It was dark and I could hear crickets along the neighborhood streets. Mostly, I could hear my heart like an earthquake. I could still see Bill's face, white and damp and wincing something awful. Sweat was slipping over my temples where the blood quivered thumping under the skin. I felt dizzy and my vision was grainy. I kept on, one foot in front of the other, listening to myself breath and running it all over and over again in my head. The two of them were walking and joking quietly just behind me.

"You keep moving," said Timmy. I winced. His voice came out like bullets on account of the gun in his hand. I would wince when he would speak and then I could see Bill's expression again, clear as day, eyes wide in that white face. Something like a cough and a question and despair around his mouth, something awful.

Timmy had a mane like the one on a coconut or a hyena. It was wire and bristle and it made him look wild. His little teeth were sharp and spaced out, set against bad skin glowing oily in the cool night. I never did know how some people ended up with teeth like those. Darren was walking with Timmy. The other two were back at the house with that lawyer so scared that he'd pissed himself. They had taken my phone along with the others', and I knew that if I yelled they would shoot Jenny's boy. I couldn't stop thinking about Bill and his sweaty hands and his white face and his coughing and his eyes. He's probably dead now. Christ, Marcy had gone to hysterics when they'd shot him. She'd just snapped. I suppose they had to shoot Bill so we all knew they'd shoot the boy. I suppose they had too.

Darren, walking behind me with Timmy, he was real big with wide shoulders and a face that became a neck. His eyes didn't sink or bulge. They sat still, flush with the rest of him. Darren and Timmy were walking me quiet down the street. They were joking and talking and Darren was smoking a cigarette. Like they hadn't just shot a woman's husband down. The sweat was dripping off the sides of my face and my hair was slicked sickeningly against my scalp. My heart was drumming just like a hummingbird's and I kept forgetting to breath until I felt suddenly woozy.

"Tell this asshole to stop slowing down," Darren blew out smoke as he talked.

"Hey asshole," Timmy hissed, gesturing subtly with his pistol, his words hot and stinging, "stop slowing down."

They laughed mildly.

My shirt stuck to my back, dripping and suffocating. Vaguely, I wanted to pull it away from my skin, to let some air slip in against the clamminess there. I kept walking, trying unsuccessfully to spit every couple of steps. If I don't do something, someone else will have to do something, and if they don't, I don't know what will happen. The intense, demanding stress was coming back like an unwelcome, pushy acquaintance. A house guest that couldn't take a hint. Persistent as a drunk. I'd felt the same absorbing fear in the war, unwillingly entertained the same tug of ugly cowardice that comes grasping at you from every corner of your mind. The thing was to do something even if it seemed impossible, even if it seemed rash and un-human, beyond your personal limits. This wasn't the war, but if I'd managed to make it through that, I could certainly live through this.

I scanned the ground frantically, and then without warning I was picturing Bill pale and empty. I pictured Marcy, shaking with tears, hugging one of the pillows on our couch and staring at Bill, her mouth wide open. I pictured Jenny trying to be calm and telling Tyler that everything will be okay, that this is going to be over soon. I pictured the lawyer, standing in the corner with all of the man out of him, a dark piss stain running the length of his pant-leg. And then the men with the guns, I pictured them too.

I could see their van now in the street, tan and brown with the little plastic lips shielding the front passenger windows and the windshield. Oh Jesus please don't shoot the boy. Not Jenny's boy.

"Round the side of the van," Darren said, "not so fast now. Nothing funny either, nobody else has to get hurt."

Darren was doing the talking because Timmy wasn't cut out for it. He didn't have a reassuring bone in his body. With his pistol and his wiry hair and his sharp little teeth; plenty more people had to get hurt and he damn well knew it and he didn't even care to lie about it.

"There you go," Darren said, "we're just gonna talk in the van for a minute. Right?"

"Right," Timmy tried, eyes shining.

