Closer To Heaven - Patrick Sean Lee (rosie project .txt) 📗

sick, because he’s one of them! They want you to help him find us, and then they’ll all come and kill us! You, too!”

“You’re crazy, Amelia.”

“No I’m not.” I looked behind me, up the stairs. “What’s up there?”

“My bedroom, dummy. You’ve been there.”

“What else? There’s another bedroom across from yours. What’s in it, Munster?”

“I dunno’, just a bed and a dresser and stuff like always,” he said. “I can’t get in no more.”

“Why?”

“Bax locked it.”

“Why?”

“He said there was stuff in there that was dangerous now, that’s all.”

“Like ray guns, or...or a cloud sleeping in there!

“I have to go, Munster, and I don’t want you to follow me. Mr. Baxter is not Mr. Baxter, and now I’m not crazy or dumb. It’s you that’s crazy if you believe him. Goodbye.”

I got up and walked to the front door, but Munster was very excited and said he didn’t want me to leave. Not without him.

“You can’t go, Munster. That man will find you again, and then we’ll all be killed.”

“No you won’t, ‘cuz I won’t come back here. I’m tired of livin’ with grownups. We’ll get another car and you an’ me ‘an your friends’ll go far away where he ain’t, and maybe there won’t be any clouds there neither. I promise we’ll do that.”

Munster stood there right beside me at the door, and he looked so sincere. I wanted to take his hand and run as fast as I could back to Father Kenney’s house, but something told me not to let him come with me.

“Where’s you gun, Munster?”

“He took it. Said kids shouldn’t have a gun.”

So, the man named Mr. Baxter Klondor had it. I was sure he wouldn’t need it to shoot us because he could just turn into a cloud, like he’d always been, and kill us that way. I also knew that my friend Munster was not crazy. Maybe he was telling me the truth when he said he didn’t know what was in that locked bedroom, but somehow I think a locked door would not keep him out for very long.

I had to think quickly if I wanted to get away.

“All right. You can go, but first I need to go back to the kitchen and get something I left there. You run up and get a heavy coat. It’s cold there.”

“I don’t need no coat…”

“Just go!” I said very strongly. “I’ll be here when you get down. Hurry!”

I ran across the living room until I heard his footsteps clomping up the stairs. I stopped, then, and ran back to the door and left as quickly as I could. I felt I think what Mommy would have called a pang of consciousness, or something like that, but as I ran down the steps and out onto the street, I thought of my friend Diane Fairmore, and it didn’t hurt so bad.

 

TWELVE

I ran and ran and ran, but I didn’t want to stay on the street because Mr. Baxter might come driving up or down it, so I left the street and went through one yard, and then another. I went on the sidewalks on the sides of the two houses, and in the second yard—well, no, in the house in that yard—there was a window that was open, and this man who was dead was hanging out of it. His skin was all crinkled up on his hands and his face, and I tried not to look at him. I wondered if Mommy and Daddy looked like that, except they weren’t hanging out of our windows? But I couldn’t think of that anymore because it hurt to think about them all dead, and so I ran faster and thought of Lashawna and Jerrick instead.

They were probably very worried about me. I’d been gone so long, but when I left this morning I didn’t think I would be away until nearly dark. The sky was beginning to get dim already, and I just wanted to be home and see my real friends. Finding Munster, going to his house, seeing and hearing the cloud and Mr. Baxter—maybe these were bad things, and I shouldn’t have ever gone. But, I did, and now I had to figure out how to hide all of us from them. Jerrick might know how to do this. I hurried faster, looking behind me all the way, hoping Munster or Mr. Baxter or the evil cloud wouldn’t see me.

I was so hungry and thirsty.

At last I came to our street. I hurried across and ran into the church, locking the big doors behind me. Inside the church it wasn’t dark, and I knew that was bad, because the light came from the candles beneath Saint Terese’s altar and someone looking at the church might see them through the big windows. As I ran up the main aisle I asked Saint Terese to forgive me and pretend I hadn’t done what I had to do. I put every candle out, one after another. I said one more small prayer, and then rushed through the sacristy, across Father’s yard to the back of the rectory, and then turned Jerrick’s generator off. The lights inside went out right away. Now it was good. All I had to do was run inside and tell Lashawna and Jerrick everything that had happened while I was away.

No lights tonight, and we’d have to move out of our comfortable home, go far away and find a new, safe one. I was angry at myself for having found Munster, but if I hadn’t, he and Mr. Baxter would have found us eventually, anyway, because of the noisy generator and the lights. So I was the opposite. Maybe I’d saved all of us.

