Chapter 1: Coming Home ... to a Surprise!

Elyse Keaton stared at the shotgun pointed at her chest and didn’t know what to make of it. After all, she had walked into her kitchen thousands of times before but, before today, it had never contained a short, skinny black boy pointing a shotgun at her chest. Today, however, there was a black boy who was all dressed in red except for a pair of blue jeans and this child could not have been more than fourteen. His skin was as black as coal and, judging by the ugly scowl he wore on his face, he was not someone to be trifled with. Just inside the doorway, merely a few feet from Elyse, he stood with his feet slightly more than shoulder width apart and the toes of his red canvas tennis shoes pointing outwards. He also seemed to sight down the barrel as if, even at the short distance that separated them, he still needed to aim.

“Y’all home early” the boy said however, his words ran together with such bad Ebonics slang, that Elyse could barely understand just what he was saying. However, while her mind processed his words, she needed no time to understand the shotgun. The two black holes that made up the end closest to her looked as big as the Lincoln tunnel and the sight of it made the pretty liberal mom instinctively want to back up. This the gorgeous, blond forty-two-year-old now did, or tried to do, but then she was stopped and not only stopped but shoved forward further into the kitchen.

“No ... don’t move. They could cut all four of us down with one pull of the trigger.” Steven’s voice was harsh in her ear while his breath felt hot on her neck. From behind, her husband’s body pushed firmly against hers, not only preventing Elyse from retreating but instead kept pushing her forward, into the kitchen, and towards that terrifying gun.

“It’s alright” Steven now said from directly behind her his voice noticeably quavering.

“Take anything you want, just don’t hurt my family.” “Dad, you said we were going to stop for ice cre-.” eighteen-year-old Mallory stopped in mid-sentence and froze, just a few steps inside the doorway to the kitchen. The pretty young brunette stopped so suddenly that her fourteen-year-old brother, Alex, walked right into the back of her. For a moment it was comical, as all four members of the Keaton Family were mashed together like some sort of pair of back to front Siamese twins. Then it was deadly serious again and everyone was far from laughing, as the puny young gang-banger swung the menacing steel barrels of the shotgun towards the younger members of the family. While, up until that moment, it had been a fun night out at their local Catholic Church it now appeared destined to end in violence.

“Get in here.”

The boy holding the shotgun pointed it at each member of the family in turn and then at the empty space that stood to the left of the doorway indicating that he wanted them to come inside.

“Get in here or I’m going to splatter your guts all over the walls.”

At first no one moved and then it was Alex who possibly saved all their lives by shoving the other three members of his family forwards towards the space that the gunman had indicated. The youngest member of the Keaton family then shut behind him the door to the mud room and when he locked it, the sound of the brass bolt sliding into place would be a noise Elyse would always remember.

“We can’t run or they might shoot us.”

Though he was the youngest, the Keaton’s fourteen-year-old son seemed to have taken control of the situation and, though Elyse didn’t know why at the time, but his calm and steady mannerism made her all the more afraid.

“I ... I’m sure they’re just here for m-money and ... and maybe jewelry and, when they’ve got what they wanted, they’ll leave without hurting us.”

Neither of the two Keaton ladies moved as Alex stammered out his reassurance; instead, they both behaved as if they were frozen to the floor.

“What do you want?” Steven said angrily, the fear now gone from his voice.

“The four of you,” the gunman now said, “over by the kitchen table, other side of the center island. Move. Or I shoot one of you to prove I mean business.”

The boy now motioned to his right with the shotgun and, once again, it was only when Alex started shoving them in that direction did either his mom or his sister start to move. Hesitantly, Elyse and Mallory now shuffled nervously across the kitchen with Alex pushing at their backs and, only then, were they followed by Steven. “You ... you can have everything we own, just please ... don’t hurt my family!”

This latest plea came from Elyse and, while the fear that her voice contained was completely genuine there was something else underneath. It was bitterness and it was a resentment that a boy so young could have power over her.

I ... I never would have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. If it wasn’t happening to me. He ... he’s just a kid. He ... he’s not supposed to be in a position where he’s ordering adults around.

“Shit bitch,” the little gang-banger now said breaking Elyse’s train of thought, “you think I don’t know I can have everything I want? Why don’t you just shut the fuck up. If I’s needin’ to talk to someone, I’ll talk to a man. Women ain’t nothing but a hole to dump yo’ seed anyway. Only good for one thing and can’t get nothing without a man giving it to ‘em”.

Elyse was stunned. In her entire middle-class upbringing, no one had ever dared to speak to her like this for, while she may have been a wife and mother with deeply held traditional values, Elyse Keaton was also a proud and passionate feminist. Her eyes now bulged out in anger while her skin flushed red and hot. Steven’s eyes now glanced over sideways at his wife, and the 40-year-old married man thought he had never seen his wife this mad.

