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Image Credit: Modified from Quizilla.Teennick.com - Eden. ~Landing

Author's Note: There is no connection between the novel by Harlan Ellison and my story except perhaps that we both just chose something simple that describes the story. :)

This is a fan fiction, the Whateleyverse and all canon characters are the property of their respective writers. If you find your life being depicted in this story you it is purely accidental and you have a hell of a lot more to worry about than suing me. No canon characters have been hurt in the writing of this story...yet.

Many thanks to GinnCaster5 for the editing help, without Ginn this story would probably be unreadable. And to Pmanpman and Rozarius for their read through.

This is a Whateley Academy fan fiction story, you can find the Whateley stories at http://www.crystalhall.org/ I highly recommend them. ~Landing

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Chapter 3
 

I woke up late the next morning, but when I did wake up, it was with none of the grogginess I normally had. I remembered everything that had happened last night. I rolled out of bed and hurried to the bathroom to stare deep into my own eyes. They were bright; you could tell that they were glowing even in the glare from the harsh overhead lights above the sink. It wasn’t like they were flashlights or anything, but they definitely were illuminated from within.

I found that I wasn’t as stunned as I had been last night. I was able to actually think about what this meant. I didn’t know of that many things that could make your eyes glow. I had never heard of anything medically that could do that, so having some kind of disease didn’t seem very likely. And I know I didn’t put anything in my eyes like some kind of new high tech specialty contact. And I was pretty sure no one else had put anything in my eyes either. It might have been aliens that abducted me in the middle of the night and did something to my eyes, but I found that unlikely. Besides, my ass didn’t feel probed at all. That left one thing, mutation.

Everyone knew about mutants; hell, superheroes and supervillains were on the news all the time, and a lot of them where Mutants, or so the fan sites said. There were even a few local super heroes that worked out of the Houston area. Like The Cowboy, who played being a Texas cowboy to the hilt and really annoyed most people around here by making us look like hicks who rode horses to work and put on spurs every morning. I had even heard he wasn’t really from Texas, though that might just be a rumor started in order to save some of Texas’s dignity.

I had heard that about one sixth of the population had something called the meta-gene complex, but that didn’t mean you would be a mutant, despite all the rumors to the contrary. Something happened at some point that no one understood, and suddenly some of the people with the meta-gene complex manifested powers. You always heard that someone’s friend’s cousin’s nephew’s roommate had it happen to them, but I had never meet anyone that turned out to be a mutant.

So let’s say I am a mutant, shouldn’t that mean I have cool powers? I tried to lift Kelly’s toothbrush from its little holder with the power of my mind, nothing happened. Next, I tried to fly, but no matter how hard I strained nothing happened, except I felt rather silly with my arms up in the air in the accepted superman pose.

Well this sucked, I turn into a mutant and the only power I have is flashlight eyes? How was I supposed to fight crime with that? STOP, OR I’LL FLASH YOU! It just didn’t sound right; probably get a ticket for indecent exposure or something.

It was 8:12, I noticed on my way through my room. I guessed that the folks had decided to let me stay home from school. I could just hear my Mom’s call to the attendant’s office now. ‘Yes, I would like you to excuse my son from school today. Why? Well, because he looks like he grew up in Midwich.’ Hmm, I better be on the lookout for people thinking about brick walls.

Downstairs was quiet; I had to wonder if anyone besides myself was home. I padded on bare feet into the kitchen, the growling of my stomach choosing the direction. I opened the fridge and peered inside, trying to determine what I could make that wouldn’t take that long. I finally settled on making an omelet. I grabbed the eggs, some cheese, and some fresh bell peppers and got to work.

The smell was just starting to get heavenly when I heard the back door close and the sound of shoes on hardwood floor and the clicking of nailed paws.

“Hey Mom thanks for taking Harvard out for me, I got breakfast going. You want some?” I said. No, I wasn’t suddenly getting some new power that let me know it was my Mom. I knew it was her since the sound of her shoes was rather distinctive.

There was a flurry of paws on the floor, and Harvard ran into the kitchen to stand next to me, tail wagging.

I scowled at him. “The offer of food was to my mother, not to your overgrown self.” His tail just wagged all the harder.

My Mom entered the kitchen and said “No thank you Adam, I already ate this morning.”

