The Permutation

Trial Run

Now that her vision was fully functioning, Jordan approached the window cautiously with a hairbrush in hand. It wasn't much of a weapon but applied in certain areas it could buy her some valuable time. She inched towards the window prepared for anything. She imagined an invader in a white mask with little holes all over it. He was the man in a movie her mom was watching after Jordan was supposed to have gone to bed. Ever since they moved, Jordan couldn't fall asleep. Without the familiar noises of the city, her thoughts were deafening, running rampant through her mind. At this moment, she longed for that silence. She would be able to hear whatever it was that was outside instead of Albert's insistent barking.

She had come up to the window at a diagonal angle in order to minimize the chances of her being seen by her potential assailant. She could feel the blood draining from her fingers as a result of the death-grip she had on her hairbrush. Before she could get a good look, light pierced her window, bathing her room in a color her eyes had a hard time processing. It felt like purple, but it was brighter, like it was too complex for her simple eyes to handle. She darted her eyes away from the window and realized that Albert's barking had stopped. The dog had lain on the ground, unmoving. She couldn't tell if he was breathing or not.

Jordan took a step towards him and felt her socks rub against the carpeted floor. A jolt of electricity rushed through her body, paralyzing her in place. She had lost all muscle control. Energy crackled through her body. Her nerves felt like wires with electricity surging between them, and her small body was just an inadequate vessel for all of the energy. She didn't even feel like a person anymore, just a being of pure energy. She fought to hold onto Jordan. An image of her mother crying in the living room every Sunday night made her fight even harder.

Jordan focused every ounce of her willpower to lift her right foot. She needed to get to window and see what was going on. Her foot lifted a fraction of an inch off the ground when a sound pierced her conscious mind. Her willpower scattered to the wind, and her body collapsed underneath her. The closest thing she could compare the sound to was when her shower was warming up. It would give off this high-pitched sound that got more and more annoying until it reached the target temperature. As it increased, so did the electricity in her body. She could see little sparks travelling between the hairs on her arms.The sound levelled off, and she could feel the air in the room get heavy. It slipped over her like a warm blanket, and she fell asleep.

Paul

A loud thud startled Paul from his uneasy sleep. The simultaneous glares of the lights from his TV and the laptop resting on top of his rotund belly momentarily blinded him. Without looking, he reached his arm onto his side table. He pawed at it a few times before finally grabbing the remote in his sweaty hands. He shut off the television, closed his laptop, and looked at the double sliding glass doors that led to his backyard. Small cracks spiderwebbed from a point in the middle of one of the doors. A large dust imprint and small flecks of blood dotted the area like some abstract work of modern art.

"Stupid fucking birds," Paul muttered to himself.

He started shifting his considerable girth back and forth in his seat, trying to use his momentum to get himself out of his chair. After a few futile attempts, Paul decided it wasn't worth the effort and settled back onto his Relaxzen Rocker Recliner with massage and heat capabilities. The best three-hundred-and-eleven-dollars he had ever spent. Lately, he could think of fewer and fewer reasons to actually leave this chair. In the big scheme of things, did it really matter if he had a crack in his door? He never had any visitors, and he rarely went outside.

He loathed the thought of going back to sleep, too many dreams. He decided to try and get some work done instead. He booted his laptop back up. When you worked from home, it didn't matter when you did your work. Before he could decide who he wanted to be for the evening, a horrible yapping disrupted his train of thought. It had to be that damnable miniature schnauzer that lived next door. It didn't matter what the new neighbors  assured the homeowner's association. He knew those city folk and their stupid mutt would be nothing but trouble. It went deeper than that. Their type of people just didn't belong in a nice, respectable neighborhood.