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CHAPTER FOUR: A SAVIOUR COMETH

Jam took in the polluted air of Echo Creek, somehow viewing himself as his young and eager ten-year-old self. The young boy was outside, his left hand covering his eyes to avoid the glare of the red sunset from afar. His other hand had a firm grip on a larger and wider hand.

The sun dimmed slightly, and the young boy removed his hand and met dark brown eyes from his right. His father had a large scraggly beard and lush dark hair the same spikes and smooth patches as it had always had. Sometimes Marco refused to shave because it made him seem tougher in some ways. His warm brown eyes contrasting with a cold tone. They looked on ahead from above the grassy hill, into the torn-down city of Echo Creek.

His father's hand grabbed to his tightly as he whispered, "Don't let go."

The father and son trod through the forests, slipping into the sea of trees. Jam gagged slightly due to the smog and hazy air around them, but he was quickly met with his father's reassuring words whispered into his ear. The young boy smiled.

Down the hill, Jam tried his best to ignore the thick smog clogging his nostrils. He tried to focus on another sense and listened to the sounds around him. Other lifeforms besides humans, birds, and monsters were very few and far between, so it was expected that the boy would receive sounds of near silence from around him.

Father and son eventually landed in a dense forest with flat fields. Pebbles laid scattered on the floor, and trees were vastly spread out on the flat landscape. Even though he had been near the forest so many times alongside his father, the forest alone always made him worry about the things around him.

Marco carefully placed his blaster rifle into his son's arms. The young man gave his son a nod as he stepped a few feet in front of him and grabbed a few rocks in a pebbly clearing a small distance away. Coming back, Marco dumped the rocks in the grassy patch and arranged the skewed rocks into sizes from smaller and bigger rocks. Jam definitely noticed how much of an organiser his father was, his mind ticking like a computer as he placed the smaller rocks on the left and larger rocks on the right.

Next, he grabbed the brown patched-up backpack skewed from his back and pulled out a Jam's favourite teddy bear, Mason. The wool somehow wore out and the dark coloration of the stuffed animal was rather faded. He gave the bear to Jam, who hugged it closely. Jam never really understood why he hugged Mason as much as he did.

He hadn't done such a thing since he was six years old. But for some reason, he felt a sickly ball of nervousness sedentary within his stomach. Marco's actions made Jam's heart race as he anticipating and estimating what his father's next order Eventually, he gave up on predicting and calculating his own father's motivations. Patiently, Marco laid the bigger rocks as a foundation and quickly stacked smaller and smaller rocks on top. At the end, Marco had a small stone tower which was nearly cone-shaped, as was as tall as his knees.

Marco paced back to Jam and held his hands out, gesturing to the young boy to hand back the small bear. Jam hugged Mason closer to his chest. Now he was convinced that his actions were more than just a reflex.

"Jam," Marco commanded his young son as he walked back towards him from the stones, "I want you to shoot Mason."

Jam looked at his father in disbelief, who stayed in a dazed look, mind running in circles. He normally didn't speak out against his father, but he couldn't stop thinking about his memories with Mason.

"Dad, no," he replied sternly, keeping his blaster pointed to the ground. The young man stared at his small son, taken aback by his son's words but still keeping his often stern demeanour on his young son. Marco exhaled heavily, an action that easily scared the young Jam Diaz more than any of the monsters lurking about.

"Let me put it this way," Marco said calmly at the same time with a cold impression. "Mason just got bitten by a zombie and you're told that he will die in several minutes. If you don't kill him, he could possibly infect our whole family. He even tells you that he wants to die. Would you kill him?"

"Mason wouldn't hurt anybody," Jam replied, in a tone that sounded childish, even to his own standards. For some reason, the young ten-year-old found himself regressed to an age that wasn't even his own. "Even if he would kill us all, I wouldn't hurt him."

"Why is that," Marco said, his tone sounding slightly harsher than before. Jam shrugged, unsure of what to reply to his own father. His father stepped closer to him and knelt down on one knee to be on the same level as his smaller son, who was just about as tall as his chest. Marco looked at Jam straight in his green irises.