My dog nudged me with his head as if to say “see she doesn’t want it; I’ll take her share.”

“Dr. Evens will be here at nine, so I want you to be dressed and ready by then. He is doing us a favor by coming over here instead of making us come to him, so I won’t have you keeping him waiting,” warned my Mom.

“Got ya,” I replied and slid the omelet out of the pan and onto a plate. It smelled delicious.

It didn’t take me long to finish the omelet, and I put the plate on the floor for Harvard to clean up the scraps I had left him. After that, I went ahead and got dressed. It took me all of about ten minutes to get ready, so I had time to burn before the doc showed up.

I spent that time channel surfing; I really couldn’t find anything that interested me, so I ended up on a cartoon channel that was showing old reruns of The Roadrunner. You have to feel sorry for old Wile E. Coyote; the guy tries so hard but always ends up failing. He should really have just saved the money he spent on Acme products and gone and bought a nice hamburger or something.

Dr. Evens showed up just as Coyote was once again falling off a cliff, 'help me' sign in hand, so I turned off the TV and went to greet him. He was a tall African American man, about 6’4” with black hair curled tightly to his head. He was probably in his late 40’s early 50’s and had a stayed, steady demeanor that must have been soothing to his patients. As soon as my mother introduced him to me, he shook my hand with a firm but not crushing grip and peered at my eyes.

“Yes, I can see that we do have a problem here,” he said in a surprisingly light voice with a distinct New England accent.

“Why don’t we go inside and you can look him over,” said my mother.

Dr. Evens grabbed a large black bag from where he had set it down outside when he first greeted us, and we went into the living room, where he had me sit on the couch.

He started off with what you would normally expect from a visit to the doctor’s office, blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, and the like. He spent a long time looking at my eyes with one of those magnifying doohickeys that shine a light in your eye. Of course my eyes were shining right back at him so I guess we were even. This whole time he was asking me questions. They were about what you would expect and lots of them had been asked by my mother and father last night.

How long have your eyes been like this? Do they feel any different? Were you exposed to anything unusual recently? Have you changed any of your normal habits? I answered all of them as honestly as I could but didn’t really think there was anything important in any of the information.

When he asked if anything unusual had happened lately, I had to pause for a moment. Could what happened to my test have anything to do with this? I wasn’t sure and part of me was still afraid to admit to lying to the folks.

My hesitation was noticed, and before they could ask anything, I remembered about how everything had looked funny yesterday morning when I was walking Harvard. So I told him about everything looking like there were glowing lines in them and around them. He wrote a note down about this and continued on with the questions.

I know I was being stupid; how is a doctor supposed to help you if you don’t tell him everything he might need to know? You got to cut me some slack, I was a teenager, and we are known for doing stupid things for stupid reasons; it’s practically what being a teenager is all about.

After Dr. Evens had asked all the questions he wanted to, he brought out a needle and took his share of my blood, the damn vampire.

“Well Mr. Oakson, as far as I can tell there is nothing physically wrong with you except for the obvious fact that your eyes are not normal. I believe that the most likely explanation for what is happening is that you have manifested as a mutant. We will know for sure if that is what happened after I get the blood work back. Until then, I want you to stay out of school; you may end up being a danger to yourself and others, and you will probably need to get more testing done before I feel I can lift that ban,” said Dr. Evens.

Well, being a mutant wasn’t a great surprise to me; I had already figured that was what it was. Still, it was kind of nervous and exciting to have it confirmed, at least tentatively.

“Will I get any cool powers or anything?” I asked.

“That remains to be seen and is the reason I want more testing done. I want you to be very careful, and if anything strange happens, immediately tell someone,” said the doctor.

I promised him I would, and before he left, he gave me some pamphlets with titles like ‘Your changing mutant body’ and ‘Now you have powers, what do you do?’ Okay, I read the pamphlets, and there wasn’t anything that wasn’t covered in the mutant section of the high school biology class. Most of the advice they gave was to see a professional. I did have a snicker though at the part that told you that you might start to notice hair growing in strange places. I had to wonder when the puberty pamphlet people got into the mutant pamphlet business.

I hung around the house for a while, catching a few more cartoons, but in the end, I got bored. There was nothing to really do, and I was antsy with built up energy. I wandered around the house, poking my nose into things before I eventually decided to go for a run. My mother was not happy with the idea.

