Sam punched it up over the hill and noticed the next intersection was also a mad scene of carnage and ripped through the supermarket parking lot to his right. A woman ran in front of his car and he veered sharply right to avoid hitting her, snapping off the legs of the bag boy who was pursuing her with a crazed look in his eyes. The sneaker-sheathed feet, dangling loosely from the broken legs that brushed the roof of the Porsche and he never looked back as he slowed and weaved in and out of the running and screaming women and the stiffly pursuing men.

He made it out of the lot and onto the secondary street without hitting another person. The Porsche hummed along around the circuitous asphalt way. A small girl was on her back crying while another mailman was stabbing her with the base of a mailbox stand.

He glimpsed the tail of a yellow Scion up the street that bisected the neighborhood, and tore up it as fast as he could, pulling to a stop in the middle of the street and bailing. Before the door even swung shut he was sprinting across the lawn halfway to the front door. He ran up the stairs and crashed through the front door, splintering the wood frame, and not even noticing the pain in his shoulder.

Mrs. Dawson was laid out on her back with numerous bleeding wounds to her stomach. She was holding her belly and looking up at him with glazed eyes, trying to speak. He dove onto his knees and looked into her face. She smiled, an airy whisper escaping from her lips, “I should have never left last week. We should have seen it together.”

He began to say he loved her and she gripped his collar frantically and hissed into his ear, “Save my daughter” and she gurgled. He went to hug her and then saw a pair of men’s shoes approaching. He looked up and saw a fellow that looked uncomfortably like him.

The man had a butcher knife in his hands and just stood staring vacantly at him and Mrs. Dawson on the floor. Sam felt something at his feet and looked down to see that she was gone, her head turned toward him, away from the man who had killed her. The man then looked into him with wide-open vacant eyes and began to plunge the butcher knife into his own stomach. Sam could not have recalled how many times this man did this as he stood in a reeling daze above the woman he had come to save, the woman he had improbably fell in love with, that lay butchered at his feet. Her husband—he assumed it was Mister Dawson—was doing a far more thorough job on himself than he had on his wife.

Sam stood above the Dawson’s for how long he could not have said. The world had become an empty, inconsolable mess, just a hell he wished to escape by any means.

“Do You Know My Mommy?”

He looked over at the couch in the formerly white living room, and saw a ten-year-old girl peeking out from behind the arm, tears streaking her face from her blue-on-bloodshot eyes.

“You are not like the other men, like Mister Joe who killed Mary and her mom, like the cable guy.”

She was sobbing, afraid to come out from behind the couch.

“Yes, I knew your mother. She was a nice lady. My name is Sam. Your mother asked me to get you to safety.”

The girl looked outside fearfully and glanced back at him before returning her fearful gaze to the street. There were slamming sounds outside: a window, a door?

“What is your name?”

The girl kept her eyes on the going’s on outside. Sam only had eyes for her, so much like her mother. The girl seemed lost within as she spoke. “Ellen. Ellen is my name.”

Sam tore the quilt off the back of the couch and then spread it out on the couch.

“Lay down Ellen. I’m going to wrap you up and carry you out. Keep your hands up by your face so you can make a pocket of air to breathe.”

Ellen cast one painful look down at his feet, where her parents lay dead and then jumped backward onto the couch, closing her eyes and curling her little hands up under her chin. He wrapped her like a burrito and headed out toward the Porsche, which was being run over and crushed by a Comcast Cable van. For the first time he could recall he was deeply angry. He had left anger behind on the soccer field, had become a mellow dude. He whispered to the bundle as the van crushed his car up against a white SUV, “I’m setting you down, Stay still. I’ll be right back.”