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“…Also according to our study, done with cooperation from both the US Department of Veterans Affairs, and the FBI, more action urgently needs to be taken by both the military and Congress to prevent the radicalization of current and former military service members, particularly those just returning from, or heavily traumatized by, combat. Disturbingly, neither the military’s top brass, the current President, nor Congress, seem to be taking this issue seriously…”
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—Another excerpt of Saber Parish Sentinel reporter Chadwick Hillman, during a March 25, 2034, episode of his investigative podcast Investigation 411, discussing a 2034 study titled Study On Terrorist Radicalization of US Military Veterans, Subsequent Mobilizations of Said Veterans Against Democracy, and Possible Countermeasures—Both Deployed and Un-deployed. The study in question was released by Patriot's Guard a military veteran’s charity, to determine what—if anything—the US Government was doing to prevent the radicalization of active and retired US Military personnel, including combat veterans, by domestic terror groups.
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Lisa was so very tired, to such an extent that her eyelids felt physically heavy, and it took conscious effort to prevent them from sliding shut over her blue eyes. But a job was a job—whether it was late at night or not was beside the point. That said, the fatigue had the nineteen-year-old very much worried about having to drive the following day. Especially having to do so safely.
Lisa’s black hair, typically held up in a ponytail, was under a hairnet, and she made a point of keeping it that way. Her boss was exact about such standards. Not that Lisa blamed her boss for being so exact about those standards. Either way, Lisa was wearing her work uniform, composed of a white polo shirt—which contrasted with Lisa’s black skin, although it wasn’t like Lisa minded—and black pants, along with black shoes. The shoes had specialized, nonslip soles, designed to make slips and falls less likely—although not impossible.
The business known as Dockside Bakery took up the first floor of the building, with tables and chairs for customers to sit at, and a counter with a cash register, next to a glass display housing various pastries. There were two massive, plate glass windows at the front of the shop, and a little bell mounted at the top of the door.
You have to drive tomorrow. There’s no choice for you, just like there’s no choice for your father in whether or not he got cancer, Lisa silently told herself, your father needs that surgery to not die! And you will get him there. It is what it is.
Kathrine—the owner of Dockside Bakery, where Lisa was employed, and where she was currently standing at the cash register—walked into the room. Katherine was also a tall, African-American woman, with waist-length black hair, in jeans and a green crewneck shirt. Upon seeing Lisa, Kathrine’s green eyes lit up with concern, worry drenching Kathrine’s voice as Kathrine said, “Lisa, don’t you have to take your father to his cancer surgery tomorrow?”
Lisa nodded, saying, “Yes, ma’am. But I’m out of vacation and sick days, because of how much I’ve been—.”
“Taking care of him. I know. Look, let me get changed into work clothes, and then take tonight and the rest of the month off. We’ll call it paid sick leave. Cancer cost my father his life. I see no reason why it should take yours,” Kathrine said.
Stunned, Lisa stammered, “I, I—uh, I…thank you, ma’am.”
“You’re welcome. Now I'll get changed into working clothes, and then you’ll get yourself home. I don’t want you to fall asleep behind the steering wheel. I’ll cover your shift. Besides, it’s almost midnight. We’ll have…what? One customer? Two, maybe three at most, before dawn,” Katherine told Lisa.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Lisa said, her face feeling wet. Touching two fingers two her left cheek, Lisa realized that she was crying tears of joy and relief, although she did not know when this had started. The crying, that is.
Lisa left the counter, telling Katherine, “Ma’am, please wish your daughter happy birthday for me when tomorrow comes around.”
Then the little bell mounted to the door rang, and Lisa saw what looked like a bearded man, reeking of chemicals, and muttering incoherently under his breath, enter the bakery. This stranger was wearing a black, hoodie-style sweatshirt, with the hood up, cloaking the upper part of his face in shadows. His jeans were old and ragged, with both knees torn, and he had holes in his shoes where his grey, wool socks showed through the material of the man's footwear. Judging by the stranger’s figure, he was a man, and likely a homeless man at that—if his clothes were any indication.
A confused look came over Kathrine’s face, as she asked, “Sir, how may I help you? Are you okay? Have you been hurt? Are you ill?”
Abruptly the man collapsed to his knees clutching his head. Lisa found herself thankful that the interior of the building was soundproofed, so that little Lela wouldn’t be woken by the noise. After all, she lived with Kathrine in an apartment above the bakery.
“Get out of my head,” the man abruptly screamed, “I don’t want to hurt anyone! Why do you want me to hurt people? Damn it, just get out of my head!”