“Adam, I don’t know if you should be going out of the house; it might not be safe,” she said.

“Come on Mom, it will be perfectly fine. I am just going to run around the neighborhood, and I’ll be right back,” I wheedled.

“What if someone sees your eyes? Who knows how the neighbors would react to something like that.”

“Look, if it will make you feel better, I’ll wear some sunglasses. It’s bright outside, and no one will notice my eyes. I really need to get out and run some, please?”

She seemed to relent after a moment of hesitation. “Alright, but I want you back in 40 minutes. I’m expecting someone to be here soon, and you need to meet him.”

Mom still seemed nervous, so I hurried before she could change her mind and changed into some running clothes. On my way out the door, I yelled for Harvard, and he came running out to join me. I always took him running with me; he kept up fine, and it was nice to have undemanding company.

I did a few stretches to warm up my body before I took off at an easy pace down the road of our neighborhood. My troubles started to melt away as I got into the zone that came from a really good run. It was just me and the road. My breathing was coming easy, and I felt my legs warm with my exertion. The wind cooled my sweat and made the leaves in the trees sigh. There were no cars on the street; it was the middle of the day and everyone was at work or school. My dog was keeping up with me, sometimes staying to sniff at the grass then running ahead to chase a squirrel or investigate where some other dog had left his scent.

After about 20 minutes, I rounded a corner and decided to run through a new part of the neighborhood that was being developed. Most of the lots were empty, but here and there was a new home being built. I ran on for a little while before I came to a cul-de-sac. All the properties along this dead end were still being built, and I decided to take a bit of a rest on a low pile of timbers next to a mound of dirt. Well, it used to be dirt, now it was mud, thanks to the rain we seemed to have had last night.

Harvard sniffed around it for a while before heading off in another direction, doubtless hot on some trail. I leaned back against the wood, my finger just reaching the ground as it fell over the side of the pile. I was focusing on breathing in and out. It was starting to get hot, but it still wasn’t as bad as it would get later in the year.

I felt a tingle in my hand and looked down at it. Without me even knowing it, my finger had been idly moving along the ground making lines in the dirt, but it didn’t look right. It didn’t look like a mark that just happened. If you just swing your arm around, you should just get a lot of loops. What it reminded me of was those patterns from the test yesterday.

I’ll tell you the truth, I started to freak out a little. My hand doing things on its own just creeped me out. It brought to mind old sayings about the devil and idle hands. I might have given more credence to the thought if it had been my right hand doing it. I am left handed so it’s nowhere near idle, I write with it, I eat with it, I get o…uh I do a lot of things with it.

It really was a moment of terror staring, me standing there and staring at my hand. It is rather unfortunate that this perfectly good spine chilling horror that I was feeling was completely eclipsed a moment later; it really was a nice little terror and didn’t deserve to be upstaged like that.

I was looking down at my hand, when heard a kind of slumping noise. It was the same kind of noise you hear when you land your shoe in deep mud and you go down about a foot. I tore my gaze away from my hand to see where the little picture or whatever it was seemed to be rising. It kept rising till it was level with the pile of lumber I was sitting on. I just sat there, frozen in something akin to shock. I don’t actually think anything was going through my head; I was stuck on observe mode.

The lump of brown mud kept up its steady increase, and after a second, it started to get definition. It was now about three and a half feet tall with a smaller basketball sized lump on top of a much bigger one. On that smaller lump, I was starting to see indentations and protrusions, and, as it continued to grow, they became clearer. It finally resolved into the crude contours of a human face! When its eyes seemed to pop open, I have to admit I screamed, not yelled. There are times when screaming like a little girl is justified, and when there is a giant mud monster looking at you, it is one of those times.

It was level with my height sitting down, and its growth seemed to be accelerating. My scream must have upset it, because it screamed back in a burbling, bubbling voice, and it lifted an arm I hadn’t seen form and took a swipe at me. I would really like to say I had lightning fast reflexes and dodged the strike, but to tell the truth, what really happened was I lost my balance when I flinched back and fell off the woodpile.

I actually did take the opportunity to do something smart after that and rolled away from the lumber in the opposite direction from the monster. It was a good thing too, because there was a shower of splinters and bits of wood as the mud man pounded the pile of wood to pieces.

