Little Vivian -Part 2

  Vivian woke up in her own bed that morning from the light of the sun shining on her face, and when she looked out between the curtains of the small window in her bedroom, she could see the warm sun rising in the east, in a perfectly clear and deep blue sky. The newly fallen snow from last night was like a sparkling blanket covering everything, and she felt snug and warm and safe under the thick down comforter that covered her bed. She could smell coffee and bacon coming from the kitchen downstairs.
  Everything was back to normal! Throwing her robe over her pajamas and jumping into her slippers she ran downstairs to see her dad sitting drinking a cup of coffee at the kitchen table. Mom was cooking all sorts of things and had all four of the gas burners running plus the oven was on. It was really warm in the kitchen.
  “Honey please go outside the back door and get the milk for me will you?” said her mom.
  Caught off guard by the unusual request, Vivian couldn’t help but sound a little confused as she paused for a moment and thought, before shaking her head a little and saying, “What?”
  “Oh, and good morning baby.” Her mother said without looking up from what she was cooking on the stove.
  “Good morning,” Vivian managed after a long yawn, and she started to sit down at the kitchen table, beside her brother Andrew, who was unusually quiet this morning, and was sucking on the straw of an orange juice box. He was obviously lost in his own little world as he was watching an old dvd of Tom and Jerry on one of the battery powered video players.          `
  “Honey, Please, The Milk, it’s just outside the door, Just go and get it please, you’ll see.”
  Still waking up, but doing as her mother asked, she went to the back door, opened it and saw that her dad had set up a couple of coolers like the ones they used when they when they went on picnics. He had piled snow up around them so they were completely buried except for the lids.
  Opening the first one, she saw the milk jug, the butter, and pretty much everything else from the refrigerator too. Looking into the other one there was all the stuff from the freezer and the rest of the stuff from the fridge.
  “Honey! Please get back in here and close the door! You’re letting all the heat out!” It was her mom.
  Giving the milk to her mother Vivian asked, “Why is all the stuff outside?”
    “Because the power still isn’t on and we didn’t want all the food to spoil, so daddy built us a temporary fridge outside last night after you went to bed.”
  “Everything is still off?”
  “Yes honey.”
  Vivian felt the blood drain from her face and suddenly she was scared. She ran to get her cell phone and tried to call out. “No Service!” She yelled in disbelief, “How is that possible?”
  Rushing to her laptop in the living room, she opened it and turned it on. While it was booting up she ran back upstairs and grabbed her Mp3, turned it on and stuck a bud in one ear. She was immediately relieved as she heard music coming from it, but then she realized that it was just the hard drive playing, and when she tried to get on the net for the online music service it was the same as the phone, “Unable to locate server.”
  Running back downstairs, through the kitchen, and right past her parents without even a glance, back to her laptop, neither her mother or father said a word as she went about trying to access the net. She was best in her class at computers and tried to troubleshoot the various network access errors that kept coming up.
  After several minutes of pounding on the keyboard she abruptly stood up and yelled at her laptop, “Stupid Machine! Why won’t you connect?”
  Now in a near panic, she went running by her mom again, who had moved from the kitchen into the hallway, to try to intercept her frightened daughter and talk her down.
    Then Little Vivian went to her last resort, the telephone landline, and just knowing she would hear a dial tone when she picked it up, she held the handset to her ear. And as she listened to the silence, she looked at her mother and her eyes began to fill with tears of fear.
  “What’s Happening Mommy?” It sounded like the plea of a dying mouse.
  “It’s the Sky Vivian.”
  Vivian was trying not to cry, and to hold her voice steady as she said, “But the Sky’s fine, I saw it when I woke up.”
  “Out your window to the east and in the back yard it is.” But then her mother led her to the front door, and their dad and Andrew joined them. Despite the cold, Mrs. Matthews opened the double doors wide so they could all stare at the most incredible thing any of them had ever seen.
  From their house on the top of the gentle Holcum Hills, you could see views for 360 degrees all around. To the east, outside of Vivian’s bedroom, and the kitchens breakfast nook windows, it was all rolling plains, sun, newly fallen snow, and blue skies, as far as the eye could see.
  But to the west, outside her front door, you could look down and across a shallow valley fifty miles across, where the city was, all the way up to the foothills, and to the rise of the great wall presented by the Rocky Mountain Front Range.
  The city below them was covered by low-lying bank of thunderclouds, but these clouds weren’t normal, they were filled with colors and flashes of light that looked like the lights in the sky that they had seen last night, and the thunderheads reached upward into the sky until you couldn’t see them anymore.
