Everyone stood still. Christine behind the couch, Steven next to her. Rosalyn to Steven’s left and front, her parents and two younger sisters to her left. They created a taut, terrified semi-circle around the gunman. He faced them all in turn, pistol drawn and dangling at his right side.

He was small, standing little more than five and a half feet off the ground. His pants were baggy and dirty not because they didn’t fit, but because they did. His cheap, white t-shirt was stained with dirt and sweat in patches, especially around the collar and armpits. Unshaven, his face twitched occasionally to mirror his unsteady hand. His breath came in muted gasps. He was recovering from his run in the cold November wind.

Emily, terrified and twelve years old, tried to escape everything—that room, that smell, and that awful man. But she couldn’t. Jamie wouldn’t let her. She grabbed Emily’s arm and wouldn’t let go, even though her wrist was turning red and her hand was turning purple. Emily couldn’t run, and something inside told her she wasn’t allowed to cry either. What could she do but cry, or argue, or run? If she couldn’t do any of those, she was stuck. So she began to cry.

Jamie reverted to a much older, almost ancient state of mind. There was no fight or flight there; the only safety was in invisibility. So she froze, watching the man like deer does a hunter, and holding Emily to keep her quiet. If she and Emily could go unnoticed, maybe they would make it out alive. But one wrong step and they were gone.

Had Jamie glanced right, she would have seen Mrs. Horne trembling and grasping her husband’s arm. While everyone else remained separate, Mr. and Mrs. Horne truly had bonded together in marriage, as shown by their current co-dependence. Mr. Horne gripped his wife’s hand and stood still. Her dependence created his feigned strength. They were equally pale and equally frightened and shock froze them together. There they stood, useless to all but each other.

Beside her father, Rosalyn fought the urge to hyper focus on the man before them. She insisted that she keep her ears and eyes open, uselessly glancing left at her parents and younger siblings and right at Catherine and Steven. Intrinsically, in a way she could not fully realize, she knew she must be aware of everything. If she could find a weapon or take advantage of the environment, they could escape. Even now Emily and Jamie might be able to run down the hallway and she and Steven could attack the man and wrest the gun from him. There was a slim chance everyone would survive, though, and Steven and Catherine would probably be the first to go. She couldn’t lose Catherine. So she waited.

Steven shuffled in front of Catherine. Six in the magazine and one in the barrel. No matter how many bullets the man had in his pockets, it was unlikely that all seven of them would die. It was just a question of who would. If his shoulder covered Catherine’s heart and she ducked in time, she could be safe. Maybe. He couldn’t think of anyone else. He could not be distracted from Catherine. She was most important.

Catherine was terror-stricken and her breathing was uncontrollable. When Steven stepped in front of her, she could only think to be grateful. Anything for a barrier between her and the man with the gun. She closed her eyes and prayed that they would live, at least her and Steven. Roslyn would find a way out; she always did. In her terrified stupor, Catherine forgot that there was anyone else in the room but her, Steven, the man, and some shadow of Roslyn.

Until he moved.

The man looked at them all and allowed an impudent smile to crawl across his face until he couldn’t contain himself anymore. When he threw back his head and laughed, he made a dry, empty roar. In a few minutes, these religious curs would destroy themselves. He would disclose the festering, gaping hole in their ideology. They loved those who hated them? They had never seen true hatred. They forgave those who hurt them? They had never really been hurt. They blessed those who persecuted them? They had never been tirelessly, inexhaustibly, purely persecuted. He would show them the difference between delusion and reality and when he did, they would be crushed by the emptiness of their creed.

So he watched.

He watched, inspecting the smallest movements until he understood their dynamics. He confirmed his target as the girl half covered by the boy. The brunette could lunge in front her in a matter of seconds, though. Inconvenient. He would play their game. He toyed with the gun, twitching it in the direction of the younger girls further left. It worked. The brunette shifted towards the younger ones, but the boy didn’t move. Interesting.

Roslyn watched the gun move closer and closer to Emily and she prepared herself to leap across the living room and block her sister. She had to wait, though, just in case he wasn’t really going to pull the trigger.

The parents never noticed the subtle movement of the gun.

Jamie faded in and out of awareness, never realizing how much danger Emily was in.

Steven breathed a sigh of relief.

Catherine closed her eyes.

Roslyn tensed.

The gun raised and aimed. In a blurred, instinctive moment, Roslyn lifted her right foot off the ground and ran towards Emily, grabbed her shoulders, and twisted her away from the shot. Before they landed on the carpeted floor, the man turned forty-five degrees, leveled the barrel at Catherine, and shot once, twice, three times.

She screamed, Steven shouted, the parents collapsed, Jamie came to, and Roslyn jumped. She couldn’t see Catherine and tried to run back to her, but Jamie blocked her. The man smiled and spread his hands, basking in his victory. Someone would kill him, and in that act they would destroy, line by line, story by story, everything they claimed to represent. It would take seconds.

The man and the gun grew nearer and nearer as Roslyn forced her way to him, screaming and grasping for the weapon. He killed Catherine. Everything else disappeared as she tore at his hair, his face, wrenching the pistol from his limp, careless hand and holding it to his head. She stood eye-to-eye with him.
Vicious, violent hatred filled her mind and clouded her soul as she beat him over and over again with his own pistol. Blood dripped down his face as it curled into an hateful smile and Roslyn held the gun to his head again. Every fibre of her being yearned, demanded to pull the trigger. She wanted to watch him die more than anything else.
So she stopped and drank in the moment.
In the silence, she felt something cool in the back of her mind, a pinprick from the past. As she looked into his hollow brown eyes, the chilly shaft brought her back to her childhood, when she and Catherine played with dolls and chased each other, and rolling over laughing. She thought she saw them outside, eight and ten years old, making crowns of grass and giggling in the setting sunlight flooding the yard—only for a moment.
But that moment was enough.
She wavered. Did she have the right to do what he did? To deprive someone else of living? He took a life that wasn’t his to take, but was his any more Roslyn’s than Catherine’s was his? She lowered the gun and allowed her father to take it.
Catherine was over to the side. Roslyn knew where, but she didn’t see. She looked out the window in front of her and saw two girls playing with toys in the warm, summer grass.
“Hands over your head.”
The man didn’t care that the voice commanding him was strained and high. He shouldn’t be hearing anything. He should be dead, but for some hateful reason the brunette hadn’t shot him. She must not have actually loved the blond.