I got to my feet; the thing was now close to seven feet tall, and did the only sensible thing, ran like hell. Now, I’m a runner, mostly its long distance, but I have long legs, and I can get a good turn of speed when it’s needed. Which is something I am eternally thankful for because that thing was right on my ass.

It really wasn’t all that fair; mud men are supposed to be slow, oozing creatures that haltingly stalk their prey; that’s how it is on TV and in fantasy books. This thing was nothing like that, well, except for the oozing part; it was fast. It had a liquid smoothness and seemed to flow forward. It reminded me of a clip I had seen on the internet a while back. It was of a guy and his buddy driving as fast as they could away from a mud slide. The buddy was filming in the back of a truck and a wall of mud was right behind them. Everything that was in the path of the mud was picked up as if it were made of styrofoam. The mud man that was chasing me was that kind of mud man, an unstoppable force bearing down on me like the earth had suddenly decided that gravity was going the wrong way by 90 degrees.

I tried suddenly changing my course and dodging to the side, but all that did was almost get me plastered. Where is the conservation of momentum? A seven foot pile of mud should not be able to corner like a granny with a shopping cart that sees a sale on denture cream.

It was slowly gaining on me, and I was getting desperate. The thought of being smashed to bits by that thing was horrible. Or it could be worse maybe it would grab me and wrap itself around me so that I was trapped in the mud unable to breath and… Now really wasn’t the time to be thinking of those things, I told myself. Up ahead was a house that was under construction. The framing was all up and so was most of the roof on the two-story home. I quickly made my way to it, hoping that I could hide in there, since I didn’t think it could fit though the door.

I made it to the house just in time, as the mud man was oozing on my heels. I shot through the front door, which was thankfully a small one, and slammed it behind me. The mud man hit the door and…the door bounced right back open! Damn, they hadn’t put the hardware in yet! Even with the door not being able to latch closed, it did slow the mud man down, and I quickly wiggled my way through two of the studs to the next room. Ha! I would like to see that giant, oversized excuse for a mud pie pull that trick off.

I know what you’re thinking, you fool, it’s a mud man, do you really think wooden studs are going to stop it? The studs will just go through it; it’s made of mud after all! Well, in a way you are right, but in a way, you are wrong too. The mud man did try to do a dirty imitation of the move that the liquid terminator did with the prison bars, but I guess it wasn’t as high budget as he was, so it was real slow doing it. Of course, I was already out of that room and into the next. So I think it got a little frustrated, and, with another bubbling roar, it seemed to shake itself all over, and the wood that was halfway in its body broke as it demolished part of the wall it was stuck in. Holy crap, as if I wasn’t scared enough of what that monster would do to me.

It came rushing back after me and didn’t even slow as it meet the next wall, just crashing through it with a snapping of the wood that sounded like a bulldozer. I looked around desperately for something to do and spied a set of stairs leading to the second floor. I scrambled up them, going three steps at a time. It was only when I reached the top that I realized I had effectively trapped myself up there with no way to get down except a jump off the side of the building.

I turned back to see how Mr. Mud Man was dealing with the stairs and praying that it would have a harder time of it than it did with the walls. At first, it seemed like my “plan” had worked, and I would be safe. The monster took a couple of steps up the stairs, and one of them creaked and gave way with a loud snap. Its leg fell down through the broken board, and it almost looked like it would get stuck. Yeah right, like I would be that lucky. Its lower body seemed to coalesce, and the now solid pillar of mud seemed to spread out, supporting more of its weight on the flight of stairs. It slid up the stairs, leaving a thick trail of mud behind coating the steps.

So here I was, trapped at the top of a half-constructed building with nowhere to go, unless I wanted to risk a broken leg from a fall, faced with something from a bad horror movie. And you know, now that I had nowhere else to go I stopped feeling as frightened as I had at first. I started feeling kind of angry. This kind of shit shouldn’t happen, not to your average 16 year old who was just going out for a run. I mean, mud men? Really? What was next, an evil cult of demon worshipers or secret assassin teams? This wasn’t some Saturday morning cartoon, this was my life!