  It was the biggest thunderstorm any of them had ever seen anywhere. And they were seeing this one from their own porch. It filled the whole sky over the whole valley.
  Underneath the cloud blanket, they could see what looked like giant lightning bolts hitting the ground.
But they were more like some kind of electrical tornadoes than lightning. Because they were huge, like enormous lightning bolts that stayed connected from the ground to the sky for a really long time. Like gigantic snakes of electricity, they randomly twisted their way through the city. She could see trails of fire and smoke coming from where they had been.
    When Vivian and her family at last broke their gaze from the lightning tornadoes, they all looked back to the colors in the clouds, and suddenly it was like they were all in a trance, because no one spoke for a long time.
  Each of them felt that the cloud was trying to show them something or say something to them. The swirling and changing of the clouds and the colors inside them seemed to speak a different language to each of them, one that they each heard speaking only to them, inside their own heads.
  It felt evil, and it felt violent, but it was also seductive, and you couldn’t look away. It was so seductive the despite the feeling of evil, you didn’t want to stop it. But at the same time, it was like being molested in your mind, and you were helpless to stop it.
  It was George who first became aware of something being horribly wrong, as he suddenly realized that what was happening inside his head felt like some kind of rape, and he started yelling, “Don’t look at it! Don’t anybody look at it!” Then grabbing each of them, he pushed his wife and kids back into the living room through the front doors, and slammed them closed hard behind them.
  “Oh my God!” He was yelling, and he was shaking his head as if he was trying to shake out some kind of insect that was inside his skull and that was stinging his mind.
  Vivian was terrified and confused and crying.
  And all eight year old Andrew could keep saying was, “The sky is so pretty! I wanna see!” And as Andrew prepared to throw a temper tantrum over not being allowed to watch the pretty sky, Margaret Matthews and her husband just looked at each other with frightened tear filled eyes, and embraced for dear life.
  And Vivian remembered being pulled into that circle of love and protection along with her little brown-eyed brother, and suddenly she felt safe.
  But at that moment, Little Vivian remembered something vague from her dream last night, and she had an awful feeling that it would be many, many, years before she would ever feel that safe and loved and protected again, and that it was the last time that she would ever be able to feel that way with the only family she had ever known.
  Still clinging to each other, they all made their way back to the kitchen, and without really saying a word their mother made them all sit down at the table. She was acting as though nothing had happened just now, as she freshened her husbands’ coffee from the pot on the stove, and lit a cigarette.
    Margaret had been cooking pancakes, and they were still sitting on warm plate on top of the oven, covered with a light towel, and right next to them was a hot plate of thin sliced perfectly brown and crisp bacon.
  Acting on some kind of instinct, Margaret Matthews went about serving them all breakfast, and Vivian noticed that everything was still steaming and hot.
  Vivian had another misty vision from her dream that made her pause in her own thoughts and take a long moment to look at her mother, as Margaret poured milk for Her and Andrew and her Husband, as if nothing was amiss.
  And right then, at that moment, to Vivian, her mom seemed like the strongest person in the world. Someone who both could and would do anything to protect her.
  But she couldn’t get the Boy from the dream last night out of her head. She remembered the Boy’s Cat, and what the boy had said, and she remembered the feeling that she had when she heard the Dream Cat purring, and then hearing the voice of the Boy, and even though she didn’t really remember just exactly what he had said, suddenly everything felt safe, and perfect, and normal.
  In the years that would follow, all that little Vivian would remember of that last breakfast that morning with her Mom and Dad and Andrew, in their kitchen, was the perfect and total sensation of love and safety and peace that had overcame her at that moment.
  Then, at the smell of bacon on her plate in the real world, Vivian suddenly found herself thinking only of how hungry she was. So she began to fix her pancakes the way she liked them best, in a tall stack, with butter in between each one, and on the top, and a little icing sugar, and of course lots of warm syrup over the whole thing. And she liked to put her three slices of crisp thin bacon on the same plate, so it could get some of the melting butter and syrup on it.
  Her dad was fixing Andrew’s, plate but her little brother never really seemed to care how. He liked breakfast no matter what it was. There was more crisp bacon on the side, and the milk was ice cold, and Vivian couldn’t remember pancakes ever having tasted better.