These were criminals that were entirely out of their mind. They'd arrived at the door some time after dinner and rung the doorbell like a couple of house callers. They forced their way in with guns, took up all of our cellphones, then corralled us into the living room. The lawyer they'd strong armed in with them was making up all of our wills - mine, Jenny's, Bill and Marcy's - leaving the four armed men all of our worldly possessions. I was convinced it was an absurd joke; was wracking my brain hysterically trying to get this bizarre episode to somehow harmonize with reality. No amount of drugs or desperation could possibly convince someone that such a shockingly unreal plan would actually succeed.

That's when they shot Bill. Marcy fell to pieces and the rest of us with her, and then they told Jenny that they'd kill her boy of we didn't do everything they asked. I'd felt my confusion and anxiety turn hollow and cold, felt a sudden and overwhelming powerlessness. Fleetingly, I wished I'd been keeping up with my medication, wished that my nerves were in a better condition so that I could make a stab at handling this. That's when Darren and Timmy had separated me from the others and led me right out the front door.

And now we were just feet from the van.

I swallowed pungent bile that had spilled up my throat and felt a spike of raw-nerved panic driven into my stomach. Jittering, uncontrollable fear hardened somewhere into a dreamy dissociation so that I began seeing everything as if in a film. I drew back safely into the audience, feeling vicariously that $10.50 worth of thrill, suspense and fear so easily attainable from the edge of a plush, red theater seat.

Darren stepped in front of me in the silver, grainy night. He opened the driver's door of the brown van while my heart whirred and my underarms and lower back oozed a cold, sticky sludge. Tobacco smoke trailed dully from the cigarette between his thick, hairy fingers, and the gray, humid moonlight defined him crisply in front of me just like putting a photograph into a frame. The smell of the smoke was acrid and clear, so pure and accurate that it registered against my senses with a tingling vibration.

The van's locks clicked their plastic click as Darren pushed down a black rocker switch on the driver-side door panel. He pulled open the sliding door which emitted a low, lubricated grinding noise of metal on metal. For a moment the three of us stood there. Darren heavy and wide and breathing with an open mouth by the driver's door, me facing the gaping side entrance of the van, and Timmy behind me with his breath coming fast and his pistol pointing squarely at my back.

"You get in the van now," Timmy whispered with a snake's lisp.

My mind reeled frantically, wildly probing every crevice of the circumstance looking for some solution, some ghost of a way out. The van was empty behind the front seats. The floor was covered in black, rubber matting and debris littered the dark surface like crumpled trash at an underfunded state fair. There was a tire iron directly in front of me. It was dull and metallic and stained with grease. My gaze caught it immediately, flitted over it, then snapped back to it and clawed there feverishly like a drowning cat.

Timmy's gun poked into my back.

"He thinks we've got all night," he smirked, then pushed the gun harder so that it bit into my spine, "don't you?"

Darren grunted and shifted his formidable weight, dropping his cigarette butt on the ground and grasping the handle of the open driver's side door with his thick paw.

I eyed the tire iron, felt the electric twang in my hand so that I thought I'd already started reaching for it, then felt a fresh wave of cold, prickling fear.

My nerves ached and swam with dizzying potential. In conversation, people sometimes allude to the repercussions of cornering a wild animal. This was that corner. I was that animal.

And then my hand was wrapped tight around the long shaft of the tire iron and my torso was twisting and spinning to bring the biting end of that tool into Timmy's forearm. There was a deafening crack and a high pitched, ringing reverberation in both my ears. I felt the impact of the swing in my wrist and a flushing, intense relief at the absence of any pain as searing and shocking as a bullet wound. Timmy's hand hung twisted from his arm, his face drooped instantly into an open mouthed frown of horrified defeat. A second blow met his ear heavily and the follow-through pushed his body so that it was lying flat on the ground.

Darren jumped back on powerful legs in utter surprise, then grasping the situation clambered forward and dove for the pistol. Somehow it was already in my left hand like magic. The tire iron was still rigid and menacing in my right, and the night swirled around me violently, confidently and encouragingly so that rage and revenge bubbled up fast from my belly.

