Zootopia: Runaway: Gazelle's Story

Chapter 2: The Night The World Fell Apart

BANG!

There was dead silence.

BANG! BANG! RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!

Gazelle's brown eyes floated open, as she heard a collection of sounds from just outside that were loud enough to wake her.

KA-BANG! BOOM!

Explosions, followed by the sound of a roaring fire and panicked villagers.

She quickly hopped out of bed, clutching Amigo tightly as her wide, scared eyes surveyed the horizon.

Oh, no.

From their cottage just outside the village, Gazelle could see three massive, poorly-maintained dump trucks parked near the border. Their occupants, a collection of colossal, brutish animals wielding guns, leapt from the back beds and swarmed into the village, firing off their weapons as fast as they possibly could. Fires had begun to spring up across the village, sending animal inhabitants running in every direction. It was total chaos.

It was then that someone in the village finally worked up the sense to start ringing the bell in the village church. The massive iron bell began ringing out the deep-throated dong-dong-dong-dong, and at that, the sound of panic exploded throughout the village.

"M-mamí?" Gazelle called out, afraid. She didn't know what exactly was going on, but she knew it wasn't good.

Maria came rushing down the stairs from the roof and hugged her daughter tight. Tomás followed her, running over to a hidden spot in their kitchen: the hiding spot for the rifle he used to scare off thieves and to kill swarms of invading locusts.

"What's going on, Tomás?" Maria asked. Gazelle could tell that her mother, though she was trying to hold it down, was scared too.

Tomás answered as he slid a couple of shells into the rifle. "The Eskhan Gang. They're back."

Almost as soon as Tomás had mentioned the gang's name, the small wooden door at the front of their home was shaken by knocks, followed by a loud, booming voice.

"Open up! Come out of there!" the voice yelled. "Come now, Tomás, we know you're in there! You and your little wife, too!"

Gazelle suddenly found herself being shoved towards an adjacent room by her mother.

"Get out of sight, pequeña!" Maria hissed. "If they find out you're here..."

Gazelle didn't hear her mother finish what she was saying, because an ear-splitting CRACK shattered the door, the result of the butt of a machine gun being smashed against it. This was the product of an angry cheetah with sixty pounds of force from his bulging biceps slamming the gun into the wood of the door, not courteous enough to wait for Tomás to open it.

Gazelle obeyed her mother and crawled under the table in the kitchen. Curling up into a little ball of goldish fur and quivering nerves under the table, she peeked out from between the legs of the stools around her and watched on in horror.

The cheetah thug that had smashed the door in shouted a curse in Spanish and made a mad rush at Tomás, his right shoulder angled down towards him in a charge. In all the confusion, Tomás' rifle went off as the cheetah knocked it out of his paws. A foot-shove from the brute sent Tomás to the floor, pinned down with a KA-44 semiautomatic rifle aimed straight at his face.