ONE

 

 

January, 2014

 

My father was an astronaut I think.

I can’t be sure because I was only eight when they all died, and there is no one I knew back then that survived who could tell me if it was true. But I’m pretty sure he was. He worked in Marysville where we lived, and left each morning to go to his job at Cape Canaveral, somewhere outside of the city. I remember hearing that name one day and I asked him what Cape Canaveral was. He told me that’s where they launch rocket ships from, and that he was going to go there. Each day when he left to fly someplace he took his lunchbox with him, and my mother always kissed him goodbye at the front door, telling him to have a safe trip.

Munster, the boy I met after everything went to pieces just before Christmas, told me I was an idiot; that Cape Canaveral was in Florida, not California, and that my father had probably been on his way to the nutty farm, which Munster said is where I should be. I kicked him in the shins when he said that because I’m not crazy, and neither was my father. He said, too, that my father could never have been an astronaut because he wasn’t smart enough, and he bet Daddy never even flew a little plane, let alone a rocket ship. That he probably worked in a gas station because astronauts don’t need lunch boxes, and their kids don’t live in ghettos and wear crappy clothes.

I cried when he said that to me, and that made him feel bad because he apologized.

 

                                                       *

 

I met Munster when I was going up and down the street a couple of months ago, knocking on the James’ front door, and the Raineys’s, and the Horvat’s. Every one of our neighbors that I knew, and lots I had never ever met. No one would answer because they were all dead, even Jason Mark James who was in my grade at school, and lived four doors away. I didn’t want to think about him or his parents or little sister dead inside their house, and I began to cry. I went and sat down on their porch swing and put my hands over my face. I didn’t know what to do, and that scared me very much. I couldn’t call anyone because the phones didn’t work anymore, and neither did the TV or the computer. But then I thought maybe it was just our phone and TV and computer that didn’t work anymore. Maybe the James’ phone was still working, and so I jumped off the swing and wiped the tears out of my eyes. Somebody’s voice stopped me.

“Hi.”

           That’s what Munster first said to me, and I didn’t know whether to run away or jump up and down and clap my hands. He wasn’t carrying a gun or a knife or an axe, and that made me feel safer. I wasn’t alone anymore. He told me his name, and he hadn’t said I was stupid or crazy yet, so we became friends.

Munster told me not to bother trying to get into the James’ house because he’d already broken in. They were all curled up together on their couch, he said, not breathing or moving, and he said, too, that he’d tried their phone and TV, but didn’t bother with the computer. Nothing worked.

“If you don’t believe me,” he said, “I’ll show you the busted window in the back where I threw a brick through and then went in.”

I told him I believed him and then asked where he lived. I lived four doors up, and I pointed.

 

                                                           *

 

I slept at his house starting that night because he had lots of candles and a lighter and I wouldn’t have to cry and be so afraid at night anymore. I slept in his room. I didn’t want to fall asleep all by myself ever again, but I slept on the floor because girls don’t sleep with boys, at least until they get married, and I didn’t like Munster enough yet to get married to him. So I slept on the floor beside his bed with lots of blankets, and a candle sitting on a shoebox close to my head, but not too close. I was so happy to have a friend again, and someone who I could sleep in the same room with. Besides, his mother and father weren’t in the house, and it wasn’t spooky like my house. And it didn’t smell bad. He’d taken his mother and father out into the backyard three weeks ago and dug a grave for them, he said. I asked him if he’d help me dig a grave for my parents the next day, but he said no. So I curled up and went to sleep and dreamed Daddy and Momma were still alive.

Me and Munster spent the next day and the next day and the next walking around the neighborhood where we both lived, looking for anything alive, and I didn’t cry so much, being with him. Munster threw more rocks through more windows a lot, and he went inside and then unlocked the front doors for me. Sometimes I’d go in, but I didn’t like the smell, so sometimes I wouldn’t go in. He took things a lot and brought them back to his house, and my house, now. I guess that was okay because the people were dead and weren’t alive anymore.

I thought I saw a dog down in the ravine near my house. It might have been a coyote, though, because there are lots of them around here—or there used to be—and they creep around at night and eat cats that get out of their owners’ houses. If it was a dog I think it would have been happy to see us, so it must have been a coyote because they don’t like humans.

Yesterday I asked Munster why his parents named him that.

“That’s a funny name,” I said.

“It ain’t my real name. I changed it when I met you.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t like the name my mom and dad gave me.”

“What did you used to be? Maybe I’d like it,” I said to him.

“It was Francis. Francis Moreno Gardella. The kids at school made fun of my name, even though I ask ‘em to call me Frank, not Francis, which sounds like a girl’s name. My friends called me Frank, but the older guys wouldn’t. Harry Podruski is…was…in fourth grade, and I hated him. He called me Francine and sometimes he hit me if I told him to shut up. I’m glad he’s dead.”

“Maybe he isn’t dead,” I said.

“Ha! If he isn’t, then he will be if I see him ‘cuz I found a gun, and I’ll shoot him, just like I would if I saw that coyote.”

That made me sad. I wouldn’t shoot the coyote, and I sure wouldn’t shoot Harry Podruski because that would be murder. I told Munster that.

We didn’t see anyone, not even the coyote again, and so we went back home each afternoon after walking around all day and sometimes breaking into dead people’s houses. At night we played Scrabble, which I wasn’t very good at because I don’t know how to spell that many words, and I wouldn’t cheat like Munster did by looking in the dictionary. So we started playing Monopoly, but he cheated in that game too.

That’s how we lived until the food at our house ran out.

 

                                                           *

It was raining. We were standing outside a gas station under the big awning. Each of us had a plastic bag filled with potato chips and candy bars and a few cans of Coke, but there wasn’t any lightning or thunder. It was one of those mini-mart stores, six blocks or so away from Munster’s and my house. I don’t remember the name, but after we went inside I saw the guy who ran it lying behind the counter, his feet anyway, and there was another guy and a woman lying on our side. They smelled and there were flies all over them. Munster told me not to eat any of the sandwiches in the cooler because there was no electricity and the mayonnaise and meat in them were probably rotten, and it’d make me sicker than a dog. So, I didn’t. But we filled a few bags with stuff we liked that wasn’t meat, and didn’t have mayonnaise in it, and then we left.

It was starting to get dark and I didn’t want to walk anywhere in the rain because I didn’t bring an umbrella or even a raincoat. Munster said we couldn’t stay in the store because the flies had germs all over them and they’d spread them on us. We’d get sick and keel over like those dead people, so we’d have to go back home and hope the flies didn’t follow us.

“Is that what killed everyone?” I asked.

“Prob’ly not, but those people are all rotten and filled with germs, and the flies eat ‘em,” he said.

“What do you think killed everyone then if it wasn’t germy flies?”

He told me he didn’t know, but that it didn’t matter a bit anyway. Everyone except us was just dead. That’s all he knew for sure.

“I don’t think everyone is dead,” I said.

“You’re crazy as hell."

“No I’m not. And don’t cuss at me. We aren’t dead, so everyone isn’t dead. I want to go over to my aunt’s house, Munster. Maybe she’s alive. Can we go there?”

             It started raining harder and I could hear the drops of rain banging on the metal awning above us. It sounded like hail, but I didn’t see any. It was really noisy and it made me scared. Munster looked out at the big parking lot where the gas pumps were and then took out a pack of cigarettes he’d stoled. He’d stoled a lighter, too, but I guessed since the guy who ran the store was dead that it was okay to take whatever we wanted. Except cigarettes because they’ll kill you just like germy flies. Daddy told me that, and so did Momma. But Munster lit one anyway, and I could see he was thinking, and that he wasn’t going to answer my question. So I asked him again.            “Can we go?”

           “Go where?”

           Munster blew out a puff of smoke when he answered me, and he coughed. I knew that the cigarette would make him sick, maybe not as sick as those people inside who died, maybe from fly germs, but if he kept smoking them he would die just as dead. I didn’t tell him that because I was afraid he’d get mad at me, so I just answered his question.

            “I want to go to Aunt Marjorie’s house. Can we go?”

            “We can’t go anywhere until this fuckin’ rain stops.”

            He used that word a lot. I told him that it wasn’t nice, that my parents said I shouldn’t use it one day when they were still alive and I’d asked them what it meant. I kind of knew. It’s just a word lots of grownups and teenagers use. It’s called an adjective, like stupid rain or dumbass rain, but they said not to use it because words sometimes have lots of other meanings. So I didn’t use it.

            I told Munster he shouldn’t use it either a long time ago, but he said it was okay because him and me were the only ones who’d hear it, and if I didn’t like it I could plug my ears.

            “How can I plug my ears because by the time I do, you’ve already said it!”

He laughed. He knew I was right. That didn’t stop him, though. Anyway, no one will care if he uses that word because they’re all dead. He won’t get his mouth washed out with soap or have to go sit on the couch and not be able to use his iPad because of using that word, either.

            Munster is twelve. He’s four years older than me, and he has a funny nose that looks like a Persian kitten’s sort of. It’s squished in at the bottom. I like cats. He has scraggly hair, too, and it’s blonde. It’s scraggly because he can’t go to a hair cutter anymore, and I told him I couldn’t do it because I’ve never cut anyone’s hair, and that if I tried to on his I’d probably ruin it. Munster told me he didn’t care. It could grow down to his you-know-what. He’s taller than me.

            We waited outside the mini-mart for a long time, and finally the rain stopped.

            “Can we go, Munster? Please?”

            He was looking out at the gas pumps where a bunch of cars stood, thinking again I knew. But he answered me.

            “Sure. Follow me.”

            He jumped off the curb into a puddle of water and walked over to one of the cars where there wasn’t a dead body inside or lying right next to it. I ran after him and tried not to step in any of the puddles, so I zigzagged. He opened the door and got in, but he didn’t close the door. One whole side of the car had a big orange flame on it that somebody had painted, and I think that’s why he went to that car. The people that owned it were probably the ones lying dead on the floor back in the store.

            “You can’t drive this car,” I said to him when I got there.

            “Why not?” he answered.

“Because you’re not old enough and you don’t know how. And you don’t have a license.”

            He looked out at me and laughed. He raised his right hand and jingled the keys.

            “This here’s the only license I need.” He was talking about the keys.

            I didn’t say anything. I still keep thinking there are things we can’t do because if we do them we’ll get in trouble. But I didn’t want to get in if he got the flame-car started. If I did we might crash into a pole or something out on the street.

            The flame-car started right up. He pulled the door shut and looked out at me smiling. I ran around the back end and opened the door on the other side. There was a big orange flame on my side, too. After I’d got in I prayed to God to protect us. I don’t like to be in pain. I had a broken arm three years ago when I fell off a swing at the park, and it hurt. If we ran into a pole I imagined having two broken arms and no doctor to fix them or give me pills to make the pain go away. That’s why I prayed. But if we got killed somehow, like if he ran off the side of the bridge into the river, then there wouldn’t be a single person left for God to listen to, and it only made sense that God wouldn’t want that.

            I put my seat belt on and crossed my legs on the seat. If we ran into something I knew my legs wouldn’t get snapped in two when the engine came through the front.

            “Are you sure you can drive, Munster?” I asked him. He was looking down at the gear thing. He had his right hand on it, and his thumb on the lock button of the handle. His legs were stretched out and his foot just barely made it to the gas pedal.

            “Yeah. I used to watch my dad do it all the time.”

            He squirmed around, stretching his chest and neck up so that his eyes could look over the steering wheel.

“I wish I was fourteen. I can barely see over the damn wheel…Hey, look in the backseat and see if there’s a pillow or a box or somethin’ I can put under my butt.”

            “Quit cussing.”

            I took off my seatbelt and looked in the back. There was a green jacket, some crumpled up paper bags, and a whole bunch of beer bottles, but there wasn’t anything that Munster could use to make him taller. That’s when it hit me that back in the store there must be something. I turned around really quick and opened the door again, and then I jumped out and ran across the wet parking lot.

            “Where you goin’?” he shouted. But I didn’t answer.

            I didn’t zigzag this time. I ran right through a puddle of water and my feet got wet, but I didn’t care because if I could find a pillow or a box or something not too tall for Munster, I wouldn’t have to walk anywhere else. I might get killed if he crashed, but I wouldn’t have to walk, and so it wouldn’t matter if my feet were all wet.

            I stopped inside the door and looked up and down the aisle where we got the candy bars, but there was nothing there but more candy bars and things like that. So I ran over to the counter where the man who ran the store was lying, and he was still there. There were little boxes and lots of papers on the shelves behind it, but no pillow or anything tall enough for Munster, so I hopped over the man and went to a big heavy steel door that wasn’t almost closed, and I opened it wider. It was very dark inside because there were no windows and the lights didn’t work anymore because—well, I wasn’t sure why all the electricity that went to the lights was gone. It was just dark.

            I saw a bunch of folded up clothes on a shelf a little ways in, though, and I knew they would work. They were white and about the same height as a big pillow. I pushed the door open all the way and ran to the shelf where I started pulling them out, and I shouldn’t have pushed the door so hard because it bounced off something behind it and then it swung shut and I heard the click, and it got very dark. That scared me. The door clicking shut, and especially the dark.

            There wasn’t a single sound at first. It was quiet. I walked very carefully back to where I thought the door was and hoped I wouldn’t trip on something, but then I thought that was silly because I hadn’t tripped on anything when I first came in, and that was only a few seconds ago.

            That’s when I heard a grown-up’s voice, and then I was very scared, more scared than I ever remember being before. It sounded like whoever said, “Hey” was really close, right on the other side of the tall shelves I had just been at. I wondered if he’d come out, and if he did, if he’d catch me and eat me or just beat me with a pipe or stab me or something horrible.

            I saw that on TV once when Daddy didn’t know I was in the room and the TV was on. That was before him and Momma died. He was watching a movie and a monster was eating all the people on a spaceship. It jumped out from behind things and had a little mouth with teeth that came out of its big mouth with bigger teeth. The people screamed and cried. I watched the little mouth come out at the people, like it was on a stick, but then you couldn’t see anymore, but you could hear the people scream.

            I wasn’t thinking that in the dark room, but I was thinking that the man behind the big shelf had a mouth like the monster’s. That’s all.           

            I found the door and I opened it very quickly because I was very scared. I didn’t want him to catch me, and so I ran and jumped over the man on the floor and the flies and almost slipped, but I didn’t. Just my heel a little. I ran outside, right through the water puddles again, but I didn’t care. I knew he was right behind me.

TWO

            Munster was still in the flame-car, but he was in the backseat, now, and he was looking through all the trash and bottles and the jacket I think.

“Munster! Munster!” I said very loud when I got there. I threw the white clothes into the front and didn’t know whether to jump in or keep running, so I stopped, and he poked his head over the seat. His eyes were very big and wide open. I didn’t wait for him to say anything because the monster man might be right behind me and he’d get both of us if we didn’t hurry and run off.

“Hurry and get out! There’s someone in there and he might kill us!”

I saw Munster’s eyes look over at the store where I was just at with the dead bodies in it, and the one that wasn’t dead, but he didn’t look scared, just surprised. Munster, I mean.

“What’s the matter?” he asked me.

“There’s someone IN there.”

He looked over at the store again, but I know he didn’t see anyone, because if he had his eyes would have been big again, but they weren’t. And that meant that whoever was in there was still in there or else Munster would have screamed just like me.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked me, and he sounded a little mad. Well, maybe not mad. Just…um, what is that word? He used it once in Scrabble, but I can’t remember it now. I was still scared, but Munster wasn’t.

“I don’t see nobody,” he said. That’s when I turned around, and he was right. There wasn’t anyone but us.

“I heard him, Munster. I’m not lying. He’s in the back of the store. We have to go!”

“You’re crazy, Amelia. There ain’t nobody but you and me alive anymore.” He was climbing back over the seat, and I was jumping around like a bug that landed in a frying pan, waving my hands and I was shaking my head no.

“I’m not crazy, Munster. I heard him.”

I wasn’t going to cry anymore, even if he told me a hundred times I was crazy. I wasn’t, and I knew he’d find out soon enough because he got out of the Flame Car and started walking across the parking lot through the puddles of water.

“No, Munster! Don’t go in there!”

He kept walking, though, and I saw him pull a gun out of the waistband of his jeans. It was the one he said he’d found. It wasn’t a big one like the ones Daddy had. Those were called rifles. Munster’s was like the ones the police shot people with on TV.

I was scared for him. I didn’t know what would happen and I wanted to run again. I wished my daddy was still alive and was there to go in instead. I stood there and watched until he went through the door, and then I waited and waited and waited, but he didn’t come out, and so I didn’t know what to do, so I ran. I knew the man was hiding and had jumped on Munster when he went into the back room. That’s why I hadn’t heard a big bang from Munster’s gun, and that’s why he didn’t come back out. He was probably dead. And now the man was laughing and had Munster’s gun, and he would come after me.

In my head I saw Munster lying on the floor bleeding and dead and covered with the germy flies, and I was alone again. I cried and ran and the sky got darker and darker and it started raining again. I ran down the street. I was wet and I didn’t know if I could remember where my house was, or Munster’s, because it was a long way away, and I had never been this far away from home without my momma or my daddy or Munster. Except to school. I knew the man was chasing me, and I hoped I could run fast enough so that he couldn’t see me, but I wasn’t sure where to run, but I ran anyway.

All the houses I ran past looked strange. I didn’t remember coming past them when Munster and me walked to the mini-mart because we were talking and I didn’t pay any attention to which way we came. I saw lots of dead bodies, too. Some in the street by cars or lying on their front lawns or porches, and I didn’t remember seeing them either when we came. I kept looking behind me and splashed through water, but I didn’t see the man, and I kept running.

It took so long. I was wet and I was cold and I was so scared. I finally came to the street called Walnut. I remembered that name because I liked walnuts, and so I turned and went on it, and after a few blocks I saw our church on the corner, and I knew where I was because sometimes we walked to it if it wasn’t raining or too cold. Momma and Daddy and me. So I looked behind me again and didn’t see the man and I ran faster anyway. Munster’s house was left on Birch Street, and my old house was right a little ways on Birch Street. I turned right because I just wanted to go home. But then I stopped. I had to think.

I ran to some bushes and climbed under them to think. I was breathing very hard because I had run so fast and so far. I was wet, and so I sat down and thought. It got dark, and the rain came harder.

I wanted to go home, but I didn’t want to see my momma or my daddy because they were dead and I knew I’d cry even harder if I saw them, and it smelled because they were dead, and there were probably tons of germy flies all over them. I didn’t want to go back to Munster’s either, because maybe the man knew where he lived and would be waiting there for me. I was hungry because I didn’t take my bag of candy bars and Fritos and Cokes and the carton of Fruit Loops when I ran away.

I sat there all huddled up and shivering because I was wet, and I thought What can I do? If I stayed under the bush I knew I’d freeze to death, and I didn’t want to die, but mostly I didn’t want to be so cold anymore. I wanted to go inside somebody’s house and get dry, but I didn’t want to ever, ever see any more dead smelly people or germy flies, and so I said no to myself. I thought about Albertson’s supermarket because it was close. I remembered it and thought maybe I’d go there, but maybe the man was coming, and maybe he’d see me going there because it was on the way from where me and Munster had been. So I decided I wouldn’t go there. And then I thought about St. Andrew’s Church that I’d just passed. It was close, too, and I thought the man wouldn’t go there because if he was a murderer he wouldn’t go to a church. I could find a towel somewhere in it and dry off, and maybe there would be some food in the place where Father Kenney lived that was right behind the church. So, I decided to go there. I wanted to pray, too, and ask God what had happened to the world, and I could do that in the church after I dried myself off and found something to eat. There were always candles in the church because Momma used to light them and pray. So, I could light them and not be in the dark if I could find some matches or a lighter.

I looked out from under the bush, and I listened very hard to hear if there were footsteps, but there weren’t, so I crawled out and ran back the way I’d come. When I was almost in front of St. Andrew’s I tripped on a big crack in the sidewalk because it was dark, and I fell. I skinned my right knee and it hurt, and that made me cry more, but I got up and ran across the lawn, up to the big wood doors of the church. My jeans were torn and I could feel blood running down my leg. I’d have to fix my knee myself if I could find a Band-aid.

I remember coming to Saint Andrew’s on Sundays, to Mass with Momma and Daddy. I liked Saint Andrew’s a lot because of the tall, colorful windows on each side. They were made of blue and green and red pieces of glass, and showed saints doing things, or just looking out at all of us. I liked the statues in the church, too, because someone made them out of big rocks, and then put them over their very own altars up in the front. Saint Andrew had his own altar on the right, and Saint Therese had hers on the other side. Momma said Saint Therese was the little flower of Jesus, and I liked her, because I like flowers. Underneath both altars there were the stands that held lots of candles in red holders, and Momma sometimes went there after Mass and lit one, and then she would kneel down in front of Saint Andrew or Saint Therese and pray for something.

There was an organ upstairs, and one of the Sisters sometimes played it. I liked that, too, even though the music was nothing like what me and my friends listened to. Father Kenney would say Mass and talk a little in the middle. Sometimes it was Father Hidick…Hedrickk…I don’t know how to spell his name, but he was old and had gray hair, and I was afraid of him because he looked mean and never smiled. But Father Kenney was always smiling, except when he said Mass because you’re not supposed to smile during Mass, and you’re not supposed to talk. Father Kenney could talk though. He was supposed to.

Lily and Harry Moul came with their mother and father, and sometimes I would giggle when Harry made faces at me if he sat nearby. Lily was always good and never got in trouble for making faces or whispering to me like Harry did.

I wondered if they were alive?

It was even darker inside than it was outside in the rain. That was okay. I knew where everything was, so I wouldn’t run into a big pillar or anything when I walked up the main aisle.

I walked very slowly, but then stopped because some of the candles were lit by the Saint Therese altar, and I knew they shouldn’t have been. Everyone except me and Munster and the man back at the store was dead. So, who lit the candles, I wondered? I almost turned around and ran back out until I heard a voice, but I didn’t see anyone. It was a small voice. It sounded like a little girl’s, which made me happy. Maybe Lily was here.

I crept forward as quiet as could be, and I stopped at the last pew. I peeked around the edge. Two kids sat cross-legged beneath the candles. A little black girl with her back to me, and very close, with his knees touching hers, a black boy. She held a book in her hands and was reading out loud, I guess to him. It must have been very hard for her to see the words because even though all of the candles were lit, the light was not very bright.

Neither of them noticed me. The boy sat quietly, and his head was bent forward, like he couldn’t hear well. His eyes, even in the dim light, were large and bright white. I listened from where I was crouching as the girl read, but I didn’t know the story. I could hear certain words she spoke, names. Meg and Charles and someone named Tesser, or Tessereck. Something. She kept reading, and every now and then the boy would turn his head sideways a little and smile.

After a while I sat back against the pew and just listened. I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. My knee hurt. I was still cold and I began to shiver, wondering who they were, and if I should say something to them. I was hungry, too, and so I decided to say something. I poked my head around the pew again.

“Hello,” I said.

The girl jumped. She turned her head quickly and slammed the book shut at the same time. The boy looked up, over at me, and that is when I noticed something strange about him. His eyes looked different, but I wasn’t sure why.

“Who are you?” she asked in a loud voice.

I wasn’t sure what to say, but something told me I was safe. So I answered her.

“Amelia. Who are you?”

She laid the book down beside her and crawled over to me. She seemed to be studying my face, deciding whether or not I had a knife, or a gun like Munster’s. I stared back at her. I was shaking, but not because I was afraid. My hair was still dripping rain. She looked warm, and that was because she had a winter jacket on and it had fur on the collar.

“I’m Lashawna Freeman. Where did you come from? You’re all wet! I thought Jerrick and I were the only people left alive!” Lashawna Freeman sat back and talked and talked and talked. She told me she was eight, the same age as me, and that her brother was thirteen, and that he was blind. That’s what caused his eyes to look funny. Because they couldn’t see anything. He could hear very well, though, much better than anyone else, she said.

“Why didn’t he hear me when I came in then?” I said.

“Because I was listening to Lashawna read. I wasn’t trying to hear anything else.”

“Oh.

“I used to live a few blocks from here, that way,” I said pointing toward Saint Andrew’s altar on the other side of the church. “My mother and father are dead. They’re still in my old house, and I think Munster is dead, too. He was my friend, and he lived that way, too. No, the other way. Why did everyone die except us?”

“Beats me,” Jerrick said, and he shrugged his shoulders. He kept staring straight ahead, and if I had moved somewhere else, and he didn’t hear me move, I think he would have kept looking straight in front of him. I stood up, then, and told Lashawna and Jerrick Freeman that I was freezing cold, and that I needed to go find a towel. Maybe in Father Kenney’s house behind the church.

“Yes!” Lashawna Freeman said. “I’ll go with you. I know where everything is in the rectory. Jerrick, you stay here and listen. We’ll be right back. Don’t move. If you hear anyone come in, crawl under the pew and don’t say a word.”

“Okay,” Jerrick answered. “But hurry up. Bring me a Coke, too.”

“They’re all GONE! You drank the last one yesterday. You know that.”

Jerrick Freeman was awfully tall. He didn’t stand up, but I could see he was much taller than his sister. He had very long fingers. His skin was dark shiny, and the candlelight flickering on it made it seem like it was dancing. He didn’t say anything else, just sat back against the pew seat, looking straight ahead. Lashawna Freeman grabbed hold of my hand, and together we went through the opening of the communion rail, across the floor by the altar, and into the room where Father Kenney and the altar boys would come out of when Mass started.