***

  After breakfast, everyone just tried to act as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Vivian helped her mother do dishes, but there was no water pressure so they used some water from snow that her mother had melted in a large pot on the stove.
  Her dad had gone to the window and was looking across the street at his friend Dan, who was working with the younger of his two sons packing stuff into their big pickup with the topper on the back.
  Vivian moved beside her dad to watch them too.
  They had their snowmobile trailer hooked up, and two of the three machines they owned had already been loaded up.
  Suddenly a very noisy hot rodded snowmobile came screaming around the corner and up the street and came to a sliding stop in Dan’s front yard.
  Before the machine had even stopped moving, Dan’s older son had jumped off of it, and running as fast as he could to his father, the two grabbed each other and hugged really hard.
  The boy seemed to be limping, and it looked like one of his pant legs was wet with blood, and his father led him into their house through the open garage door.
  After a few minutes, Dan and his older son came out of the house. The older boy was definitely limping, but went to help his younger brother finish their packing job, as Dan started walking across the street toward the Matthews house.
  George said to no one in particular, “Oh my God.”
And then to his family, “All of you stay here while I see what this is all about.”
  By the time Dan reached his front door, George Matthews was there to open it before Dan even knocked. “Come in Dan please come in,” Vivian heard her dad say as Dan entered the living room and her dad closed the door behind them. She heard him say, “Have a seat Dan,” and then, “Honey, bring some hot coffee please.”
  “Talk to me buddy.” George Matthews asked his friend. “What the hell is going on around here since last night?”
  “I don’t know George. Like you know, there’s no power and communications are all down. Everything. Even the CB sets. All dead.”
  In a moment, Vivian’s mom was right there, and handed Dan a large mug of steaming black coffee without even asking him how he liked it. As she went back to the kitchen, Dan took a long sip of the hot drink and went on.
    “So this morning, about an hour ago, I sent my older boy Jesse to head toward town and see if he could find out anything. George, he just came racing his ass back here with a bullet graze in his leg!”
  “What!”
  “Yeah! When he pulled into the gas station, there were a bunch of guys on a flatbed there. They were using hand pumps to drain the gas tanks.”
  George was absolutely silent.
  “When Jesse showed up, they pointed guns at him and tried to take his machine. He did the smart thing and got the hell out of there. He says that as he passed the open front doors of the store he saw a bunch of people lying on the floor, and he said he was pretty sure they were all dead because they were all soaked in blood.”
  “While he was trying to get away from them and get back here, he said they were shooting at him. One of the bullets grazed his leg! They were shooting at my boy!
  He says he didn’t see any signs of anyone having any power at all.”
  The two just sat in silence for a moment as Dan drank more of his still steaming coffee.
  “George, it’s started.”
  “What has started Dan?”
  “The End of the world George.”
  “Oh Come on!” And suddenly Mr. Matthews was on his feet.
  “George think about it man! You were watching TV last night just like me and you saw the same thing I did!”
  “And what about the damn sky! Have you noticed what starts to happen to you after you stare at the lights for more than a minute?”
  “Yeah I have. What is your point Dan?”
  “My point is that those damn fool politicians or scientists or terrorists or god damn aliens for all I know screwed up the sky and all the power and who knows what else!”
  “Dan, just relax man. The power will be back on soon and there will be explanations for everything I’m sure.”
  Putting down his coffee Dan took a deep breath and then said in a tone of voice that frightened Vivian,
“George, Listen to me. The power isn’t coming back on. Definitely not anytime soon and maybe never!”
  “The boys and I are getting the hell out of here. The city won’t be safe anymore.”
  “What?”
  “George!” And now it was Dan who was standing and obviously trying not to shout.
    “Think Man! No Power! That means no gas! No heat! No re-supply! No food after today!” Then Dan paused for a moment and George could see him visibly trying to calm himself, and after a moment, Dan continued. “George, the city will become un-survivable later today and then the crazies will be on their way out here. I don’t want to wait for them. Come with us. The more of us there are, the better chance we have.”
  “Where do you think you’re going to go?”
  “You know us George, since Margie died we camp and hunt all the time. You have even made fun of me for it. What did you call me at that barbecue last summer, a ‘whacko survivalist’?”
    “I was just trying to be funny at the time.”
    “Well I don’t see anything funny about what’s happening now. That’s why we have the truck and the snow machines, we can get far enough away, live off the land, and we know how to do it, until things settle down and we can figure out what to do. But first, we have to get safe, and this place isn’t safe right now. Come on and get your stuff. I’ll help you.”
  Georges mind was reeling, but he stayed calm.
  “Dan, I appreciate the offer but I think we’re ok. I think we’re just gonna wait here.”
  “Wait for what? To get killed by the same lunatics that just shot my son?” Dan was yelling now. “Buddy I don’t really know you, but I like you. You’ve been a good neighbor but I’m not spending any more time trying to talk sense with you. Good Luck. We’ll be here for a few more minutes if you change your mind.”
  And Dan Ellis walked out of George Matthews’ living room, went back across the street to his own house, and started yelling at his boys, telling them to hustle up.   
  George just watched them as they locked up their house, mounted up the third snow machine and without stopping even to wave goodbye; they piled into their truck and took off down the snow-covered road to disappear around the corner.

