War torn

The little boy stood watching over the scenes in front of him while
bouncing his ball. His eyes registering the stories unfolding but his
brain not yet connecting them to the ideas inside. The messages were
being sent, but without the knowledge to associate them with there could
be no understanding. He saw the pictures and the sounds, he heard the
voices and saw the actions, but in the end his ball was more
interesting. He bounced it back and forth against the crumbling wall.

His babysitter watched the noisy box and she understood the messages.
Her mind having received the necessary information to associate the box
with the real world, the messages had been given meaning. She sat
huddled up on the old sofa with a blanket and a cup of coffee, weeping silently the noisy box affecting her emotionally. Tears
running down her face were left unhindered as she ignored them. Her hands
shook and the coffee in the mug began to shake. Her hands wrapped
around the cup so tightly that her knuckles had gone white. She put the
mug down on the coffee table, which was littered by magazines and fast
food wrappers. Coffee had run down the sides of the mug leaving a ring around an unknown celebrities face. Finally she
rubbed at her eyes wiping away some of the tears, not wanting the boy
to see how upset she was. She stood up slowly, still shaking, pulling
the blanket around her she walked across the room and out through the
dark hallway into the kitchen.

The boy took no notice of her, he had picked up a toy car and was
playing with it on the floor. Rolling it backwards and forwards making
car sounds, "vroom, vroom." He noticed the babysitter had been crying
and she had left him in the room alone, but all that meant nothing to him.
His hair drifted into his eyes, his mom wanted him to get it cut but he
didn't like the hairdressers and cried whenever she took him. The
hairdressers' wasn't a nice place. The man was scary, he had a hairy
face, and used to pat him on the head like a dog. He ran the car across
the room and under the table, outside bright lights flashed and he
could hear the sirens of the police cars.

The noises from outside were getting louder and he was wondering was going on
when the babysitter came back into the room. She swept him up into her
arms and wrapped him up in blankets. He didn't want to go to bed
now it was still early. She told him to shush and held him tightly, her
eyes were reddened from crying and her voice was soft and pleading, not angry and
terse. She carried him down stairs and into a dark room. Her tired old
frame struggling even with the weight of such a small boy. She was holding him in her arms when he heard the noises. The shouting of men outside and loud
noises like those that the noisy box some times made. They sounded like the sounds
from the noisy box when the sirens were on he naturally associated with flashing lights just like those he heard outside the house. He wrapped his arms around the woman's bony frame holding on tightly and worrying that she was so quiet. Normally
she would be chattering on but now she was silent as a mouse, he thought it strange that for once she actually was.

When the sound of someone pounding on the door upstairs came the
babysitter began crying again. The boy could feel her tears as they
tickled down onto his own face. Not knowing why he began to weep too,
silently like the woman. She held him more tightly and huddled
downstairs in the basement. They were both wrapped in the blanket now
and everything was black. Upstairs the noises of many people walking
around could be heard, the bang noise came and the
sound of the noisy box stopped. He could hear the sound of laughing
from the men upstairs, it sent shivers down his spine.

His uncle laughed when he came to visit, he could hear him when he was
in his room. His uncle would sometimes bring friends but they always
left quickly. His mother was always nice to his uncle he used to get
mad if the boy wasn't in bed when he arrived. His mother used to always
have marks after his uncle came like the ones he got from falling down
and hurting himself. She told the boy it didn't hurt and that there was
nothing wrong. He didn't understand yet, the nasty smell his uncle
brought with him, sometimes it was from a bottle, and sometimes he just
smelt of it. His uncle was like the men upstairs, the boy buried his
face into the babysitters shoulder and wept harder. She held the back
of his head and rocked back and forth.

He could hear words she was saying but they meant little to him. She
sounded like she was speaking to someone who was very near, but it
wasn't the boy. Upstairs the men laughed more and things were broken, he could hear the smash of glasses and the splintering of wood. The babysitter pulled herself out of the blankets and buried the boy deeper into them. He was almost smothered, the blankets covered his head and he couldn't see, for a moment he wasn't sure he could breathe. The babysitter told him to be quiet and not to move, no matter what. She said his mom would be home soon and he was to go to sleep, just like if his uncle came to visit, she said. The boy couldn't remember the babysitter ever meeting his uncle but he understood.

The babysitter reached out for the stairs and she spread her hands in
front of her searching the basement. Eventually her hands came to rest
on a hard wooden surface. As her hands explored the wood she tried to
see what was in front of her. She knew what she was looking for but not
how to get it. Eventually she found a lock on the wood in front of her
it was old and brittle. With what little strength she could manage she
gave a swift tug on the lock it came off in her hands and a door swung
out towards her. She pulled it open and stepped forward again searching
with her hands until she found something. It was cold and shiny in her
hands but the grip felt well worn and familiar.

Her mind went back to the days when her late husband had shown her how
to use such a device. He had told her they were troubling times it
never hurt to be prepared. She never took his words seriously and
always thought he was worrying over nothing. Now she wept because he
was gone. Killed by men like those upstairs. She wept because he was
better than they were, better than ten of them. She wept because he
wasn't near and because he couldn't help. His grip would of held this
tool and he would of stood before these men and fought them all to
protect her. Now she could only protect herself and a boy who didn't
understand what was happening. If only she thought, if only her husband
was alive they would be somewhere else and her young friends would be
long gone from this place. The boy and his mother would not have to
live with that ogre visiting who called himself Uncle. She had attacked
the man once for the things he did but he was bigger and stronger than
she was. Her husband would of destroyed such a man she thought. She
stared at her hands and checked the barrel of the weapon to see if it
was loaded. It was six bullets she thought. Her husband had said if you
need more than six you are already dead. Her husband had told her how
to protect herself but this time she wasn't trying to stay alive, she was going to join her husband. This time she was going to save a boy and avenge her husband's death, she was going to make a small part of the world a better place.

She held on to the shiny gun in her hand, she knew it would work, it had
been kept clean and dry, her husband had kept it airtight from the world
telling her that it would never fail her. She walked to the stairs and
gripped the rotten old bannister. As she walked upstairs she
heard the stairs creak and caught her breath staying still for a
second. The noise upstairs however didn't falter and she decided there
was no chance of anyone noticing her approach. The men in the room
above were murderers and villains. She had seen them on the television
killing hundreds of her family and friends. She knew they had massacred
thousands of men and women who had stood in her way.

When she burst through the door into the room where she and the boy had sat not long ago there were men either stood or lying in a circle. Three of them were on the floor bleeding, a medical man was bandaging them up and two men were laughing
and weeping in a corner. When she burst into the room she had pointed
her weapon at the nearest one and looked into his eyes. His were as
red as hers from crying, every man in the room had tears running down
his face and not one of them begged or pleaded with her. Bullets
flashed through the window and one of the men fell to the floor without making a sound. For a moment she looked at the weapon in her hand, she was shaking so much she probably couldn't have even pulled the trigger.

Before her stood her enemies and downstairs a boy hid in blankets.
The soldiers in front of her were old and young, the youngest could barely grow a beard, he was the closest to death. They were starved and mostly dying
from their injuries. The woman looked at them and they said nothing. When she
turned to go downstairs the men politely closed the door behind her,
and she waited in the basement for them to leave.