Lashawna knew her way through the room, which was much darker than the church, and I was glad for that. I would have bumped into everything if she hadn’t been leading me by the hand. I could smell things in that room as we went along. Nice things. Much later Lashawna told me those smells were incense, and big candles that had been burned way down a long time ago. But I didn’t know that as we hurried through the room. She called it the sacristy.

Lashawna was smart. She knew lots of things about the church, almost as though she and Jerrick had grown up in it.

We left the sacristy through the back door. Lashawna kicked a stone into the opening so that the door wouldn’t shut and lock behind us, and then down the steps we went, across the lawn on a stone path, and into Father Kenney’s house that was called the rectory.

Lashawna took a box of matches off a table just inside the door and lit one of the big candles, like the ones back in the church on the altar. Papers were thrown all over the floor. Father Kenney’s desk was on the far side of the room, and it was all messy, and his chair with wheels on the legs was lying on its side beside it. I wondered why Lashawna and Jerrick would make such a mess?

There were no bodies, at least none that I could see, and I didn’t smell any ugly rotting smells. Lashawna led me to a hall where there was a cupboard, and inside it there were towels and washcloths and sheets. She pulled a towel out and handed it to me.

“Here you go. You have to take your wet clothes off. I’ll go find something left by Father for you to wear until your clothes dry. There are some crackers left in the kitchen. Some peanut butter and cans of other food. I’ll get them. Do you like sardines?” She was walking away as I began to get out of my soaking wet clothes.

“I’ve never had sardines. I don’t think I’d like them, though,” I said. “They’re fish. I don’t like fish.” She didn’t answer. “I can’t wear Father’s clothes. They’re too big, and they’re not girl’s clothes!” I shouted that because I was afraid she wouldn’t hear me otherwise.

I dried off and felt better. Lashawna came back carrying some of Father Kenney’s clothes, and stood in front of me laughing as I put on Father’s big pair of pants, his big white shirt, and then the black jacket he used to wear whenever he came out of his house. It wasn’t what he wore to Mass, and I laughed, too, because I would look so silly in those robes. Lashawna helped me roll up the pants so that my ankles weren’t covered by the bottoms of the legs, and then we rolled up the jacket arms. The jacket hung down to my knees, and all of it made me laugh with her. Father’s pants kept falling down, too, and his belt was way too long for me, and so Lashawna tied it in a knot at my tummy, and we laughed even more.

“There,” she said, “you look just like a priest!”

I hoped I didn’t. Girls aren’t priests.

She had a small box filled with cans of food and no Coke for Jerrick, and we left the rectory to return to her brother back in the church. On the way I asked her why she and Jerrick had made such a mess in Father’s house. I don’t know why the big mess bothered me, but it did. My daddy’s garage was sometimes all messy, but that was because he worked in it on his car and other stuff sometimes. Momma would never let him…or me…turn over chairs or throw paper on the floor inside our house.

“We didn’t do it,” she said. “Someone else must have been here before we came last week.”

That made me think of the man who murdered Munster back at the mini-mart. If Lashawna and Jerrick, or me or Munster had never been here before, who else could it have been? But maybe there were other people alive, and they were hiding, and maybe, too, they’d come back! I was scared all over again and didn’t want to think of another murderer being alive, but I was glad to have found Lashawna and Jerrick Freeman.

We ran through the sacristy back into the church. Jerrick heard us and crawled out from underneath the front pew, and then sat up with one leg tucked under the other. Lashawna didn’t say anything as she plopped the box of food onto the floor in front of him. I sat down beside the box with her and I waited politely. It was her box of food, and even though I was hungry, I didn’t want to seem too anxious. Lashawna was waiting as well. Maybe she was being polite, too.

“Well?” she finally said. I knew what that meant, and so I pushed my sleeve up and dug my hand into the box, pulling one thing after another out, and plonked them into my lap. There were three cans of sardines, an opened package of crackers, a small jar of peanut butter…Skippy, too, and I liked that because it was my favorite, and Momma had always bought Skippy. She’d packed some other kind of crackers, but I didn’t know if I’d like them because I’d never heard of them before. A plastic bottle of orange juice instead of Coke for Jerrick. A few cans of tomatoes and other vegetables. I wasn’t crazy about those. A small bag of potato chips, but they were all crushed. She’d put the cans on top of them.

“Why did you bring these?” I said holding up one of the cans of tomatoes.

“They’re good for you. They’re filled with vitamins. They’re fruit, too. I’ll bet you didn’t know that, Amelia.”

“I don’t like tomatoes in a can, and besides, I can’t open them even if I did like them. And you’re wrong, I’ve known forever that tomatoes are fruit. Momma told me a long time ago.”

Jerrick spoke, then. “Don’t you like fruit?”

“Of course I like fruit! Apples and oranges and bananas. Yes, I like them. I just don’t like tomatoes in a can because they remind me of spinach or beets. That stuff, and I don’t like them.”

“Well, you might if there isn’t anything left to eat someday,” Jerrick said.

I hadn’t thought about that. Not until then, anyway. It seemed to me there would always be stores with food in them, and after we ate all that, there would still be hundreds and hundreds of houses with more food, and by then maybe all the dead bodies inside them would have been eaten by germy flies, and so we could go in and get food without holding our noses.

There would be a million million tomorrows, and we’d grow up, and when we ate all the food in Marysville, we could drive to cities that were far away and eat the food there. But not canned tomatoes or beets.

I shrugged my shoulders at Jerrick, but he couldn’t see me do it I knew. “Doesn’t matter. There’s no way to open them unless I pound them open with a hammer or a rock.” I laughed, and so did Jerrick and Lashawna.

My daddy did that once when Momma wasn’t home and he was hungry, but our can opener was gone. He looked for the can opener everywhere, but he couldn’t find it, and I could see he was getting really mad, so I got out of his way. He grabbed a steak knife, and he was cussing. He jabbed the steak knife into the lid over and over, but that didn’t work, so he threw the steak knife across the room and went into the garage. That’s where he worked on really hard things. I followed him. He put the can on his workbench. I remember that so well. He grabbed a big screwdriver and a hammer and started poking holes in the top. He had a mean scowl on his face, and his tongue stuck out a little bit between his teeth. That didn’t work…punching holes in it…so he threw the big screwdriver away and turned the can on its side. I ran behind a stack of old tires and peeked over the top because I knew what was going to happen, and it did. He lifted the hammer way up, with the claws pointing down, and then he HIT the can.

I ran after that happened. I knew he was “mad as a wet hen”—that’s what Momma used to say when he got really mad—and he was covered with Campbell’s soup, and I didn’t want to be anywhere near Daddy after that, until Momma came home.

Lashawna reached into the box. She pulled out a can opener and handed it to me. “You missed this.” Jerrick was smiling, and he turned his head sideways, I think to hear his sister handing me the can opener.

Our dinner was very nice. We sat in a circle under the candles and ate, but I didn’t eat any tomatoes. The fish were okay, but I had to close my eyes and pinch my nose when Lashawna made me try the first one. Jerrick was funny. He said lots of funny things. He asked me, too, if I would mind if he touched my face with his fingers so that he would know if I was smiling, and so he could see what I looked like. I had to think about that. I felt sorry for Jerrick because he couldn’t see, but I didn’t like the idea of letting a boy touch my face. Momma told me never to let a boy touch me. Lashawna smiled and shook her head yes to me, and so I decided it was probably okay. So he did.

Later, after Jerrick knew what I looked like, I asked what book Lashawna had been reading. She told me that it was a children’s classic—I didn’t know what that meant—and its name was A Wrinkle In Time. I didn’t know that book.

“I like Ivy and Bean,” I said.

“I read that one,” she said. “It’s very good, but it isn’t a classic yet.”

“What’s a classic?” I asked.

She answered me, and that’s how I knew Lashawna was very smart. “It’s a book that’s very old, and lots of people still read it.”

“Do you read lots of books, Lashawna?” I asked.

“Oh yes! My mother and father used to read to me, and I liked that so much. Jerrick, too. Did your momma and papa read to you?”

“Sometimes. My daddy not so much because he flew rocket ships and he didn’t have time enough when he came home at night.” And I told Lashawna and Jerrick about Daddy and his job. Lashawna got a funny look in her eyes. I don’t know if she believed me, but she didn’t say I was crazy like Munster did.

I was tired after a while, and so was Jerrick because he yawned and stretched his arms out. I didn’t really want to sleep on the cold floor, especially without a blanket and a pillow, and if I went to sleep on the seat of the pew, I knew I would roll over and fall off. I think the fish made me sleepy.

I had an idea.

“Can we go back to Father’s house and get some blankets and pillows? I’m very tired, Lashawna.”

“We sleep in Father’s bed!” said Jerrick.

“You do?”

“Yes,” Lashawna said. “It’s big enough for all of us, and it’s warm and toasty.”

“I can’t sleep with boys, and at Munster’s house I didn’t sleep with him. My Momma said…”

“Silly. I’ll sleep in the middle, and then tomorrow morning we can get up and have Rice Krispies. Without milk, though, because it’s all sour, and cereal tastes yucky with water,” Lashawna said giggling.

“There’s water here?” I asked.

“Of course! Tons of bottles,” she said. Lashawna jumped up and grabbed my arm. “Let’s go, I’m sleepy too.”

Jerrick had gotten to his feet. He was still smiling, and I didn’t think he ever frowned. I was worried about leaving him, though, because if he couldn’t see, he might bump into everything, or trip on the altar steps, or fall down the back steps—if he could even make it through the sacristy room.

“Wait, Lashawna! We can’t leave Jerrick here. You have to help him.”

“Why? He knows his way.”

“How? He can’t see,” I said. I looked back at Jerrick. He walked around me and Lashawna, just like he would lead the way through the dark sacristy room.

“Lashawna helped me twice,” Jerrick said. “That’s all I needed.”

“If we walk outside I have to be careful for him,” Lashawna whispered. “I say, bump. Crack. Curb. That’s all he needs.”

I liked that, and I liked Lashawna and Jerrick. I wasn’t afraid to sleep with them. I was happy to.

 

We were in bed soon, and I asked Lashawna if we could light a candle so that it wouldn’t be dark in Father’s big bedroom. She said of course, and then she had Jerrick get up and light one because she was stuck in between us and she’d have to climb over her brother or me to go light the candle. I thought of the church after Jerrick lit the little candle beside the bed.

“Wait! We didn’t blow out the candles in church!” I said.

“We never blow out the candles in church,” both of them answered at the same time.

“Why? What if someone sees them and knows we’re here?” I said.

“Everyone knows we’re here,” Jerrick said.

“Yes, and as long as the candles burn, the prayer we said when we lit them will keep going up to God,” Lashawna added.

So that’s why my momma lit candles and knelt down to pray every Sunday after Mass. She never told me that. Still, the thought of “everyone” knowing made me a little scared.

“What if that man who murdered Munster sees them and comes in?” I asked.

“He won’t,” said Jerrick. “I prayed for our safety when I lit the candle beside you. What did you pray for?”

“I didn’t. I didn’t know I was supposed to,” I said.

“Well you can still ask God for something, Amelia. If you had one wish, what would it be tonight?” Jerrick said.

I knew at once what that would be. That Momma and Daddy could come back. But then I thought about Munster. I wished he hadn’t been murdered. And I thought about Jerrick being blind. There were too many things that were important, so many that one little candle couldn’t make them all come true. I didn’t know what to pray for.

As I thought about all of this, I heard Jerrick begin to snore. I looked over at Lashawna. Her eyes were closed. I prayed that Momma and Daddy were happy, and that somehow they could come back. That’s what I prayed for before closing my eyes, and I wasn’t afraid that night. 

THREE

            Jerrick woke me the next morning. I was so warm under the covers and didn’t want to get up, but he said it was time for breakfast. He stood at the side of the bed, looking straight ahead as usual. That made me feel funny because I still wasn’t used to having people talk to me but not look at me.

            “Are you awake?” he asked when I didn’t say anything.

            “Yes,” I answered.

            “Okay. I’ll see you in the kitchen. Lashawna’s there already.”

            Jerrick walked around the bed, and then out of the room. If I hadn’t known better, I would never have thought he couldn’t see.

            The bedroom was very bright. The curtains at the windows were open, and the sun shined so bright through them. The candle Jerrick had lit the last night was still burning, and as I got out of bed I wondered if my prayer to God would be answered? Or if it maybe needed to keep going over and over until the flame burned out, and then God would hear it?

            I pulled on the big pants of Father’s that were still rolled way up, and I tied the belt, but I didn’t put his big jacket on. I’d slept in the white shirt, and it was all wrinkled now, but I didn’t care because I was sure Lashawna wouldn’t mind, and Jerrick for sure because he couldn’t see it.

            The kitchen was a nice room, especially with the sun shining in the windows. The table was in front of one window that looked like a curled up…no…a U, like the letter U, that was cut off. It was poking out of the house. I don’t know what they call that kind of window, but it reminded me of sitting outdoors when we sat there. And the sun was warm. I could see the grass through the window, and the grass was SO tall because no one had cut it in months and months and months. It fell over because it was so tall, and also because the rainwater on it made it so heavy. It was very green, and parts of it sparkled.

            We ate Cornflakes for our breakfast. Jerrick put a little bowl of dried up fruit on the table, too, and some water, but not for my cereal. The dried up fruit was good, and it wasn’t from dead apples or oranges, or any of that. Fruit that had been lying around and never gotten eaten because Father disappeared. It came from a package, and so I knew it was still good to eat. I ate a whole bowl of cornflakes, and three pieces of dried up fruit. Jerrick watched me, but I knew he couldn’t really see me. But he looked at me anyway. Lashawna was at the counter where the sink was. She was wiping her bowl with a towel, and looking inside the pantry.

            “What do you guys want to do today?” I asked that after I finished eating my last piece of fruit.

            Lashawna put her bowl in the cupboard and turned around.

            “I think we should go for a walk. Jerrick and I need sun! We didn’t go outside yesterday at all,” she said.

            I had to think about that, but then I said okay. If a murderer was outside and he was waiting for us, we couldn’t run very fast to get away because I didn’t think Jerrick could run. But I said okay.

            “Where should we go?” I asked Lashawna.

            “Let’s go to your house. I’d like to see where you lived.” Lashawna said that.

            “Yes, that’d be great! I could feel the steps and the door, and if it has a knocker, I could feel…”           

I didn’t like that idea. And so I told them when Jerrick was speaking,“ No! I don’t ever, ever want to go back to my old house because my momma and daddy are still inside and they’re dead and there are germy flies on them I KNOW, and I don’t want to see that. And besides, Munster lives on the way. That’s where I stayed until last night when I came here all wet and cold and very hungry. If we go past his house, which was my new house that didn’t have germy flies and didn’t smell bad, maybe the man who murdered him at the mini-mart will be inside, and he’ll see us, and then we’ll all be dead for sure!” I didn’t want to go to my old house, or Munster’s.

            “But how would the man know where Munster lives?” Jerrick asked me.

            “I don’t know. Maybe he made Munster tell him before he murdered him.”

            “Are you sure the man murdered Munster?” Lashawna asked me.

            “Yes. Munster didn’t come back out, and so if he didn’t come back out, the man got him,” I said.

            “But you said you didn’t hear the gun,” Jerrick said to me.

            “No. I didn’t, but then the man probably hit him on the head, and I couldn’t hear that anyway. And after he hit him, he took his gun, and then I knew he’d come after me. I don’t want to go to my house or Munster’s.”

            So we decided we wouldn’t go to my house or Munster’s. Lashawna wanted to go to the mini-mart to see if Munster was dead there, but I said no, no, no. So instead we would go somewhere else so that Jerrick could be in the sun. I knew Munster was dead at the mini-mart.

            We left Father’s house and walked away from where I used to live, and there was a park with a playground and sand and lots of trees that wasn’t too far away. Lashawna said, “Curb. Big crack” sometimes when we were walking, but she didn’t hold Jerrick’s hand. He just walked by himself. She held my hand, but not because I couldn’t see.

            I asked her on the way where she lived because she never told me, and neither did Jerrick. She said that she and Jerrick lived in San Diego, which is a long, long way from Marysville. I asked how she got here, and she said her and Jerrick had come with their parents to visit her momma’s sister the day everything, when it happened, whatever that was. Her momma’s sister, which is her aunt, were in the house with her momma’s husband and her aunt’s husband, and they were talking. Lashawna and Jerrick were out in their backyard looking at bugs—well, she was— because there was no swing set or toys, and she saw a flash of light, and the sky got dark, but Jerrick couldn’t see it. It was a very bright light, and I remembered that too. They stopped looking at bugs and ran in to tell their momma and daddy what they’d seen and they found everyone just dead, like I found my momma and my daddy. They cried, even though Jerrick couldn’t see them all dead. They ran around like I had, trying to tell the neighbors, but all the neighbors were dead, too, even their pets. They went back to their aunt’s house, which Lashawna said was very close to the park we were walking to, and shook their parents and their aunt and their uncle, but they were dead. They didn’t know what to do, so they cried some more and slept in the extra bedroom and prayed God would send someone alive to help them. But He didn’t.

            Lashawna told me she and Jerrick stayed at their aunt’s house for almost a week, but then they left because everyone’s bodies began to smell so bad, and I knew exactly what that smelled like. They walked and walked and were hungry, and finally they saw Saint Andrew’s Church, and that’s when they went in because the doors weren’t locked and it didn’t smell inside, and they were Baptists or something like that, but that it would be okay to go into a Catholic church.

            Both of them were hungry. There wasn’t anyone around. Father Kenney and Father Hiddick or Hendrick weren’t there, and nobody was, but they found Father Kenney’s house in the back and went in. That’s where they found the kitchen and the bedroom and the food. They felt relieved because it would be cold that night and they would be hungry if they left. So they stayed there.

            I asked Lashawna and Jerrick why they sat in the church and lit candles under Saint Therese’s altar instead of staying in Father’s house, and she told me they liked all the candles and she also liked the statue of Saint Therese because Saint Therese looked almost alive, and also because Lashawna had seen a lot of pictures in books of statues, and that at night it was easier to read because of all the candles. I said that I had seen those kinds of pictures, and also the real statue of Saint Therese and Saint Andrew in the church, and then we talked about books. I read sometimes, but I didn’t know what that book she was reading last night was, and I asked her too if she read lots of books and if she liked video games. She said she wasn’t allowed to play very many video games because her momma and daddy told her they would stunt her brain, or something like that, and if she wanted to grow up and be stupid, then she shouldn’t read books, but play lots of video games instead.

            “My mom and dad wanted us to go to college,” she said, “and if we were stupid because our brains were stunted because of video games, then we could never go to college like her and daddy did.”

            “I guess we don’t have to worry about growing up and going to college because there aren’t any teachers!” I laughed, and so did Lashawna and Jerrick.           

“But there are still books,” Jerrick said. He had a big grin on his face.

            “Curb,” Lashawna said suddenly.

            We got to the park. The grass was still very wet and very tall like the grass behind Father’s house. Our house, now. The sidewalk going in was dry almost, and so we walked over it to the playground way far away inside the park. There were slides that curled and went down, and a little room at the top with a roof, where all the slides started from. There were monkey bars and a merry-go-round and a ladder that went up to the little room with the roof. We played for a while, and I was so surprised when Jerrick found his way all by himself to the monkey bars, and also because he grabbed onto the first one and went all the way across all by himself. And then he turned and came back all by himself.

            I liked the park, especially the playground. I liked the slides and the merry-go-round, but after a while I didn’t want to play on them anymore. I wanted to go somewhere else and do something else. Lashawna had brought her black backpack. She’d found the backpack in Father’s things in his closet. She’d put a whole pack of Nabisco crackers and Skippy Peanut Butter in it, and some more dried up fruit in its own package, and after a while we all got tired and so we sat on a bench beside the playground and started to eat our lunch. She’d also brought a book. Not the same one she was reading last night, though. A different one, and Jerrick was very excited when she took it out and started reading the story. I liked it, too, and Lashawna read very well and it was like listening to someone just tell a story without reading. I closed my eyes and thought about all the things she was reading about in the story. We sat a long time.

I opened my eyes much later. Lashawna had the book opened on her lap and she was reading. That’s when I saw the cloud, or no, not a cloud exactly, because it didn’t look like a cloud except that it was gray. It was in the park and…Yes! In the park right on the grass, and it was round and tall and spinning. Not like a tornado, though, where things get ripped up, like buildings and cars, and get thrown out everywhere. This cloud was spinning slowly, and it didn’t move backward or forward, but it did move sideways onto the sidewalk.

            “Look!” I shouted. I pointed toward the strange cloud.

            Lashawna raised her head. Jerrick looked at me. Lashawna looked over at the cloud and said, “Oh my God.” Jerrick turned his head this way and that way, and I knew he was listening hard because he couldn’t see.

            “It’s buzzing,” he said, but I couldn’t hear that. I mean I did hear Jerrick, but I couldn’t hear any buzzing.

            So it just stood there spinning very slowly, but I wasn’t very afraid, and neither was Lashawna because it wasn’t moving toward us. If it had moved toward us, I would have run as fast as I could have away from it, but then I would have felt very bad because Jerrick probably couldn’t run fast enough, and even if he could have, he might have run into a tree, or tripped on the sidewalk. And that’s what worried me before we ever went outside that morning. I didn’t think, though, that a cloud might appear and chase us. Anyway, it didn’t chase us.

I wondered what it was. It hadn’t been there when we came in because it was right over the sidewalk, and we would have seen it, except Jerrick. But he would have heard it at least.

Lashawna put the book down, and then she stood up.

“Jerrick, you stay here.”

She started to walk over to it, and that very much worried me because we didn’t know what it was, and maybe it was some kind of evil creature that just looked like a cloud that was spinning slowly, and when she got near it, it would suck her in or grab her with hands that we couldn’t see. And I remembered seeing something like that in a movie when the TV still worked, but I can’t remember the name of the movie.

Lawshawna walked to the cloud. Jerrick turned and made his ear point in the direction she walked.

“What is it?” he asked me.

“I don’t know, Jerrick, but I don’t think it’s bad. It’s a cloud, kind of. It’s tall. She’s almost there.”

Lashawna got very close to the cloud and then stopped. The cloud didn’t do anything except spin slowly. She stood in front of it and she looked so small. But it just spinned. After looking up at it for a while, Lashawna finally raised a hand. I bit my lip so hard it bled. Then she touched the cloud, and then she fell down. I screamed. Jerrick started running all by himself. I warned him to stop because we’d been wrong. I knew the cloud had killed her. I shook my head back and forth and cried, and ran after him.

“Stop, Jerrick! Stop!” But he ran fast and didn’t trip and fall. I caught him just before he got to Lashawna. If I hadn’t, I know he would have tripped right over her, and then he would have fallen into the cloud, and he would have been dead! But, I caught him and made him fall with me just before we reached Lashawna. His arms landed on top of his sister. He started to yell, but I knew she didn’t hear him.

“Jerrick! Pull her back. Get her away before it grabs her up! Help me!”

We pulled her back. I kept looking up to see when the cloud would get arms or a big suction mouth and pull all of us inside it where we’d all be dead then. But it didn’t reach out. It just spinned. Jerrick was so strong, and his long fingers had her arms and he kept getting Lashawna farther and farther back with me until we were almost back to the playground.

I cried even more because I’d lost another friend, and I loved Lashawna, but Jerrick didn’t cry. He touched her face all over, and he said, “What’s the cloud doing?”

I wiped my eyes and looked. It was still spinning, but it wasn’t spinning toward us. Just spinning there where it was before.

“Nothing. It’s not doing a thing.”

“Help me. We have to get her back to the church. You be my eyes. I’ll carry her,” he said very softly.

“We can’t go back on the sidewalk! It’s still there.”

“Then we go through the grass. Let’s go,” he told me.

Jerrick picked Lashawna up. I took his arm and we began to go home, but we went through the tall, wet grass, and went very wide around the cloud. It didn’t move, and I prayed that it wouldn’t see us.

When we got home my feet were wet and they were cold, but I didn’t care. All I cared about was Lashawna, and Jerrick said she wasn’t dead at all because he could hear her breathing and feel her lungs working. He carried her into our bedroom and laid Lashawna on the bed, and then he helped me cover her up with blankets. Her eyes were closed.

“What do we do, Jerrick?” I asked when she was covered and would stay warm.

“We’ll wait. She’ll get better. We won’t let her die.”

I wasn’t so sure, though. I think that cloud she touched was what killed everyone else, but I didn’t know why me and Munster and Lashawna and the murderer weren’t killed. Why it didn’t come after us, only Lashawna who went to it. But, we would wait, and I wouldn’t leave her alone, not even to go eat.

FOUR

 

            I sat in a chair beside Lashawna for two whole days and two whole nights. She didn’t move, not even a finger. But I knew she wasn’t dead like Munster and everyone else except that murderer man, and Jerrick. Her face was warm. That’s how you know someone isn’t dead. If they were dead they would get cold, and then they would start to smell. Also, their eyes would be closed.

I burned another candle when the old one went out. I hoped God would listen this time. He hadn’t listened to the last one for Momma and Daddy because they hadn’t come to find me, so I knew they must be dead still.

Jerrick sat beside me in another chair, and he talked to Lashawna a lot, but sometimes he just stared at her like I did. He was worried. He told me she had to eat, and drink water, but she couldn’t because she was asleep and he couldn’t wake her. If he couldn’t wake her she would die because there were no hospitals or doctors, but if there had been we could take her to one and they would feed her even though she was sleeping.

