Fan Fiction

This page is reserved for fan fiction created for entertainment purposes only. I own no rights to any of the characters, settings, stories, or any intellectual property associated with these works. They were all written out of love for the original material - no copyright infringement is intended, and no profit is being made from these stories.

"The Pale Woman"

A Monster Squad Short Story about Scary German Guy

Author’s Note: I have wanted to write a fan fiction story about Monster Squad for years and years. Any ideas I have had in the past usually centered around a type of sequel, revisiting the kids perhaps as adults as they're once again called to fight the forces of evil. None of those ideas ever stuck with me. I did, however, start thinking one day about a line from the movie. As the kids are leaving Scary German Guy's house, Horace remakrs, "Boy, you sure know a lot about monsters!" to which SGG replies, "Now that you mention it, I suppose ... I do." The camera pans to a concentration camp tattoo on his arm, and one day I started thinking, what if Scary German Guy did have some kind of paranomal encounter as a young man? The result is this little story, which was a lot of fun to write. Prequels, requels, and constant sequels can always be problematic. Let me just say that, if something about this story doesn't ring quite right for the Scary German Guy character, just know that it is one man's interpretation. Hope you enjoy. J.P.

The Pale Woman

Sighing heavily, Jakob Auerbach watched the dark trees of Baton Rouge whisk by on either side of his gray-green Land Rover, reflecting disconsolately on how easily and quickly human beings adapt to the most miserable and frightening of circumstances. This was not the first time he thought of such things.

Minutes before, the boy, Rudy, had dispatched a living corpse from the back of the vehicle, a mummy, as the cinema would call it, even ending with a witty barb as the monster was yanked by its wrappings. “Band-Aid Breath,” he’d called it. Had this been any other night, Jakob might have found it funny. Tonight, however, was not an ordinary night.

“Like, dude,” the teenage girl, Lisa, said next to him. “I don’t know how you can be like, so completely calm through all this.”

“Scary German Guy’s one tough mofo,” interjected Rudy. “Ain’t that right, SGG?”

Jakob shrugged his bony shoulders and self-consciously ran a hand through the few wisps of hair on his mostly bald head. “I’m just trying to drive the car.”

“But you’re so laid back,” Lisa continued. “Have you like, ever done something like this before?”

“No,” he lied.

He glanced at the little girl, Phoebe, who looked genuinely terrified, shivering in her little red sweater.

He felt bad for her. He felt bad for all of them, in truth. Most adults would have caved under the horrors they’d seen this night, let alone what potentially lay ahead. He prayed their plan would work.

While the events of the last few days were unprecedented, Jakob had experienced something like this before. When the boys had come to him, Horace had said, “Man, you sure know a lot about monsters.”

“Now that you mention it … I suppose I do,” he’d replied.

Their visit had plagued him the rest of the day and into a sleepless night, Jakob’s safe little world shattering around him like a mirror. The truth was, he did know a bit about monsters.

He’d met one up close, a long time ago.

During the war, after the horrors that came to be known as Kristallnacht, he was sent to a concentration camp, where, after proving good with his hands, he was put to work as a carpenter and basic maintenance man.

As he reflected over forty years later, he was dismayed at how quickly life had changed for him and so many others in so short a time. In just a blink of an eye, he’d gone from being a young man at university studying to be an engineer with a pretty young girlfriend to being a prisoner in striped pajamas, a tattoo on his arm, his routine, which he’d thought of as cumbersome at the time, of studying for exams and listening to boring lectures, turning into a daily fight for survival.

Of course, he was extremely fortunate; he knew that. He was young and hearty, strong of back and quick of mind, in short, of use to his Nazi captors. He’d seen what they did to those they no longer deemed of value to them. And he’d seen more than that. He’d barely escaped with his life on Kristallnacht, and he’d seen neighbors, friends clubbed and stabbed to death, thrown into the street like dogs and kicked until they resembled a quivering blob of jelly instead of a person. In the camps he’d seen men, women, and children suffer unimaginable violations. So yes, he was fortunate.

For Jakob, the tasks they appointed to him were easy work, but mending fences that kept them confined like animals and repairing machinery that assisted in gassing them to death was almost too much to bear. He knew he had no choice in these matters, as none of them did. His work was nothing more than a primal effort to survive. And yet it conflicted with his humanity and anything that was good or noble within him. While the work itself was relatively simple, it was often done in the freezing cold with no breaks. Sleep came difficult to Jakob, and when it did, only as a result of extreme exhaustion, and troubled by terrible dreams. He ate little, too, which had made him sickly and thin.

Initially, he attempted to sabotage such efforts, but when the repair he was supposed to have made did not work, he was beaten severely. He knew if he did not do as he was asked, he’d be shot. So he worked.

He found other ways to be helpful. A man who could fix things was often a hero, especially if his labors kept the guards warm and fed. He was occasionally given cigarettes and extra rations, the latter of which he made sure to give to the very elderly or young.

The guards eventually called him a “miracle worker,” a Wundertäter, an appellation he did not deserve but one he endured in the same way he endured so much else. As such, he was given more freedom to move about the camp than some of the others.

It was on such an errand he first saw the Pale Women.

One of the spotlights on the western wall, located directly above the main gate, had gone out. Initial efforts at replacing the bulb had not helped, and Jakob was ordered to install an entirely new light.

It was full dark by the time Jakob got to work, freezing cold, and while the SS guards chatted amiably with him while they paced the wall, their submachine guns slung over the shoulders of their long coats, coats which were heavier than the meager one Jakob had on, it took all his effort to keep his hands from shaking, so he did little more than nod or grunt at their lewd jokes.

Beyond the camp was the forest, nothing but an immense wall of darkness right now, darkness that was suddenly split by two white daggers of light cutting their way up the long, winding road that led up to the front gate.

Jakob was nearly done with his work when the vehicle came to a purring stop on the other side of the gate. The guards, jovial and gregarious just moments before, changed, almost as if nervous, and barked urgent orders that the gate be opened.

Vehicles arrived in the night sometimes, so this was not odd. Supplies and provisions, perhaps delayed, sometimes came in the dead of night, as did special orders or a special visitor. That was what Jakob assumed this was, for the vehicle that slinked through the gate with the regal gracefulness of a cat was a sleek black Mercedes-Benz 770, as menacing as it was luxurious as it rolled through the gates and into the camp.

Jakob tested the light and, finding it in working order, took the ladder down, grateful to be out of the cold but making sure to take the long way to get a better look at their mysterious visitor.

Unsurprisingly, the Mercedes-Benz stopped just outside the Kommandant’s quarters, the man himself standing expectantly in the doorway, his uniform spotless and pressed, the buttons and medal gleaming in the light of the headlights.

A chauffeur, a tall, sallow man dressed all in black, exited the driver’s seat and moved stiffly around to the other side, opening the door and offering a hand, which was accepted by a slender, white-gloved hand in return.

A striking woman exited the Mercedes-Benz, tall and thin, her slender body wrapped in glossy black fur. Her hair, mostly up and under a black cap, was blond, and Jakob gasped as he realized her hands were not gloved as he originally thought, but her skin was as white as milk. Her lips, as ruby red as fresh roses, parted in a beaming smile once she saw her host standing in the doorway. The Kommandant went to meet her halfway when suddenly, behind Jakob, he heard one of the guards bark at him to keep moving, a clear reminder that, while they could be friendly with him, there was still a very real, very wide separation between them.

The Pale Woman disappeared into the Kommandant’s quarters.

The Mercedes 770 was gone the next morning, so Jakob thought the Pale Woman must have been gone as well. As very few of the prisoners in the camp had seen her arrive, there was very little talk about her the next day. Jakob assumed that was the last he’d see of her.

He was wrong.

Jakob wasn’t the only man who’d curried favor with the guards; there were many. One such man was a thick, swarthy man named Samuel who’d, thanks to his size, strength, and overbearing personality, had been appointed by the guards as a Kapo, someone to help enforce the rules. Unlike Jakob, Samuel did not seem to feel shame because of his duties, but relished them. Jakob had seen him mercilessly beat other prisoners who got out of line, at first under the watchful eye of the guards, and then even when no guards were around. During mealtimes, he would lift his nose up in disgust at the spoiled cheese, hard bread, and tasteless soup they ate while boasting of the fine food, chocolate, and beer he was occasionally given in the guards’ quarters. One of the duties he particularly seemed to enjoy was keeping a line orderly and moving when they were shuffled off to work or eat, kicking, cuffing, and clubbing the prisoners as they walked.

One night, when Jakob was unable to sleep, he watched Samuel be escorted through the camp by two guards. He looked freshly washed, his hair neatly brushed, and even wore an ill-fitting suit that bulged under his large frame. The guards escorted him towards the Kommandant’s quarters.

The next morning at breakfast, Jakob overheard two of the men whispering about Samuel, one of them claiming to have been directed to bury him before first light.

“Oh, and how did he die?” one of the men asked. “Did that fat heart of his finally explode?”

“No,” the other said quietly. “It was his throat. It had been ripped out, as if from an animal.”

A hush fell over the men then. There had been no end to the brutality of the Nazis, and while none of them mourned Samuel, privately they all worried that if it could happen to him, they might be next.

And it did happen to someone else.

Jakob been working on a furnace in the officer’s building, an arduous process that had taken him all day, and it was mid-evening when he was finally able to retire, exhausted, to his own bunk.

On the way there, he spotted a man being escorted through the camp by two guards.

This by itself was not odd, though it usually represented nothing good for the prisoner under their care, as it usually meant they were to be interrogated or executed. This man, however – he was one Jakob did not know – was dressed not as a prisoner but in clean, pressed clothes, and had a freshly scrubbed look to him, as if just out of the bath. Jakob retreated to the darkness between two of the buildings and watched them pass.

They walked straight to the Kommandant’s quarters, where the Pale Woman waited for them expectantly in the open doorway. She flashed a smile at the man, her white teeth gleaming in the darkness, and she stepped aside to let the guards bring him in.

Jakob was disturbed but not surprised, for being able to fix things was not the only way to curry favor with the guards. Some gave freely of their bodies. Like everyone else, they did what they could to survive, no matter how unpalatable it might have been. That’s what Jakob figured was happening here. Not his business, not his concern.

Then, like the man before him, this one was found dead the next morning, covered in a layer of fresh powder like a sugar-dusted cake, his mouth and purple lips open in a terrible, frozen scream, his throat torn out.

In a place in which murder was a daily reality, these deaths should not have even registered to the prisoners, and for some, they didn’t. To others, however, there was something unsettling about them, something different. Their captors were never sneaky nor ashamed of their brutality; it wasn’t like them to conceal their wicked deeds, for it was through the threat of violence they kept the people under their control. It was the guards themselves who seemed disturbed by these mysterious killings, and that frightened everyone.

Jakob had seen the kommandant walking briskly through the camp the next morning, wrapped in his heavy long coat against the cold, escorted by guards. He looked waxen, haunted, and as if he’d aged ten years since he’d first arrived at the camp. Jakob’s fellow prisoners gossiped about this as well, and they talked hopefully about the war, saying that perhaps it wasn’t going well, but Jakob knew better. Jakob knew it was the Pale Woman that weighed on his mind.

He met her for the first time himself three days later as he was repairing a frozen, busted pipe outside the officer’s quarters.

It was night, a bitterly cold one, and while Jakob felt uneasy being out in the same hours that the other men had disappeared, he thought he would be fine, as he was nowhere near the kommandant’s quarters. The cloudless, frigid night sky sparkled with brilliant stars, their eternal beauty contrasting the misery below, and though shaking from the cold, there was a serenity to work like this.

He felt the presence of the Pale Woman before he saw her.

“You,” came a husky voice, accented, but not one Jakob was familiar with. “I have seen you before.”

Jakob turned around swiftly, finding the Pale Woman where she had not been just moments before, leaning against the next building. She stepped into the light, her pale skin practically reflecting it, and approached him. He backed away from her, hitting the wall behind. The Pale Woman smiled a beautiful smile at him, beautiful but wicked, as if she delighted in having startled him. Up close, she looked as if she’d been chiseled from the finest marble; her lips were as crimson as the reddest rose you would ever see, and her green eyes – eyes like those of a jungle cat – sparkled like emeralds. She was wearing her black dress, high heels, and a small fur over her shoulders. That was all.

“Madam,” Jakob stammered, “You must get indoors. It is freezing out here.”
“It feels exhilarating to me,” she said.

Jakob chuckled nervously.

“Well, yes, yes … but you see, I must finish my work.” He gestured to the disassembled pipe behind him. “The guards, they will be very angry with me if I delay.”

“These silly boys with their silly little guns?” the Pale Woman said contemptuously. “None of them will bother you while you’re with me.”
“Ah,” Jakob said. “Of course.”

She took a step closer to him, and Jakob found it as intimidating as if it were one of the guards. She reached out and took him by the arm, closing her fingers around his right bicep. While her hands were slender, he could feel the immense power, the strength within her, and it chilled him worse than the cold. He pulled away from her, and after a brief hesitation, she let him, and Jakob understood that she did not have to if she hadn’t wanted to.

The war had come closer in recent months.

It started with the distant booming of artillery shells and the whirring of unseen planes in the sky. Eventually, smoke could be seen coming from somewhere deep in the woods, and the camp grew uneasy, so much so that the Pale Woman and the increasing number of men found dead in the morning were talked of less.

One early evening, just after the sun had dipped below the horizon and icy darkness settled over the camp, Jakob received the summons he’d been dreading.

