Taken

Chapter Eleven--HAVEN

Since I was in Denny’s jacket, she couldn’t hear me crying.

          The snow made me sad, the snow reminded me of Mommy.  Daddy told me when she left that the snow was just a fact of life and nothing would happen but he was wrong.  It’s what killed Mommy and Daddy.  She went out to get water from the stream, but never came back.  The snow was thick and Daddy called it a blizzard.  He said she was coming, but when he left, too, he didn’t come back either.  That was when I was five. 

          It was a few days when Grandmother arrived.  She was carrying a shot gun  and a big suitcase and I thought she looked funny.  She had a big hat on and a long white coat, as white as the snow, and she brought her kitty with her.  She said she was going to live with me for a while.  If I would have been my old self, I would have been happy. 

          I had felt really old when I used the phone to call her.  I had told her Daddy and Mommy had gone into the woods and never came back and she said she would come as soon as the snow stopped.  On the days before she came I wasn’t hungry, but I forced myself to eat at least cereal because I knew it was bad for me if I didn’t.

          So that was why the snow was scaring me.  I liked Jeremiah, even though he wasn’t very nice sometimes. I didn’t want the same thing to happen to him.

-

          The day Jeremiah and Denny found me, I was scared. 

          Grandmother had got me up early so I could do my homework before she drove me to the bus stop.  She made her famous pancakes and drenched them with syrup, just how I liked it.  I was having troubles with my addition and so she was helping me, but then two big men busted down our door and I screamed.

          The wind blew my homework off the table and Grandmother told me to run and go hide with Louise.  Louise was her shotgun, the one she had taught me to use only a week before.  That was another way she was crazy, but I still loved her.

          Anyways, I was sitting in there and I was waiting and waiting.  I heard a lot of sounds and yelling and my Grandmother was talking.  I pressed my ear to the door and listened and she was talking like she knew the men.  “How dare you boys scare me like that.  You could have given me a heart attack! Kevin, get out of those pancakes!”

          “Sorry ma’am.”

          “What’s your business with me?”

          “General wants to know your secrets.  He says you have stuff we could use.”

          “That I do.  But who said I want to give it to him?”

          “We have come to take you.  You don’t have a choice.”

          I heard the chairs scrape against the floor.  I remember how Mommy hated that.  She said it messed up the floors and I felt like going and giving those men a piece of my mind.  They couldn’t take my Grandmother either.

          Only when I tried to opened the door it was locked.  It was the only room in the house that locked from the outside and I suddenly started to panic.  The window was too hard to open, and as I heard my Grandmother yell and struggle and glass was shattering and I started to cry.  I hated they were doing this. They couldn’t take her. 

          I heard the squeal of tires and I knew it was over.  I was by myself and I was hungry because I didn’t even touch my pancakes.  I was worrying about my homework and getting it done.  I wondered if Mrs. Hinton, my teacher, would be wondering where I was.

          I could imagine her going down her roll sheet, asking for me, and my best friend, Jade, telling her I was gone.  I couldn’t help it, I thought, I couldn’t get to school.  Would I get in trouble?

          Then I heard people in the house and I got Louise down from its spot.  It was heavy in my hands and so I leaned against the wall.  The footsteps were getting closer, only when the door was kicked in, it wasn’t the soldiers, and I felt really bad for shooting the gun.  Because I shattered Mommy’s favorite mirror.