“Maybe next time you should leave us alone,” Daniel retorts.
“Feisty,” he says. “Anyway, I thought I should warn you that Coreno is going to be home to a new base of mine, and anyone left here will be working for me.”
“And what makes you think you can do that?” Daniel asks.
“Everybody, everywhere,” Chris says like it should be obvious. “Wait a minute, I thought you were dead.”
“Aw, did you miss me?” Daniel asks sarcastically.
“It will only make it more fun to kill you,” he says.
“Do you have a gun on you?” I whisper to Kyle.
“No,” he whispers back. “But there’s one in Father’s office. I’ll go get it.” He tiptoes around me and back into the office. I watch Kyle disappear around the corner and suddenly I feel alone. His presence was very comforting.
Daniel places his hand on his hip and moves it slightly back. He slips his hand into a pocket on the side of his pants near his waistline. Something metal and shiny gleams from inside. His hand lingers on the handle of the shiny object for a little while as Chris rambles.
“… I plan to mind control everyone left on this planet, use them for my army, complete my Take Over stage,” Chris says with an evil grin. “And speaking of complete Take Over, you look just like your mother.” His smile grows wider.
Daniel’s face turns colder, stonier. He whips the shiny object—a 22t revolver gun—and aims it at Chris’s chest. He fires a bullet in one smooth motion. Excitement courses through me, until I see the bullet ricochet off Chris’s chest and hit Daniel in his lower shoulder. He falls back in pain, gripping his shoulder where the bullet pierced him.
“What?” I whisper to myself. Then I remember a similar situation. Back in the Corps’ headquarters in Chris’s office. Kelton aimed his gun at Chris’s head because he knew that was the only spot that a bullet could damage.
“Here,” Kyle whispers, returning to my left. He hands me the gun and I position myself, ready to shoot. Chris starts walking toward Daniel, his henchmen following close behind.
“You’re pathetic, just like your mother,” Chris spits. He kicks Daniel in his side, causing him to let out a painful groan. Chris’s eyes are wild as he kicks him on his other side.
I stand up slowly, aiming my gun at Chris’s head. I wrap my free hand around the one with the gun to steady myself. I pop the safety out of place and cock the gun. It gives enough noise to distract Chris. He turns his head toward me. “That’s enough,” I say fiercely.
He throws his head back and cackles like the evil maniac he is. Without really thinking, I aim my gun lower and shoot him in the foot. His laughter is immediately replaced with a scream. I readjust my aim so the barrel of the gun faces his head again. This time, he takes things more seriously.
“You think you’re so special,” he says in a taunting manner. He takes a step forward and winces. “Well, I hate to be the one to break it to you sweetheart, but you aren’t. And you never will be.”
“Hey!” Daniel says from the floor. He turns over so his body is facing me and looks up at Chris. “Don’t talk to her that way. You’re-”
One of Chris’s henchmen kicks Daniel again and he rolls to the side, shaking from the pain.
“If you touch him one more time, I’m going to shoot you,” I say.
“I bet you wouldn’t,” he says tauntingly. He pulls a gun out of his back pocket and points it at Daniel. “Shoot me, and he dies.”
And here we are again, at a stalemate. No one moves, no one breathes. If I lower my gun, I’m too vulnerable. If I keep it pointed on him much longer, he’ll shoot Daniel. It’s then that I realize how much I hate dilemmas.
Just when I feel like I’m running out of time, someone walks through the front door of the house. Everyone turns their attention in the direction of the sound. My mother stands at the door, hands on her hips. She no longer wears the beautiful red dress from before. Instead, she wears a form-fitting black uniform with a silver waistband. She looks amazing, with her long hair pulled back and shiny heeled shoes.
“Darling,” Chris coos. “I thought I told you to stay home.”
“I was bored,” she says, providing proof to her statement in her tone. “And I wanted to join the fight.”
“Well, in that case,” Chris says. He pulls the remote he uses to control her out of his pocket, aims it at her, and presses a button. She pulls a revolver out from behind her and shoots, not even bothering to aim. The sound bounces off the walls, piercing my eardrum.
