4

Gunther, still age 4

“Wait!” Gunther was sitting on her knees facing backward through the rear window. She had learned, over a year ago,  how to remove herself from her carseat, and how to put herself back in it.

Gunther’s mother slowed down. “It’s not important. None of what she had to say was real. Now put yourself back in your carseat! You’re going to kill yourself if we get into a wreck. ”

Gunther did so and put her belts back on. Her mother continued driving. By the time they left the seer, it was night and pouring. It was a warm night, but the downpour was relentless. The trees’ branches turned with the wind. The wind tossed the rain, and even nudged the car's body every which way on its axle, and between the rain hitting the car's windows and the darkness, Gunther could barely see the homes through the greenery along side her as they passed them. It was dark as it was, and Geraldine was obviously having issues driving because the speedometer read only 14 miles per hour. Even then, She was squinting, trying to see through the sheets of rain.

The air conditioning softly hit Gunther on her face, and between that, the rain hitting the car, and the feeling of dryness in the car, a feeling of safety and comfort ran through her body. The echoes of the rain against the car created a white noise that muffled the reality around her.

Sheets of rain covered the car windshield in short spirts, and the windshield wipers did little good. Gunther's mom had to slow the car to a crawl just to see anything, and at 6 miles per hour, they might as well have stopped, altogether. "I can't see anything."

Gunther took her carseat belts off again and turned around. She wanted to see the seer’s place behind her. She wanted to learn what the seer was trying to explain. She needed to go back. The red and green house looked alone and distant by then, the rain draining it out. 

But now, that rot had new meaning to Gunther. There was knowledge in that rot. Before they got there it was just a waste of time, money, and just another in a long line of ways to waste money. The seer was seen by Gunther as a charlatan and her home was just a black eye on the street of time. But now, she saw it as the answer to a lot of questions, and a beacon of hope in a world of darkness.

But she was only four, and Gunther had no way to find the seer again. She knew this was the last chance she would have to hear what the seer had to say. She had to convince her mother to turn back.

“Turn around, Gunther! You are going to hurt yourself.”

Gunther decided that yelling wouldn’t help. She would have to play it cool. “I think I need to hear what she has to say.”

“There is nothing to see or hear. We need to go home. I shouldn’t have taken you there.”

"What? This was all your idea!" 

“Gunther, get back into your carseat.”

She got back in her car seat again and strapped herself in.

Geraldine pulled the car to the side of the street and stopped the car. It was pouring by this point and she needed to wait the rain out. “Gunther, We need to talk." 

From the left, a large Semi smashed into the car hard, flipping it on its side. Gunther saw the left windows shatter, and parts of the  front door bent inward, which twisted the driver’s seat closer to the steering wheel. It squished Geraldine's turned torso, her head turned too far to the right for any human to survive, laying loosely on the steering wheel, her eyes, cold, still staring at Gunther.

Gunther felt the rear side airbags go off to protect her. But after the crash, she looked around and noticed there were no airbags. It was almost like she was protected by an invisible force that seemed to surround her.  She was completely unharmed. Only inches away, her mother was dead, her eyes staring past Gunther, and her pupils looked like they were looking at something dark. Her neck looked bent downward and didn’t seem to fit into her body properly.

Much of the car was flattened on its side as it quietly sat there, laterally. For several moments, time seemed to stop. Nothing around Gunther could be heard except for the patter of the rain. She could see nothing other than her mother’s body and the inside of the car. Gunther was cold and wet, and without the light from the car’s interior, it was dark. Gunther heard a couple tiny pieces of the car fall from it and hit the road.

Gunther could hear heavy footsteps tromping from far in the distance. She searched her mind. At the moment it was hard to think about anything. But she managed to continue listening. It was a woman, breathless. She sounded familiar but Gunther couldn’t remember where she had heard it before.

“My God!” The voice said, hundreds of yards away.

Rain came in through the car’s left windows. Geraldine's blood was all over the ceiling, the interior car, and especially Gunther to the right of her. The car was twisted from the outside to the interior.