Jerrick brought me things to eat, and a few times I got up after eating and went to the potty. But that was the only time I left Lashawna. I wasn’t so scared anymore about the man who murdered Munster, but I was scared about the cloud. It got into everyone’s house and killed them, and I thought maybe it would find the church and Father’s house where we lived and get in to finish us all off. I told that to Jerrick on the first day, the day after he put Lashawna in our bed.

“It doesn’t matter,” he told me.

“What do you mean?” I said. “I don’t want to get killed!”

“If Lashawna dies, then I don’t want to live either. But I don’t think the cloud is coming anyway. It didn’t come after us in the park, it only hurt Lashawna when she went to it and touched it.”

And after that he didn’t say anything else. Jerrick just stared ahead, with his hands in his lap, and he was quiet until that night.

He slept beside his sister, but I slept in the chair because it was big and had big arms and a cushion. I didn’t want to sleep beside her until she woke up again. Jerrick touched Lashawna’s face and sometimes her shoulder that night, and he said things to her very quietly. I couldn’t hear what he said because he whispered, but I think he was telling her to wake up, that she had to eat and drink. She wouldn’t wake up, though.

After that night we woke up. Jerrick was already up when I woke up, and he brought me Rice Krispies and some water. I ate the Rice Krispies and drank some of the water in between bites, and as I was eating he said that one of us had to leave and go find the hospital. I would have to be the one because he couldn’t look for it because he couldn’t see.

“She’s going to die unless we find the hospital,” he told me.

That frightened me for lots of reasons. One, I didn’t know where the hospital was to begin with. Two, I was afraid the murderer might be out there somewhere, and he would see me if I went to look for it. Three, I might see the cloud again, and I didn’t want to ever see it again. I didn’t know why Jerrick wanted me to go. There were no doctors or nurses even if I found the hospital. I told him that.

“You have to try. We don’t know that there aren’t doctors or nurses alive. We just assume there aren’t. Maybe there are, but we won’t know until we find the hospital. And even if they’re all dead, it’s still a hospital, and they have medicine in them,” he said.

“Do you know which one she needs? How would I find it?”

“No. I don’t know what was in the cloud that made her sick, so I don’t know what medicine to give her. But she has to eat and drink, and I know what she needs to do that, I think,” Jerrick said to me.

“What?” I asked him. He told me, and I was more scared. He said he wanted me to go into the hospital, and if no one was alive, find a room where a smelly body was lying in bed, but it would have to be a smelly body with a bottle hanging up and a tube going down into the dead body’s body. Probably the arm, he said. I would have to yank the tube out, but not the needle. The needle was no good anymore. I’d have to look all over the hospital and find another needle that would fit on the end of the tube, and then bring the bottle and the tube and a new needle back to our house at Father’s.

“But the bottle has to be full, or almost full, and if it isn’t, you have to find more. The food might be in a plastic bag hanging up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t matter, I don’t think. It’s liquid and the food will keep her alive until we can figure something else out. Still, maybe you’ll find a doctor or nurse alive. I don’t know. But you have to try, Amelia. If you don’t, Lashawna will die for sure.”

“I don’t want her to die. Can’t we do something else to make her not die?” I asked.

“No.”

“We could light more candles and say more prayers.”

“No. She needs food and water.”

I sat very still and very scared for a long time. I was thinking, but I was mostly thinking that there was no way I could go. Going out alone would scare me to death. I thought and thought and thought, though, trying to remember in my mind where the hospital was. I remembered going there a few times with Momma, because Daddy cut his finger really bad one time when he was working in the garage, and we had to get him to a doctor. Momma took me alone one time with her, too, when Daddy was out flying somewhere at work. It was a check-up was all, and so the doctor didn’t have to put stitches in her like they’d done to Daddy.

Where was the hospital, where, where, I wondered? It was a big building with lots of floors, that’s all I could remember. It was white. I remembered that. In the name there was a W, too. So, I remembered a lot as I thought harder and harder. It wasn’t too far from our old house on Birch Street, and I knew this because Momma didn’t drive very long when we had to go, and it was away from Munster’s, but past the park where the cloud was. That’s all I could remember. I could never walk there because I just didn’t know the way, and then I looked over at Lashawna again, and I knew I would have to try or she would die, and that would be my fault, and I’d be very, very, very sad.

“I don’t know the way to the hospital, Jerrick. I think I know kind of where it is, but I’m not sure. If Father Kenney’s computer worked I could maybe find a map there, but no one’s computer works.”

Jerrick pointed his head and his eyes upward when I said that. That’s how he thought, and he was thinking very hard, but not for long.

“You have to find a map, then. One that shows the streets on a piece of paper. That’s how they used to find out where to go before computers. There must be one here somewhere. Look in all the drawers.” Jerrick was still looking up when he said that, and his eyes didn’t move because it wouldn’t have done any good if they had. He was blind, but he knew about maps somehow. He put his hand on my arm and squeezed it.

I jumped out of the chair and ran to Father’s dresser that had a mirror on top of it and some other things in front of the mirror on the top. I opened every drawer and searched for a map, but there were only clothes and one drawer with lots of papers, but nothing with a map like I could find at Google. I ran to the kitchen and looked in all the drawers, but no map, and I was discouraged. After that I ran back out of the kitchen and down the hall toward the front of Father’s house where the desk was, and I looked in all those drawers, except one that wouldn’t open because it was locked. I yanked on it and yanked on it, but it still wouldn’t open, so I thought maybe I could find a hammer and hit it until I broke it open. Maybe Father hid his maps inside that drawer. So I turned to run back to the kitchen, and then I stopped. Right behind Father’s messy desk was a map on the wall! It showed streets!

“Jerrick, I found the map,” I yelled very loudly. “It’s on the wall!”

Jerrick came, and when he got there I was already on the chair with wheels on the bottom, and I had to be very careful when I pulled the tacks out of the corners of the map because the chair rolled on the wheels. The map wasn’t a paper map, it was a map made out of plastic, but it had all the streets in Marysville on it, and it had tiny building pictures, like Monopoly pieces. Churches had a cross on top of their tiny building, and once I had gotten the map down and pushed the chair away, and Jerrick was standing asking me, “What, what, what?” I put it on top of the messy desk and started looking for the hospital Momma had taken Daddy to, and the one she went to for a check up later. I didn’t see a big W on any of the tiny buildings, but I saw a picture of a church near my street that was called Birch Street on the map. The church was called Saint Andrews, and so I knew where Jerrick and Lashawna and me were on the plastic map, and I would find the hospital.

“Do you see a hospital?” Jerrick asked me.

“I don’t know what they look like on a map,” I answered. “I see Saint Andrew’s and the park up there.” I pointed on the plastic map at the green park, but that was stupid because Jerrick couldn’t see what I was pointing at. “The hospital must be one of the buildings up here,” I said.

“What does it say by the buildings you don’t recognize?”

I leaned down closer and tried to read the little teeny letters, and then I saw one that had the word hospital in it. Western Medi-cal Hospital. That was it!

“Here it is! I found it, but it’s at least an inch away from the park.”

“North or south,” Jerrick asked.

“Up.”

“Okay, that’s north.”

“How do you know that?” I asked him.

“I’ve seen maps with my fingers. Braille. North is always at the top of the page.”

“Braille?”

“Books for blind people.”

“Huh?” I was confused.

“Never mind. I can explain it later. For now we have to figure out a route for you to take,” he said.

And so he helped me find big streets that were larger than small streets on the map, and he made me find a black marker and make an X on them so that I would be able to find them easier later when I left. But always to “reference” (I had to ask him about that word) where I was by the streets I marked with an X. That was confusing, but I knew Western Hospital was north, so that was up on the map. When I had gotten the food from the hospital for Lashawna, I would have to go south, or down.

Jerrick took me to the kitchen. He got crackers and the almost-empty jar of Skippy peanut butter and some sardines from the pantry and we put them inside the backpack that Lashawna used to have when we had gone to the park. And then he did something that made me blush. He put his big fingers on my head, on both sides, and then he kissed my forehead. He said, “Good luck. Don’t be frightened. Lashawna and I will be waiting for you. Hurry, now.”

I left.

I ran all the way to the park, and then I stopped and pulled out the plastic map, which I had folded once, and then once more so that it would fit into the big pouch of Lashawna’s backpack. I looked back in the direction I had just come from, and then at the map, which I had laid down on the sidewalk. I needed to go left on that street because left was north, and so I did. I looked into the park when I got there, but I didn’t see the cloud, and I was thankful for that. I prayed that it wasn’t waiting somewhere in front of me, north.

 

FIVE

            I walked for a long time. I tried not to think about the cloud or Munster or the murderer, so I thought about my school, Vincent James Elementary. My school was marked on the map, and I knew it easily because I was good at spelling its name, and I found it on the map. It was in the opposite direction from Saint Andrew’s and my old house, too. South. I thought about my teacher at Vincent James Elementary, Ms. Terrel. She was very nice, except when you misbehaved, and she was beautiful.

            Ms. Terrel taught us how to add and subtract numbers, like 436 minus 213, instead of 4 minus 2 like we learned from Ms. Abercrombie last year in the second grade. I didn’t like math very much. I liked Social Science best, except for Art, maybe. I liked art better. Ms. Terrel told us about where we lived in Marysville in Social Science. Long ago there weren’t very many houses and neighborhoods in Marysville. Instead, the people who lived here worked on farms that grew my favorite fruit. Not tomatoes! Strawberries. And we learned a little about maps, and I was glad for that on that afternoon, except I didn’t know that north was always up, and south was always down until Jerrick told me.

            I walked and I thought about my school, and when I came to a new street I would say, “Curb,” and when I went over a big crack in the sidewalk I would say, “Crack,” although I didn’t really need to say either of those words. I stopped whenever I came to a new street and looked for it on my plastic map, because if I didn’t, I knew I might turn wrong, and then I would be lost, and I wished my Momma or Daddy were still alive.

            But, they weren’t.

           

Ms. Terrel made our class draw pictures and color them. One day before the cloud came and killed everyone she had us draw a picture of our families, and so I drew Momma and Daddy and me in front of our house. I colored almost everything Purple and Red and Orange, because Orange is my favorite color. In my picture I was in the middle, and Momma had her dress on, and Daddy was hard to draw because he wore pants. I wasn’t good at drawing pants for some reason, so I colored his legs big black, which made my daddy look like he had big fat legs. We had a tree in front of our house, though I don’t know what kind, but I made it green because leaves are green, except in the Fall when they turn ORANGE sometimes, and fall off onto the lawn, which was also green. Some trees have leaves that stay green all the time and don’t fall, but I don’t know why.

            Jason Smith drew his family, too. He sat next to me at our table. He had three sisters and one younger brother, and he drew all of them, and Jason was one of the boys who Ms. Terrel punished sometimes because he was bad, and he got in trouble when he showed me his picture. He drew a picture of his family, with his daddy and his momma on one side, and all his sisters and one brother on the other. His daddy didn’t have pants on, and Jason drew a you-know-what in between his daddy’s legs. He showed the picture to me and began to giggle, but I didn’t, because it wasn’t nice. Ms. Terrel saw Jason giggling and she came up behind him, and she saw the naughty picture, and so Jason was punished, but I wasn’t.

            I walked and walked and looked at my plastic map a lot. I was very close to the hospital finally. It was only a tiny ways away on my map. I crossed N Tustin Ave., and I could see the tall building that was white not too far away.

It was sunny and not cold and I was hungry, so I sat on a bench at the place where buses stopped and picked people up and dropped them off. I drank some water and ate three crackers with peanut butter and jelly that Jerrick put in Lashawna’s black backpack when we packed it. I’d told him, “This one is the Skippy peanut butter,” and “that one is Ragu spaghetti sauce. I don’t want that.” But he knew, he said, because he “recognized” some jars by their shape, and if he wasn’t sure what they were, he would open them and smell them. As I drank my water and ate the crackers with peanut butter and a little jelly on top, I wondered what Jerrick was doing right at that moment? I wondered if Lashawna was getting skinny and dying because she couldn’t eat? And so I stood up and grabbed my backpack and ran the rest of the way to the hospital.

I was frightened at first because I knew there were hundreds and hundreds of dead people inside, but I also knew I would have to go in and find the jar or bag with the tube coming out of it so that Lashawna could eat and not die. The big glass doors wouldn’t open, and I wondered why, but then I remembered that they opened by themselves whenever people got near them. I pushed as hard as I could, but they wouldn’t move. I took my backpack off. I sat down right there in front of the doors and I wanted to cry. I’d walked so far, but I couldn’t get in, and now Lashawna would starve to death. And suddenly I remembered that the doors went out whenever they opened. I remembered that, and so I stood back up and put my fingers in the tiny crack between the doors. I wished I had fingers like Jerrick’s that were long, but I didn’t. I pulled outward as hard as I could. The door opened a little, but I fell backward onto my behind when it did. The smell came out, and my stomach wanted to throw up my lunch. It was much worse than the smell in my old house, and worse than the smell at the mini-mart, and I didn’t know if I could go into the hospital. I had to, though.

I got up and pulled the door open all the way and went in. I covered my mouth and my nose with my hand, but I started to get dizzy right away, and my head began to ache. In the long hallway lots of people were lying there. Some were men, and some were women, and I saw a little boy who was lying on top of his mother. Germy flies flew around them. The flies flew after me, but I brushed them away and hoped they wouldn’t land on me and make me sick.

I didn’t know what was what, and I didn’t see any rooms with people who had been sick inside them, so I went to the elevators, but then I ran from them because I knew they couldn’t work anymore. I found a door that had STAIR written above it, and so I pulled that door open and went up the stairs to the next floor.

On that floor, which was Number Two, I searched every room. I hoped I’d find a dead body with a tube in it, but I didn’t find any, so I ran back to the stairway and went up to Number Three. I looked in almost every room, but there were no bodies with tubes going into them with food. I ran to the stairway again and went up higher, to Number Four. I searched again and again in every room until I finally saw what Jerrick had told me to look for. I didn’t look at the man lying there with a sheet over part of his body, but not his face, I just ran to the bed and yanked the tube out of his arm. The needle came out, too, but I didn’t care. I would find some scissors or a knife and cut it later. I put the bag with the tube and the needle into my backpack quickly, but I wasn’t finished. I had to find more bags with food in them, and more needles. Jerrick hadn’t said anything about where they would be, so I thought, If I were a doctor, where would I put more bags of food and needles for this dead man who didn’t used to be dead?

In a drawer, maybe…or in the closet on the other side of the room! I ran to the closet and opened it, but it was a bathroom. I left the door open and turned around. I would try the drawers. I looked in every one of them, and in every cabinet, and even under the bed, but there were no other bags or tubes, and so I left the dead man. I ran outside to the place where two dead nurses were lying behind a counter, and one was sticking half in and half out of the opening. Nothing in there either, and I wanted to shake those dead nurses, and yell at them, and make them tell me where the bags with food and the tubes with needles were. I stepped backward and my foot came down on the nurse’s arm, the one sticking half in and half out of the opening, and I felt the nurse’s arm squish. Goo squirted onto my foot. I got sick. I threw up, and I left that room as quickly as I could, holding my tummy.

I’m not sure why, but I looked across the hall and saw a little door. It wasn’t a door into a room where sick people lay. It was too small to go in through. It was open a little, and under it, sitting all sagged over, was another dead nurse. Her head was hanging down, and in her purple hand was a bag. A food bag. I hurried there, being careful not to touch her with my foot, and then I opened the door all the way. Inside were lots of bags and tubes and needles. There was no food in them, but I took six of each of them and stuffed them into my backpack anyway, and then I ran toward the stairway.

I thought maybe Jerrick and me could mush up Rice Krispies and water and pour it into the bags, and then Lashawna would have food and not die.

A big window was by the elevators that I passed, and I stopped suddenly when I passed by the elevators. I didn’t see the big window when I came up because I came up on the stairs, but I saw it then. I ran to the window because outside I could see Marysville because I was up so high on the 4th floor. I looked out at my city, and I wanted to cry. All over the city, but not close to the hospital, there were round clouds. They were spinning, and some of them moved slowly, and I couldn’t see the tops of them. There were lots of cars on the streets where the clouds were, but none of the cars moved, and on the freeway a lot of them looked like they had crashed. And there was no one alive in them.

I stared for a long time, and my head hurt, but I knew I had to leave, and I wanted to because it smelled so, so bad in the hospital. So I ran to the stairs and I ran down all of them with my black backpack and Lashawna’s food bags and tubes and needles. When I was outside I took a deep breath, and I hoped I could get home without one of the spinning clouds seeing me. I hoped, too, that Lashawna was still alive.

I hurried back exactly the way I had come. I crossed the streets and passed the bus stop place where I’d eaten lunch. I went under a bridge, and I knew I was going south, the right way. I don’t know how long I ran, but I was tired and very hungry again, so I stopped on Main Street. I sat down beside a door that went into a store, and I opened my black backpack. I hadn’t eaten all the crackers Jerrick had put in, and there was a little Skippy peanut butter and some jelly left, so I ate some. I sat and ate and thought about all the clouds I’d seen, and I knew they were spinning and spinning and searching for anyone who escaped them when they first came with the bright light. I didn’t know why they wanted to kill everyone. There were so many clouds.

I finished eating the crackers. They were all gone, and so I put the empty wrapper back into my black backpack like Momma always told me to do with my trash. I stood up. I put the straps over my shoulder, wiped my behind, only the pants, not my bottom, and then I walked away, south.

I came to the street where I needed to turn and so I turned. I walked up the street and came to the alley where big trucks used to go down, probably, with stuff for the stores. Or trash trucks, too. As I stepped off the sidewalk into the alley, I heard a noise and looked behind me. I saw something that made me stop and smile and want to jump up and down. It was Munster!

But Munster was walking right in front of a grownup man. They’d come onto the street behind me, and they turned and walked the same way I was going, but they were talking and I didn’t think they saw me. The man had his hand of Munster’s shirt, and I thought the man was saying something bad to him. The man leaned down when he was talking, and Munster was looking up into his face, so I knew they hadn’t seen me. The man hadn’t murdered Munster. He had captured him, though, and he must have had Munster’s gun.

            I ran into the alley and hid behind a big trashcan with a lid on it. If the man had captured Munster, then he would capture me too, or shoot me if he saw me. If I was wrong, though, and the man with his hand on Munster’s shirt was good, I shouldn’t hide, I thought. I should run back out and ask them to help me and Jerrick and Lashawna. But, I was afraid to do that.

            I lay down on my tummy and peeked under the trashcan. I could see their legs when they walked across the alley, and I could hear their shoes on it. The man wasn’t talking anymore, but Munster’s legs went fast all of the sudden, like he’d tripped or been shoved. There were no cracks in the alley where they were, and so I knew the man had pushed him.

            I didn’t know where they were going, but I was frightened, and so I stayed on my tummy for a long time, and I counted to one hundred very slowly. After one hundred and one, I got up and ran to the corner of the alley and I peeked around the corner. They were gone, but far away at the end of the street, a dark cloud was spinning slowly, where Munster and the man should have been. I turned and ran back down the alley. Another cloud was at the end. I had nowhere to go. I stopped and covered my eyes. I knew I was going to die, and then Lashawna would die, and then Jerrick. Munster and the man were now eaten by the other cloud. When the one in front of me finished, there would be no more people left in the whole world. Just germy flies, and they would die, too, when all the bodies were gone.

            Then I thought of the big trashcan with the lid, right beside me. The lid was open. I ran to it and climbed in. I pulled the lid closed and then huddled in the corner on top of a bunch of papers and boxes. I covered my eyes and prayed to Saint Therese and Saint Andrew. I told them if they let me live by sending angels to chase the cloud away that I would light all the candles in their candle holders and make sure they never went out.

            I put my knees up to my chest and kept my hands over my ears, and after a while passed, the cloud had not found me, and so I fell asleep.

SIX

I woke up and the sun was shining and I could see the sun’s smiley face through the little crack between the lid and the top of the big trashcan I was in the corner of. I crawled out from under the folded boxes and crumpled up paper, and then I very carefully lifted the lid and peeked outside. There were clouds up the alley and down the alley, but if you think I was afraid, you’d be wrong!

I lifted the lid a little higher and looked better. The clouds were spinning like they always did. Very slowly. But today they weren’t like they were when that one at the end of the alley was watching me last night. There were lots of them, yes, but there was something very strange about them this day. They had arms and legs and faces, and one of them was near me, only a few feet away by the other end of the trashcan.

            It had a blurry face, with two eyes and two ears and a nose that was very small, and a mouth. It was smiling, too. Not a big smile, just a smile. It raised one of its arms and put its hand out toward me, and then its smile got bigger. That’s what made me not be afraid at first. It wanted me to come out, and so I pushed the lid all the way up, and it banged into the building behind me when it was opened all the way. I bent down and grabbed my backpack with Lashawna’s food in it because I didn’t want to lose it. I climbed out and jumped to the ground.

            The cloud thing lifted its arm higher. It wasn’t a tall cloud anymore that stretched way up high into the sky. It was not much taller than my daddy, or Father Kenney. Its fingers seemed to move, but they weren’t really moving up and down or anything like that. They were spinning like its body and head, with…well, as if they were normal clouds in the sky that sometimes looked like dogs or lions or sheeps, and that moved. That’s hard for me to explain.

            Its hand stayed there, and I knew the cloud was asking me to come to it and take hold of its hand. Maybe if I did I could ask it why all of its friends had come and killed everyone, and put Lashawna to sleep, but didn’t kill her yet. Maybe it was going to kill me if I touched it like Lashawna did, but I didn’t think so somehow.

            I pulled my backpack up higher onto my shoulders, and then I walked over to it, and it told me not to be afraid, and so I wasn’t. Its voice was windy. No, not windy like a storm windy. It was more like windy in the trees, but not scary windy. Soft windy and music-y. Leaves moving, but not hitting each other hard. The wind was a nice wind, and so the voice of the cloud was a nice voice, like Momma’s. And that’s another reason why I wasn’t afraid.

            I took her hand, and before I could even blink I was somewhere else, but I wasn’t sure where that was. We walked up a hill with tall trees on either side, but the trees weren’t really trees. They were cloud people, and they were green. Some of them were frowning at me, and I thought they wanted to come onto the road and touch me. I knew if they did I would die, but I didn’t know exactly how I knew that. I knew it, though. The cloud person I was with spoke to them and told them that I was her friend, and that my hair was just the right length, even though it was dirty.

            I put my hand in my hair and lifted it to the front and looked at it. It was dark brown and greasy, and there were bugs crawling all over in it. I told the cloud person that it was terribly dirty and I asked her if she would show me where I could wash it because I didn’t know. All the water everywhere was turned off, like the electricity. I also told her I could take a bath or even a shower when I washed my hair. I smelled poopy. Not like all the dead people poopy, but smelly. She had kind eyes. She smiled at me and put her hand on my head. I felt the bugs crackle and pop, and then fall out onto the ground.

            “Yes, child. Up the hill. On the other side. You will find a stream with many people you know sitting beside it. Go there. Clean water is waiting for you.” And then she leaned down and kissed my forehead and told me to not wander off the road for any reason, but to follow it up the hill. I would see the stream, she said. If I stayed on the road, the other cloud people would not touch me. I would be safe.

            “Do not leave the road, Amelia,” she said, and then her face and arms and hands and legs went away. She’d turned back into the cloud that was spinning and very, very tall. But even though she didn’t have a face, I knew she was looking at me and she was smiling.

            I looked up the road. It was a long way to the top. I started to walk, and then I looked to my right, and then my left. Standing almost behind one of the spinning clouds I saw Munster! I saw the man who was with him yesterday, too. Munster didn’t speak, and he didn’t run to me. He waved at me to come over. The man who hadn’t murdered him after all was beside him. I wanted to run to him and ask Munster what had happened that day at the mini mart, and I wanted to help him, too, if I could. But the cloud lady had warned me not to go off the road, and so I shook my head no. My foot was so close to the edge of the road.

            Munster gritted his teeth and kept waving for me to come, but I wouldn’t. After a minute, he looked sad and hurt, and then he turned and disappeared into the cloud. The man followed him. Why wasn’t he dead when he touched the cloud? I began to think that maybe he was this time. That yesterday the cloud hadn’t gotten him and the man he was with. Maybe today he was so sad because I wouldn’t step off the road and go to him.           

I didn’t know, and I couldn’t help him anyway because he was inside the cloud, and I couldn’t leave the road because of what the lady said to me. The lady who was a cloud, too, and who spoke softly to me, and held my hand and didn’t want to hurt me. A good cloud. Still, I wanted to go to Munster. I thought he needed me, and that’s why he kept waving before he went into the cloud. I wouldn’t go help him, and so he committed suicide. My mind said “Go!” and then it said, “Don’t!” Over and over and over, and I almost went, but the words of the lady kept coming back. “Do not leave the road, Amelia.”

            I walked up the hill, feeling very sad about my friend Munster all the way, but I went along, and finally I reached the top and stopped to see where the stream with all my friends beside it was. Below me there were lots and lots of trees. Big ones with hundreds and thousands of leaves, and very thick trunks and branches that reached up to heaven almost. I was above them all, and the sun was bright, shining far off in the distance, so I thought I was almost as high as the sun, standing there at the top of the hill on that road. The stream was down there. It looked like a long blue ribbon and reminded me of one my momma wore sometimes in her hair. It sparkled when the sun touched it as it went along, winding and winding, and then going into a sea so far away.