I scream and duck to the floor, Kyle following my lead. Chris presses another button and she starts marching toward us. She fires again, this time lower, and I cover my head with my hands. I turn to look at Daniel, who is grimacing so much and losing lots of blood. I start to think he won’t make it.
“Mother!” Kyle screams from behind me.
She doesn’t give him a second thought as she fires again. The window behind us shatters into a thousand pieces. Chris presses another button and it finally hits me: if the remote controls my mother, and someone controls the remote, then whoever is holding the remote controls my mother. I feel as though I’m the only one who didn’t catch that the first time.
“Kyle,” I say frantically. “Try to get the remote from Chris.”
Suddenly, a gunshot. From upstairs. I turn my head in the direction of the staircase, and there stands my father, a gun in his right hand, aimed at my mother. At first I think he has shot and possibly killed her, but she doesn’t fall forward. Instead she screams and grips the back of her arm.
Maybe my father missed. But I don’t believe that to be the case. He never liked to shoot guns, but he always had some of the best aim. He told me once that when I got older, he would teach me how to use a gun properly. That never happened, but Daniel did give me a brief lesson after I learned how to fly a ship.
“I’m teaching you the basics of the two most important things known to this job,” he had told me once. “To be a pilot, you need to know how to fly. And every once in a while you might need to use a gun. I think I’m killing two birds with one stone here.” I guess he was right.
I focus my attention back to the scene in front of me. My mother is kneeling on the ground, grasping her arm. One of the guards moves to her side stiffly and applies pressure to the wound. The other guard runs toward my father, his gun pointed straight for my father’s head. Before he can fire a shot, I aim my gun at the guard’s head and fire. He stops mid-step and crumbles to the ground.
Chris goes into a fit of rage. He runs toward me, his gun outstretched. He fires once, narrowly missing me to the left of my left ear. I hear a vase shatter behind me. Chris pulls the trigger again, but nothing comes out of the barrel. He realizes this and throws the gun to the ground.
“You have been a pain in my side since the moment you walked into my building!” Chris shouts at me. He lunges forward, swinging his right arm against my jaw. I fall to the ground, and the next thing I know, Chris is hitting my face and jabbing my sides.
My whole body aches and I feel weak against his constant aggressiveness. He kicks my side and back and I roll into a ball, clutching my stomach. At one point, Kyle punches Chris in the jaw, which distracts him long enough for me to regain some composure.
Chris kicks Kyle in the stomach and he falls against the wall. I hear a crack, and I’m guessing it’s his rib cage. He clutches at his abdomen and shrinks against the wall, crying to himself. I retaliate by kicking the back of Chris’s knee in hard and he falls to the ground kneeling. My fist then finds his head, and through the pain, Kyle’s leg finds his hip. The next time I go to punch him, he grabs my wrist and bends it back.
“Ow!” I cry and I try to pull free. Kyle swings his arm down, connecting with the inside of Chris’s elbow, breaking his grip on me. I stumble backward, holding my wrist. It’s at this time that my father appears in the hallway, kicking Chris in the back and buying us some time.
My father, being one of the stron
gest people I know, puts Chris in a choke hold and pins his arms behind his back. Chris, being more mentally tough if anything, wriggles in my father’s grasp, but he has an iron lock.
“You will pay for what you did to my wife,” my father says, his voice stern but smooth.
“Think again,” Chris says snarkily. He turns to face the door and five more guards appear. My heart sinks.
Three of the guards storm over to my father and pull him away from Chris. They lock his arms behind his back and hold him as he tries to break free. I try to run to my father, but Chris motions another guard over and he pins my arms together behind my back. This kills my wrist and I let out a whimper. But I stop myself from full out crying. This is not the time to show weakness.
I grit my teeth and try breaking free again. Chris motions for the other guard to come over and help contain me. I examine the scene in front of me. Daniel is still on the floor, bleeding immensely from his shoulder wound. His face is pale and he looks frozen. Tears start to take shape on my lower eyelid and a lump forms in my throat. Despite me believing he was dead twice, watching him slowly fade away is a thousand times worse. I turn away to keep from crying.