***

  George looked back at his wife, and Vivian, who had been listening and was looking very afraid. Mrs. Matthews said to her husband, “Maybe we should have gone with them honey.”
  “Nonsense,” He replied. “I always said the guy was a bit off, and now this proves it.”
  “But Honey he said they shot his son! That there were dead people at the gas station!”
  “I know, and I’m sure the police know about it.”
  Then thinking to himself he said to his wife, “Why don’t we see if we can make it to your sisters across the river. Whenever the power goes out here, they always still have it over there. There’s a full tank of gas in the jeep and we could be there in a couple of hours.” Then hugging his wife “Does that sound like a plan?”
  “Yes.” She said in a relieved voice. And she started to gather up the kids’ stuff for the trip. “Vivian run upstairs and pack yourself a bag. Don’t forget underwear and all that.” And her daughter raced up the stairs. “Clean stuff only please!” Mrs. Matthews yelled after her.
  Meanwhile Mr. Matthews had a flight bag and was stuffing it with electronics. The cell phones, The PDA’S, Vivian’s and his own laptops, the video players and all the extra ammunition he could find for the 44.
  “Honey, I’m going out to start the car, I’ll be right back,” and leaving the front door open, he went outside.

***

  Mrs. Matthews was stuffing grocery bags with whatever she could find when she suddenly heard at least a half dozen gunshots come from the front yard.
  Dropping everything, she ran to the door to see a young man with a rifle of some kind standing over the body of her dead husband.
  George had been shot in the face and chest and there were parts of his skull still sliding down the side of the jeep and landing in the bloody snow.
  The young man pointed the gun at her and said in a cold voice, “Don’t you move.” and he began to approach her.
    Stepping into the front room of the house, he pushed her with the barrel of the gun to the couch and made her sit down. Just then, two other men entered the living room. They both had Guns. All three of them were staring at Mrs. Mathews who knew she was about to be raped.
  Suddenly Vivian came running down the stairs and froze when she saw the men, the guns, and her mother.
One of the men actually gasped when he saw the little girl and said to his buddies, “Oh God. Look how pretty. This one is all mine.”
  Neither of the other two seemed to care. Vivian must have been too young for them.
  Vivian was too scared to speak or even move as the man went to her, grabbed her arm, and dragged her into the kitchen.
  Mrs. Mathews started screaming at the man taking her daughter but before she could say three words, one of the intruders slugged her across the jaw with the butt of his rifle. She collapsed onto the floor absolutely senseless.
  From the kitchen, she could hear Vivian start screaming.
  She lost sight of the third man, as the man who had struck her knelt down beside her and put down his rifle.
  He looked at her and before she closed her eyes, she could see him sweating in the cold as she watched him lick his lips. She felt his hand touch her breast and then abruptly take it away as she heard an unfamiliar twanging sound unlike anything she had ever heard before.
  She opened her eyes to see a blood and flesh covered coil of razor wire surrounding a three-sided arrowhead protruding about six inches from the man’s face.
  The Arrow had struck him in the back of the head and smashed its way through his skull to exit from right between his eyes. He didn’t make a sound but just stayed kneeling and trembling all over.
  She saw Dan’s older son standing in the doorway and watched in disbelief as without making a sound he laid down his bow, and approaching the man from behind, pulled out a huge hunting knife. With the cold hatred of someone killing something evil, the young man that she had thought of as a boy until now, grabbed the mans forehead with one hand and with the knife in the other, cut the mans throat from ear to ear, nearly decapitating him.
  Still dazed by the rifle butt to the jaw, she realized that she could no longer hear Vivian screaming and jumped up as best she could, nearly falling before Jesse could grab her arm to help her stand.
  When she came to the doorway of the kitchen she leaned against the jamb and almost fainted at what she saw.
  Vivian was sitting in a kitchen chair, quietly sobbing, with her shoulders heaving and tears streaming down her face. She kept sniffling and sucking air in through her nose, and swallowing to clear her throat. Her eyes made her seem like she was a rabbit in the road looking into the headlights of a car that was about to kill her, as she stared around the room from one nightmare to the other.
  There was blood everywhere in the kitchen.
  She saw their neighbor, Dan, in one hand, holding by its black hair, the severed head of the monster that had been ready to rape the child.
  In the other hand, he had what looked like a short machete.
  The body lay on the white linoleum in a pool of blood that covered the entire kitchen floor like a red oil slick.
  Dan threw the head down and gave it a kick toward the back door with his heavy camouflaged hunting boot without saying a word.
  Looking at each other the father and son said together, “Michael!” And they ran outside with weapons at the ready.
  When they got to the porch there was Dan’s youngest son. Barely fourteen and holding a heavy looking compound hunting bow with an arrow knocked, holding at half draw and ready to fire. Again.
  In the middle of the street lying face down in the snow lay a body with two closely grouped arrows sticking out of its back.
  Judging by the lack of movement and the amount of blood in the snow and the placement of the group, right between the shoulder blades, they all figured the guy for dead.
 
