Will the Flashlights Pause?

by Odin Hartshorn Halvorson

Alice held the little patched unicorn close to her small chest and screwed her eyes tight shut against the sound of guns. The big guns sounded like giants dancing to a thunderous beat. The little ones were crackles like a smoker’s laughter. She wanted them all to stop. But they went on... and on...

Uni had come to her when she turned five and, in the five years since then, the little stuffed animal had become Alice’s closest companion. He grew more stained and worn as time passed; he lost a bead eye and gained a creamy button; he became personalized to the moments of her life in a thousand little ways. He was hers now, never mind that she had stolen him away from the daycare center where they had first met, much to the amusement of her mother. Now, as the world lay blanketed by the sounds of war, he was Alice’s whole world.

The apartment complex rumbled with a furious crescendo in the distance, like the final moments of a fireworks display on the 4th of July. Then silence, of a sort. Cracks and pops continued, but the giants’ feet were still.

Alice’s parents had warned her against looking out the window, but she couldn’t keep from doing it. She pulled the corner of the shutter back and peered out. The city’s dark body spread out in the night, lit only by points of flame where cars or buildings burned. Her parents had been gone for hours, now.

A bang from outside the apartment and down the hall made Alice jump. Mom and Dad? No, they wouldn’t make that much noise. Fear climbed up her shoulders, and she pulled Uni close again.

Across the apartment’s blacked-out landscape of a tatty pastel couch and chairs; down the hall from the small room with the bookshelves full of volumes that her parents made sure never to let the neighbors see, muffled voices drifted through the locked front door. In the relative silence, Alice could just make them out as they approached and stopped outside.

“This the one?”

“Uh, thirteen-twenty. Yeah.”

“Pop it.”

Silence for a moment. Then, a much louder bang and the door burst open in a flash of light and a puff of smoke. Alice tumbled for cover behind the couch.

A flashlight beam cut across the hall. “Gotta be kidding! Look at those books!”

“Definitely part of the Underground.”

“Well, they’re not here now.”

“Maybe. Come on. Intel said they have a kid.”

“Oh... Right.”

Bootsteps moved softly into the main room. Flashlight beams picked the shadows apart, and Alice squeezed herself down into a ball. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere to run. In her hands, Uni’s button eye peered up at her. As the light from a flashlight beam passed overhead, the shadow across that button almost seemed to make the stuffed animal wink.

“Nothing in the bedrooms,” came a voice a little distantly.

“Hmm.”

Alice almost screamed at the sound. The noise had come from right next to the couch. A shadow stood there and his flashlight turned...

The beam swept across Alice and barely seemed to pause, then shifted back away. “Um... nope. Nothing here, either.”

“Right.” The other voice returned to the room sounding annoyed. “Looks like they got her out. Damn. I hate it when they get away.”

“Me, too. Do you think they took Beagle Avenue? The patrols said something about an enemy presence that way, didn’t they?”

“Yeah, probably. We’d better go. The Fifth Battalion is falling back to Monument Square.”

“Yeah.”

The boots shifted, the flashlights once more swung across the room. Shadows moved in stark vertical lines around the edges of Alice’s hiding place. Then the bootsteps turned and faded and were gone.

Alice’s breath returned. With it came a full-body shudder and the hot prickle of tears. But, in her arms, Uni’s stitched and fuzzy body comforted her. And, as she looked down at the little button eye, Alice remembered the first flashlight man’s words: Beagle Avenue.

She thought she knew where that was: just a little way down from the apartment, near the park. And maybe her parents really were there. Or, if not, maybe someone there would help her find them. As long as the men with the flashlights feared them, that seemed like the right place to be.

Alice slipped out of the apartment complex and into the night where stars sparkled and distant guns crackled, and the unicorn she held felt warm and alive in her arms.

Proceed to Challenge 1093...