My father doesn’t struggle against the guards anymore. He’s not tired, in fact he has more determination in his eyes than I’ve ever seen before. I can tell he’s plotting something in his head.
My mother stands a few feet behind him, a cloth wrapped around her arm where the bullet hit her. I notice that it’s her shooting arm that’s wounded and I smile slightly to myself. I know my father purposely aimed there so she couldn’t hurt anyone but also because I know he believes she’s still somewhere inside her body. She just needs to be reprogrammed.
Kyle sits on the ground, looking defeated and tired. His face is cut and bloody but I don’t think he notices. Instead, his eyes are focused on something in front of him. Chris’s side pocket. And I know exactly what’s inside of it.
Kyle looks over at me and I give him the smallest of nods. He gives me the smallest of smiles in return and shifts slightly. With all of the guards’ gazes fixed on us, it’ll be hard for him to do much. But he’s fast. Kyle shifts again, and this time, he’s sitting in the perfect position to spring up and grab the remote. He looks at me one more time; I give him a wink this time and before I know it, he’s standing up. He moves so fast Chris doesn’t know what happened until it’s too late.
Kyle slips the remote out of Chris’s pocket faster than he can react. The guards are so distracted with trying to contain Kyle that I stomp on my guard’s foot, elbow him in the gut, and escape from his grasp. He claws at me, trying to regain his hold on me, but I’m too quick. I stand next to Kyle as he frantically pushes buttons.
My father also manages to escape and ends up punching one guard in the stomach and fistfights the other two, trying to hold them off. My heart races. Chris swings his arm and connects with my jaw. This time, though, I’m too numb to really notice, and the blow didn’t hurt as much as it did last time.
Kyle still frantically tries to push buttons on the remote, trying multiple different combinations. Nothing seems to work. I’m starting to grow worried that we may never get our mother back, but I can’t give up hope now.
“There’s no off switch, bud,” Chris says, cackling.
I let the information sink in. My mother might be an evil mindless drone the rest of her life. I can’t let that happen though. I love my mother. She raised me when my father wasn’t here, and even when he was. She taught me so many things in life. It’s this thought, these memories, that keeps me fighting. I will get her back.
By now my knuckles have turned a dark shade of purple, but I knee Chris in the stomach really hard anyway, and he stumbles back a little, giving me time to hit him in the head and knee him again. It slows him down for a bit before one of his guards tackles me to the ground. I try gasping for breath but I can’t. With the wind knocked out of me, it’s hard to move or fight back.
I see my father out of the corner of my eye, fighting for his life. He’s running out of steam and I can tell he won’t be able to fend them off for much longer. Kyle runs around the furniture, trying to dodge one of the guards’ attacks. He holds the remote in his hand, still pressing buttons. Maybe he thinks Chris is lying or something.
The guard throws a punch at Kyle, who easily dodges it. However, the guard gets enough momentum to swing a punch again, this time, knocking the remote out of Kyle’s hand and onto the ground.
“Kyle!” a voice says to the left of me. It’s so angelic and smooth and so familiar. I turn to the sound of the voice, wondering who it is. And then I see her. The real her. My mother. No longer a mindless machine but my actual, human mother. She looks at Kyle, a softness in her eyes, like the look a mother gives her newborn child.
I can tell Kyle’s caught up in the moment, and when I look around, everyone else is too. Everyone wears a different expression on their face: Chris looks horrified, my father is in awe, and the guards just stand motionless. My expression is probably somewhere along the lines of confused. How did she turn back to normal? Is this Chris’s doing? My mind races with a hundred different questions, but somehow my thoughts all swirl around one thing: the remote.
I glance over at it. It’s laying right-side up, a red light that I’ve never seen before blinking at the top. All of the sudden, my mother starts jolting fast, like she’s being electrocuted, and then her face goes stark and she’s back to being a machine. Chris sighs a sigh of relief and turns quickly to Kyle.