            Along its edge sat many tiny houses, so small that I could barely tell they were houses at all. But they were. They all had roofs, and one or two had chimneys. And in and out of them went little people that looked like ants, except ants have more legs, and feelers on their heads. I ran down the road on the hill. It took a long time for me to go down, but at last I arrived at the trees, and then followed the road into them. I walked for a long time, and once I stopped to make my backpack go straighter on my back because it was crooked and digging into my side. I saw Lashawna in my head, lying with her eyes closed and starving, and I turned around. Instead of the road, though, there was a cliff, and that confused me very much. So I turned again and kept going down the road under the tall trees. I couldn’t go back even if I wanted to. I prayed that Lashawna could just hang on for a little while longer. That I’d find a way out of that place and back to Saint Andrews with her bags and tubes and needles, and my hair would be clean.

            I had no watch. I didn’t know how much time passed, but I walked on the road and heard birds in the tall trees all around me. I liked that because at my old house and at Saint Andrew’s Church the birds were all gone. Maybe they’d flown away to escape the clouds. I didn’t know. I liked birds because they sang and flew (which I couldn’t), and crows ate junk in the streets and didn’t sing like other birds, and that was okay. If they liked old pieces of hamburger and trash, that was fine. And the noise they made was funny and always made me smile.

            And I walked and walked, and finally I heard the stream off the road to my left. I heard it because I knew that when water in a stream goes over big rocks or even little rocks it makes a noise that it doesn’t make when there are no rocks in it. I also saw a house way ahead to my right, and so I was getting close to people, and that’s what I wanted. The lady cloud had told me I would see my friends—I think she said that—and that I could wash in the stream. Which meant that when I came to the stream I could leave the road.

            I saw a lion when I finally saw the stream. It was drinking the water. I saw a horse and a bear, and the bear was sitting down eating berries from a bush near the stream, and the horse was just standing there looking at the bear. I didn’t want to go over there to wash, so I kept walking. Before I knew it, I had come to a turn in the road, and what I saw made me leave the road quickly and run toward the stream. My momma was sitting on the bank with her feet in the water. I was so, so happy, and I didn’t care about washing because all I wanted at that moment was to run to her and throw my arms around her!

            I ran to her, and when I got there I threw my arms around her and told her I had missed her, and that I loved her. But she didn’t move or say anything back to me. I didn’t think she even felt my arms. She just sat there and looked out into the stream.

And then I woke up.

My legs were cramped. The sun was shining, but it wasn’t smiling. It was just the sun. I rubbed my eyes because there was sleep still in them, and then I stood up and pushed the trashcan lid open all the way. There were no clouds that I could see, but even if I’d seen one, or two, or a hundred, I didn’t care. And even if I’d seen Munster or the man who had captured him, I didn’t care. I didn’t want to die, but I had to run home to Saint Andrew’s, and the only way to do that was to leave and not be afraid anymore.

I had to wee, though. Very badly. I climbed out of the big trashcan and ran across the alley to a door, and it was unlocked, so I went inside. It was dark, so I went back and used my black backpack to hold it open so that I could see where I was going inside the building. I found another door with a blue drawing of a lady pasted on it, and that was the ladies room. I went in. There was a small trashcan just inside the ladies room, and I shoved it by the door so that it wouldn’t close, and I could see where the toilets were.

I went wee. I had to hurry, though, because Lashawna was starving. If I hadn’t hidden in the big trashcan and been afraid, I would have been home last night, and she could have eaten. I thought about this, and I also thought about the dream with the good cloud lady and the road and the stream and Munster, and my momma who didn’t know I was in the dream. When I asked Daddy once about why we dream and if they meant anything, he told me they were just jumbled up things in our heads that come together somehow and really don’t mean anything because they make no sense.

In my dream there was a lion and a bear and a horse down by the stream, and that didn’t make sense. A lion would have jumped on the horse and eaten him, and then he would have found the bear eating berries and eaten the bear. But he just drank the water instead and didn’t kill the horse or the bear. That is not real, I knew.

My momma didn’t see me or feel my arms around her, and that made no sense either because Momma always saw me and knew me and loved me. And Daddy wasn’t in the dream. If Momma was really sitting by a stream, then Daddy would have been close by because there was no garage in the house on the other side of the road. And I missed them, but they were gone, and I didn’t miss them as much as I had the day before, or the day before that, because hoping they would come back really made no sense. It was kind of like missing Grandpa who’d died when I was a little girl. I missed him very much at first, and I cried and wished he hadn’t died, or that he could come back, but he didn’t, and as I got older and smarter I didn’t miss him like I used to. And someday I wouldn’t miss Momma and Daddy so much because Father Kenney and even Momma and Daddy said many times that dead people are alive in Heaven, and they are always watching us, and they live with their friends and their own mommas and daddies, and they aren’t unhappy at all. And they live with Jesus and God his father and the Holy Ghost, and they love them and ask them to help us. I could never understand who the Holy Ghost was, though. He was God, but he was also a bird, and he never said anything to anyone.

I didn’t understand being dead, or Heaven, or especially God who was three gods, but only one god, and that made no sense because I had never met three people who were one person, and so I couldn’t understand it, but I believed it.

I left the ladies room and ran down the hall to the back door. I picked up my black backpack and ran down the alley because I needed to get the bags and tubes and needles back to Jerrick so that we could feed and get water into Lashawna. That is all that really mattered. If I saw Munster or the man or a cloud or a hundred clouds, I didn’t care. I needed to get back to Saint Andrew’s Church.

I forgot about the dream and ran.

 

SEVEN

 

I remembered all the streets and all the turns without looking at my folded plastic map. That was good. I could run without having to stop and find out where I was. I wasn’t tired, but I was hungry, but I didn’t stop to eat what was left of the peanut butter and jelly. Lashawna was hungrier.

In school I was the best runner, even better than Marcus Gonzales who was fast. He could beat me in a short race, but I always beat him and everyone else when we ran for a long time around the quad. I got a blue ribbon from Principle Terry for doing that.

I saw the park ahead of me, and there was no cloud in it. There were no clouds anywhere, except in the sky to the north, up, but those were just rain clouds because they were very, very dark and like a big blanket. The sun was to the left, which was east, and it was only a little above the Santa Ana Mountains. Those are the mountains where most of the coyotes and wild animals lived, and it was dangerous for children to go there if their parents weren’t with them. But they were far away anyway, so most children couldn’t go there. It must have been about 7:00 o’clock, but I couldn’t be sure because time is different in the winter, and it either goes forward an hour, or else backward, and I could never remember which, and I didn’t have a watch anyway.

Daddy taught me how to tell time without a clock or the computer, or without looking at his or Momma’s cell phone. He bought Momma a clock that was called a Sundial once, and he put it in the backyard for her, right in the middle of the grass where the trees couldn’t block the sun. It had a flat top and a tall pointer thing in the middle. It had numbers, which he told me were Roman Numerals, but they were not like the Roman Numerals on the clock on the wall in our kitchen. The sundial had a XII at the top, and I, II, III, IV, V, VI, and then VII on the right side. That was not like our kitchen clock. On the other side was VII again, and then VIII, and IX, and X and XI just before XII. So it would be VII twice. I didn’t understand that, and at night I couldn’t understand how to tell time without the sun, so I asked him why there would be seven o-clocks twice. He laughed and said it was because that’s how God made sundials. I didn’t know God made sundials, but if God wanted it to be seven twice in one day, I guessed it would be, because whatever God says is the law.

Daddy told me that if I was ever out in the wilderness without a sundial (they’re heavy, so I wouldn’t ever take one to the woods even if I ever went there) that I could poke a stick into the ground, and that if I knew which way was north—which I knew very well by now—that I could tell the time because XII was always “true north”. I didn’t need to stop that morning to poke a stick into the ground because I didn’t really care what time it was.

Lashawna and Jerrick were waiting. I hoped I wasn’t too late.

The black clouds in the sky, the storm clouds I’d seen lots of time, became even darker as I neared Birch Street. I could see Saint Andrew’s right ahead of me. I could also see lightning coming down from the dark clouds farther north, and then thunder. I don’t remember seeing lightning very often in Marysville. The sky always got black, and then it just began to rain. Not that morning, though. I hurried faster until I got to Saint Andrew’s, and I ran in. When I got to the front where I’d first met Lawhawna and Jerrick, I saw that many of the candles had burned out, so that had to mean Jerrick had not come back to put new ones in. That worried me.

I ran through the sacristy, out the back door, and then I took a deep breath before opening Father Kenney’s and our house’s door. Through the front room where the desk was still messy, but the chair with wheels was not turned over anymore, down the hall, and I stopped quickly, for just a second, when I got to our bedroom. I heard Lashawna’s voice! Somehow Jerrick had woke her up, or else she had woke herself…or maybe the good cloud lady was not just a dream, and she’d come and woke Lashawna.

I didn’t knock, I just pushed the door open and ran in. Lashawna was sitting up in our bed with two pillows behind her, and she turned her head very fast when I came in without knocking. So did Jerrick. I was so happy to see dear Lashawna alive, with her eyes open, and smiling at me, and I ran across the room without saying hello and jumped on the bed to hug her.

“You’re awake! You’re alive!” I said, and she put her hand on my dirty hair.

“And so are you!”

I got up onto my knees and took my black backpack off and threw it down to the end of the bed because now we didn’t need the bags and tubes and needles anymore, and I was tired of carrying it for two days. Jerrick hadn’t said a word. He was happy too, I knew, because he was standing at the side of the bed in front of the big chair, and he had his hands together in front of him, and he had a big grin on his face. I jumped off the bed and hugged him so hard he fell backward with me into the chair, and I was glad the chair was behind him, because if it hadn’t been I would have knocked him onto the floor and maybe hurt him! But we just fell into the chair.

“What happened?” was all I could think of to say to Jerrick. That question was a lot, though, because a lot must have happened while I was away. A lot happened to me.

Lashawna couldn’t move very well. She lay there awake, but she didn’t get up. I heard her laugh when Jerrick and I fell into the chair, so I knew she was going to be better. Sick people don’t laugh. When Daddy got sick, he never laughed. He just lay in bed and moaned a lot, but Momma always took care of him, and she didn’t laugh until he got better. I know she loved Daddy very much even when he was sick or cranky, and that is how Jerrick was with Lashawna, although I’m sure she didn’t cuss like Daddy sometimes did. I mean while I was away finding her bags and tubes and needles, and she was waking up.

I sat up and put my hands on Jerrick’s shoulders. “WHAT happened? How did you make Lashawna wake up?” I asked him.

Jerrick shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I didn’t. She just woke up last night. There was a wind that started blowing. It rattled the dishes in the kitchen, and the house shook, but then as suddenly as it had come up, it went away, and afterward I heard Lashawna call my name.”

I sat on Jerrick’s lap for a minute and looked over his head at the curtains and the window behind us. I didn’t really see them. I was thinking about the wind. I made my eyes focus and see through the glass into the gray outside. Lashawna was talking, but I didn’t hear her. It was raining, then, but there was no wind. Just rain. I climbed off Jerrick’s lap and went to the window to look outside.

I hadn’t noticed it when I ran across the stone walk from the sacristy to Father Kenney’s house at first, but when Jerrick told me a moment ago that there’d been a wind last night, the long grass between the church and Father’s house came into my head. It was all bent over in a swirling pattern, like a big hand had brushed over it and made it all go one way very neatly. I looked outside the window. There was the stone path that came around the house from the front, and there was a little house with no walls farther out in the yard. It had two steps made of wood that went up to the inside where there were benches behind a fence of more wood. It had a roof that was held up by four posts, and the roof was leaning toward the stone wall behind it, just like someone had pushed it very hard. A big hand…or a big wind. All around it the grass, which was tall like everywhere else, was swirled. In the corner of the yard, a statue of Mother Mary lay on its side in the grass. I looked all around. Trash and wrinkled pieces of paper everywhere. A branch from a tree had broken, and hung down on the grass.

The wind might have broken the branch, thrown papers everywhere, knocked Mary over, and bent the roof on the little house with no sides, but it would not have twirled the grass unless it had been spinning. That’s when I knew for sure one of the clouds had been there. I thought of the good cloud lady in my dream, but I couldn’t make sense of it. Evil clouds that killed everyone except us, that almost killed Lashawna, but then had come to our house and…it confused me.

I’d seen lots of them from the window in the hospital, spinning and looking for anyone they’d missed when they first came two weeks before Christmas. I guessed that’s what they were doing. I’d seen two in the alley behind the stores, and one down the street right after Munster and the grownup had run by the alley. And the one that Lashawna had touched and gotten sick because of it.

They must have known we were in Father’s house. So why hadn’t they just come in and found us and then killed us, too? And why hadn’t the one I’d seen at the end of the alley come after me when I climbed into the big trashcan? And where were Father Kenney and Father Hiddick or Hendrick, or whatever his name was? Their bodies?

My head was spinning thinking about all of that.

“So, what did you see while you were out, Amelia? You were gone an awfully long time,” Jerrick said, and I woke up.

“Huh?” I answered, and then, “Oh. Lots and lots of dead bodies. And lots of clouds.” I told him and Lashawna about all the things I’d seen while I was gone, and how I’d hidden in the trashcan and had a dream. I couldn’t tell them everything about the dream because dreams are a lot like snowmen. That’s what Momma used to say. You always remember the snowman had a carrot nose and two rock eyes and two stick arms, but when the sun comes, he melts and goes into the ground, and then all you can see about him after another while is his arms and nose and eyes in a little pile on the wet ground. But he always comes back, even though you can’t remember everything about him while he was gone. I liked that idea. Momma called it an analogy. And so I knew a big word, and what it meant, and I knew what dreams were, but not why I had them. If I thought back really, really hard, I could remember the cloud lady, and Munster, and my momma, and the stream, but I couldn’t remember everything, like every step I took on the road, or what notes the birds sang. Things like that. I had already begun to forget about them, and lots of things were fuzzy. But I remembered everything, everything about my trip to the hospital. I could never forget that because it wasn’t a dream.

I went back to the bed and sat down.

“Lashawna, when you get better we have to go out again. Munster is out there with the man. We have to find them, and we have to help Munster get away. We have to find the clouds, too. One of them came and woke you up, and I think it was a she, and she doesn’t want any of us to die. Maybe we can find out what happened to everyone.”

“Tomorrow, maybe,” Lashawna said with a big smile.

“Okay, tomorrow,” I said. “Maybe it won’t be raining anymore, and the sun will be out. I hope.” And then the promise I made came to my mind. I had something I had to do. I jumped up and ran toward the bedroom door.

“Where are you going?” Lashawna asked me when I got there.

“I have a promise I have to keep. I’ll be back in a minute.”

I ran down the hall, through father Kenney’s messy office, out the door into the rain, and then I went into the sacristy. The little candles were in a cupboard on the bottom shelf. Boxes and boxes of them. I grabbed one of the boxes and then ran into the church to the altar of Saint Therese. I set the box down and took the burned-out candles from each of the glass holders. I replaced every one of them, and when I was finished, I lit them with a long stick match. Seeing them all bright and dancing in front of Saint Therese’s statue made me smile. I took the rest of the candles out of the box and set each one on the altar, and when they were all neat, I lit them, too. Still, it didn’t seem like enough candles, and so I ran back to the sacristy to get more. Two boxes. It took me a long time to spread them out around the altar, on the steps, and on the communion rail and the front pew. I lit them all. Then I went back to Saint Therese’s altar and knelt down.

“Dear Saint Therese, thank you for answering my prayer and waking Lashawna up. I don’t know why the clouds came or why that one cloud did that to her. Can you tell me? I don’t want everyone to be dead, either. I don’t understand it. Did God tell you why yet? I want to know. And I don’t know what will happen to Jerrick and me and Lashawna. There’s no one here to help us, so I guess you’ll have to do that. Okay?”

I knelt in front of Saint Therese for the longest time, until my knees hurt, and so I sat down and just talked to her, right there on the steps of her altar. She didn’t answer. Something strange and wonderful happened, though, as I sat there. I looked up after a while and saw the statue all wrapped in a small whirling cloud, and through the cloud I could see the statue’s face a little. Saint Therese’s face. And I know her eyes were looking down at me through the cloud. Maybe…maybe she was the cloud, the good one from my dream, like it was her spirit.

I was happy. I’d lit a hundred candles or more, and my thank you would keep going up to heaven for a long time. I was just about ready to stand up and leave when I heard Jerrick coming out of the sacristy.

“Amelia? Are you in here?”

“Yes. Over here,” I answered. “Be careful, though! I lit candles and they’re all over the floor by me.”

“Yes, I know. I can hear them burning,” he said.

“You can? Really?”

Jerrick laughed. “No, not really, but I can smell them.”

“Oh. I can’t.”

He came over to me carefully, with his nose pointed up a little.

“That’s because you depend on your eyes too much,” he told me. I closed my eyes and tried to pretend that I couldn’t see; that maybe I would be able, then, to smell like he could. Nothing changed, though.

“Amelia, Lashawna is sleeping…”

“Oh no!”

“It’s okay. She’s just weak, still, and needs rest. She’ll wake up again, I’m positive. But…we need better food. Canned beets and tomatoes, sardines—we’re running out of them, and besides, I’m sick of the same old stuff. If Lashawna’s going to get better, we’ll have to go out and find a better variety of food.”

“Where? All the fresh things are rotten and crawling with germy flies.”

“The grocery stores must have thousands and thousands of cans of different things. Canned fruits, canned meat, like salmon and tuna and Vienna sausage…”

“I like those!” I said to him, imagining walking up and down the aisles with Momma when the world was still normal. When there was music, and people talking and laughing, and noises that sometimes weren’t pleasant, but…when there were lights on, and smells that weren’t of decaying bodies.

“We have to go find more food. You and me,” Jerrick said.

I didn’t see how both of us could go, and I told him. “You can’t leave your sister. You have to take care of her. I know where Albertson’s is. I’ll go shopping for all of us. I know how to do that, and I won’t even need money to pay for all the food I’ll get!” I laughed when I said that, and that made Jerrick laugh, too.

“I want to go with you, Amelia. I won’t slow you down, and there are some things I want to help you find. Some things that might make life easier for us. Lashawna will be fine for a few hours by herself.”

“Oh, no! What if the cloud comes back and we’re not here?”

“What if it does? What do you think we could do if we were here with her? Besides, if it didn’t kill her the first time, maybe it never intended to. Maybe the reason she fell into the coma was because she went to it and touched it when she shouldn’t have. Remember, we didn’t die when everyone else did. There’s a reason for that. So, if the clouds you saw, and the one Lashawna saw killed everyone else, but not us…don’t you see? They won’t come and hurt her now.”

“I don’t know, Jerrick. What about Munster and the man who has him. What if they come when we’re gone?”

“You said a prayer here, right?”

“Yes.”

“What did you ask for?”

“I didn’t ask for anything. I just thanked Saint Therese for keeping us safe and alive,” I told Jerrick.

“Do you think she heard you?”

“Yes! I saw her smiling, Jerrick. I saw that, honest!”

“Then ask her to keep Lashawna safe while we’re out getting food. It sounds like there’s enough candles burning for one more prayer!”

Jerrick was right. He was so smart, like an older brother might be if I’d ever had one. I decided I’d let him come with me. At least I’d have someone to talk to, and we could shop together and find the other things he said would make our life easier. I thought about a new TV and a computer, but I knew that was out. Still, whatever he was thinking about, I could see it and help him get it back to our new home.

Jerrick and I left the church and returned to our little rectory house. Lashawna was still asleep, but she didn’t have that dead look on her face, and she was breathing in and out and in and out, exactly the same as she was supposed to. Just to be safe I went straight to Jesus after seeing her in bed, because he was really God and not just a saint, and I asked him to protect Lashawna while we were at the store. I lit another candle after I said that prayer, and then Jerrick and I found an umbrella and a raincoat and a regular coat that Father Kenney wouldn’t need anymore, and we left.

The rain had died down some, and it wasn’t too hard to walk in it. There was no wind like there sometimes is in a rainstorm. I held Jerrick’s hand and did like Lashawna did whenever we came to a curb. We were fine, and Jerrick walked fast, trusting my eyes. We talked about our old schools and our friends who were probably all dead, now, and soon we arrived at Albertson’s. Both of us were very excited to find marshmallows and Graham crackers, and yes, canned vegetables. I told him when we had loaded two shopping carts that I would play checkout lady.

It was very hard to open the sliding doors, but both of us pulling on them made them finally open, and when we went in, they didn’t swish close behind us. Of course there were no lights on, or music, and we had to pinch our noses because there were about twenty dead people all gooey and covered with flies lying on the floor. I was getting used to that. I could never, ever get used to the smell, though.

We didn’t bother with the fruit and vegetable area. All that stuff was pukey. We did find cheese, and it didn’t look moldy, so we threw a bunch of it into my basket. Jerrick had his own basket, and he bumped into stacks of cans, and into the ends of the food racks, which made me giggle. He knocked over a whole stack of Pepsis, but they were in plastic bottles, so it didn’t matter. We found canned tamales, tuna, creamed corn (which is my favorite corn), stuffing for a turkey, boxes of tea and even coffee! Momma and Daddy never let me drink coffee, but maybe now I would try it if we could figure out how to make it without hot water. Twice we had to turn around and go back down the aisles we were in because someone had fallen dead and blocked them.

We didn’t bother with the liquor, but we did get a few pretty folders on the stationary aisle, and a pen and pencil I liked. We found bottled water, and soft drinks, and more crackers and peanut butter and jelly and honey. Just so many things. It was wonderful shopping with Jerrick!

“Okay,” he said when we’d loaded up our baskets, “we’ll take these things home. You got batteries, right?”

“Yep.”

“Good. We’ll be fine. I hope the ones you took are good. At least we’ll have a flashlight for you and Lashawna to see with at night instead of just candles. Do you know where there’s a Walmart or Target around here?” he asked.

“Yes, I think so. There’s a Target down that way,” I said, pointing south. THAT was not smart. Jerrick was staring at me, and I could have pointed up and it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. “That way. To your right,” I giggled.

“Good. When Lashawna gets better we’re all going there. That’s where we’ll find the other things we’ll need.”

“What other things?”

“Do you know what a generator is?”

I didn’t. “No.”

“It makes electricity. It runs on gas, and as long as you keep it filled up, you can have electricity. We can have lights in the house…and music, and hot food!”

I would never have thought of that!

“Really, Jerrick? They have machines that will make electricity? I thought…well, I don’t know what I thought. I just never thought about it!” I laughed, because I never had! Electricity was always just there, and it came from big power plants that sent it to everyone’s house. And all the stores. Once more I knew that Jerrick was a genius. He knew everything, I guess because he read books in Braille, and probably studied very hard when he’d been in school. I thanked God I’d met him. I was so excited and wanted to get our food back home quickly, and get Lashawna all well again so that we could go to Target! They had toys there, too, and I remembered they had bicycles at Christmastime. It sounded like so much fun. Finally!

 

EIGHT

Jerrick and I pushed and pulled the carts home, through the side gate to the rectory. He told me of the many wonderful things we could gather again. We could have music, and I liked that, but we would need a CD player. Target had them, he said. We could watch movies on Father’s DVR. We could gather books from the library and read to one another. So much would be the same, except there would be no other people in our world, unless other children far away managed to be spared by the clouds. We’d never know until we went to look for them.

“Who knows? There might be others alive in Seattle or Los Angeles. San Diego, and all the cities in between us and them. There might be people alive in Kansas City or Chicago…New York and Philadelphia.”

“But how could we ever find them? All those places are so far away.”

“We’ll wait until you or Lashawna grows up. Maybe in a year or two. You can learn how to drive, and then we’ll start looking,” he said.

“That’s what Munster was going to do, I think, before I told him about the man back inside the mini-mart. I shouldn’t have done that. But, he is alive. I saw him.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I think the man had him, but Munster was okay…unless the cloud I saw got them.”

“Maybe Munster and the man were just together, looking for you! Did you ever think that maybe the man wasn’t bad at all?”

“He was pushing Munster!” I said.

“Are you sure? And if he was, maybe he was trying to get him to run faster, away from one of the clouds.”

I hadn’t thought of that. But the man had scared me when I first heard his voice at the mini-mart, and so that made him bad.

“Why do you think the clouds didn’t kill Munster or the man when they first came?” I asked Jerrick. We were at the door to our house, now, and so I went up the three steps and opened it.

“I don’t know. Maybe the clouds you and Lashawna saw weren’t the reason everyone—or nearly everyone—died. Maybe something else killed them.”

“Oh no. I saw them from the hospital window. It was them. I saw them looking for other people to kill.”

“How do you know that’s what they were doing? Did you actually see them doing that?”

“No, but that’s what they were doing. I know that.

“Two steps. Take the water. I’ll hold the door open for you.

“There are good clouds, Jerrick, and bad clouds. That’s what I know for sure.”

“I don’t think you know anything for sure, but we’ll find out.”

Jerrick went in with his arms filled with 24 bottles of new water. I carried two bags…no, three…and followed him into the kitchen. Lashawna was still sleeping, but I could see her breathing, and she wasn’t making faces, like she was in pain, so I knew she was fine.

“You put this stuff away. I’ll go unload the rest,” I whispered to him.

“Ya.”

It must have been close to lunchtime when I finally got all the grocery bags into the kitchen. Jerrick was doing a terrible job unloading them. He had cans of fruit all mixed up on the same shelves as canned meat, and canned vegetables, so I made him hand me the cans, and I arranged them like Momma used to do. Fruits together. Vegetables on another shelf, and like that.

“I wish we could heat the soup or tamales, don’t you, Jerrick?”

