Through Fearful Eyes

Darkness loomed over the towering structure, yet deep within a light pieced that darkness, offering the unknown, the nameless, refuge. Thin eyes within an ever tanned frame looked out into the lingering shadows.

That light, that infringing glow, should not have been there. Those fearful eyes looked to and fro, trying with all speed to discern the catalyst to their sudden appearance. While the little eyes could not find what they so desperately searched for, they did find the form of a man so very familiar to them. This man was the father of the one who wore these eyes, and the young girl, so lost and fearful, was swept over by a welcoming sense of comfort and safety. This was short lived however, for her father quickly grabbing her by the arm, an apprehensive look splayed clearly across his face, pulled her swiftly along the open path of the office, past countless plastic keeps and walls and to the even more intimidating form of a massive, heavy door.

“Foolish girl! I told you not to follow me. You too are now surely doomed.”

Her heart had sunk; she had not known what to think. But then of course what could a girl, aged only ten, in a country she had never before seen, and in a city so very unwelcoming, have ever known what to do.

When getting off the boat the many men in blue had tried to take her from her father, screaming undecipherable blurbs at both them and the many others who had traveled with them. There, not willing to let any harm come to his daughter, she had watched her father kill a man. The other men in blue, clearly outraged by her father’s actions in killing their cohort, had then tried to hurt them, but they ran; and her father had rushed away from her. She couldn’t understand why he would leave her until while hiding behind a garbage can in a dark alley, she saw the blue men chase after her father. She knew he had led them away from her. But she had followed him, had pushed her legs as hard as she knew, to keep up, and when her father had gotten away and found refuge in a large building, she too entered. Sadly she was not wise enough to avoid the many sensors; she had not the experience to halt the activation of the many silent alarms…and so had doomed them both.

He pulled her behind him as they made their way down the stairs. Her father only hopped that they could leave this place behind before the men in blue could find them again. As they stepped off the last of the many, many stairs and opened the stair well door, he knew their folly. A full team, no longer blue, but wearing a dark shade of night, the shadowed colour of death, stormed through the foyer’s main doors.

‘NYPD S.W.A.T.’ was clear on the front of each man’s vest, and they came on with unbridled determination. They had lost one of their own; there was no mercy in their hearts. There would be no escape.

Knowing that his life was forfeit, he now prayed only to save his daughter. Turning quickly, he shoved her back into stairwell’s open doorway.

A loud, angry voice called at him “NYPD, don’t move!”

He could not understand a word of it, and fearing as only a father could for his daughter, he slammed the door on his child, seeing eyes so filled with terror that his heart all but broke. “I love you always.” he said with a resigned sigh as he turned about to face the villains about to kill him. He would die with honour.

Pushing a girl into the stairwell had put them on their guard. Slamming the door had placed fingers on hair-like triggers. Turning around had been too much. As the man spun around, his dark hair flying across his face, the team simultaneously let loose a barrage that no man could ever have hopped to survive. Projectiles of solid metal hit the man, scores of them; punching holes in his flesh and puncturing organs. As they tore through him, blood spewing from his shredded body, the very bone and sinew hidden from sight shattered and gave way, and the man slipped to the ground and lay very still. The cold sense of eerie death wafted from him, filling the hearts of his killers.

Not one man there felt the taste of sweet revenge as they heard the screaming and crying of a young girl. They could taste only the sickening phlegm that came to rise in each one of their throats, the kind that comes from the understanding that you just orphaned a child.

She cried, tears ran freely, for, for all her ignorance, she knew exactly what had happened to her father. The door opened, and all she saw was a dark looming figure reaching for her as the building’s lights, now her only comfort, finally went out.