  Michael was a competition archer and had won many junior tournaments. In full camouflage, he could sometimes get close enough to a deer to kill it by hand if he wanted. And with a compound bow in hand, he was the king of the forest whenever he went to hunt.
  He seemed born for it.
  Dan began to wonder, was he the only one who realized what had just happened to the world?
  It was no longer the world they had known.
  All that was gone.
  No one here seemed to understand that the way he did, that within a weeks’ time, society as they all had known it would be replaced by a barbaric, violent struggle for survival of the fittest.
  Once the available food stores were depleted, then all hell would break loose. More than any other thing, food would become the most valuable commodity on the planet. And if you weren’t able to obtain it, you would die. And if you did have it, there would inevitably be somebody at your door who was ready to kill you to take it.
  Then suddenly, for a moment, this was all absolutely beyond Dan’s ability grasp.
  Things were happening too fast. He was ready to do whatever he had to. He was going to stay alive and protect his sons, no matter what, but for a moment though, he couldn’t really recognize any of them. This wasn’t them. They weren’t capable of being a part of what had just happened.
  But then he looked at the body in the street, and he looked at what was left of his neighbor George, laying dead in the snow, with parts of his skull now frozen, splattered against the side of the jeep.
  Turning to look into the living room he saw the body with the arrow through its skull, still kneeling against the couch, the head twisted at an odd angle.
  Then he remembered himself holding a head by its black hair in one hand, that he had just severed with two strokes of a machete blade from his other, and then kicking it across a lake of blood.
  He just closed his eyes for a moment and tried to block the sights from his mind, but he already knew that would never happen. In the years to come, He would try to kill it all away, and forget, but he knew he would always remember everything.