“It won’t be long, Amelia. Pretty soon. We have a microwave; all we need is power to turn it on.”

“How will you do that, Jerrick?”

“The generator, remember? I’ll tell you how to go to the circuit box outside and hot-wire the house circuits into it.”

“I don’t think I want to do that. I don’t like hot wires. Won’t they burn me?”

“No, silly. They’re not actually hot, and until we get the generator running there won’t be any electricity in them.”

“I want a bike,” I said.

“You can have any one you like. We’ll find the best one in Marysville for you.”

“What do you want most?” I asked.

“Music. I love music, and my ears are good.”

“Me, too. I miss my iPod. I wonder what Lashawna would like the most?”

“I’d like a hot dog,” Lashawna’s voice answered from the doorway.

Jerrick’s head snapped up. I was so surprised to hear her voice that I dropped the can of tuna I was opening. Lashawna stood with her hands at her side, smiling at Jerrick and me. She looked wonderful, except for her hair, which was all tangled still from sleeping. I ran to her and gave her my Grizzly Bear hug, one like Daddy used to give Momma sometimes when he was very happy to see her.

“You’re awake!” I said, kissing her cheeks and working some of the tangles out of her black hair.

“I’m hungry! What’s for lun…Jerrick,” she stopped what she’d started to say, pushed my hands aside, and spoke to her brother. “We simply have to make one of the clocks work again. I need to know what time it is. Well, sometimes, especially when I’m hungry, or when it’s bedtime. I have no idea how long I was asleep. If we had a clock, I’d know. Was it long? Can’t you find some batteries that work…”

Lashawna was fine. It took her five whole minutes to say what she wanted to say. She was fine.

We ate tuna for lunch with Ritz crackers and warm Pepsis, and Jerrick and I told Lashawna all about our shopping trip, and how we would all go together to Target to find more things when she felt strong again.

“I want a motor scooter. A Honda!” Lashawna said when we’d finished. “I can drive one of those. They’re just like a bike!”

“We’ll get you the best one in the city,” Jerrick said. Suddenly I didn’t want a plain old bicycle anymore. I wanted a motor bike, too. And a helmet with my name on it in case I fell, or ran into a car or a tree.

“You can ride on the back,” Lashawna said to her brother.

“Nope. I want a Maserati,” he laughed.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s the car I’ll get us.”

“But how will you drive it?” I asked.

“I won’t. You or Lashawna will.”

“We don’t know how to drive!” we both said at once.

“You’ll learn.”

So it was settled. We would find two motor scooters, one Maserati, a generator, no bicycle, new clothes for each of us, books from the bookstore and the Braille library place, lots of DVDs. Just anything we wanted and could think of. Except new friends. That would have to wait until one of us learned how to drive so that we could go far away and look for them.

While Lashawna got better, we sat mostly in the bedroom. Lashawna and I read from some of Father’s books, although none of us could understand what they were about. The words were just too big, and the sentences were way too long. Jerrick said most of them were “Theology books” that all priests and Rabbis and Ministers had to read. I wasn’t at all interested in those things. I found one called “Of Mice and Men”. It sounded good, and so I pulled it off Father’s bookshelf and began to read it to Jerrick and Lashawna that first night. It wasn’t what I expected. There was a mouse, and there were two men, but some of the words were too big, and there were no pictures at all. The mouse didn’t do anything, either, except sit in this older man’s pocket! So, I put it back, and then began to tell stories kind of made up from books I remembered reading.

I checked the candles in the sanctuary three times. They were all okay every time I went in. I watched for clouds that spinned, but didn’t see any. I fixed dinner and breakfast with Jerrick, and took a bath with a washcloth, and water from the bottles. I didn’t have to worry about Jerrick seeing me, but I stood in Father’s bathtub with the door closed anyway. The bottled water was cold, and so I didn’t take a long shower at all.

That’s how we lived for two more days. Lashawna found a Harry Potter book in Father’s library the second day, and she read out loud from that. She’s a good reader. Harry Potter made the time go by more quickly. I like him and all the wizard children, and I wished I could go to the school he did because it reminded me of a very big, happy cathedral where kids could talk and not get punished by the priests or nuns or parents for doing that. The only bad thing about Harry’s school was the three-headed dog hiding in that hall, and which would bite you and probably kill you if you got near it.

I wanted some hot food!

On the third day, I think it was, Lashawna looked all better and normal, and so Jerrick said it would be fine to leave our house and go to Target. Maybe some other stores if there were any good ones in the shopping center. The rain was gone. It was cold, but we didn’t mind that. We dressed warmly and left right after breakfast. I was so excited!

“I wish I could drive,” I told them when we reached Walnut Street. “We could fill the trunk with lots of things. Too bad Munster isn’t here. He said he could drive.”

“It would be neat to have a truck!” Lashawna said. “Just think how much stuff we could bring home then!”

“I have an idea,” Jerrick said. “Why don’t we simply move into Target. That way we could have everything we want and not have to lug anything home in shopping carts.”

“I want a bed, that’s why” Lashawna told him.

“They have beds there,” he said back to her.

“No they don’t. Just bedspreads and sheets.”

“Oh,” Jerrick said laughing.

“And pillows!” I said.

“But no mattresses. So we can’t move in there,” Lashawna said.

That settled that. Besides, I had already grown comfortable in the rectory. I liked our bedroom because it was small—not a whole store. I liked our kitchen with the window on one side. I liked our backyard, even if it needed to have the grass mowed. We could clean everything up, especially Father’s messy front room, and once we got electricity, we’d have a real home again, with hot food and lights that didn’t burn out. And I liked our church because it was big and had colorful windows, and we didn’t have to sleep there, and God was there, and so was Saint Therese. Maybe because the rectory was sort of part of Saint Andrew’s, that’s why the bad clouds stayed away from us. Anyway, we were alone, unless Munster and the man came around again, and we knew we’d have to accept that and make the best of it.

 

“Curb.” “Big crack.” “Car”…only one body in one of them…”Dead body.” We dodged it.

We finally got to Target. It had been a long walk. Jerrick didn’t walk as fast as me or Lashawna. The front doors were open wide because a lady had fallen right into one of them and blocked the doors from closing again. She smelled. We stepped past her and walked straight to the appliances aisle way back at the rear of the store as quickly as we could.

“What do they look like?” I asked Jerrick.

“Just look for the word “Generator”. I don’t actually know what one looks like. It probably has plugs and stuff on it.”

Lashawna and I ran up and down the aisles, but neither of us could find anything like that. I saw toasters and microwaves and hair dryers, but no generator. We went back to where we’d left Jerrick.

“Nothing like that here,” Lashawna said. “Now what, genius?”

Jerrick stared ahead and crinkled his lips. He was thinking.

“Umm…what else do we need?”

“Toilet paper! Shampoo. Soap. Water. Video games! Cans of food. Brand new blankets.”

“Shoes, purses, sweaters and dresses…”

“Okay, let’s get those things, then we’ll look for another store that has a generator,” he said. We all stayed together, filling our basket with lots of canned food. Next, Lashawna and I went to the clothing department for girls. Jerrick stayed with us, but after a while he became angry. There were so many cool clothes, and it took Lashawna and me a long time to choose some of the ones we liked best. He kept saying, “Come on!”

“We’ll take you over to boys,” Lashawna promised.

“I don’t care what any of the boys’ clothes look like. Just get me a few sweaters and some pants and shirts. I’m tired of hanging around in the stupid clothes department.”

“How about a basketball or a soccer ball?” I was being nice.

“Sure, why not. I can bounce it in our bedroom. It won’t get far from me in there.”

Jerrick was suddenly in a bad mood, so we hurried, and after we’d filled Lashawna’s buggy with our clothes, and gotten a few nice sweaters and things for Jerrick, we hurried past the sports department and went outside into the sunlight.

“Wait! We forgot toilet paper and things for the bathroom,” I shouted. Jerrick slumped his shoulders and sighed.

“Go back in, then, and get some. But hurry up!”

“Don’t go away,” I said. I thought that was funny, but I don’t think Jerrick did. He just made a face, and then sat down on the curb in front of the store. Lashawna began pulling the clothes she’d gotten out of the buggy and holding them up to her. She was not at all nasty like her brother.

I ran back to the aisles where the things we needed were stacked on the shelves and grabbed some. I also found toothbrushes and toothpaste and a few other things we’d forgotten to even think of. It was all too much to carry, so I laid those things down in the main aisle and ran to find a hand basket. I hurried because I knew Jerrick was angry. Just when I got almost back to the checkout place where the small baskets were I turned my head left. I know I saw something moving between the aisles way far down at the other end. I stopped. Maybe it was a coyote, I thought, but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe it was another child like me? A man or a woman? A cloud? I didn’t know what else to do, and so I said a prayer to Saint Therese to protect me, and then ran down the aisle until I came to the end. Nothing was there. I ran up and down the big aisle, left and right, looking, but all that was in any of the smaller aisles were little boys’ clothes and a few dead, stinky bodies. I listened, but there was no sound at all.

I must have imagined seeing something move.

I ran back to the front, grabbed a small basket, and then back to where I’d left our toilet paper and toothpaste and soap. That must have taken a long time, because when I finally left the store, Jerrick was on his feet, walking back and forth with a frown on his face.

“Got them,” I said.

“Finally.”

Lashawna spoke after Jerrick made another nasty face at me. “Do you think Home Depots would have generators? There’s one down at the end of the shopping center. They have tools and things. Maybe they’ll have a generator.”

“Yes,” Jerrick said. “Let’s go there. Leave the basket here. We’ll come back for it later.”

And so we did. We went into that store, way down at the end of the parking lot. There were no clothes or toys or sports things, so we hurried to the electric tools department. We didn’t need a saw or a drill or a hammer, but Lashawna saw the sign on one of the bins that said “Generator.”

“Bingo! Ohmagosh! It looks so big. I don’t know if we can even lift it!”

“It has wheels on the back.” I said that.

Lashawna and I pulled and pulled until we made it come out of the bin. I fell on my rump when it finally gave.

“It’s heavy!” I said.

“I’ll pull it home. You guys push the basket. We’ll need gas for the generator, so we have to find some somewhere, too. Do you see a can marked “gas” or “fuel” or anything like that?”

“No,” I said.

“No,” Lashawna said too.

“That’s just great. We have a generator, but no way to start it up.”

“All we need is a container,” Lashawna said. “Once we find gas, we can just fill up a bucket. They have lots of those here.”

Another problem solved. Jerrick had to work very hard to get the heavy generator home. The front of it kept hitting his heels because the handles were very short, and for the first time since I met him, I heard him cuss. But nothing like the words Daddy used to say when he was angry or frustrated.

We passed lots of abandoned cars and gas stations, but figuring out how to get gas out of any of them was hard. Until Jerrick came up with an idea that I didn’t like.

“Either you or Lashawna will have to crawl underneath a car or a truck. Find the gas line, cut it, and then fill up one of our buckets.”

“Not me!” I shouted.

“Then you do it, Lashawna,” Jerrick said.

That didn’t seem to bother Lashawna. “Okay,” she said right away.

Getting the gas took FOREVER! Lashawna crawled under a car and yanked the tube down that carried the gas. It wouldn’t stretch to the bucket, and the bucket was too big to fit under the car. Gas came out of the tube, but it just went all over Lashawna and the pavement.

“Isn’t there an easier way?” I said to Jerrick.

“I’m all wet!” Lashawna screamed.

“Just stay there and don’t light a match,” Jerrick told her. “Go find a smaller container, Amelia. Hurry up,” he ordered me.

All of this took so much time. At last we got the bucket filled, but Lashawna had to go through three cars to do it, and even worse, once it was full, we couldn’t lift it! We all decided to leave the darn bucket where it was, take our generator and clothes and things home, then come back for it with a wagon if we could find one of those.

It was very late by the time we got the gas home. Lashawna smelled, so she took off all her clothes and washed the gas off her, then came out of the bathroom with a brand new outfit on that I think made her look so pretty. We were all very hungry. We hadn’t stopped for lunch. We’d have to have uncooked spaghetti sauce and hard noodles, or else eat more tuna and crackers.

“Can we make the generator work?” I asked Jerrick in our bedroom.

“Tomorrow,” he answered me.

“We have time…”

“Tomorrow. I’m tired.”

Jerrick was snotty, and so I left him and went with Lashawna into the kitchen to make dinner, but I really wanted to go back and put on a new dress instead.

 

NINE

 

Jerrick must have slept good. He woke up first and went outside where we’d left the generator, by the metal box that he said held the circuit breaker things. That’s where he was going to somehow have Lashawna or me plug the generator in. It was very complicated sounding to me, and I hoped Jerrick knew what he was doing.

“Worst case,” he told us yesterday, “we’ll have to run an extension cord from the generator to the microwave, and if there are more than one outlets in the generator, we can run another extension cord to a lamp. Really, though, we want to disconnect the circuits from the box and hook all of them into the generator at once. That way everything here inside will work when we turn the switches on.”

I didn’t know what he meant, exactly. Inside that metal box all I saw were lots of little wires, red and white and green, and I think a blue one, going down into someplace behind the funny looking switches. I didn’t know how we’d get them into the generator, but Jerrick just said, “No sweat. We’ll splice them.”

Okay, I thought. Whatever spliced meant.

I woke up and heard Jerrick banging away outside at the end of the house where the circuit box thing was. I wondered if he was trying to get the wires from there down into the generator all by himself. I got up, put on a new sweater that was pink and white, and then ran out to help him.

He was pouring gas into the top of the generator, though how he knew where it was really going was a mystery. He’d somehow found a funnel someplace. I guessed Father’s garage. It was red and looked exactly like one that Daddy had. Jerrick spilled as much gas over the edge of the funnel as he got into the funnel, and from there into the generator. That was probably okay, though, because every car on every street had gas in it. All we had to do was send Lashawna and her big bucket and the little one, and get more.

“Hi Jerrick,” I said. He was finished pouring and spilling the gas. “You need a bigger funnel!”

“Look in there and see if I got the tank full.” Jerrick set the bucket down while I looked into the gas tank. It was sure full.

“Yes. Now what?” I asked him.

“I’m not positive,” he said. “I found some pliers and wire cutters and screwdrivers and a hammer in the garage. We have to take the circuit breakers out and get to the wires. Do that, and describe what you see in there.”

I did that, and I knew then why Daddy cussed when he worked sometimes. It was very hard. There were big screws that didn’t want to come loose, and once I’d gotten them out, I skinned my knuckle trying to pull the cover off. Pretty soon we had the thing all torn apart and all the wires showing. It was like looking at a bowl of black and white and red spaghetti!

“Now, do this,” Jerrick said. “Take all the white ones and twist them together. After you get them all together, do the same with the black ones. I think.”

I tried to twist all the white wires together, but there were so many that it was hard. “Why do I have to do this? I’m not strong enough!” I said.

“Just do the best you can. Make sure all the copper is connected.”

“What’s the copper? There are only white ones and red ones and black ones, and some of those blue ones. But not too many of those.”

Jerrick explained what copper was, and so I twisted and twisted and twisted all of the white wires together. After that, I did the same with the black ones.

“What about the red ones?” I asked.

“Leave them. I don’t know what they do.”

I knew Jerrick was smart, but I began to wonder if this would work. Jerrick handed me a big, fat extension cord that he’d cut one of the ends off of. I saw a black wire, a white one, and a copper one with no color or anything covering it. He had me hook the white wire into the big bunch of white wires I’d twisted a minute ago, and the black ones the same. Finally I twisted the copper ones all together. He had the plug-in end in his hand, and when I finished, he asked me if any of the wires were touching.

“They’re ALL touching,” I said. “You told me to…” He explained that we just didn’t want any white ones touching any black ones, and none of those touching the copper ones without the covering. Just to be safe, he had me wrap this black tape around each bundle so that none of them could touch even if they wanted to. It was all very confusing, but he seemed to know most of the stuff about all those wires, except the red ones, and finally he told me to find a switch on the generator, turn it to on, and then stand way back.

Lashawna had woken by then and had come out to see what we were doing.

“Hi guys. Wow! You hooked it all up?” she said with a big smile on her face.

“I hope we got it right. What will happen if we didn’t do it right,” I called back to Jerrick. He was getting ready to pull the cord that would make the generator go.

“Nothing. If it’s wrong, we just won’t have any electricity. But I think it’s right.”

“Will it explode?” Lashawna said. She grabbed my arm. We were ten of twenty feet away from Jerrick. Jerrick pulled hard on the cord, and the generator engine started to run. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster.

“Go in and try the lights,” he yelled because the noise was a lot. Both Lashawna and I ran into the house. I turned the kitchen light switch on. Nothing happened. I went to the toaster while Lashawna ran to the bedroom to flip switches in there. I pushed the toaster bar down. It stayed down and the tiny wires inside where the bread goes began to glow! And then I noticed the lights on the microwave nearby blinking. I heard the refrigerator come on.

Electricity!

I heard Lashawna scream. “The light is on! The light is on!”

She ran back to the kitchen. We jumped up and down and hugged one another and danced in circles. Now we could make hot soup! Lashawna and I ran outside. Jerrick was still standing next to the generator, with his ear pointed down at it. I think he was happy that it was running! We told him how almost all the lights worked, and that the microwave and the toaster worked, too. I thought of the TV and VCR. If we could get those on, we could watch movies. It was all so exciting.

We were just ready to run back inside and make something hot for breakfast, though none of us was sure what that might be, when the generator started to make a funny, screeching noise. We turned back, and I saw a little puff of gray smoke come out of the top of it. The engine made a few louder screeching noises…Jerrick ran toward it…and then it stopped. More gray smoke came out.

“What the…?” Jerrick said.

“What happened?” I screamed. Lashawna put her hands on her cheeks and made a big “O” with her mouth. Jerrick knelt down next to the generator and I could see him sniffing at it. Then he sat back on his haunches and began shaking his head.

“What is it, Jerrick? Why did it stop? How come there’s smoke coming out of it?”

Lashawna stopped at the generator and stared at it. I knelt down next to Jerrick and put my hand on his knee. He was very sad looking, and his eyes looked like they wanted to cry.

“What?” I said softly.

“I burned it up. I should have thought. I was in a hurry and forgot all about the one thing the generator needs that it didn’t have, and that we were supposed to supply.” He stopped, cringed, and then hit the sides of his head with both hands.

“What?” I asked.

“Oil! The generator is an internal combustion engine—just like a car or a lawnmower! I should have known. I did know! I just forgot to think about that. Now it’s ruined.”

“What if we put some in…where does it go?” Lashawna joined us.

“No use. Don’t you smell it?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes,” Lashawna said as well.

“It’s fried. Burned up. It’s gone.”

We were all sad for a while, but not for too long. We’d burned up the generator. We knew that, but it was Lashawna who came to our rescue. We had all gone inside, but no one was hungry. Just sad at first.

“So what if we made a mistake and forgot to put oil inside it? Who cares? We’ll just go back to Home Depot and get another one. This time we’ll put oil in it before we start it up, and then we won’t have to worry ever again!”

“Yes! And I’ll even crawl under a car and get more gas in another bucket, and then help Jerrick fill up the tank so that we don’t spill the gas all over the new one and the grass! We’ll have lots and lots of gas and a brand new generator. And then we’ll make lunch!”

This made Jerrick very happy. He sat back in his chair at the kitchen table and smiled.

“You stay here this time, Jerrick. We won’t need you to help us. We’ll take the wagon and me and Lashawna will hurry back home with the generator. While we’re gone, you can clean the house, okay?”

“Make sure you read the instructions in the generator package. See what kind of oil it needs. Once you know which weight, you can get some from the mini-mart or any gas station. They’ll have lots. If there’s an auto store in the shopping center, they’ll have lots there too.”

Will the things of oil say weight on them? Are they heavy and light, or…” I started to say.

“They’re all marked. 5, 30, and so on. Just get the one we need, and make sure you get enough.”

Both Lashawna and I understood, and so we left Jerrick sitting in the kitchen to go shopping again.

“Should we stop at Target again and get more clothes?” I asked her on the way.

“Only if we promise one another not to spend too much time,” she laughed.

I promised, but I crossed my fingers.

 

I found a wristwatch that I could wind up and make work at Target. It was a Little Mermaid one, which would have to do. I set it at nine o’clock. At ten o’clock we left and went to Home Depot with all our clothes and some toys piled into one of their buggies. By twelve o’clock we had gotten everything back home, and that included ten plastic bottles of number 30 oil, but no gas because we were late already. There was lots left in the big bucket, and I decided to go later and get more if we started to run out.

Jerrick came out as soon as we returned, and he wasn’t angry at all. He had figured something out while we’d been shopping, he said. Lashawna and I pulled our wagon with the new generator in it over beside the burned up one, and Jerrick told us to find the “oil port”.

“It’ll say oil right on top or else below it, I think,” he said.

We found it, pulled the plug out, and then put in as much oil as would go until it ran out the top of the opening, which was very small.

“Done!” I said.

Jerrick plugged the cord into the machine, and then we poured gas into the top with our funnel. Pretty soon this one was puffing away like it was as happy as a kitten. Instead of running inside, though, we stayed beside it and smelled. I looked at my watch. After nine and a half minutes, Jerrick decided that this time our generator would be okay, and finally, finally we all ran into the house to see our lights and toaster and microwave. We were so very delighted and happy and I made hot soup for our lunch. We ate at twelve-thirty, and the vegetable soup I made was so, so good.

After lunch Lashawna and I cleaned the dishes and put them in the cupboard. Jerrick went outside to check the generator. I could hear it chugging away through the open door. That was good, I thought.

Jerrick returned and told us we needed to find out which outlets were working, and which weren’t. We used a lamp to plug into each outlet. All of them were fine. It was just the ceiling lights that wouldn’t come on, but we didn’t mind that so much. We had lots of lamps, and if we wanted more, we knew exactly where to go to find them! After we’d checked all the plugs in the walls, Jerrick picked up the TV remote in Father’s bedroom and clicked “on”. The screen got bright, but all there was only a snowstorm.

“Find the DVR remote,” he said.

Lashawna found it and clicked the power button. All of this was easy. We’d all done it a million times in our old houses. She opened the DVR and put a movie in. “The War of the Worlds” with Tom Cruise. It was a scary movie, but I’d seen it with Daddy and Momma at home, and I liked it. So we spent the afternoon lying on the end of the bed watching it. After I went into the kitchen and made Orville Redenbacher Popcorn, of course! The refrigerator was working again, and so I put water and Pepsis and Cokes inside for later.

We were in heaven.

Jerrick couldn’t see anything, but he listened and asked Lashawna and me to describe the creatures and their spaceships and the boat with all the cars and people on it. And what certain noises were about, too. I felt sorry that he couldn’t see what was going on; only hear it. It must not have bothered him so much, though, because every time I described something, he got a big grin on his face, and seemed to listen harder. Maybe he could see it in a funny, blind way in his head.

We watched two more movies, “Life of Pi”, about a boy and a tiger in a boat. That was good! The other was “Hunger Games,” and I liked it a lot, too.

“We need more things,” Lashawna said later. We had finished watching the movies and Jerrick had me put in another movie from Father’s collection; Lashawna and I had gone into the kitchen to make dinner. It was getting dark outside. The light on the ceiling didn’t work for some reason still, so we found a tall lamp and put it on the floor next to the table and took the lampshade off so that we could see. That was so much better than lighting candles. We would have hot stew from two of the cans we’d gotten at Target, Pepsis, and for desert, Pop Tarts.

“Yes,” I agreed. “Jerrick made us hurry yesterday. He was so snotty, Lawhawna!”

“My father didn’t like shopping with my mom, either. I think that’s just men.”

“Jerrick isn’t a man yet!” I said.

“Not yet, but he’s the same sex. I think all men are just different in stores, no matter how old they are. I don’t know why. My mother and I used to spend hours looking at things before she decided to buy something.”

I thought back. “Yes, me too. It used to make Daddy so angry, and so he wouldn’t go with us. And then, when we got home, he’d ask Momma how much she spent, and she would lie sometimes.

“What else do you want to get?”

Lashawna opened the microwave after it dinged and took out the big bowl of steaming stew. I had set three places at the table. I could think of lots of things to get, especially since we didn’t have to pay for any of them.

“I think a hot plate would be good to have. Flour so that we could make bread—and a bread making machine! More lamps and light bulbs. More videos,” she said.

“Two motor scooters!”

“A Maserati for Jerrick!” she said giggling.

“More extension cords,” Jerrick said. He must have smelled the stew because his nose was so good, and had come into the kitchen. “I know how I can make the ceiling lights work, but I need cords to do it.”

We sat down and began to eat and Jerrick told us how he could punch holes in the walls, connect the new wires to the light switches, and then plug them into the generator outside. I didn’t understand, but if that’s what he wanted to do, it was fine with me.

“We need more books, too,” he said. “Books in Braille so that I can study about practical things that will make our life easier. I don’t suppose Marysville has a Braille library, does it, Amelia?”

“I don’t know. Would it be in a phone book?”

“Yes. After dinner will you look?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“What are practical things?” Lashawna asked her brother, and that was a very good question, I thought.

“How to farm. How to…I’m not sure. We can’t spend our lives eating canned food and watching videos, though. Eventually the food will get bad. Maybe not for a couple of years, but if we could grow corn and wheat and vegetables, we wouldn’t have to worry. If all we do is watch the VCR, we’ll stagnate, too. Become dumb. We need to study, like we did in school. Like they did in college. Learn things.”

“I don’t want to go to school, and besides, there aren’t any teachers anyway,” I said.

“We’ll have to teach one another,” he said.