"Let me ask you something, Jam," Marco said, trying to be as calm as his stern self would be. "Do you think the monsters care about their mommies and daddies? Do you think they care about their own friends?"

"They aren't zombies, Dad," Jam replied, "I think they have brains and hearts too."

"I'm pretty sure they do," Marco calmly replied with a small smirk on his face. "Gosh, I'm pretty sure that they do, anyways. But do you know why the monsters attack us?"

Jam couldn't answer. Usually, when his father tried to logically quiz his intellect, he could often answer with the most logical thing to do. He was trained by his father to train such questions as though they were math problems. However, this concept appeared too foreign for the young ten-year-old boy. He answered something that his analytically-linked brain could handle. "Maybe we've been harming them, and they just harmed us too. There's got to be something."

"A great deduction, Jam, and you're probably right," Marco replied, looking into the dark orange skies. Jam expected his father to reply but did not get a clear cut answer immediately.

"Shoot the bear," Marco insisted through gritted teeth. The father's own actions reacted back to himself, and his son replied with sullen silence.

Marco could see the sun, a large orange ball of heat from the forest, and it was no longer concealed by a flat axis of land. He looked at it and started laughing. It wasn't exactly the laugh that Jam associated with humour nor the laugh he associated to villainy, but a cold, bitter, type of laugh. The type of laugh that sounded forced, as though you were supposed to laugh at something unfunny. Jam never really talked back to his father, but internally, he had his own disagreements.

"Y'know, Jam," Marco said as he looked towards the sunset, "I was once attached to someone like you were with Mason. She was like my best friend. I always felt she was those friends that you can never get. The problem was that I got too attached to her."

"What happened to her? Did you ever find her?"

"She went missing, started this whole darn conundrum, and probably ended up killed by the monsters," Marco replied bitterly, seemingly more and more agitated with each word being spewed from his mouth. "I spent years trying to find her, but I gave up. That's why I'm telling you, my son. I simply don't think we can form attachments. We can lose our attachments at any minute and be filled with regret."

"But shouldn't we cherish the moments that we have with them knowing that we'll both die at some point?" Jam argued, before realising what he said and gave his mouth a slap. He normally didn't voice his opinions, but he expected the worst reaction from his already agitated father.

Instead, his father stayed unexpectedly silent.

"Shoot the bear," he repeated again to his young son.

Jam knew he had no choice. Raising the blaster in one hand and aiming it toward the bear sitting on the stones, he closed his eyes as he began to pull the trigger. His index finger began to twitch and his hand began to rattle uncontrollably. However, before Jam could even fire, he heard a mighty roar. He was quickly swept off of his feet and the blaster fell from his hands.

When Jam opened his eyes, all he saw were a pair of red, angry eyes staring back at him. A brown-furred grizzly bear with white suds frothing from his mouth was hollering over him. Looking ahead, the stones were knocked apart and Mason was torn into white and brown fluffy pieces. He screamed.

His father, though his usual quiet self, unarmed his small blaster pistol from his utility belt and fired several rounds. The first shot hit the bear right in its leg as it doubled over. After that, his father took shot after shot after shot hitting the bear right in the chest. The bear quickly flopped on the floor with each laser blast. Marco took out his knife and jammed it right into the infected animal's chest.

Jam started to cry. He wasn't sure why he was acting like this, the fact that Mason was torn into shreds, the fact that a bear with rabies had attacked him, or the fact that he was now staring at a dismantled body of an animal for the first time. He always used to shoot small targets like trees for practice, but never shot another living entity before.

Quickly, the bigger man scooped his son in his arms and cooed him, contradictory to his previous actions. "It's fine, son, everything's going to be all right."

Marco held onto his son for a long time as Jam cried into Marco's shoulder, and Marco cautiously watching get his son's legs and arms for any bite marks.

The last thing that Jam saw was the shredded remains of Mason.