The guard come to take him to the kommandant’s quarters stood stiffly in the door, looking harried, nervous, and almost guilty, which struck Jakob as ironic, for this same man would have no compunction about caving in his skull with a rifle butt or putting a bullet in his eye. Perhaps, because there was something unnatural about the Pale Woman, Jakob had come to understand this, it was different, somehow.

“I, uh, I am supposed to help in the officer’s kitchen,” Jakob said apologetically.

“You must come now,” the guard insisted as he shifted the weight of his machine gun on his shoulder. Then quietly he said, almost in a whisper, “you must.”

“Very well.”

Like the others, he was bathed, shaved, and given clean clothes to wear that swam on his slender body like robes.

When they arrived, the guard did not enter the kommandant’s quarters, as if he was afraid to, opting instead to stay several feet back while he watched Jakob enter.

The door shut behind him, startling Jakob, and he looked around the dark, cold quarters.

The only light came from a lantern sitting on a table at the far end of the room and two candles mounted on either side of the window (the curtains drawn). The kommandant himself sat at the table, leaning heavily against it as if for support, a bottle of schnapps and an empty glass in front of him. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, his chin covered by whiskers. Music was playing from a radio somewhere, and though Jakob knew the heater in this room worked, it must not have been on, for he could see his and the kommandant’s breath in the air.

“You’re here,” the Pale Woman said, emerging from the shadows. “I am so glad.”

She slinked out of the darkness with the grace of a cat, her beautiful yet deadly smile and eyes brighter than any of the lights in the room.

“Um, how can I help, Madam?” Jakob asked nervously.

Ignoring his question, the Pale Woman crossed the room and seductively draped an arm over the kommandant’s shoulders. The most powerful man in the camp winced and tried to recoil from her touch – a touch Jakob knew to be unnaturally strong and cold, but she held him there, whispering something softly to him. She turned back to Jakob.

“Do you like something to drink?” She cocked her head towards the commandant. “He’ll share.”

“No, thank you. Um, is it the furnace that is not working?”

“Pardon?”

She left the kommandant at his table and moved towards Jakob.

“The furnace. Is it broken? That’s why you called me?”

“I called you,” she said silkily, “because I wanted to talk to you.”

She stepped uncomfortably close to Jakob, causing the hair to stand up on the back of his neck. Using one of her long, red nails, she tilted his chin up to look in her green eyes.

“You don’t have to be afraid of me. All the boys are so afraid of me,” she said poutingly, then moved across from Jakob and folded her arms over her body. “I’m so lonely.”

Jakob felt like a fish on a line, as if she was pulling him towards her. Though he willed them not to, his feet started to move, first his left and then his right, stiffly and awkwardly like a newborn foal. Then he managed to stop himself and take a step backwards.

“You are strong,” she said with a smile. “Good.”

Outside, a wailing alarm pierced the quiet of the night, followed by panicked, shouting voices.

The kommandant’s head perked up like a dog’s when it hears a whistle, but the Pale Woman seemed to be unconcerned with the alarms. Instead, she smiled, her green eyes growing as big and deep as lakes, lakes Jakob wanted to jump right into.

Whatever hold the Pale Woman had on Jakob was broken the moment the wall behind her exploded.

Showered with shards of glass, bits of wood, his ears ringing, Jakob struggled to get to his feet, stumbling like a drunken man. There was a jagged, smoking hole where the wall had been just seconds before, giving a view of the chaotic scene outside, where men and women were running and buildings were on fire.

Jakob did not see the Pale Woman at first, and thought hopefully that the bomb had taken her, but then she rose from the rubble, her hair singed and smoking, her skin littered with bits of glass and other debris. Her beautiful face had been transformed the way a jungle cat’s could change – at one moment graceful, majestic even, now twisted into a snarling mask of terror with two long, sharp fangs.

“Nosferatu!” Jakob cried.

The Pale Woman hissed and stepped forward, but the kommandant, suddenly on his feet, stepped between them, his Lugar in his hand, which he fired at the woman until it was empty. She stood there, not so much as blinking from the reports of the shots, then lashed out with her taloned fingers, stripping half the flesh of the kommandant’s face away.

Jakob ran out the front door, ran as fast as he could, past other fleeing prisoners and shouting guards. He could feel the presence of the Pale Woman behind him, knew she was about to make chase, and he looked over his shoulder at her. There she was in the doorway, about to pounce, when the kommandant’s quarters exploded from another bomb.

He did not know if that killed her. All he knew was that she did not make chase this time.

There was much, much more to come after that, of course. There was a desperate, harrowing trek through the freezing, snowy woods; a perilous border crossing; living as a refugee in a land that was not his home; finishing his studies; coming to America, getting married, having a life, and now living quietly as a widower.

He did not care that the people of the town called him “Scary German Guy,” he endured it with grace and humor. He knew there were scarier things than he, and if he was the scariest these people ever met, then he counted them lucky, envied them even.

The Nazis were easily the most horrible monsters he had met in his life, far more brutal and terrifying than any other ghoul or goblin, but he knew that there are such things, too. He’d thought that he’d seen the last of them all those years ago in the camp, so long ago and removed from his quiet, everyday life that it was almost easy to dismiss them as nothing more than a nightmare.

Then the children came to him, asking him to read a diary that was in German. He delighted at the idea and thought it would be fun. He always liked children, but as he read its incredible stories about vampires and ghosts, of limbo and of evil taking over the world, he realized that his life, touched so long ago by evil, had been touched by evil again. While some would have found the diary fantastical, he believed every word of it, so he translated it for them, and when the boys went on their way, he told himself he was done, even while knowing he wasn’t, until the little girl, Phoebe, came to him, begging him to help.

Though he’d barely been much more than a child himself when he first met the Pale Woman, he could not let these children face this evil alone, because he had faced it alone, all those years ago, and only survived because he’d been lucky.

“Hey,” Sean said behind him. “We’re almost there!” He leaned forward and grabbed Jakob by the shoulder. “The church, remember? Go to the church!”

“Yes, I remember,” Jakob said.

A cold sense of dread, followed by quiet, settled over the Range Rover as the town square came into view. It was more than fear, though. It was the feeling potential prey feels when a predator is near, how a human being feels when in the presence of something unnatural.

Jakob had felt it before.

All is Calm, All is Bright.
A Halloween Christmas Story

Author’s Note: This story takes place in the immediate aftermath of the events depicted in the original Halloween I and II, thus in the same “timeline” as Halloween IV.

Six-year-old Laurie Strode shuffled through the tall grass of Carpenter’s Field, humming a song she’d heard in a commercial. It was summer and it was warm, Laurie’s mother dressing her in a light-colored dress that morning, the tall grass and prickly weeds tickling her ankles and knees and making her skin itch. Her feet were bare and she held her sparkly jelly sandals over her shoulder the way she’d seen her big sister do. Carpenter’s Field was an open space, a wilderness in the eyes of a six-year-old, that sat on the northwestern side of Haddonfield, a short walk or even shorter bike ride through Sutter Park and into the trees and then the open fields beyond. Laurie came here often, usually by herself, her mother allowing it as long as she never went out too far or stayed out too long. Today, she had no purpose, no goal; she was just walking.

She heard something to her left and looked just in time to see a wide-eyed bunny come crashing through the grass. It stopped and looked at her, its little nose and whiskers twitching furiously, before dashing off into the grass as she leaned in to pet it.

“Come back, bunny!” she shouted after it. She glanced at the sky and saw thick, dark clouds rolling in and thought she might head back. Her mother would scold her for sure if she got caught in the rain. She turned to head back but then heard another noise: thup! thup! thup! She looked to her right and saw the shape of a boy crouching low to the ground. His back was turned, but from the longish, sandy-blond hair she could tell it was her brother.

“Michael?” she said, “What are you doing here?” There was a hint of indignation in her voice and no small bit of resentment in her heart at finding him out here in Carpenter’s Field. Michael rarely left the house and when he did, Laurie had no idea where he went. Though it was close to their house, Carpenter’s Field was her place, a special, sacred place where she could go and be alone with the trees and birds and grass and bugs and away from the occasional darkness of her home, and she was unhappy to find him here. But still, he was her brother and a storm seemed to be coming and she didn’t want to get in trouble for leaving him out here in it.

“Michael, it’s going to rain!” She walked closer to him. Thup! Thup! Thup! He was sitting on his knees working intently at something, his arm rising and falling. Laurie thought he might have been digging a hole. Frustrated that he would not so much as even look at her, she stomped up behind him. “Michael Myers, you’re gonna be in trouble!”

She came to a stop just over his shoulder and saw what he was working at. In between his knees was another bunny, virtually identical to the one she’d seen just moments before. With his left hand, he pinned it by the neck to the ground while with his right, he stabbed it again and again with a screwdriver he’d taken from their father’s toolbox.

“MICHAEL, STOP!” she screamed. Michael ignored her and seemed to tighten his grip around the dying bunny’s throat as it made a final desperate attempt to escape, spasming in Michael’s hand, its round little belly rising and falling rapidly as its final breaths left its tiny body. “Oh, Michael.”

Michael looked down at his prey, cocked his head right then left as if analyzing a piece of fine art hanging in a museum. Then, almost in slow motion, he turned towards Laurie as if suddenly realizing she was even there. The face that looked up at her was not that of her brother Michael but his real face, the plain yet terrifying white mask and frizzy brown hair.

Laurie screamed and bolted back the way she came. Overhead, as the storm rolled in, the thunder roared.

Laurie, unstable, weak in the knees, wearing a hospital gown, stumbled through the cold, dark halls of Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, banging on windows, testing locked doors, screaming for help. It was a hospital, a fucking hospital, where the hell could everyone be? Haddonfield was a small town, sure, but it was big enough and it was Halloween, surely one of the busiest nights of the year for a hospital, but the place was as empty as a mausoleum.

She came to the maternity ward, mostly dark inside but illuminated by the full moon looking in through the window, and saw the newborns stirring restlessly in their cribs. From the heart-shaped sticker on the side of the crib, she saw that the nearest baby was named Cynthia. She heard a door open on screechy hinges at the end of the hall and even though she didn’t have to look to see what it was, she did, finding Michael Myers standing in an open doorway, wearing his blue overalls, holding an improbably large butcher knife, his breathing loud through the small nostrils of his mask.

“NOOOO!” she screamed, dashing back the other way.

The dark halls of Haddonfield Memorial seemed endless, labyrinthine, confusing. Every hospital, every public building Laurie had ever been in had bright EXIT signs, but she found no such thing in the hospital. Just more and more dark halls, the moonlight glinting off the finely waxed floors, the heavy footfalls and raspy breathing of Michael behind her.

She came to an open door and looked inside. It was a private room, and on the bed was a headstone. OUR BELOVED DAUGHTER JUDITH MYERS it said, but unlike the last time she’d seen it, it wasn’t Annie in the bed lying before it but Judith herself, beautiful Judith that was little more than a ghost of a memory to Laurie, nude and covered in bloody stab wounds.

She turned to run, dashing right into Michael’s arms.

Haddonfield, Illinois.

Early December, 1978.

Seventeen-year-old Laurie Strode woke up screaming in her bedroom, kicking frantically at her blanket as if it was the strong, vice-like grip of Michael himself holding her down, her flailing arms knocking her half-full glass of water and lamp off her nightstand. Finally, she freed herself from the octopus-like tangle of her blankets and stood almost to full height on her bed like someone feeling a scurrying rat. As the familiar shapes of her bedroom took shape before her eyes, she realized that she’d been having a nightmare and that she was still crying out. She was covered with sweat and her heart was pounding rapidly in her chest, making her think of the rapid, dying breaths of the bunny in her dream.

Her parents, Morgan and Pamela, came bursting into the room, calling her name. She leapt from her bed and into their arms like a little girl, nearly knocking them both on their backsides. Her mother stroked her hair, whispering reassuring things in her ear while her father sighed gratefully and leaned against the wall while rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Nightmares had been a regular thing in the Strode household for the last two months for all three members of the family, but whenever they were awoken by Laurie screaming, they seemed to worry that one of these nights, it wouldn’t just be a nightmare, that the Boogeyman (her brother) had come back.

“I’m sorry,” Laurie said miserably, tears and snot running down her long, pretty face. “It was a nightmare.”
“I know, honey,” her mother cooed, “I know.” Her mother used her sleeve to wipe Laurie’s face and looked her over for further injury. Pamela Strode had aged much since October 31st, her father had too. Hell, Laurie, not yet 18, looked years older since the night that had turned their lives, the lives of practically everybody in town, upside down. It was another thing she felt guilty about.

Her mother cradled her to her breast and sang to her like she used to when Laurie was a little girl. Before Halloween, Laurie would have politely but insistently told her to stop, but there was something about facing death multiple times in one night that made you feel vulnerable again, made you feel like a child that needed protectors, and a comforting embrace and a lullaby from her mother felt like balm on the wounds of October 31st. While her father leaned against the wall, reflecting on whatever private misery he was going through, her mother softly sang “Oh Holy Night” to her. It was Christmastime, Laurie could see the colorful lights strung around the big tree in the Whitmore’s front yard across the street through her bedroom window, and her mother, who used to sing in their church choir when Laurie was a girl, always loved that one. Laurie did too. Their favorite was “Silent Night,” which Pamela Strode sang next.

“All is calm … all is bright …” she sang, Laurie humming along with her.

