Quell That Rebel Yell

July 23
Port Charlotte, Florida
6:20p.m.

Every afternoon when the sun, at its highest point in the sky, and the sticky heat are at their most unbearable, the puffy white clouds, seeming relatively harmless earlier in the day, sympathetically break over the small Florida town, Port Charlotte. It's a fact of life, something that happens every single day all year round without fail. The afternoon rain is a staple in the small community. A proven stability that gives its residents a sense of security, despite the state of the outside world. Even when there's genocide in Africa and an endless war raging in Iraq, it's still raining every single day around two in the afternoon in Port Charlotte, Florida.

It's evening now, though and the clouds are still hanging harmlessly in the sky while every family in every house on Shipp Drive are going about their lives as they would any other day. Two blocks down and one street over on Topeka Avenue, however, the Novac house shakes from the inside out.

"Look, I know that it's a lot to take in, but we need to start packing now!" Mr. Novac tells his wife, as he pulls their travel suitcases out of their closet and sets them on the bed.

His wife stares at him from across the room, seated on the window seat overlooking their small vegetable garden that she tends every day to provide fresh vegetation for their meals.

Her brown eyes are red and wide behind her glasses and, not for the first time, she's glad to have her transition lenses tinted from the light shining through the window, hiding the tears that she's afraid to let fall. In her lap, her hands are shaking, mind is racing and she cracks her knuckles to calm not only her hands, but thoughts as well, to no avail.

"I don't think I understand," she whispers, not trusting her voice to keep from shaking if she tries to raise it. Her hands tighten around each other and her heart is filled with a quiet loathing for her husband and what he tells her. "Jeffrey, this town, the people we work with, the friends that your kids grew up with," her voice cracks and she can't help but omit a small sob. "All of this, everything we know is going to be gone two days from now?"

Jeffrey's hands fall onto the dresser that he stands in front of with his back to his wife, preparing to pack the contents into the suitcases on the bed. His head is tilted downward, though Mrs. Novac can't tell whether from shame or frustration at her for not dropping it and doing what he said immediately without question.

Either way, the body language shakes her resolve.

He turns to her then, while the weakness in her eyes is still hidden behind the tint in her transition lenses, and walks toward her, hands outstretched. When he reaches her, he takes her hands into his own and kneels, head level with her knees as he looks up at her.

"Nora, I know that this is hard for you, it's hard for me too," he tells her, hazel eyes full of a sincerity that she can't help but think is at least partially false, her opinion of him tainted by the news that he gave her. "I can't do anything about this but get you and the kids out of here before the storm breaks, though," he says, his frown prominent in his dark, furrowed brows.

He wants her to move, to get up and help him, but she can't bring herself to care what he wants from her right now.

"What about everyone else?" she whispers, the tears falling from her eyes freely now, darkening them and leaking past the transition lenses and down her cheeks. "Why isn't this all over the news? Why aren't we evacuating?"

Jeffrey's eyes shut hard and he pulls his hands from hers, shaking his head as he stands. "If I had the clearance to issue an evacuation, don't you think I would?" he bites out through grinding teeth, as he makes his way back to the dresser to begin packing. "Port Charlotte isn't the only place that's going to be hit by this storm, it's bigger than Katrina ever got already! If this information got out, there would be nationwide panic!"

Her heart is racing, thumping wildly within her chest, and she can't keep her hands still now for the life of her. "What do you think is going to happen when an entire city is wiped off the map?" she hisses, getting to her own feet and crossing the distance between them, gripping tightly onto his arm.

"They won't know what we've done, Nora," he whispers, his own hands beginning to shake. "There will be an evacuation, it just won't be in time."

Nora's throat tightens and she lets her hand fall from where she'd grasped his arm. A sudden cold has swept over her, seeping through her clothes and skin, clenching around her heart and settling deep into her bones.

The tears are dead in her eyes, and something has changed inside of her. Her faith in her husband, the self-made politician who'd set out to change the world, to make it a better place, was shattered.

Her transition lenses are clear in the shade of the room and she looks at her husband. Though his face hasn't changed at all and he is dressed in his usual at-home attire; a crisp white T-shirt and professionally tailored jeans, Nora doesn't recognize the man she's staring at.

She sees nothing of the man she'd fallen in love with so many years ago, the man who'd told her his dreams and expectations of a better, more accountable government. In his place, she sees another corrupt politician whose ambition has dug such a deep hole that he can't see the light of the sky anymore to tell up from down.

It hurts her to think about it, but she knows that she'll never see the man she loved again. Corrupt politicians are a dime a dozen; she's heard a million stories about their insatiable desire for power and even more about the infamous 'rock bottom' that they end up hitting. Alone.

"I'll go tell the kids to start packing," she tells him quietly from the doorway, without looking back.

He wants to reach out and stop her, to keep her there while he thinks of the right words to say to explain it to her, more for his own sake that hers. He doesn't want to lose her, but he's afraid that he already has.

He watches her leave the room with a sadness in his eyes, knowing that an hope of returning to normality goes with her.