I went over to where a stack of cut up two by four’s were scattered on the ground, the obvious discards from some of the construction, and picked up a good four foot length of wood. I swung it in the air, getting a feel for it. This mud monster was about to learn what happened when you messed with an Oakson who was having a bad day. Most likely the monster was going to break my neck, but I was going to see if I could knock its head off first!

It was almost at the top of the stairs, and I got in front of it, ready to swing at the first piece of mud that got close enough to hit. Mr. Mud was obliging by reaching out a long muddy arm and trying to take hold of me. My improvised club made a satisfying splat as it hit the side of the arm. It would have been nice if my weapon had taken off the arm, but as it was, all it did was sink a few inches into the material of its body, oh yeah, and make a god awful mess as mud spattered all over the place. I pulled my club out of its arm with a sucking sound and swung at it again, trying to hit it in the same place. There was another spatter of mud, and my piece of wood sunk in further than it did last time. I hit it one more time in the arm, and finally, with a spray of more mud, the arm fell off. What was left of the arm fell to the floor and splashed over me and the surrounding area.

Mr. Mud did not react well to this turn of events, and with an even louder roar that showered even more mud at me, it lurched finally up onto the second floor. Jeez, say it, don’t spray it. I took another swing at it, this time aiming for the torso. This turned out to be a mistake as the two by four sank into the mud of its body and seemed to get stuck there. I gave a few yanks, but it wouldn’t come free, and I decided to let it go. It was that or have a close and personal experience with Mr. Mud’s remaining hand.

I backed up, weaponless and frustrated as all hell. Mr. Mud paused long enough to reach up and pull the two by four out of its chest and throw it against the half-finished walls. It then turned back to me, and, with more burbling noises, rushed me. I jumped to the side, but still managed to get clipped. That knocked me off more courses, and I ended up landing on my side as I fell to the floor. Ow, that hurt! Why am I always getting beaten up?

I quickly scrambled away on hands and knees; it didn’t seem a good idea to stay where I was for too long. After getting some distance, I rolled to my feet. Mr. Mud was between me and the stairs, so that way was blocked for my escape. I looked about wildly; I was in the very corner of the house, and the mud monster was directly across from me, either way I went, I would be heading closer to the thing. That left one option; I just hoped I didn’t break a leg.

I was lucky, they must have planned to have an extra large window in this room, so my means of egress wasn’t that high from the floor. Not bothering to check on Mr. Mud, I ran for the window and crawled out of it. I let myself dangle over the edge of the window, then pushed off of the wall and let go. I was hoping that by pushing off with enough force I would avoid hitting the hard concrete slab.

I have read plenty of books, and at one point or another, a character has had to fall from some height, and they always talked about rolling when you hit to absorb some of the impact. I tried my best to do what I thought was rolling when I hit the ground. I had decided to roll to the right, which is probably the reason my right foot was out further than my left. I landed with all of my weight on that foot, and, while I immediately tried to shift my momentum into rolling, or rather falling, to the right, my ankle still felt like something had popped.

When I came to a stop, it was on my back looking up at where I had jumped from. It was not a pleasant sight, as Mr. Mud was now glaring down at me. Well, it would probably have been a glare if its face hadn’t been made out of mud that was constantly running down its face with that damn picture thing I had drawn on its forehead. I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and had just enough time to roll some more as the big mud man dropped out the space were the window would be.

You can probably predict part of what happened. A ton of mud hitting the ground acts in certain ways, and one of those ways is that it splatters everywhere. Since I was right next to it, I ended up covered in mud from head to toe. I rubbed the mud out of my eyes. Had the thing just killed itself? There certainly was no man shape anymore, just a mound of mud. I got to my feet shakily, my ankle killing me, and stared at the mud. It seemed to be over. What the hell had happened? Had I somehow created that monster when I drew that picture? If so, I was going to have to watch what my hand was doing much more carefully. What would have happened if I had made that thing at school or somewhere else with people? I shuddered at the thought of Mr. Mud rampaging around school, swatting students left and right and leaving horrible mud stains on the carpet. If this was some kind of mutant power I wasn’t sure I liked it. No scratch that, I was really sure I didn’t like it. Just then, the pile of mud started to shudder.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me!” I yelled.