When she’d been a girl, it usually took no more than two songs to put Laurie to sleep. As a child, she was plagued with nightmares often, usually about burglars breaking into their house, police surrounding it, and clowns. Lots of nightmares about clowns. Eventually she found out why that was, but at the time, she thought it was just the silly phobias of a child. Her parents knew differently but had kept it to themselves most of her life.

“Thanks, Momma,” Laurie said, wiping fresh tears from her eyes. “I think I’m good now.”
“Are you sure?” Pamela asked, dabbing at her own eyes and brushing Laurie’s hair over her ear. “I can stay. I don’t mind. I can even sleep in here, if you want.”

“No, that’s okay,” she said, nodding at the door. “Go back and sleep with Daddy.”

Her father had quietly excused himself a few minutes before in what was now a practiced routine. Her mother, however, just rolled her eyes.

“He won’t be in bed. Once he’s up like this, he can’t sleep.”

Laurie knew what she meant, “like this.” She meant after Laurie had one of her nightmares.

“Would you like another pill to help you sleep?” her mother asked. Ever since the nightmares had started the doctors prescribed her flurazepam to help her rest. It mostly didn’t work.

“It’s okay, Momma. I’m fine. Really.”

She heard her parents whispering in their bedroom a little bit later, the kind of stern whispering that indicated that they were arguing, and eventually she heard her father’s heavy steps as he went downstairs. In her mind’s eye, she saw him fill a tumbler with ice and then fill it almost all the way to the brim with Scotch. Morgan Strode was always a drinker, but ever since Halloween, ever since their daughter had nearly been murdered by her long-lost older brother and all her friends were killed, he was approaching full-blown alcoholic status.

Laurie sat at her window and watched a gentle December snow fall on her street. She looked at the lights of the Whitmore’s house, glanced at the brightly lit Christmas tree in the front window of the Kowalski’s home. Downstairs, their own tree was probably still lit up in their front room. They had decorated it the Saturday after Thanksgiving like they always had, Daddy drinking his whiskey-Egg Nogg and Momma playing her Bing Crosby Christmas record like always, and while they smiled and sang along, it didn’t feel like Christmas. To Laurie, it was always Halloween.

The dreamwas by and large ridiculous. Laurie had no idea her actual last name was Myers, had no clue that she had an older brother and (dead) older sister. She met Michael when she was eight after Pamela, in actuality her adoptive mother (against Morgan’s wishes), took her to Smith’s Grove to meet him (also against Morgan’s wishes). Michael killed Judith when Laurie was three-years-old, her biological parents dying in a car wreck soon after. She had no idea if he killed and tortured little animals when he was a boy. She supposed it was possible, maybe even likely. Once she knew Michael and her former family existed, her subconscious had concocted all sorts of scenarios that had never happened. Birthdays at the Myers house. Easter at the Myers house. Cocktail parties at the Myers house. Some of these dreams started out normally, but they always ended with Michael wearing the mask and chasing her, sometimes through Haddonfield Memorial, sometimes in the Doyle house.

She went downstairs, got a fresh glass of water and heard her father watching Johnny Carson in the family room. She followed the electric blue glow of the TV screen, the sound of audience laughter and Johnny’s deadpan delivery and found her father where she expected him, sitting in his easy chair, sipping his Scotch. She cleared her throat to announce herself and he hid something in his lap.

“Hey, honey. Can’t sleep?”
“No, Daddy,” she said, entering the room and coming up to his left side.

“Want a drink?” He raised his half-empty glass. “I won’t tell Mom if you don’t.”

“No, I’m okay.”

Her father nodded, tipped his glass to her and took a sip.

“Are you okay, Daddy?”

“I’m fine, sweetie,” he said dismissively. “Just couldn’t get back to sleep is all.” He shifted whatever he’d hidden in his lap and Laurie tried to appear inconspicuous as she tried to see what it was. On the TV, Johnny’s stage was replaced with a commercial, flooding the room with brighter light, light that glinted off the cylinder of his .38 revolver. She noticed that, while he was in front of the TV, he’d angled the chair so he could see through the window to the street, that he was keeping watch for her, for all of them.

“Okay, Daddy.” She left him to this, his quiet time, his private hell, whatever it was.

She felt bad for her father. Prior to Halloween, he had been one of Haddonfield’s most successful realtors, perhaps the most successful, but since then, things had been slow for him at work. Strange. While December was always a slow month for him, not a lot of people buying houses in Illinois in winter, most people really didn’t want to live in what had become one of the most infamous towns in America. If anything, they wanted to leave. What few requests he did get were morbid inquiries about the Myers house. Her house. Her childhood home. She shuddered.

She went back to bed and when she fell asleep, she did dream but couldn’t remember about what.

The next morning, in spite of the fresh snow on the ground and the freezing temperature, Laurie insisted on walking to school. It wasn’t far, she reminded her parents, and after a rough night of sleep or lack thereof, the biting air would help wake her, which was partially true. For the most part, she couldn’t fathom the idea of another slow, awkward ride with her mother to school as she assured her everything would be all right, that if she ever needed to talk to someone she could talk to her.

Everything wouldn’t be all right, though. Laurie knew that. Her friends were dead, Ben Tramer, a boy she’d had a crush on since junior high but never had the courage to talk to was dead, hit by a car. So many other people were dead, killed by her brother, a brother who also tried to kill her with a body full of bullets. A brother she’d help blow up at Haddonfield Memorial. What about any of that suggested things would be all right?

Eventually her parents agreed to let her go if for no other reason than Laurie started to raise her voice and cry about it, two things she hardly ever did in front of anyone.

She bundled herself up against the cold as best she could, wearing multiple layers - gloves, snow boots, a cap pulled low over her ears - but it was still brutally cold out. She tried to walk briskly to warm herself but the ground was slippery with ice, so she had to step carefully. It was the kind of morning that Annie would normally have picked her up.

Annie.

Annie Brackett, her best friend. How she missed her. Annie who was everything Laurie was not, loud (and foul) mouthed, confident, fearless. They had been opposites in that way that best friends sometimes are, complimenting each other and helping each other though the situations the other couldn’t get out of. Laurie was quiet, reserved, brainy. Annie was boisterous, lewd, funny. On a morning like this, she’d show up at Laurie’s house, smoking a cigarette (or something else) and blaring some Blue Oyster Clut or Credence from her car stereo.

Now she was dead.

Laurie had seen Sheriff Brackett once since November. Like all of them, he looked to have aged ten years and was rumored to be hitting the Jack Daniels a little too hard. Laurie supposed it was even harder for someone like Sheriff Brackett, a man who was so tough, so strong, to not have been able to protect his daughter or his town. He was still the Sheriff, still showed up at all the town functions, still signed all the paperwork, but more and more, the town saw Deputy Meeker taking calls and helping folks out instead of Mr. Brackett.

She didn’t take the normal route to school for that would have taken her too close to the Myers house (her childhood home, her dark internal voice always reminded her) and thus Carpenter’s Field from her dream, instead opting for a more circuitous route that would only take a little longer for her to arrive. She forced a smile at the Christmas wreathes on the doors, the trees in the windows, the big plastic Santas and snowmen in the front yards. She looked forward to Christmas, even if everyone was going to be forcing the good cheer this year.

She heard a car come rolling up behind her, looked over her shoulder and saw that it was a brown station wagon. She gasped, dropped her books and mug of hot cocoa she’d brought to keep herself warm and dashed behind a tree in someone’s yard. The station wagon, its engine rumbling like the belly of a hungry beast, was the same color as the one Michael had stolen to drive to Haddonfield, maybe the same make and model. Holding her breath as if he could hear her as it passed, she watched it roll by from behind the tree, ready to bolt in the other direction when she saw the occupants: a harried-looking mother with big pink earmuffs and a carload of bouncing children. Not Michael. It couldn’t have been Michael. He was full of multiple bullets and had third degree burns over 95% of his body. Her parents had been reassured time and time again he could die any day, that it was nothing short of a miracle that he was still alive at all.

Not a miracle, Laurie thought. A curse.

She watched the car disappear around the corner and then headed towards school, cursing herself for being stupid.

Laurie had always liked school, had always been an A student. She was the nerdy girl the other girls copied off of after staying out late and drinking with their boyfriends. Like every other area of her life, Halloween had just about ruined all of that. She didn’t even go back to school until after Thanksgiving break, there were just so many damned doctor’s appointments, questions from police, questions from the FBI, requests for interviews from reporters, and funerals. So. Many. Funerals.

Her teachers had graciously offered to freeze her grades but she was still so behind on content, she was about to fail Chemistry. She’d managed to keep a B in French and English, always her favorite, still was at an A but probably only due to the fact that her teacher, Mrs. Hill, adored her.

It was a Wednesday, and Laurie went through the motions of school as best as she could. She was exhausted from little sleep and she had a churning pit in the center of her chest that never seemed to go away anymore, as if her heart was racing, as if she was always scared, always waiting for something to happen. When she came back to school, she insisted to her counselor Mr. King that she needed to be able to see the door in every class, a request that had been accommodated. In one class, Chemistry, that meant sitting where Lynda used to sit, which was cruel.

She often ate lunch by herself most days, though there were plenty of kids that tried to sit with her, especially after first coming back to school. Some wanted to express their deepest sympathies, some seemed in awe of her, the last girl to face off against Michael Myers. She was sure the boys would stay away from her now. She’d poked Michael with a knitting needle, stabbed him with a butcher knife, shot him twice in the face, had walked away when so many others had not. The boys usually didn’t like her because she was too smart; now she was dangerous.

Every class that day was a struggle. Halfway through each period she realized she had no idea what the rest of the class was doing, no idea what the teacher was talking about. She skipped French that day, sequestering herself in a far corner of the library to try and study and do make up work. But even though the library was quiet, the opposite environment of her classes had the same effect on her. It was too quiet, making her even more nervous.

Sighing heavily, she leaned back in the uncomfortable library seat and tied her hair in a ponytail, her suspicious eyes moving over the room. Her eyes settled on a library poster, something advertising the value of reading. It had a panda on it munching contentedly on a piece of bamboo. The white face. The big black circles for eyes. It looked like a mask, the mask, the one that haunted her dreams.

She got the hell out of there immediately.

Sixth period. Choir. Practicing for the annual Christmas Concert. Her choir teacher, Mrs. Lodwick, told her she did not have to participate, but Laurie wanted to. It was one of the few classes she could keep up in, one of the few she enjoyed. She was in her place in line at the back and they were signing “Away in the Manger.” She knew it by heart, she liked the song, but the dark, musty emptiness of the auditorium before them unnerved her.

The lyrics, too.

Away in a manger, no crib for a bed

The little Lord Jesus lay down his

sweet head.

The image of a crib came into her mind, a wooden crib that seemed huge to her, as big as a lion’s cage. It had plastic ABCs that twirled in between the bars. While the crib was outfitted with pink blankets, it was a boy’s crib. It had belonged to her older brother.

She could almost picture the room. It was next to Judith’s, down the hall from Michael’s.

“Cynthia,” she heard her mother call, “Cynthia, my big girl, are you awake?”

Laurie pushed her way through the choir and ran out of the auditorium, crying.

She was walking down the hallway, coming back from the restroom. Like all old schools, the halls were dark, dusty, thick with the memories, the hopes and dreams of the thousands of students that had walked through these halls before her. Maybe that is what a school ended up being, she wondered: a museum, a graveyard of dreams that didn’t come true.

Up ahead, she saw a custodian mopping up a spill in the center of the floor. A custodian in a soiled, dark blue jumpsuit, frizzy brown hair.

It isn’t him, she told herself. It can’t be him. He’s hundreds of miles away, wrapped like a mummy, at death’s door. This is just Dick Miller, who’d been custodian here as long as anyone could remember. He was a nice old guy. It wasn’t him.

While she felt an icy hand close around her heart and lungs, she forced herself to walk forward, trying not to look directly at him but still watching him peripherally.

His slow, methodical moping was almost hypnotic as she approached him, she even felt like everything was starting to move in slow motion when he suddenly stopped, taking the mop in both hands and snapping it in half.

“No …” she whispered.

Michael dropped one half of the mop and kept the longer, sharper one, looking up at her with that terrible, expressionless mask of his. Laurie screamed and bolted back in the other direction. Michael followed, not fast but slow as he always did.

She ran down the hallways as fast as she could, pounding on classroom doors, all of which were locked. She came to a building exit and yanked furiously on the handle to no avail. She cried out to the students she saw milling around in the parking lot. Bob and Lynda were out there making out. Hearing Laurie’s cries, they looked at her and waived. Annie was out there too, sitting on the hood of her car and smoking a cigarette in that cavalier way she did everything. She waived at Laurie too, beckoning her to come with her.

She heard Michael’s breathing behind her and she burst into a run.

She got ahead of him and found another door, tried it. It wouldn’t budge.

“Laurie!” she heard a voice say.

She looked back down the hall. Nurse Franco, wearing her sweater, holding her purse, leaving for the night, had spotted her running down the hall.

“Laurie!” she said with concern.

Laurie opened her mouth to warn her, she knew what was about to happen, but before she could utter so much as a word Michael appeared behind Nurse Franco, plunging the sharp end of the broken mop handle in her back and lifting her off the ground with one hand.

Laurie awoke screaming, launching her composition book and pencil in different directions. The kids around her recoiled and Mrs. Hill dashed over to her. She was in 7th period now, she realized. She didn’t even remember what happened between leaving choir and coming to this class.

Mrs. Hill was at her side, asking her if she was all right, the whole class staring at and whispering about her, but all Laurie could think about was Michael.

