Chris Carter - I Am Death

Squirm still chewed as fast as he could. Once he finally swallowed the first mouthful, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. One more time, and still fearfully, he peeked at the man, who seemed totally unconcerned.

The boy reached for a piece of toast.

In silence, the man watched him eat. Squirm still ate fast, but not as fast as his first few mouthfuls. He drank his orange juice in gulps and finished the bowl of cereal in record time, but without spilling a single drop. He was about to eat the last of the food, a piece of bacon rasher, when the man spoke again.

‘You really don’t remember what day today is, do you?’

Squirm paused before the piece of bacon hit his lips.

‘Not at all?’ his captor asked.

Squirm frowned, but failed to reply.

‘OK, I’ll tell you.’ There was a forced, full-of-suspense pause. ‘Today is your birthday, Squirm.’

Shocked, the boy looked back at his captor. The piece of bacon fell from his fork back on to the plate.

Squirm’s life had taken such a drastic turn in the past few days that he had completely forgotten about his own birthday. The last time he had thought about it had been on the day he was abducted, as he was leaving school. Back then, there had been only nine days to go.

The boy’s eyes ran the length of his skinny arms all the way to his hands. Dry blood coated his knuckles and every single one of his nails. All of them broken. He had no idea what his face looked like, as there were no mirrors or shiny surfaces anywhere in the house, but Squirm wasn’t sure he wanted to know. What he did know was that he had also lost a silly amount of weight. He looked like someone who had been struggling with either anorexia or bulimia.

Oh my God! I’ve been here for only nine days?

In the boy’s mind, it really did feel like a year or more.

‘I guess that explains why I’m being nice to you today,’ the man said, sitting back in his seat. ‘So, happy birthday, Squirm. That breakfast was your present.’

The boy felt tears coming to his eyes, but he remembered his promise from earlier on and somehow found the strength to choke them.

‘You’re not going to read the paper?’

Squirm peered at it, but his hands didn’t move.

‘You must be curious about what is going on out there, aren’t you? You’ve been missing for quite a few days now. The police must be going crazy trying to find you, don’t you think?’

No reply. No movement.

‘C’mon, have a look. I’ll help you.’ The man reached for the newspaper and flipped it open to the crime section, before placing it back on the table in front of the boy. He watched Squirm’s good eye move to it and quickly scan all the headlines.

Nothing.

‘Oh!’ ‘The Monster’ said sarcastically. ‘Nothing in today’s paper. That’s strange, isn’t it? Would you like to check the earlier newspapers too?’

They locked eyes, or in Squirm’s case — eye.

‘I’ve kept them all.’ ‘The Monster’ jerked his head to his left. ‘They’re in the cupboard. Let me get them for you.’ He got up, walked over to the cupboards high on the south wall and opened the second one from the left. From inside, he retrieved a pile of folded newspapers.

‘Here they are,’ he said, dumping them on the table. ‘Every single LA Times since the day after I picked you up from outside your school.’

Squirm found it astonishing that ‘The Monster’ made it sound as though what had happened that day was nothing more than a regular school pick-up.

‘Go on,’ the man pushed. ‘Have a look.’

The boy reached for the first one at the top of the pile, yesterday’s LA Times, and unfolded it. He found that the papers had already been opened on to the crime section. This time he took a little longer going over the articles and headlines. In the ‘Missing Persons’ section, he came across a few photographs, most of them of kids around his age or younger. His wasn’t one of them. He put the paper down and quickly reached for the next one — the LA Times from two days ago. Again, his picture wasn’t listed in the ‘Missing Persons’ section.

A cold, discomforting feeling began to grow inside the boy’s stomach.

Newspaper number three.

No pictures of him.

Number four.

A repeat of the previous three.

The discomfort turned to nausea, branching out to some sort of spike that stabbed at his heart.

Five.

Not a thing.

‘The Monster’ simply observed Squirm, his eyes sparkling with satisfaction.

Six.

No.

Last newspaper. The one dated the day after he’d been abducted.

The boy’s picture wasn’t there.

If there was still such a thing that Squirm called ‘world’, it collapsed right in front of him that morning.

OK, this is a dream. It has to be. There’s no other explanation for how fucked-up crazy this morning has become.

‘Nothing?’ ‘The Monster’ asked, his lips parting into a malicious grin.

Squirm’s attention didn’t break from the newspapers, which were now scattered all over the breakfast table. His good eye was still searching from paper to paper.

I must’ve missed it. It’s there somewhere. It has to be.

‘Looking at them some more isn’t going to make your picture miraculously appear on the paper, Squirm. Let me try to save you the trouble. It’s not there. It never has been.’

Squirm began shaking.

‘Haven’t you wondered how come I knew that today was your birthday, Squirm?’ The man shrugged. ‘I never asked you. You never offered it.’

The boy turned to look at ‘The Monster’. All the madness had happened so fast that morning that Squirm had never stopped to think about it.

How did he know it was my birthday?

‘That question can be answered by answering another couple of questions.’ Once again the ‘The Monster’ paused, lifting his eyebrows to emphasize his words. ‘How come there are no pictures of you in the papers? How come there’s no story about the boy who went missing after leaving school a week and a half ago?’

Squirm felt as though something had begun choking his heart inside his chest. He said nothing. He didn’t know what to say.

‘And the answer is — because you were never reported missing, Squirm.’

‘Just turn the page,’ Sanders said. ‘Because here is where it starts to get interesting.’

Hunter did, and Sanders carried on with his account.

‘Five months after Ms. Dillard’s disappearance, in July two thousand and nine, Sandra Oliver, a twenty-four-year-old bank clerk from Fresno, also went missing. She lived by herself in the west part of town. Once again, the Missing Persons investigation concluded that whoever had taken her had done so from inside her own house and, once again, there was no sign of a break-in or a struggle. The abduction scene was almost a carbon copy of Ms. Dillard’s — relatively clean, no fingerprints, no mess, just a few fibers and a couple of shoeprints by the back door. The shoe size and sole pattern matched those found in Ms. Dillard’s abduction scene so suspicions of it being the same perpetrator were high.

‘Now, guess who’d been working in the neighbor’s house the same week of Ms. Oliver’s disappearance?’ Sanders didn’t wait for a reply. ‘That’s right, our friend Mathew Hade. He’d been doing several minor repairs to the property, as well as remodeling their front garden. All the work was completed just a couple of days before Sandra Oliver went missing. Once again, the police ended up knocking on Mr. Hade’s door, and once again they didn’t have enough to take him in. The detective in charge of the investigation managed to get a warrant to search Hade’s house but they found nothing incriminating. A week and a half after she went missing, Ms. Oliver’s body was found on a patch of green grass in the northern part of town.’