<div class="floatleft">(http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g194/daxionsfire/RP%20Girls/JessicaDownes003.jpg)</div><strong>Name:</strong>Chrissa Williamson<br/><strong>Location:</strong>Entering Parking Lot<br/><strong>Wearing:</strong>See picture, plus a black ball cap, hair in a ponytail.<br/><strong>Tagged:</strong>Open, Michael, Billy, Jack, etc.<br/><br/>Chris had listened closely to what Michael had said that morning at the school. She'd listened, and even as her heart tried to deny it, her mind knew he was telling the truth.<br/><br/>Her morning had started like everyone else's: normal. She'd woken up before dawn, showered, and then gone out to feed her horses. The ranch had been deathly silent, but that wasn't unusual at that time of the day. She'd fed her horses, then returned to the house to eat breakfast. Only her mother hadn't been in the kitchen. Her mother was ALWAYS in the kitchen fixing breakfast by then. Her father wasn't sitting on the front porch drinking his morning coffee. He ALWAYS sat on the front porch to drink his morning coffee, even if the weather was terrible. Chris had fixed herself some toast. Perhaps her father was out fixing the fences early. Perhaps her mother had decided to sleep in. Perhaps. But in 17 years, Chris had never seen a deviation to the pattern.<br/><br/>She'd pushed aside her misgivings and gone to school. As she drove, she saw other signs of things that weren't...normal. Other ranches dead silent, where normally there was activity. Two children waiting at a school bus stop alongside the road, for a bus that should've come half an hour ago. A big rig sitting in a cotton field, where it had run off the road, no sign that its driver had tried to slow down at all; its lights were still on, its engine running, and no emergency vehicles in sight. At the entrance to town, a homeless man laying on a bench...when normally he was up with the sun, begging for change.<br/><br/>So when Michael called the meeting and told the kids at the school what was going on, Chrissa knew he was telling the truth. But her heart...her heart wouldn't let her accept it. Not right away. So she'd jumped in her beat up white Ford pickup and left the school parking lot before things started heating up. Better to get out while the going was good. But she wasn't halfway home before she realized the error of her current actions. The town was silent, the streets empty. There was no traffic. The stores weren't open. On the highway, there were no semi trucks careening back and forth, carrying their cargo to the big cities. Michael had told the truth. And if he'd told the truth, then Chrissa's parents were already gone. There was nothing she could do for them. Or for the ranch hands, or the foreman. She could only take care of herself now...and whoever else was willing to work with her.<br/><br/>At the edge of town, she turned around and drove back to the school. As she blew through red lights, she reached over her head for the .308 bolt action rifle her daddy had given her last Christmas, sitting in the gun rack on the back window. She deftly tucked the stock of the gun between her inner thighs and held it, while with her free hand she opened the action and checked the chamber. It was unloaded. She leaned over carefully to the glovebox, and smacked it with a fist to get it to open. She pulled out the 20-round box of bullets and began loading them one at a time into the rifle's magazine. She inserted the magazine into the gun, then pushed the bolt forward, chambering a round. She set the gun on the bench seat next to her, just as she entered the school parking lot again.<br/><br/>When she arrived, she immediately saw Michael and the small group of students who were starting to congregate around him. It seemed perhaps she'd just missed some sort of confrontation. She pulled the truck up along the curb about twenty yards away from them, turned the engine off, and got out, bringing her rifle with her. She kept the muzzle pointed at the ground, wanting to show she didn't intend to be a threat. She walked a few paces toward Michael and the others.<br/><br/><strong>"Hey,"</strong>she said softly.<strong>"Everything going okay here? Those guys that just left...they looked like they were ready for trouble."</strong>