Lightning

processing information she had not consciously noted.
    Something was wrong. But what?

    They made less than twenty miles an hour on that narrow, winding, potholed, rutted, frozen dirt track. For a while the road followed the rocky spine of a ridge where there were no trees, then traced the course of a declivity in the ridge wall, all the way to the floor of the parallel ravine, where trees were so thick on both sides that the headlights bouncing back from their trunks seemed to reveal phalanxes of pines as solid as board walls.
    In the back of the wagon, her guardian murmured wordlessly in his fevered sleep. She was worried about him, and she wished that she could go faster, but she dared not.
    For the first two miles after they lost their pursuers, Chris was silent. Finally he said, "At the house… did you kill any of them?"
    She hesitated. "Yes. Two."
    "Good."
    Disturbed by the grim pleasure in the single word that he spoke, Laura said, "No, Chris, it isn't good to kill. It made me sick."
    "But they deserved to be killed," he said.
    "Yes, they did. But that doesn't mean it's pleasant to kill them. It's not. There's no satisfaction in it. Just… disgust at the necessity of it. And sadness."
    "I wish I could've killed one of them," he said with tight, cold anger that was disturbing in a boy his age.
    She glanced at him. With his face carved by shadows and the pale yellow light from the dashboard, he looked older than he was, and she had a glimpse of the man he would become.
    When the ravine floor became too rocky to provide passage, the road rose again, following a shelf on the ridge wall.
    She kept her eyes on the rude track. "Honey, we'll have to talk about this later at more length. Right now I just want you to listen carefully and try to understand something. There are a lot of bad philosophies in the world. You know what a philosophy is?"
    "Sorta. No… not really."
    "Then let's just say people believe in a lot of things that are bad for them to believe. But there are two things that different kinds of people believe that are the worst, most dangerous,
wrongest
of all. Some people believe the best way to solve a problem is with violence; they beat up or kill anyone who disagrees with them."
    "Like these guys who're after us."
    "Yes. Evidently that's the kind of people they are. That's a real bad way of thinking because violence leads to more violence. Besides, if you settle differences with a gun, there's no justice, no moment of peace, no hope. You follow me?"
    "I guess so. But what's the other worst kind of bad thinking?"
    "Pacifism," she said. "That's just the opposite of the first kind of bad thinking. Pacifists believe you should never lift a hand against another human being, no matter what he has done or what you know he's going to do. If a Pacifist was standing beside his brother, and if he saw a man coming to kill his brother, he'd urge his brother to run, but he wouldn't pick up a gun and stop the killer."
    "He'd let the guy go after his brother?" Chris asked, astonished.
    "Yes. If worse came to worst, he'd let his brother be murdered rather than violate his own principles and become a killer himself."
    "That's whacko."
    They rounded the point of the ridge, and the road descended into another valley. The branches of overhanging pines were so low they scraped the roof; clumps of snow fell onto the hood and windshield.
    Laura turned on the wipers and hunched over the steering wheel, using the change in terrain as an excuse not to talk until she had time to think how to make her point most clearly. They had endured a lot of violence in the past hour; much more violence no doubt lay ahead of them, and she was concerned that Chris develop a proper attitude toward it. She did not want him to get the idea that guns and muscle were acceptable substitutes for reason. On the other hand she did not want him to be traumatized by violence and learn to fear it at the cost of personal dignity and ultimate survival.
    At last she said, "Some pacifists are cowards in disguise, but some really believe it's right to permit the murder of an innocent person rather than kill to stop it. They're wrong because by not fighting evil, they've become part of it. They're as bad as the guy who pulls the trigger. Maybe this is above your head right now, and maybe you'll have to do a lot of thinking before you understand, but it's important you realize there's a way to live that's in the middle, between killers and pacifists. You try