Laurie’s parents didn’t argue much. They had the usual marital squabbles: one of them spent too much money at the department store; one of them did or said something embarrassing at a cocktail party; her father worked too much. Those kinds of things. After Halloween, it seemed like they may never argue again, that all their petty tiffs seemed trivial compared to the fact they’d nearly lost their daughter to murder and so many had lost theirs.

Once it was all over, the funerals and interviews and investigations, they argued often. Tonight, they were really going at it trying to decide what to do about their daughter.

Her mother had picked her up from school, took her home where her father waited for them, and the first round of tonight’s arguing began. Her father remarked off-handedly that Haddonfield Memorial had a psyche ward and while a large portion of the hospital was still under reconstruction from the explosion, it shouldn’t have touched that area. Maybe they could take her there, he suggested, which caused Laurie to lose it.

“Haddonfield Memorial? HADDONFIELD MEMORIAL?” she screamed. “You’ll never get me in that building ever again! Are you out of your fucking mind, Dad?”

“Laurie!” her mother said evenly. “Don’t talk to your father that way.”

Laurie looked at both of them, stunned. She rarely cursed and never cursed at her parents.

“I’m sorry,” she said meekly. “I can’t go back there. Never again.”

“We won’t make you,” her mother said.

Instead, they took her to a hospital fifty miles outside of town and had the doctor, a nice but clearly out of his league man named Dr. England, evaluate her. He gave her a battery of physical tests which only seemed to suggest that she was exhausted and under a great deal of stress. The doctor asked her a number of personal questions and once he learned she was Laurie Strode, the girl from Haddonfield who’d faced down a killer, he seemed to understand. He took her parents out into the hallway, leaving Laurie to try and eavesdrop from her hospital bed.

“She has like, shell shock,” she heard him tell her parents out in the hallway.

“Shell shock?” her father scoffed, “What, like a GI?”

“Yeah, sort of,” the doctor said. “GIs often still experience the horrors of war when they come back home. I think that’s what’s happening here.”
“My father was a WWII veteran,” her father said, “He never had any of that.”

“It’s not very well understood, and I am certainly no expert,” the doctor continued carefully, “but I think she needs help from a psychiatric professional, not a medical doctor.”

He offered her medicine to calm her down, to which her mother explained they already had plenty of that, thanked him and took her home.

That’s where they were now, home, trying to figure out what to do next. Her principal, while sympathetic, had politely reminded her parents that Laurie’s outbursts were disrupting the learning environment of the other students, all of whom had gone through their own ordeal and they couldn’t continue to allow her to frighten them.

Dr. England had suggested a place called Hackberry, a facility (a loaded term if there ever was one) in upstate Illinois where people who’d experienced issues like Laurie’s could go to calm down, collect themselves, the doctor said. It was staffed with professionals that could help her, he insisted.

Her parents argued about it and finally brought Laurie into the conversation. To their surprise, she agreed to try it out. Though she hadn’t been away from home since sixth grade camp, she knew she had to get away from here, from this house, from the Doyle and Wallace houses, from the Myers house, from Haddonfield Memorial, from school, from it all. Maybe it would be good to get away. Maybe she’d be able to sleep.

A week later, they were in the car heading to Hackberry. During a light snowstorm on a bitterly cold day, they packed Laurie and her bags up into their car and left their street, passed the Myers house, passed Carpenter’s Field and the Tower Farm, and made the two-hour drive listening to Christmas music on the radio, Laurie resting her forehead on the cold glass of the passenger-side backseat window, watching the snowy landscape whisk by.

They exited the main highway and followed a winding road through the woods. The constant turns in the road made Laurie feel carsick, so she closed her eyes, eventually falling into a deep (and blessedly dreamless) sleep. When she woke, they were there.

The main outcropping of buildings sat up on a small hill surrounded by hackberry trees. It looked more like a winter lodge than a hospital, which Laurie’s parents had insisted it wasn’t. The buildings, five of them from where Laurie could see, with supply sheds and a barn off in the distance, were made of dark wood with rock veneer around the base. A couple of the chimneys had tufts of smoke emitting from them, and the air smelled of wood, ash, relaxation.

“This looks lovely,” Pamela said, joining Laurie by her side and throwing an arm around her. Morgan busied himself with unloading Laurie’s bags.

“It’s okay,” Laurie said, shivering against the cold.

The door to the nearest, largest building opened and a man came out, waving from the doorway before plunging his hands into the pockets of his Southwestern print coat and hurried out to greet them.

“The Strodes,” he said pleasantly, “I’m Dr. Barker. You must be Laurie.”

He offered a hand to Laurie, which she took limply. He was a middle-aged man with long reddish hair streaked with white, pulled back into a ponytail. He didn’t look like a doctor to Laurie but more like a hippie. Her father seemed to feel the same, for he eyed the man disdainfully from behind her, not setting down a suitcase to shake the man’s hand but rather just nodding curtly at him.

“We all spoke on the phone,” Dr. Barker continued. “It’s so nice to meet you all in person. Come in! Let’s get you out of the cold.”

Dr. Barker had them leave their luggage at the front desk with a woman named Nancy. She was built like a football player, firm but friendly, and Laurie gathered she was the law and order around here. “We’ll get them to your room,” she said.

Dr. Barker showed them around the lobby, which, like the outside, looked more like a ski lodge than a hospital or facility or whatever they wanted to call it. There was a huge fireplace at one end of it, a respectable library and table with a chess board set up nearby. Cages of little birds chirping happily were on the other side of the room, protected by a big, lazy mastiff.

Dr. Barker showed them the cafeteria, the rec room, a sitting room, and a largely empty space with chairs folded up and leaning against the walls he called the “group room.” He showed them what would normally be a nice garden outside, now covered mostly by snow.

They passed a few other patients – Laurie didn’t know if that’s what you called them – people who either smiled politely as they passed or refused to make eye contact.

The last thing he showed them was her room, a small, spartan, private ward with a bed, an empty bookshelf, a small empty dresser, and a closet where her bags were waiting for her. The single window had a nice view of the snowy woods. A private room. Laurie wondered how much this had cost her father.

“Well, here we are,” Dr. Barker said, “This’ll be your room, Laurie. Not much, but everything else you need is in the building. There’s more we didn’t get to, but I know we’re burning daylight and your parents have a long drive back to Haddonfield.” He stepped closer to Laurie.

“I want you to know a couple things. First, you are perfectly safe here. The facilities are secure and locked at night and we’re a small group. Anyone tries to get in that doesn’t belong, we’ll know it. I know one of your parents’ concerns was reporters trying to get access to you. Won’t happen here. And I also want you to know you are not a prisoner. You are not a patient, as this is not a hospital. This is a place to share and to heal. If you want to go home, all you have to do is call up your parents, and that’s that.

“We have two rules: One, be yourself. Two, treat others here well. You do those two things, you’ll be fine.”

Laurie stayed in the room, looking glumly out the window, while her parents discussed final details in Dr. Barker’s office. It had started to snow outside, the fat, tumbling flakes having an almost hypnotic effect on her. While they did not call this place a hospital, it still sort of felt like one, at least an old folk’s home, and yet there was something peaceful about it. Maybe it just wasn’t Haddonfield and that was what Laurie needed.

The next hour, with the tearful goodbyes with her mother and awkward but still emotional hugs with her father and promises to call passed in a sort of blur. Before she knew it, she was alone, here in this facility in the woods. Somehow, this was all supposed to help.

She doubted that seriously.

There wasn’t a phone in her room, but there was one in one of the sitting areas. Laurie was there now, sitting in the dark in a creaky wooden chair, sitting still and waiting, making sure no one was around. The mastiff, who she’d learned was named Mac, sat protectively by her.

She’d had a nightmare, one she couldn’t remember, and had woken up crying in her bed, her strange bed in her unfamiliar room. While she thought she needed to get away, in moments like these, familiarity provided at least some security. She slinked out of her room, tiptoed down the carpeted hall, and found the closest sitting room. It still smelled like smoke in here from the fireplace, now dark and cold. She picked up the receiver of the phone on the little table next to her, hesitated just a moment, then dialed.

“Mt. Sinai Hospital,” the tired-sounding receptionist said.

“Hello,” Laurie said, clearing her throat, trying to sound stable. “I need to speak with a patient, please.”

“Patients do not accept calls at this hour, Ma’am, you’ll have to call back tomorrow morning after nine a.m.”
“Yes, I am aware of that. This is Dr. Hooper, at Smith’s Grove. I need to speak with Dr. Loomis. Sam Loomis. It’s about a medication dosage for one of his patients. I’m sorry to bother you and him at this hour, but he does have an arrangement. It should be at the desk.”
Laurie heard the woman on the other end sigh and shuffle some things around. Like her, Dr. Loomis had been plagued by requests for interviews and queries from all sorts of oddballs. Masquerading as another doctor was the agreed-upon strategy, and it usually worked. Dr. Loomis had left instructions at the nurse’s station that they were to accept all calls from Smith’s Grove. She figured they made allowances for him because he was a doctor himself.

“Here it is,” the receptionist said, “Transferring you now.”
The phone rang so many times she thought he would sleep through it, but finally he answered in a pained, raspy voice. “Hello?”

“Dr. Loomis,” Laurie whispered, “Dr. Loomis. It’s Laurie.”

A long pause. “Laurie,” he said, “God, what time is it?”

“Late, Dr. Loomis, I’m sorry.”

“Did you have a nightmare?”

“Yes. But that isn’t why I called.” She quickly told him about the incident at school, the fight with her parents, and being driven out here to Hackberry, where she was now. He didn’t interrupt her while she spoke, his raspy breathing on the other end the only sound.

“Hackberry,” he finally said, “I’ve heard of it. A young doctor runs it. Parker?”

“Barker.”

“Yes, Barker. Young, idealistic. Considered somewhat unorthodox. I suppose I have no room to talk there.” He chuckled then erupted into a coughing fit, which made him grunt in pain. She waited while he got himself under control.

“Hackberry,” he continued, “It’s good you got away, Laurie. Good to talk to people. Good to be away from Haddonfield. You stay there and you rest. Get well. Live your life.”

“Dr. Loomis,” she said after a pause, “He’s not going to die, is he?” There was no point saying who she meant. They both knew. “Shot so many times. Burned up. He’s still alive and he’s not going to die, is he?”

“I don’t know, Laurie,” he said ruefully, “I do not know. Only God knows. But me, I’m alive, too. They say I’ll be out of the hospital in a few weeks. Recovery will be long, I may never be myself again, but … I’m alive, too. I’ll never let him get out again. I’ll protect you, Laurie. I’ll protect all of you. All of you.” He sighed heavily and Laurie could hear the pain in his voice. From their previous conversations, she knew he was done, having exhausted what little energy he had on this conversation. It was a miracle he was alive, too, stabbed and burned the way he had been.

“I know, Dr. Loomis. I know. Good night.”

He mumbled a response, possibly a feeble attempt at wishing her a good night as well, more likely a warning about Michael. It was how he usually ended their conversations.

On his end, the phone went dead. Laurie listened to the dial tone a moment and then hung up.

“No one’s supposed to be out in the halls this time of night,” a voice came from the darkness. Laurie gave out a little yelp and scooted her chair away from the voice, which seemed to come right in front of her.

“Who’s there?”

A match sparked to life, illuminating the pale, pretty face of a girl sitting in a chair right across from Laurie. Completely shrouded in darkness, Laurie had no idea she’d been there at all. The girl seemed about Laurie’s height and close to her age, had dark hair and a pretty face. She lit a cigarette and took a drag.

“I don’t think you can smoke in here,” Laurie said.

“No, it is strictly forbidden,” the girl agreed, “I won’t tell on you if you don’t tell on me,” the girl said with a shrug. “Want one?”

Laurie realized she did very much, and the girl got up, gave her one and lit it for her.

“Thanks,” Laurie said. “I’m Laurie.”
“Jamie,” the other girl said. “Welcome to the Funny Farm. What’re you in for?”

Laurie hesitated. “I uh, I survived …” She searched for the words. “You hear of Haddonfield? Halloween night?”

“Shit, that’s you?” the other girl said, “I thought you looked a little familiar. I saw you on TV when they brought you out of the hospital and then at the funerals. All those were on the news, too. Yes, I know who you are. Sorry.”

“For what?”

“All that shit you had to go through.”

“Thanks. How about you? What are you here for?”
“Dad was a drunk,” she said with a shrug, “Used to beat up my mom something awful. Me too. She finally left him. He found us, though. You know how it is.”

“Yeah.”
“Friendly advice,” she said, taking a big drag on her cigarette, “I’d finish your smoke and get back to your room. Nancy finds you here, she’ll give you hell. Don’t want to get set off on the wrong foot your first day.”

“Thanks,” Laurie said, taking a drag of the cigarette and putting it out in a nearby ashtray. “I’ll see you, Jamie.”

“Yep. See you in group.”

Life at Hackberry was a strange mix of busy routines and lots of free time. They all got up at the same time and ate breakfast together in the cafeteria. The food wasn’t bad, certainly wasn’t great, at least it was better than the food at Haddonfield High School, then they had some kind of morning activity. The afternoon was taken up with individual appointments with Dr. Barker or one of the other staff members, lunch, some enrichment time doing other leisurely activities, then dinner and evening recreation. Once a week, they had group therapy.

Laurie was one of about a dozen mostly young people who sat in a circle on uncomfortable metal folding chairs, Dr. Barker somewhere roughly in the center. New people would share their stories and sometimes there’d be an overall topic. Laurie didn’t share anything other than her name her first time; she couldn’t bring herself to talk about it yet. There was one other new girl who had killed a family of four after falling asleep at the wheel.