Jam awoke from disorder, only to find himself in even more chaos.

Waking up to complete shouts and bursts of anger, the teenager looked at his digital watch and read into the bright green digital display. It was about five o'clock, two hours too early from his normal morning routine.

Staying as quiet as he possibly could, he slid off of his mattress and crept towards the brown wooden door. He pressed his ear on the brown wood and quietly listened to the blaring noises from the other side of the door.

"Y-you never cared! You don't care at all," a rather feminine voice whispered on the other edge of the room. It was definitely his own mother, her creaky, quiet voice piping up for one of few arguments that she and Jam's father had had last months.

"Care? Care about what? Our family? You? What the hell do you think I've been doing for the past twenty years?"

"Look, I listen to you and I love you for that! But you have to acknowledge your own faults as well! All you do is scream and swear at your own children. You don't let them have a life and be themselves! It's always been about 'kill this', and 'do that', but you never let them feel the burden off-"

"Oh, so this is about their freedom now, isn't it," the man interrupted, "You'd better get them to wake up, honey, cause there's a freaking apocalypse happening right in front of their noses!"

"Pipe down, Marco. The children are asleep."

Marco's groan was audible from the other side of the door.

"Let them hear my voice," the shouting got louder from Marco's end, "In fact, I want them to hear every single freaking word that I say. If you think to let our children be lollygagging with all these demons and monsters lurking about, so be it."

"That's not what I said at all, Marco! All I was asking was for you to stop using this fear tactic on our children! You think they will come back and think of you as their own father in twenty years' time, cause I would think you're just a plain old bully right about now."

Dead silence followed, and Jam reminisced every single word of his parents. The boy never thought of his father as a bully, although he did notice that his father had become angrier, and more emotionally chaotic within a small matter of time. He didn't know where it started, but he got the idea. If anybody was in the same circumstances his father was in, someone who was fighting monsters daily, wondering about when the next meal would be, and thinking about how to care for a wife and two children, anybody would crack under such immense pressure. These thoughts raced through Jam's mind until it was interrupted by his mother's voice.

"Look," Jackie replied to Marco from the other room, "I know this has been a rough ten years, and I appreciate your dedication to our children's safety. But we know they aren't going to stay young forever. They're going to have to grow up and learn to adapt to this environment God's given them."

"And why on Earth do you still think something's out there," the man yelped, changing the conversation.

"You still have to have some optimism, Marco! You do have to admit that God's keeping us alive. He kept a majority of people in this town alive. Think of all the near-death situations that our family avoided together."

"That's called chance. Not some omniscient being spinning a wheel from above. If He was really up there, He would've been spinning a wheel so we would live at Star's expense," the father muttered. Jackie's stayed silent for a second. Jam could immediately tell that his mother was thinking about how to respond whenever she seemed comatose towards answering a question.

"Yes, I know," Jackie soothed, in a silence that made her seem like she was thinking some more. "I know Star disappearing wasn't planned. I know you feel responsible for this entire mess, but things happen. We couldn't expect that some evil flying turd would fly from the skies, kidnap Star, and start an apocalypse!"

"No, there's no uncertainty about it," Marco replied, "There's a reason why all of this has happened and it was because of magic. Without Star coming to Earth, without these monsters attacking us, and without all of these magical adventures, we would still have a roof over our heads with a bed to sleep in. At the very least, with running electricity 24/7."

Jackie seemed to have had run out of things to say from this point. The room was dead quiet except for the small sound of soft air circulating around the room. Another groan came from the adult man.

"L-look, I don't know what's gone wrong with me. E-e-ever since this whole mess, I-jeez-I just-I'm... just gonna take a walk."

And with that, clamps on hard stone were audible from the other side of the wooden door, followed by the door slamming shut. Jam heard his mother crying on the other side of the door. If there was one thing that Jam couldn't stand, it was crying.

To him, at the very least, crying was a marvellous display of sadness and weakness. Yet, crying felt so uncomfortable for him to listen to. He always felt the urge to go to comfort someone who was in tears.