“What did you do?” he screams.
“N-nothing,” Kyle stammers. “Your guard is the one who knocked it out of my hand and-”
“You what?” Chris screams at the guard.
I don’t hear his response. My mind is busy working things out. The remote fell out of Kyle’s hand and hit the ground. Then my mother was back. Maybe the impact from the floor on the remote jostled something loose. Only one way to find out.
I hit the guard closest to me in the stomach, just long enough for me to get away. I run over to the remote and grab it. I stand up, hold the remote above my head, and get ready to smash it against the ground. Before I get the chance, a gun cocks.
“Drop it,” Chris says, “and your family dies.”
“I don’t trust you,” I say, the remote still above my head. “I don’t think you’ll stay true to your word. And even if you did, Coreno would be under your control anyway, so what’s the point?”
“Your family’s lives are on the line. I don’t think you quite understand what’s going on here,” Chris says.
“You’re probably right,” I say nonchalantly. “I probably don’t. But it’s like I once said, you’re a bad man set out to do bad things, and I won’t let that happen.”
With all my force and every last ounce of strength I have left in me, I throw the remote at the ground as hard and fast as I can, hoping it might break into a million little pieces. It hits the ground, sending tons of shards and wires all over the room. The box that contained the battery splits into two and the battery cracks.
Chris looks from me to the broken pieces of his remote and back to me in utter shock. Then anger takes over and he pulls out his gun again and aims it at my mother. A loud bang bounces off the walls and I shut my eyes, not wanting to see my mother die. I don’t want to join the club of kids who have watched their mothers die in front of them and they weren’t able to do anything.
I engrain a picture of my mother into my mind. She’s beautiful, her long hair flowing down her back, her eyes sparkling. That’s how she looked the day she married my father. One of my favorite memories I have of her was when I was about ten years old. She took me into her room one night after putting Kyle to bed.
“Shhhh,” she whispered then. “There’s something I want to show you.” She went into her closet and brought out a picture of her and my father on their wedding day. She looked gorgeous, and I always loved the dress she wore. She looked so happy with my father’s arms wrapped
around her and his lips brushing her cheek. She smiled the biggest smile I had ever seen.
“Wow,” was all I could say. She had another picture of them on their wedding day downstairs, but she wasn’t smiling in that one. In fact, neither of them were. But that was the picture she showed everyone who came by.
“This picture is special to me,” she said. “I don’t want it to leave my room. Do you understand?”
I nodded my head, but I didn’t exactly understand why she didn’t want it to leave her room. So I asked. “Why don’t you want the picture of you being happy out for everyone to see?”
“Because,” she said and didn’t elaborate. I knew better than to push the subject so I gave her a kiss goodnight and left the room. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t sleep that night. I knew there had to be some reason why that picture had to stay in her room.
One day, I went into her room and took the picture out of her closet to examine it. My mother came into the room a little later and saw me staring at it. “I don’t want that moment ruined,” she said.
“What?” I asked, not sure I heard her correctly.
“I leave that picture in this room because I don’t want that moment to be ruined,” she explained. “It’s very personal to me, and if I let everyone else see it, they might give their opinions and change my view of that day. That was the happiest day of my life. When you get married someday, you’ll understand what I mean.”
With that, she left the room. I didn’t understand what she meant at the time, but now that I’m older, I’m starting to understand. You cherish the moments that make you the most happy and you don’t let anyone take them away from you. Because that’s when they have power over you.
I open my eyes, not exactly sure how long has gone by since the gunshot. I examine the room, starting from my left and panning to my right. My father stands still, gaping. Kyle stands still too, but he doesn’t look upset. In fact, he wears an enormous grin on his face. I scan the room again and find my mother staring at the ground, at Chris.
Chris lies on the floor, blood pooling around him. His eyes are closed, his body distorted, and his face pale. There’s no rise and fall of his chest. He’s dead. And this time, I’m pretty sure it’s for real.
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