I almost bumped into Jerrick at the back door. He was going out to check the generator, but when I saw him I told him he couldn’t go out. I pushed him back into the kitchen with the palms of my hands.

“What do you mean I can’t go out, Amelia? I think the generator is out of gas.”

“Amelia, where have you been all day? We were worried!” Lashawna said when she heard my voice and ran into the kitchen.

“I’m frightened, Lashawna. I barely got away.”

“Huh? Well, let Jerrick go fill the generator with gas, then we can sit in the bedroom and you can tell…”

“No! Jerrick can’t go out! That’s what I have to tell you. I shut the generator off. We can’t have any noise or lights. They’ll find us!” I closed the door, grabbed Jerrick’s arm, and made him come with me into the bedroom. I couldn’t see their faces very well in the darkness, but I knew they were both puzzled by what I’d just said.

“What on earth?” Lashawna said when we got into the room. Jerrick didn’t say anything. He just sat down on the edge of the bed with his eyes looking straight out.

“Sit down. I’ll tell you what happened. It was so, so scary you guys.”

So Lashawna sat down in a chair by the bookcase. She had a worried look on her face I’m sure. I ran to the window and pulled the curtains closed, just in case Jerrick or Mr. Baxter Klondor came by searching for us, and I knew they would.

“I was angry with you, Jerrick, and so I wanted to be away from you and I’m sorry because I shouldn’t have been angry but I saw the Flame car race by and I ran after it and…” And I told them every detail of what had happened that day, and what I knew we all must do to keep them from finding and murdering us. Not Munster. He wouldn’t do that, I knew, but Mr. Baxter Klondor would, even though he acted nice when I heard him talking to Munster in the kitchen. I think that’s how aliens would pretend to be.

Jerrick kept looking ahead, but for a moment he didn’t say anything because he was thinking.

“I don’t want to leave,” Lashawna kind of whined. “Are you sure they’ll find us?”

“Yes!”

“Wait,” Jerrick finally said. “You’ve made a lot of assumptions, Amelia, and none of them are based on facts.”

I didn’t think that was right. I saw what I saw, and heard what I heard. Mr. Baxter Klondor did something to Munster, I was sure of that because Mr. Baxter the alien locked that bedroom and wouldn’t let Munster go in. And I knew Munster well enough to know that if he really wanted to, he would have broken into it, or else picked the lock, or climbed up on the outside of the house with a big ladder, and gone through the window. I knew that. So, something was wrong with my friend Munster. It just made sense. The evil man was using Munster to help him and the clouds find us. I said that to Jerrick.

“How do you think Lashawna got well?” Jerrick said.

“She just woke up!” I answered him.

“Are you sure? I heard wind that day, just before she opened her eyes. It wasn’t normal wind, though. One of them was here, and whoever or whatever it was came in and healed Lashawna. If that really happened, and I think it did, then why would the others not know where we are, and further, why would they want to hurt us?”

That made me think. I thought of the nice lady cloud. Maybe she was good, but her friends were all bad. They were because they killed everybody except us and Munster…and Mr. Baxter. He wanted to know where we were, but…? I was confused.

“Well then, what should we do, Jerrick?” I asked.

Lashawna jumped to her feet and hurried to the nightstand. “Let’s start by lighting a candle. I don’t like the dark! The curtains won’t let the light out, and we can decide what to do.”

Jerrick didn’t object, and so Lashawna lit one candle and then brought it over and set it on the floor, and then she sat down and looked up at her brother.

“Well?”

“Something terrible happened, it’s true. Those things caused all the people and animals to die, at least all of them in this city. I don’t know why they did that, but it’s also true that at least one of them is kind and doesn’t want to see us hurt. You said you met one, Amelia. And isn’t it possible that the one you saw in the alley behind Munster’s house wasn’t evil, didn’t come after you to hurt you, but was trying to find you so that it could help you? And us?

“You said you couldn’t understand what it was saying…”

“I couldn’t, Jerrick!” I interrupted him.

“If that’s true, and if Mr. Baxter could understand it, what makes you think the cloud wasn’t asking him to search for you, and when Mr. Baxter found you, lead them to us so that they could help us, not hurt us?”

Lashawna turned her head toward me and waited to see what I’d say. I had to think, but I finally figured out part of it.

“They DID find us. One of them, anyway. If that’s how Lashawna was healed. So…so, one of them likes us, but the rest want to kill us just like they did everyone else. She probably sneaks off when they aren’t