The rain fell on Gunther's face through Geraldine's left window. It mingled with, and partly washed her mother’s blood off of and away from her.  She looked at her mother's mangled body, but no matter how hard she tried to be with her, emotionally, all she could feel was the soulless mass that was shaped like her mother. She needed the comfort of her mother at this point, but all she had was a woman’s far off distant voice.

She looked at her mother's face.  It was a strange feeling knowing she was only feet from her, giving the illusion of keeping Gunther safe, but she really wasn’t there or protecting her from anything at all. It was the first time Gunther realized that safe feeling actually existed inside of her, and not from her mother. The fact that she learned this at the age of four, and not twenty, went right over her head because she had no frame of reference. This would be the first time Gunther would be forced into a position of maturing quicker than others.

 Five minutes ago, Gunther didn’t even know what that feeling of being loved was,  and now, she would get no motherly love from the world again. It would be the last time her mother could offer her that. She felt more alone than she had ever felt in her life, and this would be the closest she would come to feeling that she was loved by one person for a long time. Yet, she didn't feel totally alone. There was someone else. She still had Geoffrey, and outside, in the distance, there was that woman. But mostly, because of her strange upbringing, she would soon find that she had the strongest backing of all, herself.

But there was someone else. Gunther could hear him breathing. As  the woman approached the mangled car from a distance, she must have seen him and stopped, because Gunther could no longer hear her feet. 

“What the hell are you doing?”

At least someone knows I am here, Gunther thought.

 “We need to protect her, not kill her.” The woman said.

“No.” The deeper voice said, “I have my own orders.”

“We are trying to save the world.” 

“So am I.”

Gunther heard metal rubbing on metal, and then a gunshot.

Gunther could hear the woman’s feet scurry, and then begin clomping away. 

Gunther hung sideways in her seat by her seat belt. She wasn’t knocked out, but she was fading in and out of shock. Her skin was clammy and pale, and her breathing was shallow.  She felt nauseated. The world around her had lost some of its reality that night, and possibly would for much of her life after that. What she knew to be real would, forever more, be tested. The world will have changed, not only in Gunther's visualization of her reality, but it will have created a perspective of reality that she did not know could have existed moments ago.  

There was no way for Gunther to know this, her life was not only in danger, but this was all planned out. When she eventually survived this, and she would, her perspective of her being safe would be different in the future. 

Furthermore, everyone's lives were in danger. This was true not only by one person, or even by a group of people, but by a web of people, pushing and pulling on Gunther’s reality. Little did she know that her life was planned from the point of her birth.

Gunther could hear the driver of the truck, the one with the gun, step out of the semi’s cab and walk to the tiny twisted car. She heard the clip clop of his footsteps as he got closer. When his footsteps were nearly onto of her, they stopped. He heaved himself up to Gunther’s mother's window frame of the tiny car. He must have been a small man because the car was already not very wide, and at first, Gunther could not see him. 

The bearded man peered down the car through the shattered window. The ends of his fingers were plump and muscular. They hung on to the window frame, pressing against a few leftover window pieces. His breath was shallow as he used his muscles to lift himself. The glass sliced his fingers and dripped blood from them onto Gunther’s body, face, and lips. He did not let go. His watered down blood mixed with his mother’s blood and the rain on Gunther’s face. The blood was cold and salty. 

The bearded man’s eyes barely made it over the window, and he had to stretch to see Geraldine's body through it, but for a second, Gunther could see that the man managed to get most of his bearded face over the top. The man breathed hard, attempting to gaze inside Geraldine's sideways car. 

Gunther could see the bearded man’s  head fighting to see over the edge of the window, his breathing shallow and inconsistent, and it shook unsteadily in the air like a child reaching over a counter to get to a cookie jar. His face was old, torn, and dirty. Gunther could barely see the man’s skin, and the rain fought and lost the fight to remove the heavy dirt on the man’s face. Gunther could intermittently smell the stink of the man, as the wind blew bye.