If he were a better man, he might have stopped her. He might have told her that this wasn't his decision, how much he hates what he's being forced to do. He might have held her in his arms and comforted her, eventually giving into her wishes and allowing her to warn her friends.

The fact is, however, that he is not the man that she needs him to be. That man is dead, a ghost of his past, long since quieted and shoved into the deepest corners of his mind, safely tucked away where it can no longer speak out and cause trouble.

With so many questions of her own, Nora feels herself collapsing under the pressure of dozens of others that her son and daughter throw at her, angry and defiant.

She wants to tell them everything, that no, they won't ever be able to come visit this town that is secretly doomed, that their friends will all be dead soon, and that she isn't even sure if she'll want to be alive after it all happens.

She can't tell them that, though. She, like their father has asked her to, must lie to them.

"What do you mean, we're moving?" Vera grinds out, her two round cheeks blazing brightly against her naturally olive skin. Her eyes, dark like her mother's, are burning and she can feel tears prickling behind them, her throat clenches and loosens reflexively.

"Exactly that," Nora tells her calmly. Though she cannot bring herself to smile, she keeps her face relaxed. She's the perfect politician's wife in that moment, she realizes as she prepares to spin the half-lie he's told her to recite for them and anyone else who decides to ask.

"For your father, this is the opportunity of a lifetime, something he's worked for from the very beginning. He's been offered a position of power, where he can help improve the lies of thousands-no millions of people." Her breath catches in her throat and for a moment she's terrified that she's going to let out another sob, but she manages to swallow the knot in her throat back down. "I know it's hard that the job offer came from all the way across the country, but your father needs this, and in time, you'll start to understand."

"But prom is tomorrow!" Vera cries. Her rage is barely enough to cover the shame shining in her eyes. Vera, forever Daddy's little girl, is conflicted. "Matt Clark asked me to go, Mom! Matt Clarke!" she says the name forcefully, willing her mother to remember it as the name she's dropped for the last year in her wistful fancies of romance and young love.

Micah's fists are clenched at his sides and he looks ready to explode. His face is twisted into a snarl of anger and betrayal. "Who cares about your damn prom?" he growls at his sister. "Better yet, who cares about Dad's fucking job? It's always about him! Pretending to be the perfect little family for his big fancy dinner parties, doing well in school so he looks good on paper, making friends with people we hate so that he can secure his next big promotion; when will either of you ever care what matters to us?" he questions, glaring at his mother, daring her to deny his accusations.

She can't.

"Oh, shut up, Micah!" Vera hisses, hating him for his insensitivity. Her eyes haven't been blind to her mother's struggles to become the woman that society wants her to be. She knows the pressure well-though in a more juvenile setting-and, though it hurts to think of leaving everything behind, her heart is filled with sympathy for the woman that gave her life.

She shakes her head, willing herself not to cry. At seventeen, she's trying to act more like the adult that she's soon to be. Adults don't cry about missing their high school prom, she tells herself.

Vera gets up from the couch that she's been seated on beside her younger brother of a year and a half. She walks to the doorway coolly, her head held high. When she passes her mother, her smaller hand slips into her mother's warm palm, squeezing it secretly. She wills her mother to feel her support, though she can't look in her eyes to convey the message, unwilling to betray the weakness behind her own.

As she makes her way up the stairs to her bedroom, she feels the walls of her childhood home crashing down around her, the pictures shattering as they slam to the ground beside her.

Everything is different now.

Laredo, Texas
5:20p.m.

The sun is already high in the sky and there are no clouds in sight, Miguel Gonzalez is resentful of the dry heat of the desert. His plaid work shirt is soaked in the armpits, chest, and back from the sweat that has been pouring out of him and the others since they began their trek across the border.

The gun in his hands and the thoughts of what it will be used for weigh heavily on him as he marches shoulder-to-shoulder with the dangerous men that he has just recently learned to call friends.

In a simpler time if someone had told him that he would one day be marching across the US border with the Mexican drug cartel, plans of siege on their minds and loaded guns in their hands, he would have shrugged it off. He would have gone about his business throughout the day and laughed about it with is wife later, after returning home from work, over dinner.

The times were no longer so simple, though, and his life will never be the way it was when his wife had been waiting at the door day after day for him to return from work, loving eyes staring up at him in adoration as he strode into their home.

He doesn't have a home anymore; doesn't remember what it feels like to be wanted somewhere.

He didn't join the cartel with illusions of grandeur and being part of something bigger than himself that would possibly one day shape the world. His heart wasn't full of greed for the great riches that his friends joked about acquiring once they crossed over to the soil of a new country, where anything was thought to be possible.

He just didn't have anywhere else to go anymore.

In his heart, there is no longer love or compassion for his fellow men, no sympathy for those whose lives he is about to help turn upside down. He marches to make the world shake beneath his boots, something that he knows will reek havoc, and maybe, one day, start a war.

When he stomps, feeling the ground shake beneath him, he feels real again. If only for a fleeting moment, while the vibrations still shake through the muscles in his legs.

He wants so badly to be alive again.