“Oh, right!” I said. “I can’t teach you or Lashawna. I’m not smart enough!”

“That’s why we need to get books. Books that I can read. I’ll read them and then teach both of you.”

“Hah! Who needs books about how to plant corn and tomatoes?” Lashawna asked.

“Where do we get the seeds? What kinds of fertilizer?” Jerrick said.

“At the STORE!” both Lashawna and I both answered at the same time.

“Which store? Target? Home Depot? Where?”

I looked at Lashawna, but she just shrugged her shoulders.

“We can look in the phone book for that too,” I said. That didn’t satisfy Jerrick, though.

“There’s lots of things about growing vegetables that we probably don’t know anything about, and they won’t be in the phone book. We need books that tell us the best ways to do it. Even so, I don’t want to stay dumb all my life, and the only way to get smart is to read, not watch movies.”

“Didn’t you like the movies?” I said.

“Of course! But I’m not any smarter because of watching them. If we’re going to survive, we need to educate ourselves. Maybe if we read enough we can figure out why those clouds came, too. Wouldn’t you like to know that?”

I said, “No. I just don’t want to have them around anymore. They frighten me.”

“Well,” he answered, “we need to learn new things anyway. That’s the only way we’ll survive.”

“Well, you read and teach us,” Lashawna said. She stood up and began clearing the table. “You become the teacher. Amelia and I will go shopping and get all the books and clothes and everything else while you read.”

“Only if we can find books in Braille,” he said. “Otherwise we’ll have to go to a regular library or a bookstore and get books that you’ll have to read.”

I didn’t like that idea. I couldn’t understand most of the words, so how would I learn anything? If we could find a store that sold seeds, and a book that said the best way to grow them, that’s all we needed—except for new clothes and shoes and…more DVDs.

“Maybe we could figure out how to make gas for the furnace. Get it running. Someone must have made gas,” Jerrick said. He sat back in his chair while Lashawna and I put the dishes in the sink. We put bottled water in a big bowl and then she set it in the microwave to heat so that the dishes would come clean in the sink.

“We need hot water,” I said to him. “How do they make the water in houses hot?”

“Gas. And probably electricity, which we have. But that’s why we need the books! Someone else did it, so can we if we find out how.”

I didn’t really want to know all that. If Jerrick wanted to learn about all those things, that was fine. I didn’t care. He’d take care of me and Lashawna. I left the kitchen to get Father’s phone book while Lashawna dried the dishes and put them away. In the bedroom I sat down and tried to find stores that sold seeds, and also to see if there was a Braille library in Marysville. I couldn’t find a Braille library or a seed store in the yellow pages, but I found a place that fixed sewers, a place that made screens, a lot of restaurants, a pet store. Just everything but what Jerrick needed. I thought it would be so nice to have a puppy, but I knew they were all probably dead. And the birds and kittens.

When Jerrick and Lashawna came in a few minutes later, I told him there was no Braille library or seed store in Marysville, or even one in the phone book, but I knew there was a library for normal people in my city.

“I’m normal,” he said, kind of hurt by what I’d said, I think. “I just can’t see.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I said.

“That’s okay, I’m used to people talking about me that way. You didn’t hurt my feelings. Anyway, if there’s a library here, they probably have books on tape. I might find something I need. Trust me, though, I’ll find the books WE need. With your eyes, that is.”

I groaned. I did. All of the sudden it sounded like I’d be going back to school! Maybe we could have art class, though. I guessed we’d have to do something besides watch movies and plant corn. I decided I’d have to just learn how to read better, even if it meant reading books that made no sense. Books about electricity and gas and all those boring adult things. Books without any pictures in them, probably.

“Okay. Lashawna and I will take you to the library and let you listen to all the books on tape that you want. We’ll go shopping for more things we need.”

“There’s no electricity at the library, and how would I find anything without you or Lashawna helping me?” Jerrick said. He was staring right over my head when he spoke.

“Ohhhhh! All right, we’ll go get some books for you and then bring you home. THEN we’ll go shopping.”

“Deal,” he finally said.

After that I jumped off the bed and put another DVD in. “Jurassic Park”.

“I’d like for you to read to me,” Jerrick said when he heard me go to the DVD player. “We’ve had enough movies for one night.”

Snotty Jerrick. Now he was acting like my parents! I didn’t want to make Lashawna mad at me too, so I scrunched my mouth up, turned the player off, and went to Father’s bookcase to find something good. I found a naughty magazine behind the books when I pulled one out! I knew Father hadn’t put it there, but I wondered who did, then? I didn’t tell Jerrick or Lashawna what I’d found, I just grabbed the book and went over to the bed. I decided to let Lashawna read it while I turned the DVD back on, but I’d turn the sound way down.

The Tyrannosaurus Rex was really scary!

That’s how that night went.

 

TEN

We ate cereal with evaporated milk on it for breakfast. Momma had used it for baking, but I’d never drunk any. It was so different on cereal than the regular milk we used to have, but it was better than having Wheaties with water, or without anything at all on them. I wanted toast and butter, but there were neither of those things anymore. I daydreamed as we ate that Jerrick got some books on how to make a cow. I was sure I could milk the cow. We would have to grow wheat to make our bread, or maybe grind up Wheaties and bake it. Pop Tarts are okay, but I missed toast. And sandwiches with ham or...what else do they make for meat? Turkey!

“Do you think all the animals are dead, Jerrick?” I asked him during breakfast.

“I wouldn’t know. You said you saw a coyote, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I think it was. Maybe it was a wild dog or something, but it had four legs and a tail, and it looked like a coyote. I thought I saw one, anyway.”

“Well, maybe all the animals aren’t dead then. Have you seen any cats or dogs near us?” he asked.

“Yes. Lots of dead ones, right Lashawna?” I said.

“Yes. I saw a lot of them. Well, not as many as dead humans, but some. Poor kitties.”

“If all the animals aren’t dead, maybe there are cows and pigs and turkeys that are still alive. We should look for some,” I said.

“Are there farms around Marysville?” Jerrick said.

“I’m not sure. Probably.”

“Hey!” Lashawna said, “I know what we’ll do. We’ll get a telescope from Target and then go up inside a tall building like the one you went into, Amelia, and look all over the place for a farm! And maybe if we find one we’ll see a cow or a pig…and maybe even a farmer!”

“I don’t want to go back to the hospital,” I said. “I don’t ever want to go back there. Can we find another building? A tall one? Would that be all right?”

“Oh sure!” Lashawna said. “First we need to go back to Target and find a telescope, though.” She smiled at me when she said that. I wondered if Jerrick could hear smiles?

“Wait a minute. FIRST we go to the library. All of us. Then we can go to Target, if there’s time,” Jerrick said.

I think he heard his sister’s smile.

“You’re not the boss, Jerrick Freeman!” I told him.

“Well, someone has to be, Amelia Earheart.”

“That’s not my last name, and you’re still not my boss,” I answered.

“Well you’re scatter-brained. If it weren’t for me you’d still be eating cold food and lighting candles to see with. Someone has to tell you what to do, Amelia…whatever your last name is.”

“It’s McDougal! And you’re still NOT MY…BOSS!”

“Hah. Then go find your telescope and your dumb clothes. I’ll find the library without you. Take care of your own self,” he said.

“How will you find anything,” I yelled. “You can’t even see!”

“Get away from me you little spoiled brat,” he said. I could see he was very hurt, but I didn’t care. I didn’t like him telling me what we had to do, and so I ran out the front door to get away from him. He was nasty and mean lately. I didn’t like him anymore.

I walked through the yard between the rectory and the church, and then went out onto the sidewalk in front. It was quiet, and I was tired of that, too. I wished there would be a noise. Anything besides the sound of Jerrick’s dumb generator chugging away behind the house. A dog barking, or other children screaming. A jet up in the sky. Anything that was NORMAL!

Sometimes I think wishes are prayers, if they’re good wishes. I’d walked almost to the corner when I heard that different sound. One I’d heard lots of times before everyone died. It was the sound of a car’s engine behind me on Birch Street. The street where I used to live. I turned quickly and saw the back end of a car. I don’t know what kind it was, but I think I saw flames on its side near the rear—and it was going south very fast. I just knew it was Munster driving! He and the grown-up were the only other people alive. It had to be Munster. He must be all right, I thought. He just must be!

I ran back toward Birch Street as fast as I could, and on the way I asked Saint Therese to tell Jesus I was sorry for being mean to my friend Jerrick. Later I would tell Jerrick I was sorry, and that we could go all day long to the library if he still wanted. But for now I had to see if I could follow Munster in that car!

I came to the corner, and then looked way down the street, the way the car had gone, but I didn’t see anything. I did hear the car, though. It was far away, and so I began to run faster, hoping it would stop so that I could catch up to it. I got to the next corner and turned. There was a big house that had always been there, and big trees and lots of bushes. I was on Munster’s street again. Halfway down the block I saw the flame car parked in front of my friend’s house, but no one was inside the car. He and the man—the man must have been with him, I thought—had probably gone inside.

Munster had to be alive, and if he was, the man had not murdered him yet, and that meant that maybe he wasn’t bad after all. Still, I thought maybe the man had just captured him and was keeping him prisoner. There was only one way to find out for sure, and that was to go down to his house and peek through the windows to see if Munster was all tied up and had cuts and things on him. If he was tied up and hurt, I’d have to figure out a way to get him free. That would be very hard because grownups, and especially murderers, are much stronger than little girls.

When I arrived at the house next door to Munster’s, I sneaked into the yard, which had a big wooden fence separating it from Munster’s. Like every other place, the grass was very high and falling over, but not in swirls, which was good. The windows of the house nearest to me were broken, and I guessed that was because of Munster. The smell coming through the broken glass wasn’t too bad, but it was still there. I held my nose with one hand and tiptoed down the sidewalk until I found a board in the fence that had been broken. I looked over at Munster’s house. There were three windows; one near the front, which is where his living room was, one right across from me, and that one was his dining room I think, and another near the back of the house. That was his kitchen. I listened, too, but didn’t hear anything at first.

As I stood there peeking through the broken fence I wondered if I should squeeze through and get closer, or even walk around to the back and look into the kitchen window? IF Munster was tied up, and if the man saw me, I knew he would chase after me and catch me. But, too, maybe I would see them sitting at the table having lunch and just talking. I had to decide what I should do, and so I looked once more into the windows—there was no one inside—and then scrunched up my body and went over into his yard.

I stood with my back against the stucco wall beneath the dining room window, my arms and hands spread out as though I needed them to balance me, or hold me tightly to the wall. I listened. I thought I heard voices, but if I had, they were very low, or coming from another room. I took a few deep breaths and then crouched low and went to the back of the house where the kitchen was. Near the back of the yard, beyond the mess of old bottles and cans that Munster had tossed out the kitchen door, I saw the big mound of dirt, just inside the wire fence that blocked his yard from the alley. His momma and daddy were under that pile of dirt, which gave me the shivers.

There was a small porch made out of wood outside the white door, with two steps leading up to it. The old screen door that used to cover it hanged by the bottom hinge, like someone had smashed into it and broken it. It was lying, hooked by that hinge, onto the porch and the steps. If I stepped on the screen trying to get up onto the porch, it might creak or make some other noise that would make the man know I was outside, and so again I had to decide whether to risk that or go to another window. The sound of voices had gone, and it was very quiet, like it would be in our church when no one was inside.

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a movement out in the alley. I turned my head and nearly fainted. A cloud had appeared, spinning very rapidly right outside the gate—which I knew would do me no good, because the cloud could just whisk right through the gate and attack me.

I stared at it, frozen. It stared back at me, and I knew it wasn’t scared at all. I wondered many things in that moment, but mostly I wondered how long I had before it decided to come and get me? Near my right foot was an empty jar. I bent over, picked it up, and then threw it as hard as I could right at the cloud. I didn’t stop to see if the bottle hit the cloud, instead I turned, jumped up onto the porch, and threw myself inside the house!

Maybe the cloud would be angry that I threw something at it, maybe the man was right inside and would jump on me. The thought of that was not as scary as being attacked and killed by an angry cloud. At least the man was human. I guess that’s what I thought. It all happened so quickly, though.

Once I’d landed on the linoleum floor, I jumped to my feet and slammed the door closed and locked it. I didn’t wait around to see if the cloud was coming, instead I ran screaming out of the kitchen, into the little hallway that had Munster’s momma and daddy’s old bedroom and a bathroom on one side. On the other side was the dining room, and at the end of the hall was the stairway that led up to Munster’s bedroom where we’d slept until he got captured. There was another bedroom up there, and another bathroom. Because Munster and the man weren’t on the main floor, I knew they had to be upstairs in one of those rooms. Because I had screamed, too, I knew they had to have heard me. Well, I was so scared, that’s why I screamed. I couldn’t help it.

Which was it to be, the cloud or the man?

I had a thought. I went back to the kitchen and yanked open one of the drawers by the sink and pulled out one his Momma’s big knives. I couldn’t cut the cloud, or stab it, because what good would it do to stab a cloud? But I’d seen movies where women grab knives and stab a killer in their house. I would stab the man if he came after me—and I knew he would very soon.

Another thought came to me. Hide before the man came down. In the living room there were big, heavy curtains that hung from the ceiling almost, clear to the floor over the windows. If I could get there, maybe…but that was no good. I didn’t have time. I looked at the sink. Under it was a cabinet. Not very big, but big enough for me to climb into if it wasn’t all filled up with cleaning stuff like Momma’s always was. I opened the doors. Inside there was only a box of dishwasher soap and some plastic shopping bags. I pushed them aside, climbed in with my knife, and then pulled the doors back closed. I waited there with my knife right by my face, pointing at the closed doors. If the man opened those doors, I’d cut his hands, and then jump out and stab him! I hoped. I was shaking.

Through the little crack between the doors I could see light. As I lay there imagining having to fight a grown up when he opened the cabinet and saw me, the light began to fade, and then it went all gray, as though…a big, black cloud…had covered the sun.

The cloud had come into the kitchen, and I was certain it would find me soon enough. My only hope was that it found the man before it found me, and that it would kill him. And that Munster was tied up upstairs. And that the cloud wouldn’t know it or bother to look for me or Munster because it had killed someone and wasn’t hungry to do that anymore.

Dear Saint Terese please go straight to Jesus and ask him to send an angel down here right away because I’m very scared and don’t want to die I’ll light more candles if I ever get back home Amen.

The next thing that happened made my hair stand up.

 

ELEVEN

Just as I expected, the grownup man came down from upstairs. What I didn’t expect, though, was that Munster would come with him! There was a teeney crack between the doors, and I wanted to scoot around somehow and look out into the kitchen where they were, but there was no room to move my head that way, so I just listened as hard as I could. Munster wasn’t screaming or crying. There was a buzzing, whirling noise, and I heard the grownup man say, “She’s here? I thought I heard a scream, but…Francis, you heard it too, right?”

“Yup. And I ain’t gonna’ tell you again. My name’s Munster, like in Gangstuh,” is what Munster said back to him.

“Yes, yes. I’m sorry. I forgot.”

The cloud said something then in that funny voice, although I couldn’t understand what it was because it was all windy-sounding. It reminded me, too, of sour notes on a piano. The grownup man answered right after that.

“The little girl would be hiding, then…”

“Amelia,” Munster said kind of angrily.

“Yes, Amelia. Francis, you…”

“Munster!”

“Munster, you look in the living room. I’ll scour the bedroom and bath.”

I heard feet shuffling, and Munster calling out from his living room, “Amelia! Where are you? It’s okay, come out. We wanna’ help you!”

The cloud thing didn’t move, though. I could hear the windy, soury noise, not the buzzy, whirling voice—this was just very low, but I still heard it—and I could see the gray still in the kitchen through the crack in the doors. I didn’t trust Munster, now. I didn’t know what that cloud, or any of the other ones, wanted. They had killed everyone almost, and even though it was true they didn’t kill Lashawna, maybe they just tried and it didn’t work. Maybe the man had captured Munster and brainwashed him, and now my friend was a zombie, and if I opened those doors, I would either be killed or turned into a zombie, too. The nice cloud-lady was only in my dreams. The real ones weren’t like her at all. Lashawna got well because of all the candles I’d lit at Saint Therese’s altar. I closed my eyes and prayed.

I lay there all curled up, and my legs hurt. So did my arms. I waited and waited, wondering when one of them would think to check the cabinet I was in, but they didn’t, and that meant my prayers had been answered. I don’t know how long I stayed like that, all bunched up. I didn’t have a watch or a clock or a sundial like Daddy’s, but the cloud left, finally, and I knew this because the light in the room came back.

Munster and the man were in the living room talking. They stayed there for a while, and then everything was quiet again later on. I waited some more, and then some more after that just to be sure I was safe. My legs hurt so bad, and so finally I opened the doors very quietly and had to fall out onto my tummy because I was all stiff and cramped and sore. I groaned when I got to my feet, but not too loud. Munster and the grownup were still in the house somewhere. Probably upstairs, wondering where I’d escaped to.

I tiptoed to the doorway leading to the dining room and peeked in. No one was there. I looked very carefully, then I went across it and had to be more careful because there was an empty can on the carpet by the big table and I didn’t want to step on it or kick it. The living room was empty, just like the dining room, except for a sofa and a chair with red and purple upholsteries and a TV on a stand and some pictures still on the wall and a coffee table like our old one at my house with some magazines spread out on the top. There was a half-empty bottle of water on the table, too, and another one that was all empty because it was lying on its side. Seeing the bottles made me thirsty, and I thought I could sneak over and drink from the one with some water still in it, but then I thought that would not be a good idea because of germs. Who knows, the grownup could have poisoned Munster by putting something in that bottle that made him go crazy. If I drank some of it I might go crazy too. I turned and went across the room to the hallway by the front door and the stairs. Suddenly I heard the grownup say something to Munster. They were upstairs in Munster’s bedroom, and I heard footsteps. I ran back down the hall and hid in the bedroom. The stairs creaked as they came down.

“I’ll only be gone for an hour or so, Francis. Get something to eat if I’m not home by dark. That girl is out there somewhere. She has to be found.”

“I’ll go with you, Bax. You can drive, and I don’t wanna’ stay here by myself.”

“No. And it’s Mr. Baxter. Try to remember that.”

The front door opened and then closed. Munster cussed. I can’t repeat what he cussed, but he said something else after that.

“I ain’t stayin’ here Mr. Ass. I’ll go look for her by myself.”

He must have been waiting until Mr. Baxter drove the flame car away because I didn’t hear him move, and I would have if he had gone back upstairs or opened the door again. Now was the time. I ran from my hiding place behind the door and called out.

“Munster! I’m right here! What happened?”

He turned.

Zombies don’t move very fast. I knew that because I’d seen them in movies on TV, so if he was one of them I thought I could run very fast back out the kitchen door and get away. Munster ran toward me very fast, and I prayed he wasn’t a zombie that could run. He was smiling, though, and so I knew he wasn’t a dead person because they never smile.

“Amelia! Where in hell were you hidin’? We looked everywhere!” he said, and he looked fine. His eyes were wide open, and his shaggy hair was all messy.

“Don’t CUSS, Munster! I told you that before you disappeared. You didn’t look under the sink in the kitchen, did you? Who is that man? Were you talking to that cloud? They’re evil, Munster. What did that man do to you? Are you okay?” That was too many questions, but that’s what I said. He laughed at me, but I wasn’t mad because of it. He looked fine, and I was so glad to see him, even if he cussed.

Munster answered me. “Slow down. Bax is cool. He weren’t no murderer at all, and so I didn’t shoot him. He was just real sick. I talked to him for a while in the store, and then got him up on his feet an’ took him home after. Why’d you run away?”

“I was scared because you didn’t come out. That’s why I ran.”

“Where you been all this time?”

“I’ve been…” I stopped and thought about that question. Maybe Munster was okay, not a zombie that just looked fine, but he was here with that grownup, and they were talking to that cloud. Those things killed my parents, and Jerrick’s and Lashawna’s, and Muntser’s, even. They were bad. The clouds didn’t know where we lived anymore, and if I told Munster…? Still, I had to say something.

“I found two friends. I’ve been with them.”

He looked at me funny, like he had a big question mark in his head. “Where?”

So, now I was stuck. He wouldn’t let me go unless I told him, I thought. But if I did tell him, and if he and the grownup were bad like the clouds, they’d all come after us like that cloud did a little while ago when it chased me into the kitchen.

“I don’t want to tell you, Munster.”

“Why?”

Once, a long time ago, me and Debra Sassone had a secret. She stoled a Milky Way from Albertson’s when she and I went there after school one afternoon. I didn’t have any money that day, and neither did she, and we were both hungry for a candy bar. She took it, and we ate it outside by the place they kept the shopping baskets. Afterward, when I went home, I felt bad. I wanted to tell Mommy, but I was afraid, because she would punish me and then make me go back to the store and tell the manager what I’d done. Or what Debra had done. Debra wasn’t my best friend, but we were friends.

At school the next day I was sitting at the picnic table by the playground with Diane Fairmore, who was my best friend. I told her, and I felt a lot better. Diane Fairmore was very surprised, and her mouth opened wide after I told her. I asked her not to tell anyone, and she promised she wouldn’t. She did though, because, I think, she didn’t like Debra at all.

Mommy told me a long time later that she was not angry with me anymore, and that Diane Fairmore’s mother had called her the day after I told Diane what we’d done. That’s how my mother found out. She was angry for what Debra and I had done, because it was wrong and it was a sin, but she was angrier that I hadn’t come to her and told her.

Me and my friend did have to go back to the store and tell the manager that Debra Sassone had stolen a candy bar after all. We didn’t get thrown in jail, but Debra hated me after that, and I hated Diane Fairmore for a whole year.

So, I’d thought Diane Fairmore was my best friend, like Munster sort of was now, but she really wasn’t. If I told Munster where we lived, he would tell Mr. Baxter, and Mr. Baxter would tell the clouds, and then bring them with him.

“Because…I don’t want that man, Mr. Baxter, to know.” That’s all I could think of to say.

“Huh? I don’t get it. Bax is our friend, Amelia. Why don’t you want him to know? He’s got this thing all figured out, and he’ll help us!”

“Because he was talking to that cloud in the kitchen…and so were you!”

Munster took a step backward, and his face got that “Oh-My-God!” look on it. He came back to where he’d been standing a second ago and grabbed my hands, which made me very nervous, but he was smiling.

“You got it all wrong, Amelia. I can’t understand them clouds…I guess he can, but I can’t. C’mere,” he said, and he pulled me into the living room and told me to sit down beside him on the couch. “This is what happened.”

Munster told me how he’d gone back into the mini-mart. Mr. Baxter was still lying on the floor behind that big shelf, and so Munster went around it and pointed his gun at him.

“I was gonna’ shoot him, an’ I woulda’ except he asked me not to, that he was sick an’ was prob’ly gonna’ die anyway. I could see he was real sick ‘cuz he was layin’ on his side, an’ he was reachin’ up at me with his fingers. But I knew he couldn’t move to get up.”

“And so you helped him?”

“Well, yeah.”

 “Munster! I don’t trust him, and I don’t trust the clouds. Don’t you see? He wasn’t really 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 looking, and, and…”

Jerrick stood up. “We need to eat,” he said, “and I don’t want cold beans.”

He walked out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, and then I heard the back door open. A few seconds later the generator started up and the lights came on. Lashawna was smiling when I looked over at her. I hoped Jerrick was right, because if he wasn’t, we’d all be dead before we finished eating our hot dinner.

Munster and Mr. Baxter were looking for us. I wasn’t sure of many other things, but I was sure of that.

 

THIRTEEN

Dinner was rice boiled in a pan, because we didn’t have a steamer like Mommy did. Lashawna mixed it with Ragu spaghetti sauce. I would have liked noodles with the sauce better, but the rice was okay. At least dinner was hot. On our next Target shopping trip—if we ever had one—I promised myself to for sure pick one up!

While she and Jerrick were busy making dinner, I went into our bedroom and turned on the stereo. I put in a Selena Gomez CD I’d found at Target the week Lashawna and I went shopping without Jerrick with us to make life miserable. We found a lot of CDs, and we put as many as we wanted into the basket. I liked Selena Gomez and One Direction best. I turned Who Says up very loud. If our lights were on, then it wouldn’t matter if Munster and Mr. Baxter and all the clouds on earth heard Selena Gomez singing in our house. If they were all bad and came in to kill us, then I wanted to hear Who Says because it always made me happy when I played it.

A long time ago, last year when my computer still worked, I used to go to Youtube  and listen to songs I liked, and Debra Sassone, and Diane Fairmore—although she thought Justin Bieber was cute and sang good. But I never liked him that much. I guess he died. I hoped Selena Gomez didn’t. I wanted to think she was in a church somewhere near where she lived, and that she had friends like Lashawna and Jerrick to help her.

I began to dance. I always danced. Always with Debra, but sometimes with Diane, or Juliet Fenniston if they came to my house. We sang along with Selena, even with Liam Payne when we listed to What Makes You Beautiful, and I’d missed dancing. I missed singing. I missed happiness.

So, I turned the CD player up loud, loud, loud, and forgot all about our strange new life. I danced with my eyes closed, around and around and up and down. Pretty soon I felt my elbow touch something. I opened my eyes, and right beside me was Lashawna, dancing better than I had ever seen anyone dance, except maybe Gangnam. She smiled at me and then took my hands in hers and we danced together until the song ended. I don’t think I’d been that happy since…since everything ended before Christmas. Then I hugged her and began to cry a little. She asked me why I was sad, and I told her I really wasn’t, that I was happy, and sometimes when you’re happy—very, very happy—you cry.

