Mrs. James was watching the evening news. Her husband was getting ready to pick up the kids from the mall. Mr. James kissed her on the cheek and was off.
“Well,” the woman reporter sighed. “We’ve been searching for that psycho serial killer on the loose out there for a couple of days now. His name is unknown, but all we know is that he is about five foot three, weighs about 120 pounds, and is probably around 45 years old. Some say that he has a rather large scar on his left cheek.”
A drawn image of what the runaway maniac could possible look like appeared on the screen.









• • •
It was a dark and wet evening. Jose, Amanda, Naomi, and Richie were all waiting in front of the mall’s main entrance for Amanda’s father to pick them all up to drive home. The mall was closing at 9:00. Minutes passed, until the foursome of friends realized they had been standing in the rain a little over half an hour, and that it was time they had called Mr. James to check if anything had gone wrong.
“Nobody’s picking up,” Amanda admitted to her friends after calling her father for the fifth time with no success. She became very worried.
“There has to be some kind of logical explanation for this,” There wasn’t even a hint of fear in Naomi’s voice. She was always the technical one.
“Like what?” Richie asked. The quad of teenagers had now been waiting for an hour. Amanda began crying silently.
“Amanda,” Jose was the one to notice her supposedly insconspicuous sob, and kneeled down next to her. “your dad would never do anything like this. He’s a real nice guy.There’s just got to be a reasonable excuse for him.”
The 14-year-old girl just looked at him. “Oh, I just hope you guys are right,” she whispered. And so they waited…













• • •

Mrs. James turned off the television just as she heard a thud in the shrubs in front of her house.
“Troy?” she opened the front door. “Are you still here?”
Walking cautiously across the front yard, she stopped dead in her tracks and gasped, nearly fainting at what she saw. Right there, a few inches away, were her husband’s two lifeless legs lying there from behind the bush.
Before she would muster a reaction to this, she heard the engine of her car starting. Mrs. James hadn’t even noticed that her van had never left the driveway. With headlights nearly blinding her, the bewildered mother wasn’t able to make out the silhouette of the man behind the wheel. Then she saw it. The scar of the left cheek of the oblivious psycho was more noticeable than ever. The way the light caught a gloomy glow to it; it was as if-
Bang! Mrs. James was no more alive than a brick, let alone her soulmate, lying hopelessly in the darkness. Psycho got in his car, and drove off.













• • •
When the adolescents thought all hope was lost, fresh new springs of hope were catapulted at them when they noticed Amanda’s dad’s recognizable maroon van. The vehicle stopped, and of course everyone skipped towards the car, faith giving them new bursts of energy. Everyone except Naomi. She hid inside the opening doorways of the mall, hoping the other kids would all be too excited to notice her absence.
It turned out that Naomi was not the only one who watched the news everyday, and she knew right away that the man driving Mr. James’s van was not Amanda’s father. He was all too enthralled into his own thoughts to be able to fit Mr. James’s personality. And surely you’d think that his own daughter would have recognized her father when she saw him, but that was not the case. Either Amanda was far too sleepy to even care, and wanted to be home as soon as possible, or the serial killer really knew how to hide his face and act casual. After all, it was dark, and whatever happened inside that van as it drove away was beyond Naomi. There was a sudden feeling in her, a feeling that told her how unimaginable life would be without those innocent beings. She just had to do something to rescue her friends. She stared out into the distance until the monsterous capsule that held her friends’ lives seemed to evanesce as her entire view blurred up from stinging tears. She was their only hope. Frustrated, Naomi scrambled inside the mall, flipped open her cell phone in a primitive sort of way, and called the James’ house. Three rings screamed tauntingly in her ear until a raspy voice answered the phone. It was the murderer.