“Why you ... you ... you can’t say that to me! I ... why ... why how ... how dare you? That’s horrible. Women are just ... just as good as men. Equal in every way. They’re capable of doing anything a man can do. M-m-most things, in fact, women are better than men!” Her rage seeming to amuse him, the short little black boy now gave a small smile. His eyes were half lidded and dull, and this was not the reaction Elyse had expected but her anger still refused to die down.

“You think women every bit as good as men? You think they capable? Can do anything a man can do? That’s funny. That’s interestin’. Let’s ... that gives me an idea. Let’s see if you right. Let’s ... let’s see what a girl ... a girl on the verge of bein’ a woman such as your pretty young daughter here-”

The boy now swung the shotgun so that it was pointed at Mallory and the eighteen-year-old pretty brunette let out a terrified squeak in response.

“What do you think an eighteen-year-old girl like your daughter might want the most in the whole entire world?” the boy now asked, his eyes never leaving Elyse as he did so. “I ... I ... whuh-whuh-what? I ... I d-don’t know. T-to grow up, to have a family of her own and ... and y-yuh know t-tuh someday be a m-mom herself.”

Elyse’s anger was gone as the shotgun now being pointed at her daughter made the pretty blond-haired mother fully understand the danger that her outburst had caused. “Mmm ... yeah” the young black boy now said “but you are thinking too far in the future. I mean what do you think an eighteen-year-old girl like your daughter wants most in the world right now?”

“I ... I ... I don’t know. I ... to ... to get out of uh ... uh ... uh situation like this with ... without g-getting hurt obviously”.

The black boy holding the shotgun now smiled.

“I agree,” he now said. “Of course, there’s lots of ways in which to hurt a woman. Some are worse than others. I ... I would imagine, if what you say is true, that women aren’t just pathetic fuckholes who couldn’t ever achieve anything without a man straight up handing it to him then it should be no problem for this empowered young woman over here-”

The boy now paused to wave the business end of the shotgun over at Mallory for a moment before, once again, training it on Elyse.

“-to achieve what she wants when faced with a much smaller and younger male opponent. So, let’s see who is right, you or me. If we want to prove that women are just as capable as men, your opinion, instead of just being pathetic charity cases who can’t obtain anything not given to them by men ... then what sort of contest can we devise to find out which is true?”

The boy holding the shotgun now snapped his fingers, his eyes sparkling with delight as if he had just had a revelation.

“I know, here ... here’s what we’ll do. this will be our contest. I bet your young daughter, Mallory here, I bet what she’d most like to is to not have her little brother take off all her clothes, save maybe her socks, and then shave her pussy completely bald. I think that’s most in the world what a modest young woman like your daughter would most want.” The boy with the shotgun now seemed to take a moment and consider what he had just said.

“Mmmm ... maybe second most. No, maybe ... maybe third. In any event, I think that’s what we’ll use for our contest.”

The boy with the shotgun now turned his attention back to Alex

“Well get out there in the center of the kitchen floor boy. We need to get this little experiment about who’s right underway.”

The shotgun now swung towards Alex who immediately raised his hands and then walked forwards. The fourteen-year-old boy stepped away from the large wooden table that sat in the corner of the room and out into the large open space that was bordered by that table and the far wall of the kitchen.

“Wh-where-where-where-where d-do you want me to st-stand?”

Alex’s voice trembled with overwhelming fear, his eyes filling to overflowing with large and very wet tears.

“Right there is fine”, the boy with the shotgun now said and he pointed to a spot as far from the table as the open space allowed.

“Benny! Damon!” the boy called out again. “Go in the master bathroom. Dude in here has got a beard. Bring me whatever he uses to maintain it.”

There were some scuffling noises from the door beyond the kitchen and this was followed by the sound of footsteps and shouts back and forth. A minute later, two more boys, as black as the one in the kitchen and looking as if they might be related came through the swinging door from the living room. They were as short as the boy who held the shotgun and the blackness of their skin made the whiteness of their bulging, surprised eyes and their large grinning teeth stand out all the more sharply. In the hands of one of them were the tools Steven used to trim and maintain his beard.

“Come on sweetheart” the black boy now said pointing the shotgun at Mallory. With his other free arm, he curled his index finger towards here in the oh so familiar come here gesture.

“I ... what? You ... You can’t honestly expect that I ... I would ever ... participate in something ... something like this.”

Elyse could hear the fear in her eighteen-year-old daughter’s voice was tempered and, underneath that, was a powerful note of both revulsion and anger.