***

  There was an eerie silence on that cold and snowy Sunday morning in the front yard of George W. and Margaret Matthews.
  The neighborhood was dead quiet. So quiet you could actually hear the snow falling on the ground. It seemed like no one in the universe but the few here were aware at all of the events of the past ten minutes.
  Dan Ellis became aware of everyone standing in the deafening silence just looking at him. There were his two sons, Jesse and Michael, and what was left of the Matthews Family, Margaret, Vivian, and Andrew.
  Looking Margaret Matthews in the eyes he said flatly, “You can’t stay here.”
  She paused as she stared between her husband’s body and her kids and then without looking back at Dan, said in a whisper, “I know.”
  Then, feeling something swell in his heart, Dan Ellis said, “Come with us. We all have to stay alive. Boys! Get inside and take anything you think we can use.”
  The two young men took off into the house; they knew what their father had meant. Dan took Margaret by the elbow and helped her to turn away from her husband and the two gathered the shocked and silent children into the house.
  “Margaret, we need some clothes for the kids. Warm stuff. Mostly jackets and boots, hats, gloves. Do you guys have any camping stuff, sleeping bags, tents, anything like that?”
  “No Dan, you know we never camped or anything.”
  “Ok, Blankets then, I’ll grab that stuff and you take care of the kids.”
  And they all ran up the stairs to the bedrooms.
  Jesse was just coming back from the garage with an armload of stuff, a lantern, and a small toolbox, a couple of saws, a shovel. He passed by the open back door to the kitchen and yelled at his brother who was gathering cans of food, “Hurry up, I’m going to the truck!”
  Michael had two large garbage bags that he had tripled up so he could stuff them with all the canned food that was in the kitchen pantry. He knew this was all good stuff to have and he was determined to take all of it if he could.
  He was thinking so fast about everything that he wasn’t really afraid. He just had an overwhelming sense of urgency and the need to get out of there and get to the hills. 
  He had killed somebody. And after what he had seen happen to George Matthews in the front yard, he had been glad to do it.
  It still surprised him how easy it had been.

***

  Suddenly there was a commotion back in the living room. He heard his dad and Mrs. Mathews shouting at the same time and a third voice that he didn’t recognize, yelling for everyone to just freeze where they were, and tell him what was going on.
  Michael went quiet and pressed his body to the wall so he could look into the living room without being seen.
  He saw his brother Jesse, standing in the front door with a man behind him. His hands were raised, and the man standing behind his older brother had a grip on the back of Jesses’ jacket with one hand, and was holding a .45 in the other.
  He wasn’t really pointing it at anyone in particular but he did keep waving it around the back of his brother’s head.
  Michael didn’t wait to analyze further, and quietly stepping over to the table where he had laid his bow, he picked it up and moved back to a position by the wall.
  Suddenly he realized what he was doing. He was about to make a kill. Just like on a hunt.
  It was like stalking a deer, you had to get into just the right spot to be able to draw, aim, and fire, all in a single, continuous and silent motion, before the lightning fast reflexes of the deer beat you in the reaction time department, and it disappeared into the forest, leaving you feeling clumsy, noisy, and stupid.
  But this was no deer. It was a man holding a gun to his older brother’s head, and he realized that this was nothing like what he had done outside in the street just a few minutes ago. That had been so simple, a stupid and evil man running away from him in the wide openness of the snowy street, so the shots had been so easy, and strangely satisfying, and he could have fired once and gotten the job done, because the man was dead before he could even fall face first into the snow. But out of hatred that stemmed from what he had seen happen at this house, he fired again before the man could even hit the ground. And doing it had made him feel happy, but he wasn’t sure if he liked the feeling.
  But this was completely different. He was going to kill a man that he thought might kill his family. And he wasn’t going to allow that to happen. He knew he could put a stop to it, and he was determined to do just that but if he missed his opportunity and screwed up this kill, then the man might kill Jesse and then start shooting everyone else.
  He was going to act before that could take place.
  So he found himself gradually moving into just the right place in the room, and he silently drew a spring-loaded spiral tip arrow, knocked it, and went to half draw.
  He closed his eyes to focus his mind, and take a few long slow silent breaths, as he envisioned the move in his mind, and prepared his body to do it, without a second thought, and with no remorse. Because this morning he had learned that it wasn’t his skills, that had enabled him to kill a man, but rather, that it really was as he had been told, it was the hard heart that killed.   
  Until this morning, he never really understood that, but at this moment, his heart was made of stone.
  He would take two steps forward, while turning to the right, as he drew the arrow all the way to the tip.
  That would bring him into the perfect position and the perfect stance, in the clear, for a perfect open shot from the side of his prey.
  He would sight as he drew and turned, and just like killing a deer, as soon as the sight was there, you fired with no hesitation.
  His concentration was so intense that it was almost like being in some sort of surreal dream state.
  He only dimly heard Mrs. Matthews yelling something about everything being ok, and let the boy go, and put down the gun.
  His dad was yelling something about don’t hurt my son. The two children were crying.
  And the man was screaming for everyone to shut up.

