. Empty.

“This one. Get in!”

Against every instinct I skirted the front of the desecration. A smallish, bright red, open-front cowl sat atop the hood. I had no idea what purpose it served, if any. The hood itself, though, had been painted by some mad artist…probably the guy stuck in the glass doorway. He looked the type, flashing back to his spiked hair and strange clothes. A red and orange dragon’s head with angry, squinting eyes on either side of the littler hood cowl, covered the entire surface, ending above the grill painted as angry, pointed teeth. Red-orange flames, starting at the fender top, shot backward, clear past the rear door on the panels. I glanced in dismay across the car through the passenger window. Munster had jumped in and was furiously throwing empty beer bottles lying on the seat I was supposed to sit on into the back seat.

“Seriously?” I yelled in at him.

“Just get in!”

I hesitated before opening the door, and once again looked north. The black, swirling clouds moved silently, disgorging ever growing numbers of tiny shapes earthward. I had no choice but to jump in.

“You can drive?”

Munster had finished emptying the seat, dribbles of stale beer spotting the leather. His eyes barely cleared the top of the chrome chain steering wheel, and he had to stretch his stubby legs in order to reach the pedals.

“Kind of.”

We were sunk. "Kind of" meant no, or I stole a car once. Wrecked it.

He turned the ignition key the guy had casually left inserted in the ignition. There followed a seriously loud roar that I had no doubt awakened every dead body at the station…and probably alerted the things skirting around everywhere in the city.

Somehow he managed to stretch his right leg and depress the brake, and then he yanked the shift lever backward a notch. He stepped on the gas