She speaks!

The girl has spoken! The girl - I should say Bianca. Her name is Bianca. She's 11 years old. I finally got her to talk by blatantly cheating at a board game we were playing. She just shouted out, "That's cheating!" Her outburst even startled herself.

I started asking her some generic questions about what she likes and things like that to try and ease her into conversation again before I got into anything heavy. Bianca likes puppies more than cats. She also thinks vanilla ice cream is way better than chocolate even if it is just "plain". Then I - it was so hard to ask this sweet little girl but I had to know what had happened to her in case there was any information that would help all of us survive. I turned on a digital recorder I had picked up from one of our scouting trips. Here it is in her own words.

"It was dark."

"It's okay Bianca. We're here and we're safe now." She looked from Jan to me and then she began again.

"It had been dark for a few days. There was no electricity. My Mom and Dad - they had put boards up on the windows and on the front door. It was late but we were waiting up. We were waiting up for Daddy to get home. He went out to get some food for us and Mom said we could wait for him to get back before we went to bed. She was in the kitchen walking back and forth by the door. She wasn't even looking at me any more. She was just saying, 'Bring him home. Bring him home," over and over again. Daddy had been gone a really long time."

She paused and looked down at the floor.

"Daddy came home. He came to the back door in a hurry. He was bleeding. He was bleeding a lot. There were the monsters following him. Mom almost couldn't close the door because they were trying to push in. Daddy was on the floor in the kitchen. He stopped moving. Mom turned around when she got the door closed. She got down on the floor and held Daddy. She was crying a lot. Daddy started to move again - but - "

She begins to cry.

"It wasn't Daddy anymore. He became a monster too! He started to hurt Mom. She punched and kicked but he was biting her. Mom grabbed a big knife and started stabbing. She stabbed and stabbed until the daddy monster stopped. Mom was bleeding so bad. She came to me. She put the knife in my hand and said, 'You hide sweety. You go and you hide. Mommy's not going to be okay for very long and you need to hide from the monsters.' I ran and found a place to hide. I heard Mom going out the back door and then I heard a bang and a hissing sound. I hid. I crawled far back into my place and I hid."

At that point she broke down. She cried for what seemed like hours and then she slept.

Jan explained to me that the bang and hiss that Bianca had heard was a flare that her mother had shot up. It was her mothers last act to try and attract some one's attention to save her little girl. It worked. That flare is what brought Jan.

Bianca. The poor child. I can't imagine how she could have survived such a thing. I hope when she wakes up she'll still be willing talk to us. I hope she'll forgive us for asking her to tell the story.