Some of the other kids had been abused by family members, one had witnessed a woman committing suicide by jumping off a building. Another had a father who was killed in a botched liquor store robbery. Jamie had her alcoholic father who beat her and her mother. She finally left him and he found them at the motel they were staying at, strangled her mother, and shot himself while Jamie hid in the closet. They were all tragic stories, terrible stories, but to Laurie, they all felt minor league compared to her story.

When she finally told it, the entire group was dead silent, slack-jawed, disbelieving as she described not only being that Laurie Strode from the evening news, survivor of the Haddonfield Halloween murders which claimed the lives of 16 others, she was also the sister of the killer, sister of his first victim. Oh, and don’t forget, her parents, her real parents, were killed in a car wreck and she was given up for adoption, the only parents she’d ever known turning out to not be her parents at all. Oh, and to add icing to the cake, she found out most of this on television.

She didn’t like group, but she went, even went to all the social events, the arts and crafts, the singing of Christmas carols while Nancy played piano. She started off her first day eating alone, but now she ate with Jaime every day. The two of them had become friends of a sort. They ate together, they occasionally went on walks or played ping pong together in the rec room. They talked about school and boys and things like that. Laurie liked her. She was spunky like Annie with Lynda’s sex appeal. Again, everything Laurie herself was not. But that wasn’t quite true, either, for she was smart like Laurie, and while she could be spunky and sassy when pressed, she seemed to prefer being quiet, like Laurie. Out there in the real world, they could have been good friends.

And they were both survivors.

Laurie was walking through the woods that surrounded Hackberry. She wore a long coat, a pink knit cap, and even though she had on gloves, her hands were stuffed deep into her pockets. Her breath steamed out in front of her like a locomotive. Realizing she was lost, she thought to Dante, which they had read in English class earlier in the year, before Halloween. She recited the first line out loud: “Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward path had been lost.”

The woods did indeed get darker and colder, and she wondered where her Virgil would be, for she knew he was here, somewhere. She could hear his breathing through his mask.

Suddenly there he was, his dark jumpsuit contrasting the snow and his mask practically blending with it.

“Michael, no!” she shouted, bursting into a run. Michael followed behind her, steady and slow. No matter how fast she ran, he was still behind her, breathing heavily.

She fell into the snow and scrambled to get herself up but found that the snow held her like quicksand. She thrashed her arms and legs, screaming for help, only succeeding in kicking up so much ice it looked as if it was snowing.

Michael loomed over her, holding his knife above his head. He reached down, took her by the hair, and struck.

She awoke in her room at Hackberry, her blankets cast aside, her body covered in sweat.

“These nightmares, what do you think they mean?”

She was in Dr. Barker’s office for their private one-on-one. She’d told him about the nightmares during their first appointment and he’d just nodded his head without comment. Today he wanted to know what they meant, which Laurie thought was stupid. What the hell did he think they meant?
“I don’t know how to answer that,” she said, “Michael is chasing me. He tried to kill me. He’s still alive. I’m afraid he’ll come back.”

“That’s part of it, sure. But the quote from Dante is interesting to me. Tell me: what is The Inferno about?”

“Dr. Barker …”

“Humor me. Please.”
“It’s a trip through hell.”

“Yes. And you said in your dream you knew Michael was your Virgil, your guide, yes?”

“Yeah.”

“And what is at the end of it all? Dante’s journey, I mean.”

“If you think there’s some sort of paradise at the end of all this, I think I’ll be leaving today.”
“No, not literal paradise, of course not. Just as you are not going through a literal hell. But, you have been through hell, Laurie, as close to a literal one as most people ever get. Almost killed, your friends murdered. And to top it all off, life isn’t what you thought it was. You find out your parents aren’t your real parents and you have an older brother, the same man that tried to kill you.

“You are in hell, Laurie, navigating it, trying to find your way out. And you’ll stay in it if you don’t find a way to cope with these things. Face them. They won’t go away, they’ll never go away, but you have to find a way to live with them if you want a productive life. That’s a hard truth, but it is the truth.”

Group, the next day.

One of the girls, Tina, is weeping as she tells her story again, the one about killing the family in a car. Horrible, sure, but if Laurie could trade places with her, she would. She was driving a big metal box and hit another big metal box and killed some people. Tragic, of course. But she didn’t know the people who died, didn’t even have to see their bodies. It was an accident. Laurie had stared into the cold, evil eyes of her brother, sat huddled in a closet while he tore the door apart trying to get at her, found her best friend’s body with her sister’s tombstone placed above her head. Plugged her ears while a stranger she’d never seen before shot him six times. And that was just the first part of the night.

“It’s just too much,” Tina said, crying hysterically.

“What is, Tina?” Dr. Barker asked.

“Like, life! It’s all so fragile and fucked up and wrong. A whole family driving in their car can just be killed in one second flat. It’s an accident, they tell you, something that just happened. Then you go home and watch the news and there’s like, wars and bad things happening all over the world! There’s all those people, that cult that died in Jonestown. People are dying in car accidents and of heart attacks all the time. What’s the point?”

Laurie looked over the faces of the other members. Some of them were rolling their eyes, some were cleaning their fingernails, a couple shed tears with her. One of them, Bonnie, started to sob, too. Jamie looked pissed. Laurie actually started to feel a little bad for Tina. Her reaction, the way she was talking, she sounded like Lynda.

“The point is to survive,” Jamie suddenly said. She leaned forward in her metal folding chair, apparently having heard enough. “You go on. You fight. You get up every day and say Fuck You back to the world. Bad shit happens, yeah. Did you ever go to history class? Bad shit isn’t new. It’s been happening since people started painting in caves. Ever see 2001? The monkey? First time he picks up a bone he decides to kill with it. People are fucked up. It’s in our nature.

“Bad shit happens everywhere,” she continued, on a roll, obviously letting out something she’d been holding in for a while. “There was that psycho who killed those kids in Texas. Hacked them up and only one girl got away. All her friends, dead. There was that child killer in Ohio. How many little kids did he kill until the parents finally found him? Huh?”

Tina didn’t answer, she just continued to cry.

“Jamie,” Dr. Barker said carefully, “No cross talk, remember?”

“I know that,” she snapped, “but I get sick of it. Everyone here has gone through some bad stuff. Every one of us. You have to make a choice,” she continued, “Get off your ass, get out the door, and move on, or go upstairs, take a bottle of pills chased by some Jack Daniel’s. That’s it. That’s it, I’m done.”

Huffing, she sat back in her chair, her foot tapping furiously on the tiled floor. She reached in her pocket and lit up a cigarette.

“While the way Jamie articulated herself was less than ideal,” Dr. Barker said, “she’s right. There’s no question you’ve all been through hell,” Here he looked at Laurie, “but you have to find a way to move on. Work with your experiences. Not wash them away. You’re all young. You have your lives ahead of you. You can let your experiences define you or help refine you.”
Laurie looked admiringly over at Jamie, who winked at her slyly.

Later that night, Laurie found Jamie reading a book in one of the sitting areas, Mac lying at her feet gnawing on a bone.

“What’re you doing?” she asked.

Jamie shrugged. “Mac and me here are enjoying some quality time together.”

“Can I sit?”

“Of course.”
Laurie sat in the chair next to Jamie and looked over the sitting room. They were alone save for the big dog, which was looking at her with expectant, sad eyes.

“How do you do it?” Laurie asked.

“Do what?”

“Move on. Cope. Like you were saying in group today.”

Jamie sighed, dog-eared the page she was on in her book and shut it. “Not well, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

“That’s not true. You are so together.”

“I look like I’m together. Inside I’m a mess. Barely can see straight some days. Don’t know if I’m coming or going. But, the sun decides to get up every morning and so do I.

“I listened to my mom be choked to death in the other room and heard my father’s body hit the floor right outside the door to the closet I was hiding in after he put a bullet in his brain. For some reason or the other, that is the noise that sticks with me the most. The finality of it. But it wasn’t final. I’m still here.

“I had a shitty childhood that ended in a nightmare. But I am still here. I still draw breath. I can read books, listen to music, get a job, go on a date. I can do the things my mom can’t anymore. So I choose to do them. Not because I always want to, most days I feel like giving up, but because I can.”

“You’re so tough,” Laurie said wistfully, “I wish I was as tough as you.”

Jamie laughed.

“You? Not tough? Are you shitting me right now? You’re Laurie Fucking Strode! You fought off an escaped mental patient who killed 16 people. You stabbed him, shot him, burned him up. If you’re not tough, I don’t know what tough is.”

Jamie sighed heavily and stood up.

“I think I’m going to my room now,” she said. “I’m tired. You remember what I said, kiddo, okay?”

“Yeah, I will.”

One morning, Laurie woke up and Jamie was gone.

She looked for her at breakfast like she always did but she never showed and Laurie ate by herself. After she finished eating, she looked for her in the sitting rooms, the rec room and she wasn’t there either. She went to Jamie’s room and found the bed empty and stripped of bedding. The cleaning lady told her she’d gone home.

She left Hackberry the day before without saying goodbye, without even hinting that she might be leaving soon. Laurie had no idea why she left. She wasn’t “cured,” for the message of this place, Laurie had come to realize, was that none of them would ever be “cured” or “well” in any real sense. Maybe whoever had been paying for it couldn’t afford it anymore, maybe Jamie, who was impatient and irritable (another quality she shared with Annie), had got tired of everybody, even Dr. Barker, who could be intrusive and nagging.

Laurie sat in her room most of that day crying. Jamie was the only friend she’d had since Halloween, someone to talk to, not only about girly stuff but also the things that had happened to them. While there was nothing normal about their respective situations she made her feel normal, if at least a little.

Nancy brought her an envelope later that day with Laurie’s name written on the front in Jamie’s handwriting. Inside was a handwritten note:

Laurie,

Sorry to sneak out like this. I just couldn’t do it anymore. All the whining, the talking, the BS. We’ve all got scars. They’ll never get any better if we just rip the scabs off everyday. And like doc says, they probably will never be better anyway, so what’s the point? I’ll go home and figure it out. Do crossword puzzles, finally learn to sew, maybe find religion (ha! Fat chance of that). Maybe I’ll just take those pills and JD like I said the other day. Just kidding.

You’re a tough one, and you’re smart. Don’t let Halloween define you. There can be a whole other life out there for you, if you want it.

Again, sorry to bail. I don’t like goodbyes. Name a kid after me or something. Maybe a dog. I like Cocker Spaniels.

Remember, life’s a bitch. Be a bitch back to it.

Jamie

Laurie read the note three times, crying like a baby each time. After the fourth time, she got herself under control, wiped the tears and snot from her face, and tossed Jamie’s letter into the fireplace in the sitting room where they first met. She thought Jamie would approve.

Michael came to her two nights later.

This wasn’t a nightmare, she knew that right away, he was really there, in her room at Hackberry standing back in the darkness, mostly hidden, a single beam of moonlight shining in his black, cold eyes. She could tell he wasn’t wearing his mask.

Laurie sat up and scooted against the wall in her bed. For just a second she was frozen in terror, but it was a second only, for once the surprise of seeing him in here had passed she started thinking of weapons, of fighting, escape. She didn’t call for help, for she knew he’d kill Nancy or Dr. Barker or anyone that came to her aid. Looking around her room she knew she didn’t have many weapons. In her closet her clothes hung on wire hangers, she’d twisted one into a weapon and poked him before, but the closet was behind him. On the nightstand next to her bed she had a family portrait of her and her parents. She could shatter that and use a piece of glass as a weapon.

“Michael,” she said, “how did you get here?”

He didn’t answer, he didn’t even move, he just stared at her with his black, deadly eyes. The Devil’s Eyes, Dr. Loomis had called them. Eyes that were blank and cold yet burning with evil at the same time.

“Michael,” she said, “you are in the hospital. You’re burned and shot and poked. You’re hundreds of miles away. How did you get here?”

He didn’t move, didn’t even blink, and Laurie suddenly realized that he couldn’t move, that he could be here, that he could somehow send his essence due to whatever connection there was between them, but he was not really here, not physically. Laurie saw him, the real him.

For just a moment she was no longer in her ward at Hackberry but in a dark hospital, near a bed surrounded by machines. The large form of a man was in that bed, his face wrapped like a mummy, his breathing slow and labored. She was here with Michael just as he was there in her room.

In one of their previous conversations, Dr. Loomis had described something like this to her. Loopy with drugs, he was going on one of his rants about how evil Michael was, how he sat there with him for years watching him stare at a wall, knowing if he ever got out of Smith’s Grove, he’d unleash hell on earth.

“Dr. Loomis,” Laurie had asked him, “How did you know he was so evil if he never moved or talked?”
Dr. Loomis paused, cleared his throat, and when he spoke again, he sounded less loopy and more clear.

“He came to me one night. Was standing there at my bed, staring at me. I knew he wasn’t really there, knew he was still in Smith’s Grove, but yet he was there. Looking at me with those eyes of his. I knew then there was something wrong about him.

“You see, I’m a doctor. I’ve treated psychopaths before. Murders, rapists, and the like. This was different. Michael was different. I knew then there was something evil about him, paranormal, for lack of a better word. As a doctor, those were two things I never believed in before: evil. The paranormal. But I knew I was looking at it then. I tried to tell the hospital, but they wouldn’t listen to me.”
“What did he do?” Laurie asked him.