    But Michael shut out all of that chaos, because it all seemed like a part of the dream that would only defocus his concentration on the move, and the shot, that in this kill, he was going to make perfectly.
  The decision to do this was already made in his mind.
  He closed his eyes and took in a long slow breath and when it had reached its peak, he held it for a second. Then opening his eyes, he felt a calm spirit suddenly fill his chest and mind that instead of distracting or startling him, or causing any second thoughts, actually triggered the move, and in Michaels accelerated mind, it seemed like it all was happening in slow motion.
  In a fraction of a second that seemed like a dozen, Michael took his planned steps and turned, and suddenly found himself in full eye contact with the man who was ready to kill his brother with a gun pointed at the back of Jesse’s head.
  The arrow was at full draw, and the sight seemed to supernaturally find the Kill Spot, and even though it was only inches from his brothers own, he fired.
  The shot felt perfect, like the most natural thing he had ever done.
  His senses were so accelerated, that he swore he could see the slim folded arrowhead spiral into the man’s open mouth without so much as touching a lip or chipping a tooth. He could imagine it spiraling into the flesh at the back of the throat, springing open to its full lethality, slicing through the brain stem in that perfect corkscrew cut that this tip did best, and then smashing its way through the spinal cord.
  It worked just like they had advertised that it would. The man’s body went instantly limp and collapsed in a heap on the floor.
  Jesse slipped out of the man’s grasp and whirling around pulled his own gun, an eight shot .357 short barrel revolver and shot the man twice before seeing the arrow and realizing that the guy had already been dead for at least a second.
  The gunfire started the children to screaming, and as Margaret Matthews knelt and hugged her two kids, she let herself cry for the first time that morning.
  Dan Ellis stood on the stairs and stared at his two boys. And suddenly it seemed to him as though they were now different boys that he didn’t know. No, these were not his boys anymore, at least not the ones that he used to think he knew, but rather, these were young men. The faces that they now wore, and their expressions, spoke about how boyhood had been left behind by the act of killing a fellow man, and he saw that a new consciousness of existence that had been born in each of them.
  Mrs. Matthews had started yelling, “Are you people crazy! That was Danny! From next door! What the hell is wrong with you people? He would have helped us. He probably thought he was!”
  Dan Ellis didn’t bother to answer, but ran down the stairs and grabbed his older son, holding him as if he had almost lost him.
  Which he knew he almost had.
  Then after making sure Jesse was ok and hugging him again, they both turned to look at Michael, who had already, and now seemingly instinctively, knocked another arrow and was standing there at half draw, calmly waiting for anything.
  His dad saw a wisdom and maturity, and calm resolve and control in the young face, that didn’t belong there for another forty years. And he could actually feel the boys hard heart in his own, it was a kind of cold determination that he wasn’t sure he understood, or liked, so he approached his son slowly, and said, “Michael? You OK dude?”
  “Yeah.” Came the chilling reply.
  “You’ve done real good this morning.”
  And when Michael didn’t say anything his dad just repeated, “Yeah Son, you’ve done real good.”
Slowly approaching the boy, Dan helped Michael release the bow, and then hugged his young son for the first time in a long while.
  Michael was fourteen and didn’t like hugs, but now he grabbed his dad, and although he didn’t cry, he held on harder than he ever had in his life, as his dad silently shed tears for both of them.
  Jesse opened the cylinder of the warm gun, pulled the two spent cartridges, and reloaded the chambers.
  Police issue, high power, sabot tip rounds. Illegal for civilian use. At least they used to be. His dad had connections with the police, or at least he used to.
  Jesse was the smart ass of the family and Michael was always so serious about everything, and dad, well he was just dad.
  Looking at the two still hugging, he decided to break the tension and get everyone moving again, so he said, “Hey, Guys! Get a room already!”
  And Michael almost made him laugh as he let go of his dad, and wiping his eyes, looked a little embarrassed.
    But something inside Jesse stopped his laugh.
  There were five dead bodies here, and blood everywhere.
  It was like a scene from some horror movie, but it was really happening.
  They had to get away from this place. Now. Everyone seemed to realize that together, because with Michael as security guard, the others had everyone loaded up in less than three minutes.
  Dan started the engine of the truck as Jesse helped his brother into the back of the camper shell, and then went around the truck and got in the passenger side, sitting right beside his dad.