Jam stepped out of his bedroom and his mother turned to look at him. Jackie's bright green eyes were glimmering with tears as she looked at her son's similar green eyes. Without any thought or words, Jackie came over to her son and hugged him tightly. Jam never remembered when her mother seemed so frail and helpless, but he didn't think about this much more as he kept her body in his grasp.

"You caught some of that, did you," Jackie asked her son in a blubbering manner.

Jam nodded. "You don't have to let him do this to you, Mother. What he does to you is vile and disgu-"

Jackie put a finger to her son's lips. "It's not a big deal, Jam."

"Not a big deal," Jam asked, shivering from her own mother's words. Jam couldn't believe that his own mother was defending his father. "Do you hear how much he yells at us, Mother? Are we just going to let him bully us like this? Are I and Grace supposed to be huge punching bags for him to beat?"

Jackie sighed and turned to the kitchen. As she rummaged through the kitchen cupboard, she uttered a few words to her own son.

"There's always two sides to every story, Jam," Jackie replied as she grabbed two small pieces of bread and turned to Jam, handing him over one of the pieces. "Eat."

Jam complied and took little mice-sized bites of his bread. For some reason all of this made him bottle up his stomach. He wanted to focus on the conversation at hand.

"So just because he lost this magical princess way back when this gives him the justification to yell at us?"

"I never said everything your father does is the most morally correct," Jackie replied, looking towards her father. "I know it's hard to deal with him, but even I know we should both be more understanding of him after all he's done."

"Not after everything he's done. I can't get his shouting out of my head," Jam said coldly, remembering all of the times that Marco had shouted and acted restrictive in the previous year.

"After everything he's done," Jackie snapped, repeating Jam in the exact opposite connotation. "He leads a large rebellion of citizens against the outside forces, and has worried consistently about staying alive every time he goes out in the cold. Your father sees members of the rebellion die every single day. Yet alone, he worries about what and when his family's next meal is. If you really have such a negative view of your father after all that, I really suggest you reevaluate the relationship with him."

Jam stayed silent at his mother's scolding. It wasn't exactly something that she did very often, even in Jam's own opinion. Right then and there, Jam started to get a reality snap. The apocalypse had taken a toll on each member of his own family, and Jam knew he could no longer saw the world through rose-coloured glasses. There was indeed an apocalypse, which took many lives and added anxiety to the entire Diaz Family. He felt hopeless watching his family and the people around him crumple to bits.

Jackie broke half of her fist-sized piece of bread and handed it to Jam. "Make sure that your sister gets some."

Jam paced back into the bedroom, where he saw his young sister. She was awake and on both shins, cautiously observing him with a hint of optimism and a hint of worry.

"What's going on, Jam," Grace asked, stroking her brown strands of hair, looking cautiously at her brother right in her eyes. Secretly, Jam scoffed to himself. He may have been hesitant to harm a small teddy bear, but this paled in comparison to his actions toward his innocent, eleven year old sister. She would never be in harm according to her.

To him, Grace was too precious. She was the last shred of positivism that Jam kept throughout all of the ordeals that his family faced. Whenever he was faced with ordeals in his life, he always turned his internal vision back to the sight of his green sister's small eyes and her brown flowing hair. Having these protective feelings toward his sister definitely did not translate well for Jam when he found his own sister seemingly scared and isolated.

"No, no, I was just talking to Mother. Here's your food." Jam handed Grace the small piece of bread, who cupped in in her hands.

Jam sat on the bedside next to Grace, watching his sister take small nibbles of the crumbling bread. Jam patiently watched her take small munches on her food, which baffled him. For a certain reason (Grace's reason being that she wanted to savour every bite of food she could muster) the young girl always took small nibbles of her own food.

After a minute, The young brown-haired girl had finished her own food, and quickly munched on everything.

"Jam?"

"Yes, Grace," Jam asked. It was also odd how he would talk to all his other family members by formalities, but would refer to his own sister by name.