The damn thing was still alive, if you could call something made of mud alive. It grew upwards, seeming to mound up on its own till it had reformed its rough body. It was maybe a little smaller, probably since it had lost a bit of its mud. So it was only six feet tall rather than seven. I started limping away from it at high speed, cursing under my breath the whole while. Where was a super hero when you needed one?

I didn’t get that far before Mr. Mud had caught up with me. I turned to face it. I wasn’t going die running away, I was going to go down fighting, no matter how futile it seemed. But before Mr. Mud could strike, there was a horrible barking and growling, and, like a streak of brown lighting, Harvard was beside the mud man biting at the back of its leg. If Mr. Mud had been human, he would have been hamstrung, but, things being as they were, all my dog did was get a mouth full of mud, despite the incredible power of his jaws. Harvard must have been channeling his inner wolf, because, before Mr. Mud could turn and swing at him, he had faded back out of the way.

“Get the hell away from my dog!” I yelled.

I might be willing to face my own death, but no way in hell was I letting some reject from a horror show hurt my dog. There are some things you just don’t do and one of them is mess with a man’s dog. I attacked the mud monster, hitting it with my fists in a futile attempt at destruction. They sank into its muddy flesh again and again, but nothing seemed to really hurt it. It turned back to me and slapped me down with a wet blow of its arm.

“Harvard get away, go home!” I yelled trying to save my dog at least.

But he wasn’t listening, and, as the mud man bent over me to smother me or kill me in some other horrible fashion, my dog leapt right at it. He landed on its back and started tearing at it with his teeth. Mr. Mud was thrown forward by the weight of my dog, and my dog climbed higher on its back till he was in reach of its head. Then he bit at it savagely. In all the biting, my dog got just the right spot, he bit where the pattern I had drawn when this whole mess started was, and, with that simple action, Mr. Mud fell apart, most of it landing on me, by the by.

I know it should have been obvious to me what to do, you probably already figured out the way to beat Mr. Mud as soon as it formed. I’m still beating myself up about that, and someone never lets me hear the end of it, but back to the story.

I was laying there covered in mud, a bit at a loss. I was safe, I wasn’t going to die, my dog wasn’t going to die. My mom was going to kill me when she heard about this! Harvard came over and sniffed at my face before sneezing mud out his nose.

“You have definitely earned a Scooby Snack,” I told him while I reached up and patted his head. “But only after you have had a bath.”

The two of us must have looked a sight on our way home. I had lost my sunglasses at some point, and there wasn’t a spot on us that wasn’t covered with mud. If I had drawn a picture on my forehead, I could have passed as Mr. Mud’s younger brother. That thought sent a chill down my spine. I had no plan to draw anything that wasn’t in the alphabet any time soon. Hell, I might not even do the alphabet; that letter Q has always looked a little funny to me, like it was up to something.

The walk home was uneventful; no one was out except Ms. McCfinlie, and I just waved to her as she stared slack jawed at us walking down the sidewalk leaving muddy footprints behind us. She was the local gossip, so I was sure everyone would have heard about my dirty condition by the end of the day. She was also accepted as the one that made up damn fool stories that no one believed, so I wasn’t worried about my reputation much.

When I got to my house, I got a bad feeling; something just wasn’t right. The stillness of the air or the quietness of the natural sounds, something was off. I just couldn’t put my finger on it. I tried to ignore it, putting it down to my recent unnerving experiences. But when I got to the door and saw it was partly open, alarm bells started going off in my head. Harvard started a warning growl deep in his chest and got in front of me trying to block my way, his eyes locked on the door with a hard intensity. The alarm bells in my head had sirens added to them. My dog never growled like that unless there was a real threat. Something was up.

I pushed Harvard out of the way gently but firmly. “Mom's in there, boy, we ain’t goin’ nowhere till we know what’s up,” I whispered. He must have gotten the message, because he stopped his growling and kept quiet, splitting his focus between the door and me.

I creeped up to the door and put my ear to the crack. I heard nothing, but that might have had something to do with how loud my breathing seemed to have gotten. Strange, isn’t it, how the harder you try to be quiet so you can listen, the more noise your body seems to make. I eased the door open, glad that Dad kept the hinges oiled and there was no tell-tell squeak to give me away. Inside, things were a shambles, furniture was turned over and pictures had been knocked off the walls. I stared down at the broken glass of the photo of me and my sister fishing in Lake Livingston when I was ten and she was seven. Both of us had sunburned noses and the biggest grins, as we held up the ten pound bass we had managed to wrestle about the boat. Unless you have had someone break into your home and destroy it, you really don’t know the feeling it gives you. You feel violated, like something precious has been stolen from you. The one place in all the world you thought you would be safe just no longer feels that way. That is what I was feeling as I stepped over the scattered detritus of our lives and into my home.