Just as abruptly as he had begun screaming, the man began sobbing, “I thought the exorcism would heal me, and get these damned voices out of my head!”
With those sobbed words, the man screamed again, this time yelling, “Damn it, I don’t want to kill! I don’t want to kill them for you!”
Kathrine turned to Lisa, saying, “Lisa, call an ambulance for him, please. I thi—.”
“No,” the man screamed, interrupting Kathrine, paranoia suddenly filling his eyes, “They’d kill me! Even these damned creatures in my head know that!”
Pulling a revolver from his waistband, the man told the two women, “Put your cellphones on the table, ma’am. Both of you. And give me all the money in the register. I need it. Only the fix that Jerry sells me…only whatever’s in those syringes can drown out the voices of these fucking things in my head! Please, I can’t hold them back much longer!”
The man held the pistol in his right hand while tossing a green pillowcase to the ground at Kathrine’s feet.
“Lisa, do as he says,” Kathrine calmly instructed Lisa.
Numb with terror, Lisa obeyed, putting her cell phone down on the counter. It was a flip phone she had downgraded to when she sold her old smartphone for a few hundred dollars—among other things—hoping, in vain, that the chemotherapy she was paying for with the proceeds would cure her father’s esophageal cancer.
Doing the same with her own smartphone, Kathrine emptied the register into the pillowcase—as she pleaded with the stranger, “Please, sir, I’ll get you the money, just let Lisa leave! She has to drive her father to cancer surgery in the morning! He will die if he doesn’t make it to that surgery! Even a single day's delay could kill him!”
Lisa wanted desperately to take Lela from her bedroom upstairs, and get both herself and Lela to safety, but realized that Kathrine had probably omitted any mention of the nine-year-old to protect her.
If this man is hearing voices telling him to kill, Lisa thought,then it’s probably best we omit any mention of Lela. We cannot endanger that child.
“Just give me the money, in the pillow ca—no, I will not kill these people,” the stranger said, tilting his head down, and slightly to the left, as he seemed to interrupt himself mid-sentence, with the latter portion of what he said most likely being directed at the creatureshe’d mentioned—or, Lisa would assume, voices he thought he was hearing in his head.
As Kathrine emptied the register’s contents into the pillowcase, the stranger then begged Kathrine, “Please, ma’am, hurry up! I can’t resist these creatures much longer!”
Then the man pulled out a box cutter in his free hand, and—pressing the switch up with his thumb—extended the cutter’s razor blade, as he yelled, “No! If they die, we all die!”
Lifting the blade of the box cutter to his own throat as tears slid down his cheeks, leaving streaks of slightly less soiled skin snaking down from his eyes, the man pleaded, “Please, don’t kill them. Please, don’t make me kill them. I don’t want them to die!”
Slowly approaching the man, Kathrine held out the pillowcase, now laden with money, saying, “Here’s the money, sir. Go get your fix.”
Much to Lisa’s surprise, Kathrine’s voice was filled, not with fear, or tension, nor was it filled with anger, or hate. Rather, it was filled with concern, and empathy, for a man who was actively robbing them, and endangering their lives. Lisa had known Kathrine to be compassionate, but Lisa had vastly underestimated the vast reserves of Kathrine’s compassion for others.
“Thank you, ma’am,” the stranger said, “Both of you.”
With those words, the man retracted the blade of the box cutter, and slipped it back into his pocket, before taking the pillowcase. Getting up, the stranger staggered away, walking backward, his face still towards them, suddenly seeming much less steady on his feet.
Then, just two yards from the door, the man sunk to his knees again, yelling, “No! Not now! They’ve compiled! Don’t hurt them!”
The man put the gun to his own head, sobbing as he choked out the words, “No! I won’t let you use me to kill them, damn it! Get out of my damn head!”
The man’s thumb cocked back the revolver’s hammer, as he sobbed, “I won’t let you hurt them!”
Then suddenly, his face went cold, blank, and emotionless. For a brief moment which seemed to stretch into an agonizing infinity, there was an almost sacred silence, that no one dared disturb. When the man spoke next, his voice, tone, and attitude were different, as though he had swapped bodies with someone else. Then he grinned, a knowing, relieved grin, and Lisa thought, for a brief moment, that maybe this tormented stranger had beaten back the voices in his head. Maybe they were finally safe.
His voice altered somehow, this strange, tormented man—now steady on his feet—gleefully whispered, “Finally, I’m free again.”