"D-did you dream anything last night?" the young girl asked, putting one of her hands on her brother's lap.

"Nah, it was nothing," Jam replied softly, stroking his sister's luscious brown hair. Even her soft sweet voice forced Jam's concentration. She could have been talking about the most boring topic to Jam and he still would have listened.

"Jam, what was it about?"

Jam sighed. Their relationship was a two way street. Stories, thoughts, and pure emotions would transfer from one end to another. The major thing Jam loved about his younger sister was how bundled up they seem. They always seemed to know how the other one felt or thought at the same time. They read each other like a textbook. Jam felt like a fool for trying to deceive her in the first place.

"I dreamt," Jam started, "about something that happened when I was around your age."

Jam started explaining all the small details of his dream to Grace.

"That sucks," Grace scoffed, "Did you ever get a new stuffy?"

"No," Jam replied, continuously stroking his young sister on the head, "Never did. I had too many memories with Mason."

"At least you had one."

"Yeah, I guess you're right," Jam replied.

Grace closed her eyes a bit, putting her hands on her hips. Jam looked at her, and his sister reminded him of Sleeping Beauty, an old story his father had told him when he was a child. Grace's luscious hair was strewn across the bedsheets and her skin as soft as clay. Her body was as elegant as a swan and as pieceful as an old turtle, but it was not his sister's present appearance that made Jam smile. Jam admired her patience. Even when everything around them seemed wrong and chaotically evil, she still knew to stay patient and calm. He also found it sad because it was the only life that she had ever known.

'She deserves better,' Jam thought in his head, while lying there in the queen's bed beside her. The two adolescents stayed silent for a while before Grace had a question on her mind.

"Do you want to know my dream, Jam," His sister replied, smiling. Jam nodded, prompting the young eleven-year old to continue her story.

"I dreamt that I was stuck in a giant spider web," Jam winced mid-sentence, knowing that Grace had a phobia of spiders. "And they were all crawling over me. There were so many of them over me that I couldn't see anything at all. Then there was this big spider who came in front of me, and it swallowed me whole with me in the web."

"Sounds like something."

"Yeah," Grace spoke quietly, "It's wackier than your dream, but it's still something, I guess."

Jam was taken aback by another one of his sister's questions, "Is there a reason why we dream? Is it because God is trying to tell us something?"

Jam thought puzzlingly about what to tell his sister. He had never been much of a religious person before, especially that he felt neglected and forgotten after so many years of red skies and monsters lurking. God seemed like a peaceful figure to Jam, but with all the monsters that he had slain throughout his years, he was distracted with thoughts of constant violence and hate.

However, he covered up his own thoughts, these 'cursed thoughts' as he'd like to call him, and tried to keep Grace in the little box of innocence that she had left. "Yeah, I guess."

"Well why is it so hard to talk to Him? Why did He leave us in the middle of a warzone?" It was almost scary how close the eleven year old girl's thoughts were to the sixteen year old boy.

"I think He's out there," Jam replied to his sister, "Something's out there, right? What about the times that we went into the outside and monsters attacked us? I'm pretty sure that He was protecting us."

"I'm pretty sure, I guess."

"You can't ask for everything. God does work in his own mysterious ways, I guess."

A long silence succeeded their conversation after Jam's sister declared, "I'm probably going to go to sleep, Jam."

"Alright then. Sleep tight." He smiled as he kissed her on the forehead. Grace giggled.

Jam slowly got up from the bed and walked out, cautiously shutting the wooden door. He slid down, his back scrunched up against the brown wood. His mind was racing with lots of thoughts.

It was at that moment of silence that Jam Diaz realized how much better his life could possibly be. There could be so little hatred and much more peace and love within a mere couple of interactions and seconds as seen with his sister. It was at that moment that he decided to do something incredibly ridiculous. He was going stop this ordeal for his young Grace and for his distressed mother and father.

Jam knew what he was going to do, and he had already calculated how he was going to do it.