***

Saving Hazel
  But as they left the drive and started down the road, suddenly Andrew started yelling, “Wait! Wait! Hazel! I have to save Hazel!”
  And before anyone could stop him, he jumped out of the back of the moving truck and began running back toward the house. Vivian was as shocked as everyone else, but at hearing her brother shouting the name “Hazel”, her dream from last night came exploding back into her memory, and without a word, she also jumped out of the back of the truck and ran after her little brother, back towards the house.
  Suddenly, everyone left in the truck all began shouting after the two running kids.
  Dan was yelling the loudest of all of them as he ordered everyone to stay right where they were. He threw the truck into reverse gear, and spinning all four tires in the snow, he backed up into the Matthews front yard, running over the bushes and shrubs, and then came to a skidding stop, with the back of the truck knocking down the railing on the front porch. Then everyone jumped out of the truck to see what had gotten into Andrew and Vivian.

***

  When Vivian stepped back into the living room of her house after chasing her brother, she stopped instantly, because Andrew was standing right there, in the middle of the living room.
  The sight in the room was horrifying, because there were two dead bodies there. The one man still kneeling against the couch with Jesse’s arrow through the back of his head, which if Vivian had seen in a cartoon or something might have seemed funny, but there wasn’t anything funny about it. Vivian had seen more real life blood, and death this morning, then she had ever imagined that she would see in her whole life, and she was still in shock over it all.
  Andrew was standing beside the body of their next door neighbor, Danny, who was lying face down on the floor with his blood still soaking into the dark colored carpet, with Michaels arrow going through the man’s open mouth, and protruding from the back of his neck.

  And amidst the horrific scene, was the oddest thing.   
  Sitting calmly on the back of Danny, the man from next door who thought he was just trying to help, but instead had died by Michaels arrow, was a beautiful, small, gray, orange, and brown, cat.
  The little feline was just calmly sitting on the dead mans back, with its green eyes looking back and forth between the children.
  Andrew looked at his sister and said flatly, “Vivian, this is Hazel.”
  And without even thinking, Vivian replied, “I know Andrew.” And then, “You were at the beach with me last night weren’t you?”
    Andrew’s eyes brightened as he said, “Yes! We have to save her Vivian. Thomas told us we had to!” Then Andrew picked up the cat and held it close to him, and his eyes suddenly filled with tears, as the little cat began to purr softly.
  Just then, everyone else came bursting into the room, and everyone was shouting something different, but when they saw Andrew holding the cat, everyone fell silent.
  Dan was the last person to enter, and after only a second, he yelled, “What in the hell is going on here? We have got to get going. Now!”
  And Margaret Matthews yelled, “Andrew! What are you doing?” And she tried to grab Andrew’s arm and pull the cat away from him, as Andrew shouted back, “No! This is Hazel! And I have to save her! Thomas said to!”
  “No, you are not taking a cat with us! Let go of it and let’s go Andrew!”
  But Andrew was able to pull away from her and kept his grip on Hazel, who was now clinging to Andrew and didn’t seem to be afraid in the least bit at all the commotion.
  Dan Ellis started saying “This is ridiculous,” as he began to move toward Andrew, who was now in a position to run down the hallway and out the back door, and it looked like he was planning to do just that as he repeated, “No! I am going to save hazel! Thomas said I had to!”
  By now Dan and Margaret were both yelling at Andrew “Who the hell is Thomas?” “What are you talking about?” “Put down the cat!” and Vivian could sense that Andrew was on the verge of running away, and that chaos was about to erupt, so in her loudest voice she shouted “No! Everybody stop! Mom! We have to take Hazel! Thomas told us that we had to.”
  And before anyone could say another word, it was Vivian who took command of the situation by yelling, “Everyone just shut up! And let’s get away from here! Hazel is coming with us! She has to. Thomas said!” and then grabbing her younger brother by the arm, “Come on Andrew, Let’s GO!”
  Dan and Margaret just looked at each other a moment, and Dans two boys looked at their father, who with a slight grin, surprised by the sudden authority that little Vivian had just exerted upon them all, said, “Fine then, let’s go.” So everyone got back in the truck and in seconds they were all leaving the horrible scene of carnage and blood, and the body of George Matthews, behind them.
  And no one looked back as the six of them were now driving down the snowy road, heading for the mountains. Seven of them, if you counted Hazel the cat, who was with them.
  Just like Thomas had said.