“Is the little girl dead?” Said the woman, panicky, in a distant voice.

“No. Only her mother.”

“Well, thank the lord for small favors.” The woman’s feet were still moving closer, and she had panic in her voice.

“I thought you wanted her alive.” The man said.

“What’s important is that the girl is alive. She needs to be alive.”

“Not for long.”

“What? No you don’t!” Gunther could hear the panting of her breath as her steps clopped closer to the small, bearded man, his semi, and the mangled car. 

But she was too far away at this point. The man dropped from Gunther’s mother’s car, and Gunther could hear his feet quickly clip clop back to the truck. Gunther was sure he was going for the gun.

But before he could get back to the semi, it became bright as day outside, and then even considerably brighter, bright as the sun. Gunther could see the true interior damage of the car. She had no idea how she survived the incident. The entire inside of the car was mangled beyond the point where it actually looked like the interior of a car. But around her was an empty space where there could have been an air bag, or  large egg-like object surrounding and protecting her. Gunther had to squint, it had gotten so bright.

The light, that emanated through the windows, went out, and replacing it was the darkest darkness she had ever experienced. It was considerably darker than night. It was pure blackness. 

Gunther could hear a heavy wind, and then nothing. There was no color, no sound, nothing. The car shifted on the street as she hung in it in her seat belt. Even the car was missing large pieces.

Then the darkness returned, so did the sounds of the crickets in the night. Gunther could hear footsteps. They were too loud and slow to be the short bearded man. “Are you ok?” Said a familiar voice. It was the woman. “Wait there. Don’t try to get out. I’ll get help.

At this point, it was no longer raining.

When Gunther finally did get out of the mangled car, with the help of the police and the fire department, She surveyed the scene. 

There was no Semi, and the car no longer looked like a car, just a mangled mess that no truck could have created, only tire tracks that looked like their heavy tracks had done donuts, and then disappeared. Part of the ground had also disappeared, along with all of the nearby phone poles, and even parts of the nearby houses. There were no cars or even hydrants nearby. Water sprang from the ground, and Gunther assumed that was where the hydrant should have been. Gunther could see into the houses like they were cut in half, the bathroom pipes sprouting water.

“We need to get out of here”, a fireman said, “The gas company hasn’t had time to shut off the gas in the houses, and the whole place could go up at any time.”

Also, Gunther could smell the petrol leaking from her mother’s car. It stunk. 

There was dirt and debris everywhere, lying on the ground, and the grass that should have been in the nearby lawns was either missing, or floating to the ground. Something strange had happened. Everything nearby was missing. All of it just wasn’t there, and there were lines of muck, dirt, and what used to be road, that seemed to have pulled to a central location next to Gunther, where the Semi used to be. The man who was short was gone, too.

“What the hell happened?” Said a policeman. “Nothing could have done this.”

The woman must have been far enough away that she was not affected by the darkness, either that, or she was sucked in. That was all Gunther could think of.  Sally was now putting a blanket around Gunther. “Come back to my house. I’ll take care of you until we can find better accommodations.” 

This was the part Sally was dreading for years. She knew, from this point on, she would have to watch over this child. She hated children.

“But what about my Mom?”

“Gunther, we need to talk. There will be hard things to hear, even for an adult, and you are four, which will make it harder and more confusing. But you are going to have to grow up quickly. You are going to have to be a grown up, even more than a grown up, and you are going to have to do it without your mother’s help. Furthermore, you need to hear it now. Even if she were here to bring you up, she wouldn’t have the knowledge or ability to teach you what you will need to know.”

Gunther grabbed the blanket. She was wet, cold, and still in shock. She wanted her mother. She needed her. “What am I supposed to do without my mom?”

“Do you like pizza? How about some pizza! I love pizza, how about you?” 

Gunther didn’t smile, but the idea of pizza seemed to get her mother off her mind for a minute because she headed back to the seer’s home with the seer.  

“There are things I need to explain. Let’s get a slice.”