Hello Beautiful!!

PART TWO- HOME

"Francine, did you invite any friends over for your birthday?" My mom asked.
"No, I didn't. You know I'm not close enough to anyone at school to want to invite them."
"And besides, it's past ten p.m, if I even had anyone to invite, I would have invited them in the afternoon or the early evening," I said logically.
"Right, makes sense. So, who could it be?" She muttered under her breath but was still loud enough for me to catch up on.
Out of the blue, my brother let out a groan that made me jump in a bit of a fright.
"What? You almost scared me!" I chided.
"You're such a baby, Fran. You know what? I'm going to be a man and check out who's at the door. You both are always getting scared for no reason," Eze rolled his eyes as he got up and began making his way to the door.
"Yes, thank you oh chivalrous alpha male for being the leader of us poor, scared damsels in distress!" I sarcastically retorted at his retreating figure.
"Why did he have to turn twelve again? I miss when he was five and looked up to me as if I were some sort of goddess," I complained to my mom, chuckling a bit as I was thrown back into a memory of our life in Nigeria when my father was still alive.
My mother's response pulled me out of my pleasant memory of home.
"He has grown up so much, hasn't he? He reminds me of your father so much," She said, her voice cracking as she tried choking back a sob.
My mom always tended to dissolve into tears whenever she remembered a fond memory of my dad or saw either my brother or me doing something that remotely reminded her of him.
My memories of him were not as vibrant as I would have liked them to be, but there were moments that I would never be able to forget.
"Oh, mom..." I sighed, taking her hand in mine.
That soft moment was interrupted by a whimper coming from the direction of the door.
"Did Eze find a stray dog or what?" I wondered.
I turned my neck to look but my vision was obstructed by the giant bookshelf my mom decided to have constructed right behind the dining table.
My mom's alarmed cry testified that she had a better view of what was going on at the front door than I did.
"Blood of Jesus Christ!" She screamed.
Her urgency pushed me to stand and inspect whatever it was that was going on.
Immediately, I understood why she had screamed.
My brother had a gun pointed at his forehead.
"What the hell?" I mumbled in fear. My throat closed. Fear had taken a hold of me and chilled me to the spot I stood on.
Everything was like a fever dream. My mom rushed to the door, stopping in her tracks when the unknown assailant who was wearing a black ski mask and an all-black outfit, brought his hand down pulled my brother to him, held him in a tight neck lock, and pointed the gun at him again, this time, at his left temple.
"Please, please don't hurt my son. I'm begging you. Please let him go. He's just a boy. Please!" My mom's pleading voice didn't fully register in my head.
I was rooted to the ground. I couldn't bring my legs to move or my throat to produce any sound, talk less of words.
It wasn't until three more masked men wearing the same outfit as the first, poured through the front door and pointed their guns at my mom, that I snapped out of the mental grip that fear had on me.
My feet moved quickly, pushing my mother behind me and planting myself in front of her in a defensive stance.
I held out one hand toward them while stretching the other hand back to stop my mom from trying to drag me behind her.
"Look, you can shoot me if you want, you can take anything you came here to take but let my brother go. He's just a child for fuck's sake!" I cursed, trying to appeal to their humanity if they had any.
"I see you're not so much of a coward anymore, young miss. What are you, your family's Amazonian warrior?" He said, thinking he must have cracked such a hilarious joke.
By the boisterous laughter of his masked peers, they seemed to share in his twisted humor.
"Just let him go," I demanded, lifting my chin in defiance as I tried to exude the kind of power and confidence that action movie heroines gave out.
I hoped that they would not be able to smell my fear that I had tried to bury behind a rather weak wall of bricks.
My mom tried getting around my left side to stand in front of me but I stood my ground and refused to budge.
"Mom, stay behind me," I ordered.
In a normal situation without the presence of these intruders, my mom would smack me for daring to give her orders.
But at that moment, it was neither the time to smack me nor the time to bicker about who was supposed to be protecting who.
All that mattered was getting my brother back into our arms and these intruders out of our house.
I noticed the intruder who was holding my brother at gunpoint, tilt his head to the side, and one of them who appeared to have the body build of a scrawny teenager got the message and climbed up the stairs where our rooms were.
Instantly, I recalled that I had left my mom's wallet containing cash and both her debit and credit cards right on her bedside table after she had sent me to take out fifty pounds from it to go to the store to purchase some items earlier in the day.
The scrawny teenage robber as I mentally decided to address him, would not even need to search for it.
All he might want to search for were valuables like pieces of jewelry, bags, or whatever.
It infuriated me that this gang of robbers, these miscreants, and uncouth rogues would be taking everything my mom had worked for since we moved here.
However, there was nothing I could do about it as we were all at gunpoint and I couldn't let my anger push forth as it might break my confident facade.
I prayed internally for God to protect my brother whose eyes were close to bulging with the amount of fear and distress I was sure he was feeling.
My mom held my hand tightly as she kept pleading for the blood of Jesus like she always did whenever there was any sort of danger or inconvenience.
A short while later, the scrawny teenage robber came pounding down the stairs, armed with his gun in one hand and my mother's wallet in the other.
"Was that all you could find?! How many rooms did you search, you bloody bastard?" The guy who held my brother spat. I assumed he was the leader.
"I searched the biggest room and found the wallet. It is full of cash and cards so I just took it. That's why we came here, is it not bruv? For only the money?" The scrawny teenage robber replied timidly.
"Oh, bloody hell. What was I thinking bringing a stupid kid along?" The leader sighed ruefully.
"You! Go upstairs. You know what to do," He instructed his other colleague who had muscles like a champion bodybuilder.
"And you, take this blubbering child away from me," He said, a disgusted look on his face as my brother began to cry.
He shoved him to the scrawny teenage robber who clumsily caught him and he began to stalk towards me.
I gulped down the fear that threatened to crawl its way up my throat. I felt my mother pull me back slowly as she took steps backward.
Abruptly, she stopped.
Tearing my eyes away from the advancing figure in front of me, I swiveled my neck to find out why she had stopped suddenly.
It was just as I had feared. The last of the robbers with a basic physique had a gun pointed to the back of her head.
My mom was sweating profusely, tears streamed from her tightly shut eyelids, and her throat bobbed up and down as she visibly kept swallowing.
Without warning, a gloved hand wrapped around my elbow and it took everything in me not to recoil.
My back straightened even further than it was before as I felt a gun pressing into my back, where my kidney should be.