“Yes. That’s true, Amelia.” Lashawna put her hands on my cheeks. “I remember once when my father was really sick, and my mother and Jerrick just knew he was going to die. I sat by his bed—he had the flu really bad that year—and talked to him, and to God. A few days later while I was sitting beside his bed talking away as though he could really hear me, he opened his eyes and smiled up at me. I was so happy that I began to cry, but I think I was smiling, too. That’s happy crying, just like what you just did.”

“Yes,” I answered her, “and even if I still miss Mommy and Daddy as much as ever, I’m happy you and Jerrick are here now, and I’m happy we can listen to our music and dance and yell if we want because no one will care. And I’m glad we have a home and electricity. I’m glad we aren’t cold and can cuddle up in our bed to stay warm, and that someday everything will make sense again. Maybe I’ll even marry Jerrick.” I said that in a whisper because Jerrick had such good ears. Because he was blind. Lashawna giggled.

“That won’t happen. Jerrick loves books, not girls.”

“Then I’ll never get married. The only other boy I know of is Munster, and he might be a zombie now.”

“Oh, no!”

“I don’t know. I mean, he looked normal, but...well, I just don’t know.”

I heard Jerrick fumbling with the dishes and silverware for our dinner, and I looked over Lashawna’s shoulder. Jerrick was so quiet, except for rattling the dishes. I wondered what he was thinking?

“Where do you think Munster is right now?” Lashawna asked.

“Don’t know. Out there I guess. Looking for me—for us. He’s going to find us, you know.”

“Then we will go into the church and pray that he’s good, and that Mr. Baxter is, too. If you like, we can even light more candles beneath your Saint Therese…if that makes you feel better.”

It would. It did.

Lashawna was not Catholic. She didn’t believe in our Pope and our saints. She believed in Jesus, though, and so did I, so I guessed that would be enough. I wished he would come down and talk to us. That would have made all of us feel very, very better. I knew he wouldn’t, though, so in the meantime I would keep asking Saint Therese to ask him to send more angels down to protect us until we grew up, or he decided to come down from heaven to earth in person.

Jerrick called us. He had put the rice with Ragu sauce mixed in onto the table. He had also found a candle holder with three candles in it, and he’d lit them and set the holder in the center of the table. Even with the lights on, the candles made our dinner seem beautiful. Like we had all gone to an expensive restaurant where there are waiters with white towels on their arms. We could go to one of those restaurants anytime we wanted, but there would be no waiters with white towels, it would be dark inside, and we would have no way to cook our dinner. Our rectory kitchen was just fine, I thought. It was home.

Lashawna and I sat down, and we both thanked Jerrick for being so kind while we’d been dancing and singing.

“My pleasure,” he said. “Now, what would you ladies like to drink? We have water in bottles, Pepsi, I think. Tomato juice in a plastic bottle. We even have wine if you’d care for a glass. Which shall it be?”

“No wine!” I laughed. “My daddy used to drink beer, and beer is like wine. It made him cranky, and he used to hurt himself after he drank it. So no wine for me. I don’t want to hurt myself or cuss. Pepsi!”

“Very good, Madame. Pepsi it shall be. And you, little sister? What would your pleasure be?”

Lashawna beamed. “I’d like a glass of your best wine, sir. We drank wine on holidays, remember? Our Papa never got cranky or cursed, or hurt himself, and neither will I.”

That made me think about how different her mother and father must have been from mine. How she had never seen her daddy lose his temper after drinking, like my daddy sometimes did. The three of us were in a brand new family, now, and so I decided to celebrate with them. Once when my daddy had offered me a sip of his beer, Mommy had gotten very angry and told him not to do that, ever, that children don’t drink. He had had lots of beer that day, and he told her that in Europe all children drink beer with their fathers.

“Not beer, Matthew. Wine. And they grow up in households where the father isn’t a drunk!”

“I’m not a drunk,” he answered her, and he was angry because of what she’d said.

“No, you’re not, and neither will our daughter be if I have anything to say about it.”

Daddy got up without saying anything else, turned off the TV, and then went out into our garage. I don’t remember if he hurt himself that afternoon, or even if he cussed, but I knew my mother didn’t want me to drink beer or wine, and so I didn’t.

That night at the table, though, I was with my new family, and if they thought it was okay to drink wine, then I would try it—but only a little bit. I would be European.

 

We ate our dinner. I had a small glass of purply wine. It was Christian Brothers, and because of that I knew Father Kenney had bought it. He wasn’t a Christian Brother, but he was a Christian Priest, and so that’s why he bought wine made by Christian Brothers. I liked how it tasted. Jerrick had gone into our bedroom and turned the CD player down low after he had gotten the bottle of wine and opened it. He put on one of Father’s old CDs; one where a big orchestra played, and no one sang. The candles in the holder flickered sometimes when we spoke, and the rice with Ragu sauce was good, although it was gooey. For dessert we had Keebler cookies, but no more wine. I wanted milk, but the cans of evaporated milk tasted yucky, so we drank water instead.

“They will find us. They have found us,” Jerrick said after dinner in our bedroom. He kept putting on Father’s CDs, even though I wanted to hear my favorite music, and I told him so. Father’s music was so boring. He said we needed to think, and that it was impossible to think with Selena’s music. So I just crinkled my lips and let him have his way again.

“They have found us,” he said, “at least one or two of them anyway, and the question is, why don’t they simply come in and speak to us?”

“How would they do that if we can’t understand them?” Lashawna said.

“Maybe true,” Jerrick said. “But if they are smart enough to cause everyone’s death, wouldn’t it be reasonable to think they are smart enough to talk to us? I mean, they spoke to Mr. Baxter Amelia said.”

“But Munster didn’t know what that cloud was saying!” I told Jerrick.

“Yes, I guess you did say that. But what about the dreams, or what you call dreams, that both you and Munster had? Maybe that was their way of communicating with you,” he said.

“I don’t know. They were just dreams. Dreams are funny.”

Lashawna came closer to me and put her arm around my shoulder like a big sister would do. I wasn’t angry, just confused again.

“You said Munster saw you in his dream, and that you were with the nice lady on the road. How do you explain that?” Jerrick went on. He was staring right at me, as though he could see me, but I knew he really couldn’t.

“I can’t. I don’t know.”

“Then they weren’t dreams at all. Both of you were somewhere else. You thought you were in that dumpster dreaming, but you weren’t. They took you someplace so that they could talk to you.”

“I woke up in the dumpster!”

“The lady brought you back, and then she woke you up…just like she did with Lashawna.”

“Why” I asked.

“I’m not sure, but the fact is, she has been taking care of all of us in some way. Maybe she is sympathetic concerning us; maybe most of the others aren’t. The only way we’ll know for sure is to meet Mr. Baxter. He knows something we don’t. I don’t think he’s evil. I sense that somehow.”

“He locked that bedroom, Jerrick!” I shouted.

“Maybe for a good reason that has nothing to do with evil. Perhaps whatever killed everyone is locked up inside that room. Maybe whatever is inside that room is precious, and Munster getting at it might be its ruin. He sounds a little crazy to me. Undisciplined. Carrying a gun is crazy, right?”

“Mr. Baxter took it away from him…”

“And so, Mr. Baxter did something good. We should go to Munster’s house.”

“What!” It wasn’t Munster who was crazy, I thought after hearing Jerrick say that. It was Jerrick who was crazy.

“If they’re home, we’ll knock on the door and ask Mr. Baxter who he is. If he shoots us with your friend’s gun, then we’ll just get to heaven more quickly. If they’re not home, we’ll wait for them to get back, and then we’ll ask Mr. Baxter who he is, and what’s in that bedroom.”

“I’ll go,” Lashawna said. “I’m not afraid.”

We didn’t have to go. Just as Lashawna was busy agreeing with her brother, Munster’s voice came in through our bedroom window.

“Amelia! It’s me. Unlock the door. Me and Bax want to come in.”

 

FOURTEEN

I was so scared!           

I ran out of the bedroom, through Father’s front office, and then across the walkway into our church. I kept thinking about when I was hiding in Munster’s kitchen, and I thought, too, of Mr. Baxter talking to that cloud that was looking for me. For me! And now they were here at our house! If only Jerrick hadn’t turned the lights back on.

And then I was inside the church. I ran to Saint Therese and prayed to her to protect me, because no matter what Jerrick said, I didn’t believe Mr. Baxter was good. He might not have killed Munster, but only because he was one of them, and they were after us.

Only six or seven candles were burning, and so I took a match from the box and lit a new one and said more prayers.

“Please, please, Saint Therese. I’m so scared. What should I do? Where can I go…” And right in the middle of that prayer I started talking to myself, which made no sense, because when you talk to yourself you say crazy things sometimes.

I’ll run away. Right now! No. It’s dark. I’ll just hide…they won’t find me. Ohhh no, no, no! Please! Mr. Baxter will kill Lashawna and…I don’t care about Jerrick. I don’t! It’s all his fault. I know they’ll be here to find me in a minute. Stupid Jerrick! No, I don’t want him to die.

“Please help them, Saint Therese. Please. I have to go. I’m sorry. Help me. Help me.”

MR. BAXTER is a cloud person. He must be…

I made the sign of the cross as quick as I could, and then got up and turned to run down the big aisle to the front doors. That’s when I nearly fainted, and when I tripped on my feet. I saw them. They were everywhere! Spinning slowly. They’d found me, and there was nowhere to go, now. Nowhere to hide from them. I didn’t see them when I came in. I knew they hadn’t been there until after I ran in. Mr. Baxter had led them to me. To us.

Momma told me a long time ago about how churches used to be, back when knights and people like that still lived. They would always chase robbers and murderers. Knights had swords and big axes, but no guns because there weren’t guns then. But the knights would chase the bad men all over the hills and towns to kill them, but if the bad men could get to a church before they were killed, they could go in, and then they’d be safe. People who chased other people couldn’t chase them into a church because all churches were holy, and if you were chasing someone and wanted to kill him, it would be a mortal sin to do that inside God’s home.

I remembered that. But there they were, so many of them all around me. They had chased me into God’s home, and I was sure they didn’t care. They would finally get me and kill me, and it probably wouldn’t be a sin for them because they’d come from somewhere where no one even believed in God.

I couldn’t see their faces because they didn’t HAVE faces! But I knew they were frowning and laughing like murderers would after they had got you. They had me.

I turned back around. One of them was right in front of Saint Therese’s altar, right where I’d been seconds ago. It was her—the nice cloud lady I’d met in my dream, and she had a face, now, except it wasn’t exactly like my face or Lashawna’s or Saint Therese’s, even. All that I could see were her eyes and parts of her cheeks and chin and mouth, like in a very old, worn out photograph in one of Momma’s picture albums. She was the rest a cloud, spinning very, very slowly, and she was smiling down at me. Not a big smile, but a smile. And then part of her—two parts of her—reached out. Like hands. Like she wanted me to come back to the altar.

There was no place to run to, no place to go except to her, and so I went back. As I got close, her hands turned up slowly, the way Momma’s did when…when… Something deep down told me not to touch them; that if I did, that would be the end of me. But the lady was smiling.

I reached up, and with my shaking fingers, touched hers. Oh Saint Therese, if you’re here…

I was no longer in my church, but I was. I felt my feet on the stone floor. I smelled the wax burning. There was candlelight everywhere suddenly, though. Bright and soft. Not at all like lights in our rectory home, or even the lights that used to be at Target or Albertson’s. Thousands of tiny flames that were warm…oh, it’s so hard to explain.

Momma read a book to me once. About fairies. About where they lived in a forest, and how at night they would all come out of the places they lived, and they would fly around, all glowing and tiny. When they all came together, though, the trees would wake up and look like they had bark that was soft and bluish. Yes! From the fairy lights! And the trees would have faces, and their branches became arms, and the fairies would land in them and talk and sing. The fairies in that book never wanted to hurt one another, and the trees would not hurt them either.

And that is how it felt as I stood there, kind of. The church was golden, though, not blue, and it was warm, and the clouds became like the trees in the story about fairies that Momma read to me a long time ago when I was a little girl.

And there was music, far away, that came closer and closer and closer. I felt as though I was in Heaven right then…so close. It was such beautiful music. Oh, so beautiful. I knew there were violins—I think that’s what they were—and some kind of horns that I didn’t know what they were, but they were beautiful, too, and all that music began to swirl around me in the soft lights.

I looked around as the music played. I saw many of the clouds surrounding me, and somehow the music was coming from them. Each time they moved, so did the violins and the horns. The music was their voices! It felt strange when the voices touched me, so very strange. One, two, three, four. One after another whisked around me like ribbons flying, mostly touching my head. How do I say…? I almost understood the notes, because they were like words, only musical words! They were talking to me!

I wasn’t afraid any longer. How could creatures with such beautiful voices want to hurt me? We were in my church, too. God’s home. No one could hurt me there, not even if they wanted, because I was protected. But I knew, I just knew they didn’t want to hurt me. That is what I knew, and that is what they told me.

High above me, way up in the top of the church where the big wooden beams that held up the roof were, some of the clouds and their musical voices floated in and out of the pieces that made up the beams. Maybe they were really angels, I thought. That is what I wanted them to be, anyway. Maybe the kind cloud lady who had my hand was really Saint Therese. Even if none of this was true, I wanted to believe it was. I turned back to the lady.

“Dear Lady, thank you. I’m not afraid anymore, but I have one question, please. You must answer it. Will you? Why did you kill my family and everyone else? What was the reason?”

She did not move her lips, but she spoke to me.

Go back, dear little one. Go back to your friends. You will find your answer there. We will not leave you just yet. Go back now.

I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay right where I was, holding her hand and hearing them sing to me. But I left after the lady let go of my hand. After the music that was voices went away, the clouds with it. And the lady, too. I stood for a minute, searching with my eyes to see if any of them had stayed behind. If way up in the ceiling any of the small, soft lights were there. But they were all gone, probably back to heaven.

I looked up at Saint Therese just before I left. She held lilies in her right hand, just like always, and she was smiling down at me.

I went away.

 

FIFTEEN

When I got back into the rectory and closed the front door quietly, I could hear two things. The chug, chug, chug of the generator outside, and a voice coming from the bedroom. The voice was Mr. Baxter’s, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I walked down the hall like a kitty cat, and then stopped before I reached the door to listen.

“It’s true, Jerrick. Very sad, but true. There are pockets of survivors just like us scattered about across the globe. There must be. In time we shall want to search them out. Those we can get to at least.”

Munster, my good friend, my crazy friend answered. “I can get to ‘em, Bax. I’ll just load up my car with cans o’ gas…”

“Patience, Francis. As I’ve said over and over, we must plan well. Remember what I told you about Rome. It wasn’t built in a day.”

Munster must have known he couldn’t win. “Who cares about that dumb…” and his voice went all lower, drowned out by the chug, chug, chugging outside. I stood up. I don’t know what I expected to see, really. You see I had never really SEEN Mr. Baxter, except little parts of his pant legs and his shoes when I was hiding. And his voice at the Mini-mart. Just the back of him when him and Munster were a block away that afternoon when I was coming home from the hospital. That’s all.

I peeked around the corner. It wasn’t a corner, not really. The door was half-opened and I was behind the half part, so it was sort of like a corner, and I peeked. Mr. Baxter was sitting on the edge of our bed with his hands folded in his lap. Jerrick and Lashawna were sitting right in front of him on the floor. I didn’t see Munster. Mr. Baxter noticed me when I peeked, and he sat up straighter, with a funny look on his face. A smile, but he looked like he was very surprised, too.

I wasn’t afraid, though. The clouds didn’t kill me, and so I knew he probably wouldn’t either. I wasn’t thinking that, but I knew it all the same. I was just embarrassed.

Momma and Daddy were in their bedroom a long time ago, sitting very close on the edge of their bed. Daddy was kissing her, which was okay because I knew Daddy kissed Momma sometimes when he wasn’t angry over something that had exploded or broken when he was working on it in the garage. I had come to ask Momma something. I can’t remember what it was, but I stopped at their door and peeked around it when I heard Momma giggle. I saw them, and then they saw me, and Daddy jumped. He turned very red, and Momma smiled. I don’t remember if she turned all red like Daddy, but I was embarrassed. Diane Fairmore had told me all about what parents do when they’re in their bedroom like Momma and Daddy were.

Mr. Baxter in our bedroom wasn’t like that, but I felt like I did that time when I saw Momma and Daddy kissing and giggling.

“Well, well,” Mr. Baxter said. “This must be our little Amelia! Do come in. Don’t be afraid.”

I knew Munster and Jerrick and Lashawna had told him I was afraid. That I’d run away when he and Munster came to our house. I wasn’t afraid now, though, and part of the reason was that the kind cloud lady had told me he would tell me all about what had happened. That’s what I wanted to hear from him. What happened, and would anything ever be the same as it once was. So I walked in.

Munster came out of the kitchen with a handful of crackers and a jar of Welch’s Grape Jelly.

“Amelia!”

I looked at him standing there with the food, and all I could do was smile at first. We’d all have to go back to Albertson’s with big shopping baskets if HE stayed for very long.

“Hi Munster.”            He looked at me for a minute. Maybe it was only a second. Anyway, after that he looked over at Mr. Baxter.

“You don’t have to worry about Bax. I told ya’ he’s trying to help us. That’s why he came with me. Heck, I knew you were stayin’ here. I was gonna’ come sooner, like days ago, but Bax said they told him to tell me to wait. He can understand ‘em. I sure can’t. But anyway, I waited…and then YOU came bustin’ into my place! Why’d you run off?”

“I told you, Munster. I already told you! But that’s okay now. I understand them too,” I said to him, and I think that last part surprised Mr. Baxter because he sat up even straighter, and his eyes opened wide. “I ran because I didn’t trust him. I think there are bad clouds, Munster, and they want to kill us all. But there are good clouds, too, and they told me that Mr. Baxter…I think she said he would help us. She said he could tell me what happened. Well, she said “they”, but that means him.

“They sang, Munster. They flew around the church like hundreds of angels, and when they sang, I understood every note, just like if they were words! I don’t know really how to describe it better, but she told me Mr. Baxter was waiting, and that he’d help us. So here I am.”

Mr. Baxter smiled, shaking his head at me.

“What happened Mr. Baxter? Why is the world all dead except for us? Why did they kill my parents, and Lashawna’s and Jerrick’s, and Munster’s. Why did they leave us alone? Why didn’t they kill us too?”

Mr. Baxter smiled at me, but it was a sad smile.

“Sit down, honey, this is what I know. What they told me. What happened is more than just sad, it’s tragic…and after it happened all of them realized it. There was little they could do, though. Even they have no power to raise the dead. That belongs to another set of hands.

“But “they” call themselves Crinians—translated roughly into our English language. Their home planet is far, far away in another galaxy, one a lot like ours. Theirs is an old race of beings, much older than ours. Many centuries ago, at about the time our ancestors were trying to stay warm during the last ice age, the Crinians reached out and began to explore the planets, and then the planets of stars nearby their home. That is exactly what we began to do fifty-odd years ago—and we would have reached out as far as they, had time allowed us.

“The universe is big, Amelia. Very, very big. In our small galaxy alone there are billions and billions of stars. Can you imagine exploring all the planets in our galaxy alone? More billions on top of the billions of stars! But so they did, slowly. A handful of Crinians at first, and then a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million as the centuries rolled on. Large groups of them going out in every direction, the same as we seemed destined to do.

“Out they went, landing on so many habitable planets, observing the native life on each. They loved it. There are many, many different forms of life scattered across the heavens. Interesting beings. Insect-like creatures, they say—huge, but quite friendly, unlike our spiders! Big blobby creatures that eat the mud of their planet, which is rained on continuously. Worlds composed entirely of water. Oceans. Filled with creatures that swim, and often eat one another. So many different kinds of creatures. So many stars and galaxies.

“The Crinian explorers spotted earth—heard the messages we broadcast, sometimes inadvertently from our TV sets and radios, long, long before you were even born. Before your parents were born. They decided to visit us. Stop here for a rest, as space travel is a long and wearisome job. But their eyes were not on us, particularly, rather a planet the size of Jupiter, roughly, circling a star in a system much farther inside our Milky Way galaxy. That is where they were headed.”

I had sat beside Lashawna, holding her hand tight, trying to imagine a spaceship so big, SO BIG that it could carry all those tall clouds. I listened closely as he told me about them.

“They arrived at the outskirts of our solar system, millions and millions of miles away three months ago, just before our Christmas. Because their ships were capable of traveling at nearly light speed, it took them only a matter of hours to reach their “resting place.” Thousands of their craft went into orbit around us. They told me that messages flew out from our scientists and politicians. Messages filled with excitement; those of our governments demanding to know who they were and what their intentions were. Their leaders sent a message around the world saying they merely wished to visit, to speak to us if we could understand them, and that they also wished to disembark and “stretch their legs.” I know that’s a funny way of putting it. They have no legs—or arms, or feet, even heads as we know heads! But that was their message, broadcast in their musical language, and it seems no one here could decipher it!

“Isn’t it funny, Amelia, that creatures we see as rather ugly and menacing sing to communicate?”

I didn’t think it was funny at all. I thought it was beautiful, but I wondered why they just didn’t keep singing to us more and more until we did understand, instead of…well, I wondered; did they just give up and come down to kill us all because we wouldn’t sing back to them?

“We did not understand evidently. Our leaders sent message after message to them, ordering them to tell us who they were, and what they wanted. If they did not tell us, our leaders threatened to shoot missiles at them! The Crinians understood us, though. Their leaders raised their eyebrows, although they really have no eyebrows. The idea of a missile or two or a thousand to them was much like us being threatened with pebbles by tiny little monkeys who jump up and down and scream whenever someone not in their tribe comes near!”

“Monkeys don’t throw rocks,” I said to Mr. Baxter.

“You get the idea, though. Whatever we might throw at them would not, could not harm them in any way.

“They were tired. The journey had been long. Our earth was warm, covered with vast oceans, and our air seemed pleasing to them. So they decided to land all across our globe, travel to our cities, over our mountains, across our seas…and hopefully find someone, or someones, who could understand them. They simply wanted to rest, as our civilization was very primitive compared to theirs.

“They landed. Hundreds of thousands of them everywhere. I’m sure you remember that day. It was day here in the United States. Everyone, or nearly everyone, was fast asleep in Europe, Asia, Africa. When they came, they came swiftly, and flew out by the hundreds and thousands to see us. To spin and breathe in our air. To feel the cool waters in our oceans. To whisk across California, Alaska, Missouri, New York. Everywhere! We looked much like an anthill to them, running around with seemingly no purpose or direction. Many of us dashing out of their way. Covering their heads. Kneeling to pray—which act they had no knowledge of. They found us curious. They also found us rather disinteresting.

“In our big cities, like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—many others—our tanks and soldiers and planes swarmed around them. Like ants would if you stepped on their pile. Like bees would if you shook their hive.

“What happened next took only a matter of hours. It saddened many of them when they saw the bodies falling lifeless all around them, when they understood too late what they had caused. On no other world had such a thing occurred.”

Mr. Baxter stopped talking after he said that. I saw his eyes close. Munster had squeezed in beside me and Lashawna, and I could hear the crackers crunching as he chewed on them. Finally Mr. Baxter opened his eyes again.

“Their bodies—you’ve seen them a few times, Amelia—their bodies carried a virus, or perhaps emitted something entirely different that was swift-acting and lethal to our species. The majority of Crinians shrugged their shoulders, if you can visualize that, and said to one another. ‘Too bad, but at least their scurrying around has ceased. Annoying little things they were. Let us continue our rest, and then leave this place. We have far to travel yet.’

“Still, a few were moved by our demise, and they saw a few of us who seemed unaffected by whatever it was their bodies carried that destroyed us. The lady you spoke of was one of them. Yes, like you, I also met her, and yes, like you, it was in a sort of dream state at first.

“My first encounter with them was on the afternoon of that fateful day when it all began here. I was in my office at the college reading papers written by my students. I saw the bright flash of light, just as Francis described to me later after we’d met. At nearly the same instant the sweet odor descended into the room, and the moment I smelled it, I reeled. It made me dizzy and nauseous, and I must have passed out and fallen out of my chair, because hours—perhaps days— later I awakened with a terrible headache, and it was dark outside. Everything was deathly quiet as well.

“I rose from the floor shakily, with great effort, using the unsteady chair with wheels on the feet as balance. It was very difficult for me, Amelia. My head spun and every muscle in my body felt like rubber. I wanted to fall again. Go to sleep, or even die. But I struggled across the room and lifted the open window higher to let fresh air in. There was none. The air outside was no better, even worse. That’s when I saw the first glimpses of the horror that had befallen us.

“The campus lamplights which had always illuminated themselves, without tending, triggered by evening’s darkness, were black and lifeless. Still, I could see them—the bodies lying this way and that on the lawn bordering the buildings, on the walkways, collapsed over bicycles and books and one another. Lying backs against the walls in doorway openings of the Science Building not far away. Twenty, perhaps. Maybe thirty. It was dark, and I was in shock and still very, very nauseous. You can imagine, I’m sure, the rage of thoughts pummeling my brain all at once! WHAT happened, I thought, trying to understand in that terrible moment. To make sense of a sight that is incomprehensible.

“I staggered back to my desk and clicked my computer’s mouse. News would be broadcast on the internet—everywhere. Of course you know that every vehicle of communication died when the city populace died. The screen remained black. There was no power any longer. There was nothing to grab onto. Only silence as total as the ruination around me.