Darren's palms were facing me wide and at shoulder height now, open and innocent and shrugging with a silent, placating gesture. His eyes were wide and resigned, shiny with the knowledge that dissuading me was impossible. When I shot him twice we were both expecting it.

There was a dog barking immediately. Lights blinked on steadily in the rectangular windows of homes lining the streets, whispering like quiet yellow inquiries in a timid, domestic voice. I looked at Darren and Timmy lying still on the ground with the blood growing under them like nonsensical shadows. The tire iron dropped with a dull, metallic thud that sounded somehow disproportionate and inadequate. And then I was running back to the house, pistol in hand with a mind full to the brim with nightmarish scenes of Jenny, Marcy and the boy being shot down in the living room.

In moments I was racing across the lawn of our home. Jenny was standing mournfully on the front porch. Her arms were wrapped maternally around Tyler, who stood in front of her soaked conspicuously in the implacable fear of youth, an alarming, untamed agitation that escaped easily from behind wayward brown hair. I stopped running just yards from where they stood, my first question - whether Tyler was safe - having died on my lips. The warm light spilling through the front door cast strange polygons against the porch and the lawn, punctuating Jenny's long, lean shadow and declaring her presence and apparent safety with an eerie, looming ambiguity.

"Henry," she said in a heartrending whisper, "we've been so worried about you."

Marcy and then Bill approached the door from behind, so that I was looking up the front steps at a back-lit semicircle of my peers. Jenny, my beautiful and caring girlfriend of four years, stood front and center with her arms encircling her boy Tyler. On her left stood Bill, looking the perfect picture of a man who hasn't just been shot in the gut, and on her right Bill's high strung, homemaker of a girlfriend Marcy.

A dog barked insistently from the neighbor's yard, and lights continued to wink on in the surrounding houses spreading menacingly like cancer from bedrooms to living rooms to front porches. I looked down at my hands, at my blood stained clothes, and at the light, menacing pistol I was gripping white knuckled.

"Jenny," I started, bewildered and feeling strangely like a doomed defendant looking sullenly up at a panel of wigged and powdered judges.

"Jenny... are ... are they still here?"

"Oh Henry," her voice came broken, sickeningly sweet like warm, trickling honey, "is who still here?"

I heard the dull thud of the pistol landing listlessly on the lawn, heard Jenny telling Tyler to go inside in a hurried whisper. Her voice came strained and wet, like she was just barely holding herself together.

"Henry," she managed, the words squeezing through strangling emotion, "where are Bill's friends? Where are Darren and Timmy?"

"Bill's Friends?" I echoed.

The dog was still barking in the house next door. I sensed the slow, persistent illumination of the neighborhood, a quiet, mounting accusation.

"You have to answer me, Henry."

I didn't answer her.

"Henry," said Bill, pushing his fingers through his hair like a fleshy comb, "everything's going to be alright. I've called Dr. Finch. He should be here soon. I need to tell you that, well, that he thought it best I call the police, too."

"The police?"

My voice came in an incredulous squeak, choked so that it didn't even sound like my own.

"Henry where are Bill's friends?" repeated Jenny, this time with a veneer of authority and rising, confused anger.

"I want to come inside," I said, still sounding pitiful and wondering at the childishness of my voice.

Jenny started to cry. She turned to the side and planted her forehead sluggishly on the frame of door, her body convulsing rhythmically and pathetically with deep, quiet sobs.

"I'm not sure that's a great idea."

It was Bill's voice, now.

"Marcy is a little afraid. Hell, Henry, we're all a little afraid to be perfectly honest. Let's just wait for the police, okay? Dr. Finch will be here, too."

I had sunk to my knees on the lawn and wasn't even sure who he was talking to. I knew the couch inside would be warm and comfortable, but somehow I was sure I could sleep right there in the lawn, too. The dog next door was still baying enthusiastically. I closed my eyes. When I heard sirens, faintly at first and then drawing steadily nearer, I decided to keep them closed forever. Maybe this, too, was just a terrible nightmare. Maybe this would all just fade away if I refused to open my eyes, if I pressed my body prost