In an instant, he spun around, stretched his arm out, revolver in hand, and opened fire, with a thunderous cracking sound. The first bullet struck Kathrine in the head, sending her crashing down amid a mist of blood splatter—mixed with grey matter and bone fragments—from her cranium. Lisa tried to get behind the counter, to find some sort of cover, only to feel a burning, stabbing pain in her stomach, as another shot rang out, before she collapsed down, no longer able to feel her legs. The floor rushed up to greet her, but she never felt its cold embrace. Lisa never heard the fifth gunshot.
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Alex lay in bed, reading an ebook on his tablet, waiting for his mother to fall asleep. She normally went to bed around nine at night, and would sleep like a log—or, in other words, she slept deeply, which meant she was both unlikely and difficult to wake up at that point. The point at which Alex would find Jessica. Or leave the apartment, and start working to that end, anyway.
Alex’s room within his mother’s apartment was a blue-walled affair, with a wooden desk, a chair, two bookshelves lined with books, and Alex’s bed. It was a twin-sized bed frame, with a metal rectangle forming a ring around the wooden supports that held up the mattress, and which was itself elevated from the wooden floor by a wooden end piece at both the head and foot of the bed. All the furniture in Alex's room was wooden, bar only the swivel-mounted office chair. He liked wooden furniture, although even Alex himself didn’t quite know why.
The ebook Alex was currently reading was an electronic copy of the 2035 edition of the training manual for Wilderness First Responders, a type of civilian wilderness medic. Alex had been trained as one the previous summer, and had—much to the astonishment of the two instructors—actually managed to get the certification. The instructors had outright told Alex at the start of the course not to be mad at himself if he failed because it was a college-level course. Alex had been the only teenager in the class, having just finished his freshman year of high school. Before attending the course, Alex had claimed to Francine that he’d wanted to do it because he’d been interested in the possibility of going into medicine as a career field, causing his mother an extreme amount of joy, although the actual reason was that Alex thought it might be useful to him as Pyre. As such, Alex studied the training manual in his spare time, given it was one of those skill sets that—if not actively in use—had to be studied in a continuous, and ongoing, manner. Otherwise, the memories of one's training would fade, and one would lose their ability to perform those skills, to act on that training, in the field. Plus, there was no telling how badly Jessica would be injured when Alex found her. Alex worried about that.
Eventually, ten o’clock at night rolled around—late enough that his mother should have been deeply asleep by then—and Alex pulled the black duffel bag out from under his bed, before retrieving his burner smartphone from the bag. Turning it on, he looked in the contacts, and speed-dialed the number labeled Reforger, before putting the burner smartphone to his ear.
“I’ve been waiting for you to call,” said a mechanically disguised voice on the other end, which Alex knew was Richard, but only because it had been Richard’s burner phone that Alex dialed.
“Sorry for the delay. Has Richard been discharged from the hospital, Reforger,” Alex asked, addressing Richard by his alias, instead of by his name, and speaking of him in the third person.
If the conversation was overhead, perhaps by a wiretap, Alex didn’t want to compromise Richard’s identity or his safety.
“Yes,” Reforger answered, “And, in unrelated news, I’m already working on the eavesdropping app for your burner smartwatch.”
“Thank you for that,” Alex said, “However, we need to deploy mass surveillance algorithms.”
“Unfortunately, we cannot do that at this time. Even if we did deploy those algorithms, we would have no way to sift through that much data in a short enough time. By the time we read any relevant information, it would have expired, and been rendered false by changes in situation occurring over time,” Reforger retorted, “As such, we cannot deploy the algorithms. However, there is one lead I found.”
Alex anxiously asked, “Okay, what’s the lead?”
Reforger answered, “All the gunmen wore the same insignia on their clothes and body armor. It’s the image of a gold-handled knife, with the silver blade of the knife half soaked in crimson—which is presumably blood of some kind. Thing is, I haven’t been able to find any match for it, with my search engine algorithms comparing it to known gang, cartel, triad, terrorist, police, and military insignias. Hell, I even checked a database of known PMC insignias—the algorithms are drawing a complete blank.”
“How can those algorithms work at that, but not perform mass surveillance,” Alex demanded.