"We'll wait here until nightfall," Antonio says once the first ranch comes into view. He pops a squat under a thin tree that provides little safety from the unforgiving sun. "Prepare yourselves in whatever way you need, friends. Tonight, we march."

Antonio is full of false hope and promise, he wants to be a great leader. He wants to lead them to freedom, or a dream of freedom that his father sold him on years ago, when he was still a child.

He doesn't care about what this 'freedom' might cost him or those around him. Though his heart, he feels, is pure, he leads with an iron fist. An iron fist caked with a blood so deeply engraved beneath his fingernails that he's sure he'll never be able to fully scrub it out.

Miguel falls to his knees beside his companions, his heart wrenching at what has caused him to become so empty, so ruthless. His friends, used to his eccentricities, ignore him and go about their business around him as he grips tightly to his wife's rosary beads and begins to whisper prayers for their salvation in their native language.

His wife's face, swollen and torn as the day he last saw her, the day she took her last breath, stays imprinted on the back of his eyes that are closed so tightly that they sting.

'By the time we're finished with you, A Time To Kill is gonna look like child's play.' the words ring endlessly in his ears, deafening him to the outside world and filling him with such hatred and rage that his body can barely conceal the storm within.

Phoenix, Arizona
4:20p.m.

He can feel the world coming into focus as he takes a slow, steady inhale off the top of the bong that Heather has passed to him, with an encouraging 'Happy 4:20' to go along with it.

As the reefer mixes with the Jack that he consumed earlier in the day, Grayson wonders why they even really celebrate 4:20.

It's not like they have any real attachment to the date or time, neither have any true significance in their lives. It was just something that they, and every other stoner that they knew of, did.

He doesn't care when his mother tells him that it's a stoner holiday because it was Hitler's birthday and he couldn't care less that she doesn't want him to smoke at all.

Grayson Matthews does what he wants when he wants, no matter who or what stands in his way. When his mind is made up to do something, it takes the world shaking beneath his feet to change it.

Right now his world is steady with a reefer-tinted lid and what he wants to do is be inside someone elses life, and that's exactly what he tries to do, much to Heather's expressed delight.

For as long as he can remember, Heather has been a part of his life.

They have always been two peas from the same pod.

In grade school, still innocent to the cruelties of the world, they'd made hell for any teacher that they ever shared, loving life and laughing up a storm. They were the king and queen of the playground, making up games for all their classmates to play with crooked rules that always made them win in the end.

Along with middle school, came the first of his parents' many fights. In the beginning, it was only arguments that sometimes got so loud that the neighbors called the police.

Grayson took out his confusion and resentment for what was going out at home on any of the kids that ever dared to make fun of Heather's glasses and braces.

Through it all, the good and the bad, Heather had been there, two houses down, for him to seek comfort and security in. He defended her with a ferocity that sent their classmates cowering and made their teachers wonder.

Heather's braces came off in their Freshman year, she'd switched to prescription contacts, and her chest had grown to a healthy pair of C's. She'd turned into a beauty practically over night and took the world by storm the next day.

Instead of leaving him in exile, feared and therefore hated by the entire school, she laughed at the girls who tried so hard to invite her to join their groups and made fun of the boys that tried to ask her out.

Her hand, both physically and figuratively, stayed forever clenched in his, squeezing it to keep them both firmly planted on the ground.

When his father hit his mother for the first time, Heather had been the person that he'd called in the middle of the night, crying. The whole story came pouring out of him between choked sobs that made him feel so small and insignificant that he almost couldn't stand the thought of breathing.

She'd hung up when he'd finished his story and snuck, in the dead of night, in through his sliding-glass back door, padding silently down the hall to his room, where she found him, still crying.

Her clear, sea-green eyes had been so full of sympathy then, not pity, that his heart had filled so tightly with gratitude that it almost shattered in his chest that instant. He pulled her into his arms and held her against him. That night, they rid each other of their pesky virginities that their friends had relentlessly picked on them for still having.

The first time his father had hit him for defending his mother, she'd been the one to nurse his black eye, using cold compresses: twenty minutes no, twenty minutes off.

The last time that the police had been called by a neighbor about another 'argument' between his parents, they came to the door to find he and his mother covered in bruises and Heather there with them, her hand gripping his tightly, as he told them what his father had done.

At twenty-one, they live together in a small, one-bedroom apartment, close as ever.

Fists digging into her silky, black hair, Grayson wants to tell her that he loves her, and in his own way, he does, but he dares not speak the words into life. They mean two very different things to the two of them, who think so much alike in all other ways.

In her mind, 'I love you' means: let's get married, buy a big beautiful house, have a few kids to share it with, get a dog to complete the picture, and stay together like this forever. In his mind, 'I love you' means: today I want to be with you, hold you, take care of you, but don't ask me what I'm going to feel tomorrow or twenty years from now, because I don't know and neither do you.

No matter how much he wants to be what she needs, he knows that she deserves better. She deserves someone that can make her big dreams-as bright and wide as her eyes-come true.

For now, he settles for the way she feels against him.