"I ... I killed them," I stammered. "They were going to take me and ... I shot them."

I was standing in a parking lot, in the dark, in the middle of the night. Beside me, inside the plane, were the two people I'd shot. The two people I'd killed. That rattled around in my head.

I'd killed them. Shot them dead before they could shoot me.

"Adam ... what happened?" my mother demanded.

She, my father, and the twins were there with me. We stood in a huddle, with my family trying to calm and comfort me.

Howie, my mom's lieutenant, stood nearby.

My whole body had started shaking, as if I were standing out in the freezing cold. But it was actually just a cool late-summer night.

In the lights cast by the several patrol cars that had gathered, the whole scene was now as bright as day. Here I stood in the parking lot of the strip mall — the mall where I used to go to get an ice cream or to run an errand and pick things up for my parents at the grocery store or the drugstore, or the bakery. The place I'd come to get a slice of pizza.

Although the stores were mostly abandoned, the mall looked pretty much the same as it always did. The differences were the nearby high fence that marked one edge of our community, the armed guards at the gate, and of course the airplane with the two bodies inside it.

Those things were more different than anything I could have even imagined a few months ago, before the blackout hit.

I tried to gather myself.

The twins — my younger brother and sister — were holding on to me, crying.

"I didn't have any choice," I said. "I shot them. I had to."

"You shot who?" my father questioned.

"Two of the prisoners, Owen and Tim. They were trying to force me to fly them away."

"Oh my lord!" he exclaimed.

"They killed the guards and they all escaped and —"

"Brett has escaped?" my mother asked.

I could tell by her expression how shocked she was. More than that, there was fear.

"Yes, all of the prisoners. He and the others are probably already over the walls and gone."

My mother launched into police-captain mode, barking out orders to Howie, who rushed off to notify the guards on the walls.

She turned her attention back to me. "But why were you even out here to begin with in the middle of the night?"

"It was Brett," I said. "He was in our house."

My sister gasped.

"In my room. He had a knife." Even as I said the words it didn't seem real, more like a bizarre nightmare. "He told me if I didn't come along quietly he'd kill me and everybody else in the house. I had to go with him. There was no choice."

"But why? Why did he want you to go with him?" my father asked.

"He didn't want me. He wanted the plane. Once we were outside the house, we met up with six others, and he ordered two of them to come along with me. They tried to make me fly it out for them and —"

Then I remembered.

"We have to get to Herb!"

"What?" my mother asked.

"They shot Herb ... We have to get help ... We have to bring the doctor! He could still be alive!"

I broke free of my family and started running.

I heard them shouting out after me, but I couldn't stop.

I raced through the parking lot, dodging the abandoned cars, and ran out into the street. I pounded down the hill back toward Herb's house, where I pictured him lying in a pool of blood, having been shot in his bed by two of Brett's militiamen.

My feet and legs,