“He eventually just left. I knew then something was coming. I knew I had to fight, probably the rest of my life, to keep him in the hospital.”

And now here Michael was with her in Hackberry.

Back in her bed, Laurie relaxed a little. She knew he couldn’t hurt her here.

“Why, Michael?” she asked. “Why did you kill Judith? Why do you want to kill me?”

Michael didn’t answer, she’d never heard him speak, even the time her mother took her to meet him at Smith’s Grove, even the fragmented memories she had of living with him back in the Myer’s house, she couldn’t recall ever hearing his voice. Instead, he just stood there breathing, tilting his head from side to side.

“You can’t hurt me anymore, Michael,” she said. “I’m safe from you.” She said this to make herself feel better but realized she believed it, that she was right. He couldn’t hurt her anymore, and he wouldn’t. Somehow, she knew this. Michael, seeming to understand this, wrenched his fists in rage.

“You can’t hurt me or anyone else. You’ve lost, Michael. Do you understand that? You’ve lost. You go away now. You go away now and never come back.”

Michael stood there, unmoving except for the rising and falling of his chest and furious wrenching of his fists. Laurie didn’t want to but realized she needed to look away from him. She had wondered earlier about weapons and that was the weapon she had against him, the most important weapon anyone had against evil, the ability to turn away and not look at it, not fear it.

She looked out the window of her room and watched the snow fall. She didn’t know how long she sat like that, but when she finally looked back into the darkness, Michael was gone.

No, that wasn’t quite correct, he was still there, the essence of him was there and always would be there. She knew he’d still appear in her nightmares and she knew she’d still see him behind bushes and hedges and in the dark, cold hallways of hospitals and schools but those were just phantoms. That was what the Boogeyman was, after all, that dark, cold presence that followed us around but really couldn’t hurt us. A shadow, a reminder that there was evil in the world. But he couldn’t hurt her anymore.

She lay back down and when she fell asleep, if she dreamt at all, she couldn’t remember them.

It was Christmas day and even here at Hackberry, an environment pregnant with fear, anxiety, and trauma, the air was light with frivolity.

They exchanged gifts that morning in one of the sitting areas, giving each other homemade crafts they’d made throughout the last two weeks. Laurie received a gift from Jamie, left behind with Dr. Barker, insisting Laurie be the one that get it. It was a little knitted doll, a white face, brown hair, blue overalls, black buttons for eyes. For a moment, Laurie was horrified, nearly dropping it on the floor, when she found a small note written by Jamie in the bag.

Take the son of a bitch and throw him in the nearest fireplace. Watch him burn, all the way this time, and never look back. That’s the best gift I can give you and the best one you can give yourself.

So that was what Laurie did. She didn’t even care if anyone saw her. She took the little effigy of Michael Myers by one of his limp little arms and tossed him in the fireplace. She stood there, a wry little smile on her face, watching the fire consume the little doll until its remains were indistinguishable from the rest of the wood and ash.

Laurie wasn’t stupid. She knew this was a symbolic gesture, but damn, it felt good. In fact, in that moment, she felt better than she had in weeks.

It was Christmas, and here, in this moment, all was calm. All was bright. Her parents would be here shortly and they’d join her for dinner. They were making a Christmas feast in the cafeteria that night and while it would be nothing compared to the food her mother normally cooked them, it would be all right. They probably had gifts for her and she found herself hoping they did, feeling almost like a little girl again.

It was Christmas and, in a few days, it would be 1979, a year later it would be 1980, a new decade, 20 years away from a new century. She hoped eventually that everyone would forget about Michael Myers and Halloween, 1978.

She hoped.

"A Desperate Flight"
A Star Wars Story

Author's Note:

This story is an alternate reality story set in the Star Wars universe. It takes place in an alternate timeline, one in which Anakin Skywalker defeated Obi-Wan on Mustafar and was not burned and thus not in the famous black armor. It is set five years after the events of Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

Darth Vader, still called Anakin by his wife, lay in the tall grass of Naboo and watched the twins play with a nanny droid. At various points in the field, red-armored Sith Troopers stood guard, watching the skies, the hills, everything around them, so still they could have been statues, the gleaming crimson of their armor a contrast to the lush green of the tall grass. His wife, Queen Padme Skywalker, sat on the blanket next to him, looking toward the twins, but Vader knew she was not looking at them. They’d been married long enough for Vader to be able to know this even without sensing as much through the Force. Always a serious woman, Padme had grown sullen since the birth of the twins, a condition the medical droids and midwives insisted would pass, but it never did, for Anakin knew it was more than just the hormonal imbalance after giving birth that affected some women. She’d never been the same since he’d told her he’d killed Obi-Wan, since Order 66, all of it. Vader had come to accept the fact that it would be a permanent thing with her. He accepted it, yet it still still irritated and perplexed him.

He couldn’t fathom why she would be sullen. The Republic had won the Clone Wars, the corruption of the Jedi had been exposed, the Order disbanded, they had two beautiful, healthy children, and she was again Queen of Naboo, Queen for Life, in fact, after a forced change to the Naboo constitution insisted upon by Vader. It wouldn’t do to have a wife of his serve as a mere Senator, especially since he knew that the Emperor’s long-term plans were to disband the Galactic Senate. They had everything anyone could ever have wanted. Why would she be sullen?

“You are quiet, my love,” Vader said mildly. He reached out with the Force, bringing his goblet of cherry wine to his hand. In the early days of their relationship, when they were younger, things like this delighted Padme. Nowadays, she reacted to such things either not at all or negatively. Today was a not at all reaction.

“The Parva pollen makes me sleepy,” she said dismissively. “You know this.”
“I also know you have medicine for that. Tell me: what’s on your mind?”

She was quiet for a moment, Vader sensing the tension within her, and he thought she might actually say what was on her mind when she said, “I’m just watching the children.”

Vader grunted and set his empty goblet in the grass. She had never had a problem speaking her mind before, why did she now?

“Watching the children,” he said. “Anything else?”

Padme sighed.

“The children. The guards. The Imperial shuttle beyond them. The Executor hovering above Theed. I’m looking at all these things.”

“Yes. The children are safe. You are safe. The people of Naboo are safe. The galaxy is safe. These are good things, Padme.”

“Are they?” she mused. “Some of them, yes. Sometimes, however, I miss the Naboo I knew, the one that didn’t have two garrisons of Stormtroopers stationed in Spinnaker, or Sith Troopers in Theed, or an Imperial base on Ohma-D’un. A Naboo where Gungan City wasn’t used to train underwater troopers. You ask what I’m thinking, and there you have it.”

The anger within Vader started to swell. His jaw cracked, and he clenched his artificial hand so hard the gears within it squealed in protest. He knew she felt this way, of course, but she hadn’t verbalized as much since the twins were babies, and his own frustration and anger that had boiled within him for months and months was about to erupt out of him when another feeling, anxiety, coming from the children, called his attention.

He looked up, finding the twins fighting over a holo-kite, each pulling the generator with both hands, demanding the other let it go.

“Children, enough!” Padme cried. Ignoring or not hearing her, they persisted in arguing, so the nanny droid floated between them, gently placing a padded metal hand on the shoulder of each child. Snarling, Luke let go of the holo-kite and lashed out with the Force, propelling the nanny droid through the field and slamming it into the trunk of a tree, effectively destroying it.

Vader was between the children in a flash, so fast Padme didn’t even see him move, pushing Leia back with one hand and grabbing Luke by his tunic with the other.

“What have I told you, boy?” Vader snarled. “You never, never use your powers unless directed by me. Never!”

Luke, shrinking in terror from his father, pawing at his gloved hand, begged for forgiveness.

“Look what you did to H-5,” Padme said reproachfully, pointing at the crumbled droid at the base of the tree.

“He killed her!” Leia cried.

“It was just a stupid droid,” Luke moaned. “I didn’t mean to!”

“Stupid droid?” Vader hissed, “Stupid droid?” Vader let go of his son with his hand but then raised him off the ground with the Force, bringing them face to face. Tears flowed from Luke’s blue eyes while Vader’s burned orange. “Only a spoiled little boy who has grown up in a palace would treat his things so carelessly. Perhaps you’d like to live in a desert, be a slave to a filthy, stinking Toydarian, forced to work day and night, building a ‘stupid droid’ so that he and his mother could have one true friend. Would you like that, Luke? Hmm?”

“No!” Luke cried. “No, I wouldn’t!”

“Anakin,” Padme said, grabbing Vader by the arm. “Enough. Let him go.”

Glancing at Luke once more, Vader remarked, “As you wish,” and the boy fell back to the grass.

Luke ran to his mother, who, even though she was also cross with him, held him tenderly. She looked up at Vader and shook her head. Again, Vader didn’t need the Force to tell she was shaking it at him, not Luke.

“He killed H-5,” Leia whined, wrapping her arms around her father’s legs.

“I’ll get you another one,” Vader said. “I promise.”

Vader looked back up at Padme, both of them sharing a look that seemed to say we’ll continue our conversation later, when Vader’s comm went off.

Vader put the comm to his lips and said, “Disturbing me when I am with my family can be dangerous. This had better be important.”

“My apologies, Lord Vader,” came the voice of the Grand Inquisitor, “but it is important. Very important indeed.”

“I’m listening.”

“We believe have found Master Yoda, my Lord,” the Grand Inquisitor said proudly.

Vader and Padme met eyes. Her expression was unreadable, but her feelings were not. A stab of fear jerked through her body, one she tried to subdue before he detected it, but it was too late. Padme had always had a weakness for the Jedi she had known.

“I shall speak with you in my shuttle,” Vader said.

Padme and the children still outside, Vader brought up a holo image of the Grand Inquisitor on the family’s private shuttle as he gave his report. The image of the Grand Inquisitor shifted to the image of an unremarkable planet called Dagobah, then flickered to a recording.

The images, filmed by an Imperial Probe Droid, drifted through a filthy, murky swamp. The Probe Droid navigated around trees, hanging vines, and floated over putrid brown water. It seemed to be daytime, but the sky was so full of dark clouds that it practically looked dark. The images suddenly stopped, the perspective of the droid shifting as it swiveled its head. Then, a blur, so fast even Anakin’s eyes, honed by training and the Force, nearly missed it.

“Replay that and freeze,” he demanded.

The image reversed and advanced slowly. Then came the blur, just a shape at the top right edge of the image, which froze. There, on the screen, was a single eye looking at the probe droid, a pointed green ear, and part of a green face that glowed greener still from what could only be a lightsaber. The image blinked out.

“Replay it again.”

The Grand Inquisitor obeyed. Anakin watched it four more times, finally instructing the Grand Inquisitor to shut it off.

“It appears to be him,” Anakin said. “It would, however, be unlike Master Yoda to make such an error.”

“I would agree, my Lord,” the Grand Inquisitor said, “but the image appears to be authentic.”

“But how long ago was this footage taken? He could have fled by now.”

“We have been monitoring the planet ever since receiving this transmission, my Lord,” the Grand Inquisitor said, “We have detected no ships leaving its atmosphere. If you’d like, I can send in a garrison of troops to confirm it is him.”

“No,” Vader said brusquely. “Yoda could dispatch a garrison of Stormtroopers as quickly as a swarm of flies.” Sighing, Vader closed his eyes and reached out with the Force, recalling the images, reaching out to Dagobah, thinking of the presence of his old master.

“It’s him,” Vader finally said. “I shall contact the Emperor and leave immediately.”

“I shall have my Inquisitors rendezvous with you there.”

“No,” Vader said. “I shall go alone.”

“Lord Vader,” the Grand Inquisitor began cautiously.

“As you are well aware, Grand Inquisitor, I dislike repeating myself.”

“Of course, my Lord.”

In their private quarters, Padme rushed around the room in a huff while Anakin stood by impatiently. She roughly put away the children’s clothes, adjusted things on shelves unnecessarily, straightened and cleaned, as if they didn’t have servants for that.

Finally, she stopped and looked at her husband with a pained look on her face.

“Anakin,”

“I would assume, after these last five years, you would have tired of telling me, ‘You don’t have to do this.’”

“I am tired of it, but I still say it. I still ask it: do you have to do this?”

“Of course I do!” Anakin said desperately. “With Yoda alive, the Jedi have a chance of returning, the Jedi and their oppression.”

“Yes, oppression,” Padme said, sighing. She thought back to the hours and hours of hearings in the Galactic Senate after the Jedi Purge. Naturally, there had been galactic outrage once news of the Jedi’s destruction spread from Coruscant, and answers were demanded. The Emperor paraded hundreds of witnesses in front of the assembly to attest to the claim that the Jedi were planning a hostile takeover of the galaxy: servants, maintenance droids, cleaning droids, former padawans, even three Jedi who’d been arrested that night. The star witness, of course, had been her own husband, General Anakin Skywalker, one of the greatest living veterans of the Clone Wars and one of the most famous Jedi in the order, who insisted that Count Dooku had not actually left the Jedi order but was actually working in tandem with them to cripple the galaxy with the Clone Wars. It was the Jedi Council itself that provided Dooku and General Grievous with intelligence on Republic troop movements, and it was the Council that attempted to overthrow the Senate by attempting to assassinate Chancellor Palpatine.

There had been a shocking, cold logic to it all, and hundreds of delegations were easily swayed. In just a few short votes, the Jedi were evil and hereby banned from ever reforming and the Republic was now the Galactic Empire.

“What if …” Padme began, but was unable to find the words.