“Because mass surveillance requires an algorithm or algorithms, that can scan every source of communication we can spy on, then determine if it’s potentially relevant, and filter out massive amounts of non-relevant data from all avenues of surveilled communications, before reporting anything relevant to us,” Reforger said, before adding, “and between all the social cues it would need to differentiate, all the various forms of communication it would need to scan, the massive volume of data it would have to be able to sift through before you even get to how the fuck we make it prioritize and report all the relevant data to us, we don’t have what we need yet. Plus, we would have to tell it to look for any crimes being planned or actively in progress, then have it prioritize the data accordingly. That’s just trying to get such a thing to function once, let alone function reliably and repeatedly. In comparison, having an algorithm look for an image identical to one we already have a copy of is a relatively simple task.”
“Oh. Yeah, I see it now. Sorry if I got a little pushy about that,” Alex said, feeling genuinely guilty about it, “And I me—.”
“Ah, do not apologize, Pyre,” Reforger interrupted him. Alex feared for a brief moment he might have offended his friend, until he heard Reforger say, “You have nothing to apologize for—you’re just anxious to rescue Jessica. I respect that. It’s commendable.”
“Thank you,” Alex stated sheepishly.
Brushing Alex’s gratitude aside, Reforger stated, “I’ll be sending an image of the insignia taken from the deceased police officer’s body camera to your burner phone and smartwatch.”
A photo of the insignia, embroidered onto what appeared to be a Kevlar vest or some other sort of body armor, showed up in a text on the burner smartphone’s screen.
“Got it,” Alex said upon seeing the image, before adding, “I gotta go now. I’m heading out as Pyre.”
“Something specific, or general patrolling,” Reforger asked.
“Call it a hunch. What other data do we have on the perpetrators,” Alex asked in reply.
Reforger said, “Neither I nor the cops, know anything about these guys. Considering the way they move and handle their small arms though, I think it’s safe to bet that they’re at least partly composed of ex-military personnel, and considering that attacking a school is not exactly in the Army Creed, probably the subjects of bad conduct discharges. So be careful.”
Alex simply replied, “I’ll keep you posted if I find anything. I expect that the vice-versa will be true. Pyre, out.”
Pulling the phone away from his ear, Alex hung up, thinking, we don’t have time for caution. Silently, Alex stripped down to his briefs, and put on the Pyre uniform, while donning the corresponding equipment.
His mother’s four-bedroom apartment was within a seven-building apartment complex and was split between the fifth and fourth floors of their building. Francine’s bedroom was on one side of the fifth floor, with the master bathroom, while the other full bathroom (in other words, the only other bathroom with a shower) was on the opposite side of the fifth-floor section of the apartment, next to Alex’s bedroom. Sandwiched between those two bedrooms were the other two bedrooms, one of which Francine used as a home office, and the other of which belonged to Jacob Junior. Both Alex’s bedroom and Francine’s bedroom had balconies, although the second and third bedroom—one of which belonged to Jacob Westsmith Junior, the younger of Francine's two sons, whom they simply referred to as Jake, or Jake Junior—had no balconies. Even those balconies that were there had little walls on the balconies separating the sections for the bathrooms from the sections which could be accessed from the bedrooms—for privacy. There was a hallway next to the guardrail of the stairs. The hallway held the doors to the communal bathroom and all four bedrooms.
Either way, if Francine had gotten one of the three-bedroom apartments that took up the second and third floors of the buildings, it would have been cheaper. Those apartments, however, had no bedrooms without balconies. Balconies were something that—given his drug abuse and behavioral problems—both Francine and Alex considered to be a safety risk to Jake Junior. At least, on those rare occasions when he was home, and not bouncing from rehab center to rehab center for his narcotics addictions. Granted, Jake had never deliberately self-harmed, or shown suicidal tendencies. However, considering the numerous types, and high doses of—in all honesty, mostly illegal—mind-altering substances Jake had consumed, shot up, snorted, smoked, or otherwise used, they felt it unwise to assume Jake would never possibly throw himself from, hang himself from, or accidentally fall from, a balcony. This was to such an extent that they had installed a second set of locks on the doors to the four bedrooms, and had put a second set of locks on the balcony doors as well. These were locks that required keys to open. The door to the fourth-floor balconies, as well as the balconies in the fifth-floor bathroom, Alex’s bedroom, and the master bedroom, were sliding glass ones, so to prevent Jake from shattering it if he ever wanted to hurt himself, the panes of regular glass were replaced with bullet-resistant glass. The landlord had approved all of these modifications to the apartment, on the sole condition that they pay a monthly fee on top of their rent that would cover the costs of removing or undoing said modifications when they left. There was a fourth bedroom, as already mentioned, which Francine used as an office, and kept locked whenever she left it, given that part of her job as a psychiatrist involved writing prescriptions to patients for controlled substances. In the past, Jake had stolen documents from her, before using said documents to forge prescriptions for those substances as a way to get high. As already mentioned, of the four bedrooms, only two had their own balconies, and Jake Junior’s bedroom was decidedly not one of those two.