“That is when I heard it. The silence was broken. At first it was merely a soft, low shuuu-sh. Something like a breeze that comes out of nowhere and picks up leaves and bits of paper, flinging them about in its travel down the street. It grew louder—not terribly so—but higher. More pronounced, as though whatever it was was drawing near to the room in which I was entombed. Outside the window.

“I made my way back, staying close to the wall, and peered out with one eye in case…in case. All things were dangerous to me suddenly. Some thing, or some one had killed everyone and everything around me. Perhaps, I thought, it was some drone outside, scouring the campus searching for anyone left standing so that a signal could be relayed…somewhere. Whoever, whatever they were would suddenly descend on me and do to me what they’d done to those students, those teachers, all those innocent people outside on the ground.

“I couldn’t see it, hiding there with my back tight against the wall, but I’ll never forget the sound of it. It stopped just outside the window, as though it was listening, or peering through the glass and open space beneath. A moment or two passed. I’d begun to pray. Anyone. God, Buddha. Someone help me… I stayed glued to the wall, trying not to move a single muscle, trying not to draw in or exhale a breath for fear whatever it was would notice.

“It went away after a few more terribly long moments, and I filled my lungs as though I’d been under water for hours. I slid my back down the wall and sat with my knees drawn to my chest. Sick, despairing, confused. Outside the strange noise—noises, I noted many distinct ones then—began to soften. They were moving on. To where I had no idea, but whatever they were, beast or machine, they were leaving.

“I stood up carefully, crawled to the open window, and peeked over the sill. Clouds…tornados that did not roar or tear buildings from their foundations. Quiet, nearly, but shaped like tornados, these…things. What were they? Where had they come from? Why did they do this…or did they? Yes, I reasoned. They must have. But why? To what cruel end? All of you know that terrible confusion of thoughts. The instant obliteration of everything living that draws a breath, when only moments earlier you were sitting, gazing at the Christmas tree, or helping your mother bake cookies. Talking to your friend on the phone. Playing a video game. Whatever it was you were doing. Then, POOF! It’s all just gone. Nuclear destruction without missiles or bombs. But, destruction just as thorough to our species.”

I thought back to that moment, and the pain returned. Daddy was watching TV, talking to Momma. He was on the couch with a can of beer in his right hand. She was in the kitchen making our dinner. And then the bright light came. I remember the room. It was suddenly so dark, and I remember hearing his can of beer hitting the carpet with a thud. And I didn’t know what had happened, or why everything suddenly smelled funny and it was so dark suddenly when it was still morning. I began to cry again. Munster saw this and put his arm around me. Lashawna started crying then, and I wanted to get up and run away again and not remember.

Mr. Baxter got up from the bed and knelt down in front of me. He touched my shoulder, and Lashawna’s, too, and asked both of us to forgive him for saying what he just said—about all of us knowing what happened when they first came. It made us remember when we had started to forget.

“I’m so sorry,” he said to both of us. “I shouldn’t have reminded you. Will you forgive me?”

We told him we would, and then Munster hugged us. Mr. Baxter got back up and then sat on the edge of the bed again.

“I don’t know how long I sat there. Hours it seemed. I am not an impulsive man. I consider every move I make—I like to think I do, anyway. But the shock of all of that kept me frozen, thinking run, one moment, stay until someone bursts through the door to rescue you the next. Sleep. It will all go away, and you will know it was only a very bad nightmare when you awaken.

“I taught psychology to my students. Do you know what that is, my young friends?”

“Yeah, it’s what they do to you in the nuthouse. I mean, it’s how they know what to do to you there,” Munster said to him.

Jerrick had been sitting quietly, leaning against the headboard thing where our pillows were all that time just listening. After Munster said that, he spoke.

“It’s the scientific study of human behavior. If we are doing things that hurt us, or even hurt others, there is a scientifically-based reason, and if someone trained to observe the phenomena assesses the personality disorders in the offending person correctly, a cure can more often than not be found.”

I didn’t understand that, but Mr. Baxter did.

“Very good, Jerrick. VERY good. The more I hear you speak, the more impressed I am! You are correct. There are many disciplines in the field of psychology, however. Clinical. Grief counseling. Teaching—which is what I did, as I’ve mentioned. The point is, in those first days I tried to analyze myself; discover if I’d somehow gone insane! But the bodies were all too real, not some very elaborate trick my mind was playing on me.

“My body. I needed food and water, the same as you. The university cafeteria was filled with rotting food because the refrigeration was gone, and so I wisely stayed away from it. After a few days I began to weaken. The once-fresh vegetables had gone bad. The packaged sandwiches likewise. If only, I thought, there were someplace, some store or plant where emergency generators had kicked in after the city power company had shut down. That is how the mind begins to work when a crisis has risen. We begin to grab at straws. Explore avenues that end in block walls. It is a coping mechanism hard-wired into our brains.

“I continued to weaken as more days slipped by, and I was still sick, getting sicker. Still nauseous, and by then, vomiting frequently. I needed help, and if everything else was muddled, that instinct remained solidly in place.

“My mind was drifting away, more often as the days passed. I began to hallucinate, and rationality left me entirely. Something told me death was close, but something deeper inside me told me to hang on; to fight. That’s when I stumbled out the doors and wandered from building to building, not caring if the clouds reappeared and finished the job they’d started.

“Death and rotting flesh in each of them. Food. I craved nourishment—that deeper area of my brain urging me on. Get away from the bodies, get away from the university. Go. Seek something living out in the city. Find a steak! Find…find edible food. Find help. Find survivors.

“I have no idea how long I wandered aimlessly, stumbling over bodies, seeing visions of tin men, and stars that spun in crazy circles in the sky, then dropping down in front of me as roasted chickens!

“How I got into the rear of the Mini-mart I have no idea. I don’t remember entering it. I don’t even remembering being in the neighborhood, miles and miles away from where I began my journey. Bits and pieces, though, remain. Someone standing near. My cry for help, and then a set of hands helping me to my feet. When I finally did awaken from that nightmare world, I was lying in a bed. A young man feeding me with a spoon. Cold soup out of a can.”

“Yeah, that’s about the time those clouds started hangin’ around,” Munster said.

“I was still delirious. Perhaps it was delirium…well, so I thought as I walked with my young friend into that dream.”

“What did you see,” I asked.

“A city. Someone following close behind me on an avenue. The feeling of terror, and my wish to escape around a corner. Then a veil that passed over my body quickly. Not cloth or fabric of any kind, but a whirling covering through which I passed, or which passed over and through me. A cloud, but not a cloud. This veil had substance. Onward I went, not feeling one foot pass the other as it should when we walk or run, but I was on a road of some type, moving. I looked behind me and discovered Francis had disappeared, though I didn’t know his name yet. That person who had helped me to my feet. That person whose face was the first I saw when I awoke in that bed. That person who was right behind me on the avenue. He was gone, but he had been with me only moments earlier.

“I continued on in that strange dream. It seemed to last forever, but the road ended eventually, and I found myself in a room. No, not a room as we know them. A vast enclosure of some kind, though. Walls that were not walls. They undulated…”

“What does undulated mean?” I had to ask Mr. Baxter.

“They rolled like waves, Amelia. Up and down; in and out. Grey, but with shadows that grew, and then fell as the waves coursed this way and that, with no discernible pattern. Imagine if you can the inside of your stomach when you’ve swallowed a piece of toast, or a banana! Something like that! It was a frightening place. Unlike home. Unlike any place I’d ever been. Foreign…or alien, as it were.

“From one end of the cavernous room one of them entered, although no doorway existed—at least that I could see. And then another, and another, and another. The clouds as you call them. Crinians, I learned not a great time later, and they were coming toward me. Oh, I had seen them before, although I’m certain they hadn’t seen me that day in my office at the university. Had I been able, I would have run, but then, where would I have run to? Into the undulating wall? Better that than… Anyway, I found I was unable to move my feet—OR my arms. I was pinned solid to the cold floor, and they were now nearly upon me.”

“I would have…” What would I have done, I wondered? I was able to run when I saw them in the church. When I turned and there they were, everywhere. “I would have cried!”

“You did, Amelia.”

“Huh?” I answered Mr. Baxter. “But I wasn’t even there.”

“You were, though I didn’t see you enter. Lashawna was with you. Just the two of you, and she was lying on her back. Her eyes were closed and she wasn’t moving, and you were kneeling beside her saying something over and over through your bursts of crying. Something about needles, tubes and…something. Of course this evening I learned what all that meant.

“I was certain I was about to die, or be dissected in some horrible way, and that the two of you were about to suffer a similar fate. One of them separated from its companions and swirled quickly in your direction, like mercury released onto the surface of a slide. I screamed, but no sound came out of my throat. And then the others were upon me, and so I closed my eyes, waiting.

“What became of you I did not know after that moment. The only thing I recall is the rise of some sort of conversation among them—like singing in an odd way. A second later the veil consumed me. I suppose that is the right word—a feeling that I can only describe as oblivion.

“I awoke some time later. How many days had passed? I have no way of knowing. Perhaps only minutes had passed. It was morning. I was lying in the bed where I had fallen asleep, or passed out from malnutrition. I awoke, and I knew instinctively what was required of me. Concerning all of you. Concerning the pockets of survivors strewn about like scattered leaves across our country. I knew that without my help your futures—your very lives—would be in jeopardy. What I did not know was where exactly you were. Unfortunately, neither did Francis.”

Munster jumped to his feet. “Bax, I wish you’d quit-callin’-me-that! I’m Munster, not some dumb girl. How many times I gotta’ tell ya’ that?”

“I’m sorry, Francis. I suppose the name Munster is okay, but in the low German it means monster, and it brings images to mind of a family of misfit ghouls. Those who teased you about the noble name you were given at birth are gone, now. There is a saint whose name was Francis. He is beloved…he was beloved by people the world over, of every faith or non-faith.”

Munster wadded up the empty cracker wrapper. He tossed it off to the side, and then began to leave the room.

“I’m gonna get more crackers. I’m sick of crackers. I want…” And the rest of what he said got lost to me.

“Crackers brings up something very important to us—and it is us, now. We are our family. We must begin to feed ourselves nourishing foods. Fresh vegetables, not canned, although in the short term they will suffice. Vegetables grown in the soil we cultivate. Someday the stocks of canned goods will begin to spoil like everything else, but we will not wait that long. The river is nearby, and in time the water in it will be potable…”

“What’s that?” I asked Mr. Baxter.

“It means drinkable,” Jerrick said.

“I’m not drinkin’ that piss,” Munster said from the kitchen. I put my hand over my mouth and giggled! “My ol’ man said the Santa Ana River’s a sewer!”

“Nature has a way of cleansing itself, Francis. You will drink it someday. Trust me.”

“Your language is terrible!” Lashawna shouted at Munster.

“Who gives a good crap?” he said. “There ain’t nobody but us here to hear it. ‘Sides, what’s wrong with piss? Miss Holy Girl. You and Amelia sittin’ there…” Munster’s voice got all mumbly, and what he said made me wonder if he was angry because neither of us cussed like he always did.

“Language, as well,” Mr. Baxter said. “Aside from Jerrick, who seems to have lived in books—and his spoken words show it—you girls, along with Francis the uncouth, will need to be instructed in the basics. Where you left off when the catastrophe happened. You will have children someday, and they will need your help, not only with fundamental survival skills, but with skills that give living a higher purpose. You will need to be educated. We will not sink into savagery. With what we have at our disposal, we will make our new world more beautiful than the one we lost. And I will help you achieve that before I die. That is the trust given to me when I lay unconscious in their spacecraft.”

“All I need is video games and some electricity to run the Xbox or Wii,” Munster yelled.

“All you need is an education, Francis, and you shall have it.”

I liked that. Kind of. Mr. Baxter reminded me of our school principle. Mr. Laird was tall, with a little pot belly, like Mr. Baxter had. He had a moustache, though, and Mr. Baxter didn’t. He used to always say, “And you shall this,” and “You shall that.”

Munster was banging around in our kitchen, and I just sat there waiting for Mr. Baxter to tell us more about what happened to him after he threw up and then had his dream, which he’d said Lashawna and me were in, but we weren’t really there. That’s when Munster’s locked bedroom came to me.

“Mr. Baxter?”

“Yes?” he said.

“You locked Munster’s other bedroom upstairs and wouldn’t let him go in. Why did you do that? What’s in that room?”

Mr. Baxter smiled at me before he answered.

“I don’t know precisely, Amelia. She came to me a day or two after I awakened, no longer so sick that I wanted to die. The same lady, as you call her, who probably visited you. The same lady who you thought was chasing you when you ran into Francis’ kitchen. She is one of those who took pity on us and endeavored to help correct the mistake her people had made—and who were getting ready to leave. She bore a gift for us. Something she commanded me, though, not to open or tamper with until the sun had risen and set 3,623 times. That’s ten years, Amelia! I asked her what it might be, but she repeated merely what she’d just said, adding that it should be kept locked up safely.”

“It’s a bomb!” Munster said. He was coming back into the bedroom with a box of Cracker Jacks he’d found in the pantry, and he laughed. Then he sat back down between Lashawna and me, almost in my lap!

“What does the present look like?” Lashawna asked. “I mean its wrapper. Does it have a bow?” She poked Munster in the ribs. “Or does it tick?”

Munster didn’t laugh this time because he was busy stuffing Cracker Jacks in his mouth. But I knew he wasn’t mad anymore because he was smiling big, chewing on the Cracker Jacks, and his teeth showed through his big smile.

“It’s about the size of an old mainframe computer, Lashawna. It is very heavy—I pondered trying to scoot it across the floor in the bedroom after they whisked it upstairs one afternoon when Francis had left in his hideously colored car, but I was instructed not to touch it, nor allow anyone else to touch it.”

“He likes my car,” Munster said with his mouth half-full of Cracker Jacks. He was smiling again, and his teeth showed again.

“There is no wrapping on it. No bows, either. It isn’t metal, but its surface is hard from the looks of it, the same as steel. It is ebony-colored, and shines like a polished granite countertop. As far as I could tell, it has no door. No lock itself. It simply looks like a tall, narrow black box. I haven’t a clue what’s inside it, nor why I was told not to open it for so many risings and settings of our sun.”

“Do you have the key?” I asked him.

“There is no key, honey.”

“Then how would you open it? And if it can’t be opened, why did you lock the door? How will we get into it after ten whole years? The present, I mean. Why did they put it upstairs, too? They could have left it in Munster’s living room! Or out on the front porch!”

Mr. Baxter laughed because I’d been talking so fast.

“That’s a lot of questions, Amelia dear. But, I don’t know. Perhaps the lady reasoned that were it left anywhere else, you-know-who would eventually disobey me and tamper with it. Perhaps one of you in a moment of curiosity.”

“She shoulda’ stuck it in a bank vault, then. I can get in that bedroom anytime I want. I could bust the door down with a sledgehammer, or climb up a ladder and bust the window, then go in. If I wanted. I think it’s a bomb, Bax. I won’t touch no bomb, so you can go ahead an’ unlock the door. I don’t give a sh...”

“Watch your language, Francis,” Mr. Baxter interrupted him before he finished saying that word.

“It is something precious—and it doesn’t tick, Francis—something that for the time being perhaps is of no use to us. I don’t know. In ten years time, though, we shall all find out. That is all I know.”

“Maybe it’s filled with McDonald’s Big Macs and fries! THAT would be cool,” Munster said.

“You are an idiot, Munster,” Lashawna said. “I think it’s a book telling us how to raise the dead,” she said dreamily.

I thought that was so nice, but it probably wasn’t either of those things. If it was a book about how to raise the dead, then she could have just given it to us, or else brought everyone back to life herself. It was something else. But what, I wondered?

“They haven’t left, Mr. Baxter,” I said. “When do you think they’ll go?”

“Yes, I know they’re still here. Some of them. Those who vowed to help us, anyway. I suspect they are…but I don’t know, dear. I just don’t know.”

“Can we talk to them? Maybe tomorrow?” I said.

“If they wish to talk. But let us get some rest, now. It must be getting late. I’m tired. You need your sleep, all of you. Munster and I will go back to his house, and then in the morning we can all gather and have a nice breakfast—a hot one for a change—and then make plans for our lives together.”

“I dunno’ about anyone else, but I’m taking my car out for a spin. Maybe there’s someone alive over the mountains. If there…”

“You will do no such thing, Francis. That is foolish. There will be time for that later, after we establish ourselves safely here. We’ll need to find a larger home. We’ll need to provide it with power, such as our resourceful Jerrick has done here. We have much to do before we run off—run out of gas a hundred miles away. You will wait until later for your adventures.”

“Bax, you ain’t my boss. I told ya’ that a hundred times already. My name ain’t Francis, either. It’s MUNSTER, now, and I’ll go any-damn-where I please, whenever I want!”

Mr. Baxter smiled and patted Munster’s head. I thought he would slap him, but he didn’t!

“Let’s go…Munster, my boy. Tomorrow comes early. We’ll take your car after the sun rises, and run to the store to get some fresh…oatmeal.

“Goodnight, children. Sleep well. I’m so happy we found you.”

I was surprised that Munster got right up! He did, and then he and Mr. Baxter began to leave the room. Another thought hit me as they went into the kitchen, and I called after them.

“Mr. Baxter!”

He stopped and turned. “Yes dear?”

“Why didn’t the lady tell you where we were? She knew we were here. She must have.”

Mr. Baxter smiled. For a minute I saw my daddy standing there smiling at me.

“Who knows, Amelia? Maybe she wanted us to have to search you out, so that when we did find you our joy would be the greater. But who can say how they think? We found you, that is the important thing, and that gives Munster and myself great joy. Isn’t that right, Francis?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said.

“Well then, Goodnight again.”

And then Munster and Mr. Baxter left.

 

CHAPTER-THE LAST

I woke this morning—the anniversary today of the event. Ten years to the day now, as closely as any of us can determine at least, since the creatures came and inadvertently stepped on us. That, in a nutshell, is what happened—we were stepped on.

As we did last year, and the year before, and the year before that, we dressed according to the weather, and then walked to the small park near the rectory to visit the graves.

Munster carried Jacob, six months old yesterday, under a sky depressingly tin-colored, threatening rain, arm around his dear Lashawna. Francis Jr. tagged behind, trying to skip rocks across the street pavement, cracked and buckling in spots, there sprouting ever-widening growths of grass and weeds. This slow deterioration of the world his parents and I once knew has not registered in his young mind yet. I suspect it will be Lashawna who reveals that old world to him as he grows. She has settled my wild old friend into our new life as easily and surely as though at her birth the focal point was set by God Himself. Her ultimate mission on this earth; to meet Francis and make him into a fine young Adam in the Garden. Is that what all women have always been for? To tame and redeem men? Mold them into what they were meant to be? She is glorious, my precious Lashawna.

I walked beside Jerrick, and the four of us talked. Small things of no great consequence, mostly. Of how and why we survived when nearly everyone else perished. The immunity granted by God or fate or blind luck, certainly not by the visitors. How many times have we wondered? Was it the doing of some extremely rare gene each of us possessed, maybe?

But why we survived is really of no great consequence to me any longer. We simply did. Our world died, but we escaped the ravaging.

I of course am most interested in the health and arrival in three months of our first child, whom I decided months ago to name Jerrick Jr. Lashawna will christen him, unless the him decides to enter this world as a her. And Lashawna will do the christening beneath the statue of Saint Therese, in our church, near our new home.

 

Those we loved lay in the center of the park, not far from the playground (which slides and swings and merry-go-round Munster has faithfully maintained for our children’s enjoyment). Not far, either, from the spot where Lashawna fell. Mother and Father are there, as are Munster’s and Lashawna’s and Jerrick’s parents. After the visitors left, we painfully decided to move their remains to a place dedicated to their memories. A place where their spirits can watch with delight as their grandchildren play. We did not place ghoulish headstones above the graves, rather planted a single Chinese Maple—a lovely tree, we all thought—surrounded by flowers that we all tend, season in and season out.

The four, no, the five of us moved within a week after Lashawna, Jerrick and I met Charles, into a home on Dahlia Street, two blocks south of the church and the rectory. A substantial old home sitting on a corner lot, with five bedrooms, a formal dining room, a TV that merely stares at us dumbly in the corner of the beamed-ceiling living room. Furniture that the deceased owners took great pride in, and which we do as well. A kitchen nearly as large as Father Kenney’s entire house! It is an elegant place, with large windows, and many of them. A fenced backyard, too, more than adequate in size for the children. We are all so very happy there. Between us, we gathered a ton of useful tools and objects of art from the abandoned stores and galleries across town. The lawnmower, for instance. Thinking back, I have to laugh—Munster would not settle for a simple gas-powered push mower. He HAD to have a sit down Mercedes model! Well, they were all free, so I suppose his fancy mower with its padded seat, steering wheel, and futuristic instrument console was okay. He loves those crazy kinds of vehicles—like his old Flame Car that finally died of mechanical hardening of the arteries a few years ago.

Mr. Baxter, Mr. Charles Devonshire Baxter, died 4-1/2 years ago. How we all cried, especially Munster. Well, no more than me. Along with the elderly couple who resided previous to us in our present home, we buried our wonderful Mr. Baxter in the backyard at the rectory. A solemn place; a place of respect and holiness. Fitting, we thought. Without a doubt it was he who saved us in the long term. Although Jerrick had read widely in Braille, although Lashawna mirrored her brother’s love of books and read much herself, it was Charles who brought that definite discipline regarding the acquisition of knowledge into our previously shattered lives. Our lives without the many companies manufacturing food, as unwholesome as it was, power—all those things we once took for granted—was rigorous enough, yet Charles entered our lives and insisted we read, and by reading, think. By thinking, survive and make our lives something meaningful.

As it turned out, Mr. Baxter was no more, nor less, than just another victim. Or survivor—as we were all victims in our survival. How often he corrected us in those early days, reminding us that we could be victims if we chose, and live our lives, however long or short they might be, as either. “Make the conscious choice,” he would say, and so for me, I learned, difficult as it was in those silent hours when thoughts of Momma and Daddy, my old schoolmates, of everyone I’d known and loved crept into my head to haunt me.

When we’d settled into our new home, lessons began. Each morning we gathered in the library—a smallish room, but filled with books gathered from the local schools. He read to us, and we to him, and questions inevitably arose. He answered them as best he could, sometimes as questions thrown back at us. Following our classroom routine, we would work the fields for several hours, tending a wide variety of vegetables. Seed was plentiful, stored by merchants in warehouses. Stack upon stack in sturdy burlap bags. Unspoiled like other perishables, waiting to be taken along with rich topsoil back to our square-block field behind the shopping center. By Fall of that first year we enjoyed a meager but wonderfully delicious harvest.

Munster left, as he’d threatened, or promised, in the Spring of 2016. This after many discussions with Jerrick and Charles, neither of whom agreed with him that is was safe or wise. But Munster won out. The backseat and trunk of his Flame Car were a virtual bomb, filled with can upon can of gasoline, and the condition of the gas was a major question, as it deteriorates after time, like everything else.

He was gone for over a month, traveling up the coast, through Los Angeles, the San Joaquim Valley, and then to San Francisco. He found no one alive anywhere, and so he returned, telling us in words punctuated with cussing about what he’d seen, that maybe we should pack up our things and move to the valley where the soil is rich and there still grow many trees that bear nuts, and even fruit to enrich our diet. But our lives are here, we said, and we would make our soil as rich, if not richer, and plant an orchard ourselves. And so we did.

We grew and prospered, unafraid and thankful for our lives together, and we fell in love in time, secure in our tiny universe. How often Lashawna and I have wondered in that regard about Charles, set apart from us by age and responsibility, alone in a way, and strangely sad at times for reasons he never verbalized. I’m convinced his celibacy contributed to his physical failing in the end. Of that I’m certain. How we all miss him, our father and friend.

                                                    *

I stand with Munster at my side, and Jerrick, Lashawna, and little Charles Jr. We’ve gathered in the bedroom before the gleaming black box, a pound or two of dust on its top. Munster forced the door a moment ago. I think it delighted him to finally be able to put his strong shoulder into it and break it in.

Charles possessed the only key with which to unlock the gift the Crinians had left. Seven notes to be sung in a particular cadence, ten years after the gift was placed in this room. How clever and secure! When he discovered that he was dying one rainy winter’s evening, Charles called me to his room and sat me down in a plain wooden chair beside his at his desk. He closed and locked the door, and then informed me, first of his imminent death, and then after gently drying my tears, he sang the notes to me.

“Memorize them, Amelia. I’ve chosen you to open the gift. Oh don’t be so sad, my precious girl, I’ll be near and watching.”

“Why me?” I remember asking. The box sat in Munster’s room. Jerrick was the wisest and oldest. Lashawna? Why not her?

“Because of all my children, I’ve loved you the most. Don’t ask me why—I am a psychologist, I should know, but for the life of me I don’t. Maybe because…”

In that moment, through all my tears, I knew. Charles had fallen in love with me. He was bound by his trust to nurture me—he might be dying in part because of that heavy burden—and so what final act of love could he give me that would be finer?

As the weeks passed cruelly by, his own deterioration growing by the day, and then the hour, I sang to him in seven notes as I sat at his bedside wiping his feverish brow. My wonderful Charles, who many years earlier I feared so deeply, smiled up at me—at all of us gathered—that moment he left.

They are waiting. Francis Jr. is busy exploring the dusty room, uninterested in this plain, black box. I begin to sing the first notes as everyone else holds their breath in anticipation. I wonder what we’ll find when the door we cannot see opens?

 

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 24.06.2013

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