“Padme,” Vader said softly, suddenly her Anakin again in that way that he would somehow rematerialize. His face was not hard, but soft, his touch gentle as he put his hands on her shoulder, and his voice had the loving tone of the young man she had known. “I do this for you, for the twins! The Clone Wars nearly destroyed the galaxy. While the Empire is not perfect, it runs with an efficiency the Republic has never enjoyed before. If the Jedi are allowed to return, that would jeopardize all of that. They would come for the Emperor, they would come for me, for us. Once they are all finally gone, we can all be at peace, and I won’t have to leave anymore. I promise.”

Peace, he had said. She knew full well he wasn’t only sent on missions to find missing Jedi, they had the Inquisitors for that. She knew he was also sent on missions to quell dissension and rebellions on worlds that had not warmed to the Empire. She knew their palace, all the things their children had, were bathed in blood.

“I so wish that was true,” she said sadly.

“It is,” Vader said, bringing her to him. “I promise.”

They embraced for a long time, until Vader finally said, “I must go.”

Leia, sitting lying on her bed and making a ball float above her with her hand, watched an Imperial shuttle escorted by two Tie Fighters soar into the sky.

“There goes father,” she said.

Luke walked up to the window and watched the ships disappear. “Yes,” he said. “I sense this mission is more important, more dangerous than others.”

“I felt this too.”

He glanced over at his sister, frowning when he saw the fall hovering above her bed.

“Father says no powers without his permission.”
“Father isn’t here,” Leia said matter-of-factly, “and besides, I am his favorite.”

“Are not!” Luke said.

“Am too!”

“Are not!”

“Am too!”

Luke was about to reach out with the Force and snatch the ball away from her when both of them felt a presence in the room with them.

“Younglings,” an old voice said. “Younglings!”

They turned, and there, sitting on one of their chairs, was the Little Green Man.

“Fight, you should not,” he said.

He had been coming to them for a while now. They knew he was not really here; he was somewhere else deep in the galaxy, and if they touched him, their hands would go through him, like a hologram. But he was not a hologram, but more like a projection of himself. That is what he had told them, anyway. They had both tried this. He was wearing, as he always was, his dirty robes, had his little cane sitting across his lap, his little pointed green toes wiggling from underneath his folded robe.

He had started coming to them when they were just learning to walk. He refused to tell them his name, but insisted his mother knew who he was. He was a calm, quiet presence in their lives, so different from their quietly suffering mother and wrathful father. He was there for them when their parents fought, and he was there to comfort them when their father had chastised them. He taught them things, and he listened to them, asking only in return that they never tell their father about him. That had been surprisingly easy, for while they loved their father dearly, he was a dark and frightening man, their young, untrained Force ability sensing the malice within him.

“Younglings,” the Little Green Man said, somewhat more urgently. “Time, it is.”

Luke and Leia exchanged looks.

“It’s time?” Leia asked.

The Little Green Man nodded.

“Tell your mother, you should.”

Padme Skywalker, Queen of Naboo, stood before her mirror, leaning against the dresser for support, and cried like a widow. She supposed that was what she was, she had been a widow since the night of the Jedi Purge, her Anakin dying right along with all the other Jedi and this, this Darth Vader, was all that remained.

And yet it was more complicated than that. He was still her Anakin in so many ways. And yet, this Darth Vader was a different creature entirely – dark, deadly, and remote.

“Mother,” Leia’s voice, behind her, startled her out of her weeping. She whirled around, finding both the twins standing in her room. They had a strange look on their faces, as if they’d just broken something and were afraid to tell her.

“Children, I am sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I was just …” she couldn’t find the words, so just shrugged. “having a moment.”

“The Little Green Man was back, Mother,” Luke said.

“He said it is time,” Leia said.

“It’s time …” Padme whispered. She composed herself quickly, a skill she had picked up from a lifetime of public service, first as Queen Amidala, then Senator Amidala, now as Queen Skywalker. “It’s time,” she repeated, then commanded her children to go to their room and await her summons.

Once alone, in the desperate, cold quiet of her chambers, she wondered … could she do this?

She had thought of leaving Anakin the moment she awoke on the Emperor’s personal shuttle, her throat still sore from Anakin choking her, and upon learning of the Jedi Purge and that he had killed his best friend, Obi-Wan, she nearly demanded they take her back to Naboo immediately. However, in the presence of Palpatine, Emperor Palpatine, and his apprentice, now calling himself Darth Vader, she learned that her ability to demand things had been greatly diminished. She was queen of her home world and wife to the second most powerful man in the galaxy, but she found out very quickly she had very little say in anything that happened to her. Or her children.

And Anakin was her husband, her beloved Ani, the father of the twins growing in her belly, twins that arrived that very same day. How could she leave him? If only he could make her understand what had happened? How could the Jedi, the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy for over a thousand generations, be evil, corrupt, and at the heart of the war? How could the Sith, contrary to everything one was taught in ancient history, be the “good” ones? Padme knew that politics, galactic governance, and everything in between were complicated and had lured the strongest people astray, but this, this did not make sense, and for years after, she begged Anakin to explain it to her, to make it make sense.

He never could.

She reached up and squeezed her right earring, opening a secret compartment in the wall where three bags, packed especially for this occasion, waited for her. She sighed wearily.

Anakin would never stop looking for the three of them once they were gone, he would shirk his official duties in order to search for them. She imagined him torturing and killing their household staff in order to find out where she’d gone, even long after he’d come to realize they did not know. She visualized him destroying the royal palace and laying waste to Theed in his rage. She wondered if, were he to find them, would he kill her? Would he snap her neck with his robotic hand, take her breath away with a Force-choke, or run her through with his crimson lightsaber? The Anakin she had once known would not have done any of these things, she was sure of that, but Darth Vader was not her Anakin anymore. He was the Emperor’s, and she had seen this version of Anakin kill subordinates before, let alone knowing full well what he did when he went out searching for surviving Jedi. This Anakin had killed his best friend, Obi-Wan Kenobi, on Mustafar, still keeping his old master’s lightsaber mounted on a shelf in their chambers as a memento of his freedom from the Jedi.

And now he was heading to the Executor to hunt Master Yoda, the final (apparently) living member of the council. She knew he would cut his old master down without a second thought, and she wondered darkly what would happen to her and the children should Yoda, a powerful Jedi in his day, killed Anakin? What would happen to her and the twins? She knew what would happen, and that was why she was afraid.

Palpatine would take the twins. He may let Padme live at first, at least while the twins were still young, but once they got older, their abilities stronger, a strong-willed, opinionated mother would just be a nuisance, and she would be eliminated. She did not care what happened to her, but she would not let that monster take her children. Neither of these monsters, she corrected herself.

She gathered her bags.

Vader’s TIE Advanced X1 TIE Fighter breached the clouds of Dagobah and screeched over the swampy, slimy land below. His TIE Fighter, like all TIE Fighters, was loud, possibly alerting the former master of his presence, but that would not matter now. The Executor and three other Star Destroyers were in orbit, monitoring every possible escape route.

Of course, Yoda wouldn’t need the sound of the TIE Fighter to alert him to Vader’s presence. He likely knew he was here. That was fine, too.

There were no good spots to land his TIE in the vicinity of the holo recording, so he hovered the ship above a clearing, put it on autopilot, and leapt out of it, landing firmly on his feet in wet, smelly grass.

Vader looked disdainfully at the landscape of the place. It was wet and ugly, a tangle of vines and trees and stinking plant life. Vader understood why Yoda had hidden himself here.

He moved through the jungle, climbing over obstacles, hopping from rock to rock to cross running water, using his lightsaber to cut down trees or other hanging foliage he could not pass, all the while reaching out for the Force, searching for the former master.

“Anakin,” a calm, wise voice said. “Don’t.”

It was the voice of Qui-Gon Jinn, the Jedi who had plucked him from Tatooine and delivered him to the Jedi Order like some bounty, leaving his mother to remain in the clutches of Watto. Vader had come to both blame the Jedi master for everything that had happened but also thank him for it. Were it not for Qui-Gon, he would never have met Padme, never found the Emperor, and would never have been able to help destroy the Jedi. And yet, it was Qui-Gon’s cold indifference that led to his mother’s death. He could have taken her from Watto. He could have cut him down with his green lightsaber of the stupid Toydarian tried to stop him, and yet he left her there, for all he cared about was snatching this Force-sensitive boy from his home, the same way all Jedi plucked children from the arms of their parents for centuries.

No longer.

He ignored Qui-Gon’s voice, and moved on.

He sensed something, suddenly, something that did not make much sense to him. He sensed the power of the Dark Side. He followed this feeling; it pulled at him like an icy cold tether, leading to a cave made from a tangle of trees. As he approached, he heard a laugh, light at first, then growing in intensity. It was the Emperor.

Frowning, Vader headed toward the cave.

The Emperor. He gave Vader his blessing to go after Yoda alone, but had he changed his mind? Did he decide that he must be the one to slay Master Yoda after failing to do so during the Jedi Purge? Vader knew the Emperor was jealous of him. He envied his youth, his growing power, even his young family. Had he decided to deny his apprentice this honor and claim it for himself? Vader could see him doing something like that.

The figure of the Emperor, just a black, triangular shape in the dark, waited for him in the cave, still laughing.

“Master …” Vader began. He could sense the menace rolling off of his master, could sense he was about to attack. “I did not expect you.”

Palpatine’s face was illuminated in red as he ignited his lightsaber. Without a word, he leapt at Vader, using a Force Scream to stun him, aiming his saber for Vader’s chest.

Vader ignited his lightsaber and parried the attack in the same motion, launching a counteroffensive of his own.

Emperor and Apprentice fought ferociously in the small, dark place, searing limbs off the trees with their lightsabers and starting mini fires in their wake. The Emperor, as he often did during such things, laughed the entire time, which enraged Vader. He’s mocking me, Vader thought. He thinks I am not worthy. His arrogance will be his undoing.

And then it happened. Vader baited his master and Palpatine took the bait, thrusting his saber at Vader’s chest. Sidestepping the attack, he slashed downward, taking off both of Palpatine’s arms with one strike and then his head with the next.

The body went in one direction while the head went the other. It rolled unevenly to a stop, eyes up. The head was not that of his Master, but rather of Padme.

Screaming, Vader attacked the cave with all his might, cutting through the tangled ropes of vines, slashing down trees, using the Force to blast holes through it until finally, he emerged back out into the swamp. He turned back around and, using his remaining human hand, incinerated the rest of the tree cave with a blast of Force Lightning.

Panting, sweaty, Vader extinguished his lightsaber and turned around.

Master Yoda stood across from him, resting both his little green hands on his cane, looking at him reproachfully.

“Young Skywalker,” Yoda said. “Still so angry, you are.”

Vader reignited his lightsaber.

“Master Yoda,” Vader hissed. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Found me, you have.” Yoda glanced beyond Vader at the crackling remnants of the cave.
“What saw you in the Cave of Evil, young Skywalker?”

“Anakin Skywalker is dead,” Vader proclaimed. “I am Darth Vader.”

“The boy I first met when Qui-Gon brought him before me, I still see.”
Snarling, Vader leapt at Master Yoda, who lifted his hand casually, as if he was telling Vader to stand back, and Vader was propelled backward and into the burning cave.

Vader hopped from the flames, casting his burning cloak aside and turning back toward the Jedi Master.

But he was no longer there.

“I’m sorry, Ma’am,” the Sith Trooper said , “But we shall have to accompany you. Lord Vader’s orders.”

Exiting the royal chambers with the twins in tow, Padme had found the hall guarded by two crimson Sith Troopers. This was rare. The palace was one of the safest places in the entire galaxy, the entire planet transformed into a veritable fortress under Imperial rule. Guards, while always present, were usually only visible when there was a security threat.

“Am I not Queen?” Padme demanded, “Do I not rule Naboo?”

The Sith Troopers stared at her silently from behind their crimson helmets, as if considering their answer carefully. “You rule Naboo, Ma’am,” the trooper admitted, “but we must obey Lord Vader’s orders. We are happy to escort you and the children anywhere you would like to go.”

She opened her mouth to protest when, next to her, Leia said, “You don’t need to escort us anywhere.”

The Sith Troopers glanced down at her as if trying to comprehend what they’d just heard. Then, one of them said, “We don’t need to escort you anywhere.”

“We are free to go where we wish,” Luke said.

“You’re free to go where you wish,” the Sith Trooper said.

“You don't need to tell anyone you saw us leave,” Leia added.

“We don’t need to tell anyone you left,” the Sith Trooper agreed.

“Let’s go,” Luke said, grabbing Padme by one hand as Leia grabbed her with the other.

Padme, sure that their exit was going to be more difficult than she planned, looked back over her shoulder at the Sith Troopers, who stood guard, looking out the window as if they weren’t even there.

Once out of earshot of the Sith Troopers and in the turbolift, Padme bent down to the children, whispering, “How did you know how to do that? Is that something your father taught you?”

“No,” Luke said, “It was the Little Green Man.”

“The Little Green Man …” Padme said.

“He told us we may have to.” Leia said.

“Well,” Padme said sadly, thinking it was this very same man her husband was on his way to destroy, “the Little Green Man is very wise.”

For the first time since beginning this perilous errand, Padme thought it might actually work.

Vader walked through the humid, filthy jungle, reaching out with the Force, searching for Yoda. He could see why the old master would choose such a planet for his hiding place. It was remote, largely unknown, and so teeming with life that it was hard to pinpoint a single life form even with the most advanced equipment. There was also something off about this world, Vader realized. The Force was strong here. While Yoda likely had the ability to hide himself from Vader, he felt as if the planet itself surged with the Force in a strange balance of the Light and Dark sides.