Before Francine had married Jacob Senior, and for a while, after she left him, the two boys’ mother had worked as a social worker. It didn’t pay well enough to support two kids though, and—after their father managed to wrestle custody away from her when she was evicted from one apartment too many—Francine had decided to use what had been her dream job before meeting their father to work her way through going back to school, and getting a job that would be able to pay the bills which came as part of being a mother.
That having been said, despite her newfound profession as a psychiatrist, she never cared for Alex or Jake in a psychiatric role. Once, Alex had gotten curious about why she paid for Jake Junior to see a shrink when she was a shrink. Her reply to his question still resounded in the young man’s mind.
“Firstly, because he’s my son, there’s no way I could make an impartial decision on how to help him—or you, for that matter if you ended up struggling like him. My personal connection to him, and the biases that go along with that, would be counterproductive in rendering psychological and psychiatric care.
“Let’s say, for a hypothetical example, that he had formed a plan to commit suicide. Now, he actually has not—at least, insofar as we can tell—but, if he did, I might incorrectly assume, based on my personal bias against thinking that my kids are suicidal, that it’s suicidal ideation or suicidal thinking, but that he had no plans to follow through with it. In other words, I would not believe him to be at the highest level of suicide risk, because of his personal connection to me, which would cause me to not want to believe he’s planning to attempt suicide. The risk of death from—and the treatments for—thinking of suicide without any intent or plans to commit suicide, and for planning to attempt it, are vastly different. Therefore, there would be a chance that he could die due to the wrong treatment being applied.
“The second reason is that, if someone else is the one who oversees his medical or psychiatric treatment, and he needs to be prescribed a controlled substance, they can do it with far less risk of your father trying to misconstrue it as me abusing my psychiatry license to improperly give him prescription medications for recreational purposes. I’d rather not take the risk of him doing that, and possibly trying to claw back custody. We both know your father is not averse to lying.”
Pyre opened the sliding glass door to the fifth-floor balcony of Alex’s room, which was separated from the bathroom balcony by a wall, and walked through it. Gently sliding the glass door shut behind himself, Pyre then proceeded to hurl himself over the railing with a pillar of solidified fire—having to be very careful not to hit his head on the sixth-story balcony above him—before generating a pillar of solidified fire beneath himself, and hurling himself from one rooftop to the next rooftop, and from there onto further rooftops.
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Lela woke up in her room, her mind immediately buzzing with excitement from the instant her eyes opened! It was her birthday! And best of all—at least, in her opinion—her mom had given birth to Lela on her mom’s birthday! It was both of their birthdays!
Lela’s room was plain, with a small, desk—paired with a wooden chair—in one corner of the room. On top of the desk was a small, homemade, wooden desktop shelf, which her mother had made for her. There was also a brown, wooden bookshelf—lined with books upon books, naturally—a grey-painted, wooden, bedside table, holding a lamp, and her bed, a smaller size mattress, placed atop a metal, box-like frame.
Getting out of her bed, the nine-year-old got on her hands and knees next to her bed, before pulling a gift-wrapped present out from under her bed. The tag on the box was addressed to her mother, Kathrine. It read as follows;
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To Mom/Kathrine Feris, with love
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—From your daughter, Lela Feris
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Standing back up, Lela ran into Kathrine’s bedroom and looked around. The master bedroom had a larger mattress, also sitting atop a metal, box-like frame, a black-painted, wooden bedside table on both sides of the bed—each holding up a lamp—and a set of brown drawers at the foot of the bed. Then there was a television stand against the blue wall facing the foot of the bed, holding up a flatscreen television. But Kathrine was strangely absent.
“Oh mom, I’ve got something for you,” Lela said repeatedly in a singsong, happy-go-lucky voice, going from room to room, yet finding all the rooms in the apartment oddly empty. This included the small living room, the kitchenette, both bedrooms, and the shared bathroom.
The living room, a small room that was almost filled by the grey sofa that snaked along the wall in a crescent shape, and a flatscreen television mounted to one of the blue walls, had been notably devoid of people, the television sitting dormant, like the one in the master bedroom, in the apartment’s dead silence.
After that, Lela checked the kitchenette and the shared bathroom.
