Relentless

high-powered rifle round. If he concentrated rapid fire on the bottom of the overturned sofa, one or both of us would be hit.
    The window-piercing
pock
of a third round was followed by the crack of wood as the apron of the coffee table took the hit a few inches above our carpet-hugging son. Splinters prickled down on his head and back.
    Cursing the gunman, Penny started crawling toward Milo.
    Grabbing her by an ankle, I warned her not to abandon even the inadequate cover of the sofa. She tried to kick loose, and I held tight, desperate to gain a moment to think.
    I wanted to go for Milo, shield him and move him, but if Penny and I were killed, Milo had less chance of surviving than he did even at this moment.
    If he stayed flat and slithered, he could get behind furniture and then snake to the back of the room, putting ever more obstacles between himself and the gunman, and then make his way into the hall.
    I needed to get his attention, but I remained reluctant to shout at him, for fear that, already terrified, he would be easily startled and would raise his head.
    Suddenly Lassie appeared, ran to the boy, and stood over him. Even these circumstances could not knock a bark from her, but she began to lick her young master’s left ear.
    He opened his eyes, saw her, and reached up to pull her down out of the line of fire.
    “No!” Penny kicked out of my grip and crawled toward Milo, intent on dragging him to safety but making of herself a target too easy to resist.

   Penny began on hands and knees but quickly rose into a crouch, leaving the cover of the sofa with perhaps no other intention than covering Milo with her body and taking a bullet for him.
    For a moment, I froze.
    Each of us is the sum of his experiences, not in the Freudian sense that we are victims of them, but in the sense that we rely on our experiences as the primary source of our wisdom, unless we are delusional and live by an ideology that refutes reality. At decision points in life, a sane person is guided by the lessons of his past.
    Among other things, my past had taught me that the very fact of my existence is a cause for amazement and wonder, that we must seize life because we never know how much of it remains for us, that faith is the antidote to despair and that laughter is the music of faith.
    But every lesson we learn from past experiences is not always the one we should have learned. One moment of my past had taught methat anger should always be watered down if not extinguished with humor, and I made no distinction between unworthy anger and the righteous kind. Anger is the father of violence, as well I knew, but I had not allowed myself to consider that wrath, when it is the product of pure indignation and untainted by ideology, is the father of justice and a necessary answer to evil.
    The funny thing is, this awareness informed my fiction but not my life—until Shearman Waxx.
    The bow-tied beast was my tormentor but also my teacher, for by the Taser attack and by the destruction of our house, he awakened the part of me that had been in this moral coma. And by shooting at Milo, he helped me to learn as a man what I already knew as a novelist: that wrath can lead to principled action
and
to principled violence.
    If I’d had a gun, I would have gone out of the house to search for the source of the rifle fire, and would have tried to shoot Waxx dead before he shot me.
    Lacking a firearm, I had no moral choice but to give in to the urge to act that suddenly ruled my mind and heart, whether it was a mad dominion or not. Because I was unarmed and helpless to defend my family in a rational way, my only choice was irrational action.
    As Penny rose from her hands and knees, into a crouch, breaking cover, I stood upright, making the better target of myself. I bolted across the room, toward the corner where the entertainment-center wall engaged the view wall, passing in front of the windows.
    My wrath was so intense that I half believed a bullet couldn’t stop me, though I didn’t turn directly toward the windows with the intention of catching one in my teeth.
    I heard a round
pock
the glass, perhaps two, and prayed that I was the target.
    At the corner, I flicked down the wall switch that activated the motorized shades encapsulated within the three-pane windows. Because of the damage to the glass, I worried they might get hung up before fully descending.
    As the blinds came down, I turned my back to the windows to look for Penny and