I moved as silently as I could from the entrance way and into the living room. I was looking all around me trying to spot any threat. Once I got well into the living room and could see the front of the couch, my heart flew up into my throat. On the sofa was my Mother. She didn’t seem to be awake, and for a horrible moment I thought she might be dead. I rushed to her side, heedless of any noise I was making, and felt for a pulse. Thank god my high school had offered first aid classes last year, finding a pulse can be much harder than it looks on TV. I found one, it was strong and steady, but my Mom's skin felt clammy. I dug in my pocket, pulling out my cell phone so I could call 911.

“Put down the phone, boy.”

My gaze snapped up, standing in the kitchen was a man dressed in casual wear of white button up shirt and khaki pants, holding a gun, a big gun. Well, it looked big to me, but then, I tend to think most guns pointed at me are big.

“Uh, hi?” I said. Yeah, I know, not the greatest line I could have thought up in that situation, but I didn’t get shot, so by my book it worked great.

“I said, put down the phone,” Khaki guy repeated. Oh right, I had forgotten I held it in my hand. I let it drop to the wooden floor with a thud. I hoped my screen didn’t just bust, it was a new phone.

“Jameson, Zerg, get in here,” called Khaki guy.

Behind me, from the direction of my Dad’s office came the sound of two sets of hurried feet. I shot a glance over my shoulder and saw two more men enter the living room from that direction. One was tall and skinny, and the other was fat and short. They would have made a perfect set of clowns if it wasn’t for the burning look in their eyes.

“Y’all take whatever y’all want; I’m not going to try to stop you,” I said, trying to keep the situation calm.

“Oh, we will be taking what we want! Our Lord Whippoorwill has commanded us, and in the name of our Dark God Cochul’relk’thultul, we shall carry out his will!” said Khaki guy, and I could almost see the spittle flying as he pronounced this with religious zeal.

Mark him down as crazy with a side order of insane, I thought to myself. This did not look good. Anyone whose god had more punctuation in his name than the rest of the sentence he said it in was defiantly not someone you want pointing a gun at you.

I lifted my hands very slowly to show I wasn’t up to anything and said, “Just tell me what it is you want, and I will see to it you get it.”

The fat one behind me let out a little titter that gave me the creeps. I wanted to turn around and see what he was laughing at, but I decided it wasn’t a good idea to take my eyes off the gun toting maniac. I did catch a movement out of the corner of my eye. It was Harvard silently moving in the entrance way. I have no idea how he could be moving that quietly, but somehow he wasn’t making a sound. All his muscles were tight, ready for action at a moment’s notice.

“That is so kind of you to offer,” said Khaki guy. “You see, what we want, what we were sent for…was you!”

Several things happened at exactly that same moment. The clowns behind me grabbed for my arms, and Khaki guy raised the gun in warning for me not to move. At the same time, Harvard made his leap right for Khaki guy, a blood chilling roar coming from his gaping jaws. He hit Khaki guy teeth first right on his extended arm, knocking it off course. The gun went off with a bang that sounded much louder than it did on TV. Sensing the moment, I wrestled my arms out of the reach of the Clowns and managed to give one of them an elbow right in the face.

But my victory was short lived, as the next thing I knew, something heavy and hard hit me right behind my ear. I saw stares and fell to the ground. I must have lost it for a second, because when I opened my eyes, I was staring up at the clowns. The tall one who looked like he had a broken nose had a gun out and was pointing it back towards Khaki guy yelling, “Move out of the damn way, and I’ll shoot the damn thing!” Oh god! They were going to shoot my dog! I tried to get up, but my hands didn’t seem to be working right, and I just fell back down on to the floor. The fat Clown loomed large in my vision, and I saw him bringing a metal bar of some kind down on me. The last thing I heard before everything went dark was the single bark of a gun…

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To Be Continued...