The kitchenette was a small, rectangular thing, with lime-green walls, and tan counters along two of said walls, propped up by drawers and cabinets. There was a white, joint freezer/fridge unit for food; a sink with two basins; a small closet-style pantry; and a gas-powered stove/oven hybrid unit for cooking. On the counter lay a toaster, a dish rack right next to the left sink basin (which drained the water into the sink); a metal bread box; and a few cup-shaped pottery things that held various cooking and serving utensils, including—but not limited to—soup ladles and massive serving/stirring utensils, which were shaped like spoons, but were not spoons. Lela did not know the names of the cooking utensils which looked like giant spoons but were not called giant spoons. There were also stacks of milk crates on one section of the counter, which held can goods. These were kept there to save space in their tiny pantry for use in storing other goods. The kitchen was utterly devoid of people—bar Lela—when she checked it for her mother’s presence.
Then there was the shared bathroom, a small, box-like, blue-walled thing, with a white, hybrid shower/bathtub thing; a toilet; a cabinet, containing built-in shelves, and mounted above another storage compartment, next to the shower; a towel rack; and a small sink basin, mounted below a small mirror, and above a small cabinet, which was smaller than the other bathroom cabinet. The cabinetry was white, as were the sink basin, the trim, and the material that the shower/bath unit was constructed of. The shower curtain was also white, pairing nicely with the blue walls of the room.
It was at that moment that an idea crossed Lela’s mind. Namely, the idea that her mother might have fallen and hit her head as she got into the shower, and—therefore—Kathrine might be unconscious in the shower, behind the shower curtain. Dreading what she might find, Lela griped the shower curtain and pulled it off to the side, only to reveal…
Nothing. The bathroom was empty.
Upon seeing that nobody was in the bathroom, Lela thought, Maybe she’s down in the bakery? It’s worth a look.
Going to the staircase that led to the bakery beneath the apartment, Lela descended the stairs and came to a door. The door was locked, but Lela slept with a key on her, as her mother instructed. Reaching into the pocket of her pajama pants, she felt the cold metal of the key. Assured now that—if something went wrong, such as accidentally locking herself out of the apartment—she had a way back in, Lela unlocked and opened the door.
Walking down the stairs, Lela eagerly held the present, thinking, she’s probably either dealing with customers, or she’s in the bakery’s kitchen.
Lela was just through the door at the bottom of the stairs when she saw the bodies, lying on the ground like puppets with cut strings, spread eagle in pools of crimson liquid. No one needed to tell Lela it was blood—Lela knew what it was. Dropping the present and rushing to her mother’s body with the intent of trying to help her—she vaguely remembered something about applying pressure on a wound to stem bleeding, which she’d overheard an EMT say to a doctor while buying muffins the previous week—Lela saw her mother’s eyes, which were staring blankly into nothingness, glazed over just like Lisa’s eyes, a crater gouged into the top of Kathrine’s head.
They’re dead, Lela realized in a mixture of numbness and horror, as she knelt next to her mother’s body, only to feel something odd under one of her knees.
Looking down, she saw her mother’s smartphone, laying screen up, in the same pool of blood Lela had unintentionally knelt in, under Lela’s left knee. Picking up the smartphone, Lela felt the lukewarm, sticky blood that had coated the back of the smartphone, which painted the dark brown skin of her fingers crimson as she picked it up, and pressed the Home button three times fast, just as her mother told her to do in an emergency. A screen with numbers came up, under the words, Emergency Mode. Lela dialed 911, and tapped the call button, her thumbs leaving a series of small, crimson thumbprints on the screen as she did so.
“Nine-One-One,” a female voice spoke from the phone, “What’s your emergency?”
“My mom and her friend were shot. I just found them. They’re…they’re dead,” Lela sobbed.
“Where are you,” the phone lady asked, sounding alarmed.
Lela replied, “1800 Creole Street. In New Hellensburge, close to the Mississippi River.”
“All right, police are on their way,” the phone lady replied, before asking, “What’s your name?”
“Lela Feris,” Lela sobbed.
“And how old are you,” the phone lady asked.
“Nine years old. I turned nine today,” Lela answered with a shaky breath.
“Is the shooter still there,” the phone lady inquired.
“I don’t think so,” Lela replied, suddenly scared by all of the spaces in the area where a murderer might hide.
Her hands trembling, Lela tried to speak further, to ask what she should do, only to find her voice gone. Then, Lela dropped the phone by mistake, because of the violence with which her hands now shook. It was the first time that Lela had noticed the shaking of her own hands. It was then that Lela broke down crying.109Please respect copyright.PENANA8gqkNKtwSO