He was still disturbed by the encounter in the tree cave. Clearly a vision, it felt so real, more real than any vision he’d ever had. And it was the Dark Side that showed him this vision, not the Light, which confused him.

He sensed danger a millisecond before it was upon him. He whirled toward the sensation, igniting his lightsaber, but found nothing there but more greasy vines and gurgling, filthy water.

Something burst forth from the pond nearest to him, a slimy, gray-purple tentacle that wrapped around his ankle, yanking him toward the water and certainly to the hungry maw of whatever owned it. Taking care to avoid severing his own foot, he cut away the tentacle easily, the stump, spitting black, viscous blood, retreating into the water.

The pond suddenly bubbled as if set to boil, and a hideous, multi-tentacled horror erupted from its depths, howling in rage and pain. It lashed at Vader with its tentacles; the first two, he cut away easily, while the third, sneaky and fast, wrapped around his midsection and hoisted him into the air. He lifted his lightsaber to strike it, but the beast, apparently learning from its errors, fastened a tentacle around his right arm to stay his blade. A mouth the size of the viewport on his TIE Fighter opened in the thing’s head, a mouth full of jagged teeth, and the monster pulled him to it.

He extended his left hand, reached out with the Force, and blasted the monster with Force Lightning at close range. Howling, the monster dropped him and retreated to the pond, its head smoking.

Vader got to his feet, made a futile effort to brush the mud from his clothes, and moved on, seething mad.

He saw a light ahead, a dim, flickering glow that could only be a fire. He headed toward it.

Sneaking through the palace was easy. Padme knew every inch of the place, every secret passage, every possible route, and had plotted their exit ahead of time, making sure to choose halls that did not have droids or cameras watching them.

She and the twins emerged from the palace’s main building into a service alley behind it. This was a place she had only been as a child, when playing games with her friends. As part of the palace grounds, it was well kept and not filthy, but it was plain and well-worn, a far cry from the areas they usually traveled in.

“Why are we here?” Luke asked.

“We are … expected,” Padme said.

A City of Theed waste management vehicle hovered in their direction, coming to a rumbling stop right before them. A side door opened, and behind it stood a huge Lasat wearing a bright orange sanitation uniform.

“Good day, your majesties,” the Lasat rumbled in his curious accent, bowing his great, purple head slightly. “I take it we’re ready to depart?”

“We’re going on that?” Leia asked, incredulous.

“Now, now, princess,” the Lasat said. “It may not be a Nubian Royal Starship, but it’s a bit nicer than it looks.”

He reached behind him, hit a button, and the side of the vehicle, the part where the trash would normally be loaded and compressed, hissed open. It was not dirty nor dingy at all inside, but rather, transformed into a sort of mini transport, including proper, padded seating.

“Not like any trash vehicle I’ve ever seen,” Luke said.

“Well then, climb aboard and enjoy the ride. I’m Zeb. I’ll be escorting you out of the city.”

Vader approached the small domicile slowly, his lightsaber already ignited.

It was a roundish, plain, shabby structure, likely appealing to Master Yoda’s ego and how he liked to view himself as a “simple” being. Through the small window, Vader could see a tiny fire flickering in a fireplace and could smell something foul cooking over it.

He lifted his left hand, opened it all the way, then snapped it tightly into a fist. The structure imploded, crumpling in on itself, extinguishing the fire, upsetting the foul-smelling stew, and destroying whatever, whoever, was inside. He opened his fist and the debris scattered in every direction.

He approached cautiously, kicking his way through the remains of the house, looking for signs of the Jedi Master. He found none.

“Ah, Skywalker,” Yoda’s voice came from behind him. Vader looked, and Yoda was now there, standing where Vader had been just a moment before. “Still troubled by your time in the cave, hmm?”

“I told you,” Vader said. “Anakin is dead.”

“And Darth Vader is all that remains,” Yoda said. “Heard this before, I have.”

“And yet you seek to anger me by using a name that no longer exists?”
“Is not Skywalker the name of your wife? Your children? Was it not the name of your mother?”

Vader gritted his teeth.

“You do not speak of my family.”

“What saw you in the cave?”

“Shadows and ghosts. Just you soon shall be.”

Vader leapt at him, swinging his lightsaber in a downward arc. Yoda, in that perplexing way he did, cast aside his cane as if he didn’t even need it, and called his lightsaber to his hand, igniting it and parrying Vader’s strike.

Enraged, Vader attacked viciously, slashing and hacking at the shorter opponent. Yoda, though centuries old and likely out of practice, deflected each attack, managing to return with two strikes of his own, which Vader blocked.

Jedi Master and Sith Lord circled, holding their respective green and red blades in front of them. Yoda remained impassive, while Vader’s face burned with rage. He snarled before he attacked, which Yoda parried easily, then returned with a thrust that Vader barely deflected.

Yoda flipped into the air to avoid Vader’s next attack, then did it again. As he landed, he reached out with the Force, propelling Vader away from him.

From his back, Vader lifted a hand, pulling a large, ancient tree from the ground, roots and all, and hurled it at his former master, who dodged it just in time.

The two adversaries charged at each other, meeting halfway, their sabers crashing together.

Zeb helped Luke, Leia, and Padme off the sanitation vehicle and onto the loading dock of an old, dirty spaceport outside Theed, where a junk transport sat whirring before them.

“Let’s move along now,” Zeb said, “Quick-like. There you go!”

“First a trash compactor and now a junker?” Leia moaned.

“Just temporary, princess,” Zeb said. “And we’ve got snacks and drinks on board. On you go!”

He ushered the twins to the ramp, both of whom scampered up, as if racing each other, disappearing into the light of the ship.

“My lady?” Zeb asked, offering a hand.

Padme took it and started to ascend the ramp with Zeb but then stopped, as if the gravity of what she was doing suddenly crashed over her. She looked over her shoulder at Theed, the spires of the palace poking above it. She was leaving Naboo, the planet of her birth, very likely for the last time. She was leaving her childhood home, her people, and her husband, a husband who would be merciless in his pursuit of them. She was escaping a nightmare, yes, but what kind of nightmare was she unleashing, she wondered.

“My lady,” Zeb said, “We really must be going.”

“Is this the right thing?” she asked out loud. “Will this even work?”

“All we can do is try, my lady,” Zeb said. “Come. Everything had been well-planned and arranged.”

A single tear rolling down her cheek, Padme nodded and followed Zeb on board.

The fight had moved into the jungle, and Vader stalked his prey with the silent, deadly efficiency of a predator. He walked amid the tangled roots and hanging vines slowly, listening, reaching out with the Force. He knew Yoda was still here. Even if he’d fled, they would catch him above the planet.

Growing impatient, he tried goading him.

“Do you know I’m the one that cut off Master Windu’s hand?” he asked. “My master blasted him with Force Lightning and cast him through the window. There are some that say he survived and is out there somewhere. Truly, I hope he is. I would take his other hand and then his legs before I took his head. He never liked me, never trusted me. I suppose he’d been right about me all along.” He looked for movement in the darkness, tried to sense anything. He could not, so he continued.

“Obi-Wan failed on Mustafar. It wasn’t for lack of trying. In the end, it was his weakness that cost him his life. You see, he held back. He held back as if he hoped, at the last second, I’d seek some sort of redemption and grovel at his feet. A second’s hesitation was all it took. I stabbed him in the chest and threw his body into the magma. It cooked him like bantha meat. You should have seen it, Master Yoda.

“And then there were the younglings. The fear in their eyes. Most of them didn’t even run, did you know that? It was as if they could not comprehend what they were seeing.”

Across from Vader, a green lightsaber snapped to life, illuminating Yoda behind it.

“See their faces when you look at your own children, do you?”

“I told you,” Vader snarled. “Do NOT talk about my family!”

He charged.

The tensest moments on their journey thus far happened above the planet as they were questioned by Executor. Zeb, however, remained calm, gave the proper authorization codes, and they were allowed through unimpeded. Padme had feared something going wrong the whole day and knew the biggest chance of that happening was now.

But instead, they jumped to lightspeed.

“We’ll be on this ship for a bit,” Zeb said, “then we’ll transfer to another.”

The transfer happened quickly. They dropped out of lightspeed and rendezvoused with a VCX-100 class light freighter, which Zeb called the Ghost. They connected to the Ghost and boarded it as quickly as possible. The pilot and copilot of the junker joined them as they crossed over, where they were met by a green-skinned Twi’lek, who identified herself as Hera Syndulla.

“Captain Hera Syndulla,” Zeb corrected.

Smiling modestly at him, Hera crouched down to the twins’ level. “All right, your majesties, let’s get you settled in so we can be off.”

“I like your head-tails,” Leia said, touching one of them.

“You shouldn’t touch other people without asking,” Luke said.

“It’s all right,” Hera said. “I like your curls.” She gave one of Leia’s curls a playful tug.

“Come along, children,” Padme said.

Standing, Hera looked to Zeb and said, “Send the distress signal.”

“Right away.”

After they were buckled in and it started moving, the Ghost swung around and destroyed the junker ship with a quick blast of laser fire. Padme understood what they were trying to do. A distress signal and debris would confuse the Empire at first, but it would never convince Anakin. Never.

“Make sure everyone’s locked in,” Hera said over the intercom, “we’re about to make the jump to lightspeed.”

“Locked and loaded, Captain!” Zeb cried.

Brilliant cones of light started streaking by the viewports, and they were yanked into their seats as the ship blasted forward.

A little smile, peaceful and relieved, came over Yoda’s face, as he felt the presence of the twins rocket away from the Mid Rim. He let up in his attack.

“What is this?” Vader asked. “A trick? You are giving up?”

“An inevitability,” Yoda said. “Done, my work is.”

Yoda held his lightsaber vertically at his chest and closed his eyes.

Vader hesitated, sure that this was some trick, but he swung his blade anyway, propelling it with all his rage, all his might.

It cut through Yoda easily, but then … oddly, all that fell to the mud was the old master’s lightsaber and tattered, dirty clothing.

Vader stepped on the old Jedi robes, feeling for any sign of Yoda. He could find none.

Yoda was ancient, wise, and knew many tricks, but Vader could not think of one that would make him just disappear like that. He had struck, he’d felt it, and yet … where was he? Was he so old that he just disintegrated?

He turned off his lightsaber, hung it from his belt, and took out his comm. “Grand Inquisitor,” he said.

“Yes, my Lord?”

“You may land your forces now. I want them to search every inch of this area.”

“Of course. And what are we looking for, my Lord?”

Vader glanced down at the robes. He picked up the lightsaber. It was real, still warm from the battle, and the robes were cloven in half, still smoking from his strike.

“Anything,” he said.

The Inquisitors found a small shuttlecraft covered in vines and other filth, likely the one Yoda had used to come here five years ago. Stormtroopers sifted through the remains of Yoda’s house and combed the surrounding area, finding nothing else of interest.

Vader rolled Yoda’s small lightsaber over in his hand, his brow furrowed in irritated concentration. He could not sense the old master anywhere.

His comm went off, drawing him out of his own mind, and he answered it.

Captain Ozzel’s voice, sounding uncertain and scared, came through. “Lord Vader, I am sorry to disturb but-”

“What is it, Admiral?” He could tell something was wrong.

“I – I am not quite sure how to explain this, my Lord, and please – know this information comes from Naboo, not from me…”

“What information?” Vader hissed.

“Well, you see my Lord, your wife, your children. They’re missing …”

Vader clenched the comm so hard in his hands that it nearly broke.

“What do you mean … ‘missing’?”

Padme, Luke, and Leia were given long, heavy coats before they exited the Ghost. Zeb, wearing one of his own, showed them how to zip them up all the way and how to raise the hood. “You shouldn’t need your goggles,” he said, “but there are some in the coat just in case.”

They walked down the ramp and stepped into the frigid and yet furiously busy Hangar Bay 7 on Hoth. It appeared to have been carved right out of an icy mountain; enormous icicles hung from the ceiling, and frost covered the ground. All around them were unfamiliar ships and speeders, tended by droids and dozens and dozens of men and women of a variety of species wearing heavy cold-weather clothing.

Looking over it, Padme realized that the place was new, and still under construction.

Hera Syndulla and Zeb walked behind the royal family, ushering them farther in, where the temperature rose but just slightly. Padme expected a welcome committee, but let out a little gasp of surprise when Ashoka Tano, wearing a heavy cloak over her Jedi robes, stepped through the crowd to greet them.

“Ashoka!” Padme rushed to her and they embraced, the children noting their mother was crying again while this strange woman whispered to her.

Ashoka went to the children. “Younglings,” she said, bowing her head slightly. Leia noticed she carried not one but two lightsabers on her belt. “I trust you had a pleasant journey?”

“The Little Green Man said we must go away on a secret journey,” Luke said. “He said our father could not come. Is that true?”

“Yes. You will understand, in time.”

“Are you a Jedi?” Leia asked.

“Yes, I am.” Ashoka said with a smile. “So is he.”

A young man in Jedi robes walked over to them. “Hello,” he said. I’m Kanan Jarrus. You must be Luke and Leia. Welcome.”

“Father said there are no more Jedi,” Luke said doubtfully.

“There are some. There are others here. Perhaps you’d like to meet them?”

The twins exchanged a doubtful look. “Yes?” Leia said.

“Come,” Ashoka said. “Let’s get you inside and get you something warm to drink. You should all rest, for there is much, much to do.”

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