Closer To Heaven by Patrick Sean Lee (best free ebook reader for android .txt) 📕

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.

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