Death On My Mind

Jason is 16-years-old who lives with his parents. Both of his parents work and do not pay attention to him. Their focus is that he behaves properly at all times so that he does not create problems for them. He has been bullied by his classmates as well for the last three years at school. Jason feels lonely at home and in school. He is irritated and frustrated with everything in his life. He wishes his parents to go away and his classmates who bully him to die. He is happy to imagine his classmates being killed in an accident or he is ready to kill all of them on his own. He just wants his miseries to end. If none of it works, he will commit suicide so that he does not have to go through it every day.

There is a killer in the town who has been killing young girls. Until now, he has kidnapped and killed 4 girls. The people of the town have started a vigilante march every evening to keep their city safe.

Marvin is a control freak when it comes to his wife and daughter. He lost his wife in a car accident 2 years ago and his daughter does not talk to him. She lives in her college hostel and never comes home or calls him. He has been kidnapping and killing young girls for the last year since his first victim walked up to his door on her own by mistake.

One evening, while Jason was taking a stroll, going to his friend’s place, Marvin kidnaps Jason. When Jason regains consciousness, he finds himself chained to a pole in a strange room. He also finds out that he is not alone in the room. There is a girl already chained and bound on the other side of the room. Her clothes were in tatter & dirty, and she was not moving at all. It looked like she has been in that room for a long time, and she was barely alive.

While Jason looked around, Marvin barges into the room. It is dark in the room and he looks tall & terrifying from the floor where Jason was lying. Marvin ignores Jason and goes straight to the girl. He picks her up in his big arms and takes him out. He bangs the door close behind him. There is silence in the room again. Jason is unable to hear anything that is going on outside the room.

A few minutes later, while Jason struggles for his release, the door opens again. A girl is standing at the entrance, cleaned up, and wearing new clothes. Jason slowly looked up, noticing her dress first, towards her face, and cannot believe who she is. The girl standing in front of him who was lying like rotten meat on the floor is Stephanie. Stephanie is Jason’s classmate and the one he has a crush on. She also got him beat up by her four bully friends just because he talked to her to discuss a class assignment.

She did not look at Jason, goes straight back to the place where she was chained, and sit with her legs folded in her hands. She is terrified and crying but Jason does not feel anything for her except hatred. Marvin comes to the room again and this time he looks at Jason. He picks Stephanie up, unchains Jason, and takes both to a deserted place with him in his car.

Marvin gets out of the car and pushes Jason and Stephanie out of the car as well. He makes Stephanie kneel, pulls out a gun, and hands the gun to Jason. Jason is amazed but he has no choice but to take the gun. Marvin forces Jason to kill Stephanie and Jason pulls the trigger and everything goes blank.

The next day, Jason feels tired but without guilt or remorse for killing Stephanie. Marvin goes out to the vigilante march in the city to kidnap another girl. Marvin finds his next girl and hits her on the head with a metal tube. It turns out to be his daughter. Rather than taking her to the hospital or saving her, he runs away, leaving her unconscious. Jason is angry Marvin didn’t kidnap any girl that night and gets restless.

The next day, Marvin is still thinking about last night. He hasn’t told Jason about it. Leaving him behind, Jason goes out on his own to find someone to kidnap. He finds one of his bully classmates, Abraham, out on the road. Rather than hunting for girls, he decides after killing Stephanie, he should do the same to him as well. He makes him unconscious and throws him inside the car. When Jason reaches home, looking at a boy in the back seat of his car, Marvin is anxious at first but then plays along. They kill Abraham the same day before he regains consciousness. After killing Abraham, Jason decides he will hunt for his classmates and kill them the same way he killed Stephanie and him.

But things go bad when Jason and Marvin break into the home of the last bully, Callum. He fought back and they were not able to kill him and get injured. Callum goes to the police and files a complaint. Jason and Marvin hack a plan to bring Callum to a neutral place and kill him. They kill him but get caught while running from the police. When there was no other way left, Marvin kills Jason, and the police shoot Marvin and both die.

Chapter 2

"It is almost 8. I have been awake for the past 25 minutes when I heard the main door open, and my dad was leaving for the office. I can still hear my mother outside, scrambling to organise everything before she leaves for work as well. She usually leaves within 10 minutes of my father. I am waiting for her to go before stepping out of the room.

Today is my day off from school and I will be alone for the whole day. My parents won’t be back before 8.30 in the evening, probably with some takeout dinner. One time, while coming back from the office they both brought Chinese food because they didn’t call each other. We ate it till dinner the next day. Today is an important day. I had planned for this day a week ago. I had thought about how I am going to use this day. Nobody is going to be home and I can execute my plan without any interference. I just have to wait for everyone to leave and the house to be empty. I am not going to jeopardise my plan, for which it took me a lot of mental strength and courage to be able to do it. I am afraid that if I see or talk to anyone today, something will change in me, and I might decide not to do it. I might not feel sure, or I might have second thoughts about my plans and if that happens, I don't know if I will ever get a chance like this and even if I did, I might have to go through the same process of hesitation and restlessness. I have been feeling it the whole week.

Since everyone will be at work, I am hoping nobody will find out about it until the end of the day and since I am not expecting anyone today, even if I couldn't do it or something goes wrong the first time or ultimately, I couldn't do it, I will have the whole day to try it again."

"It's not like I am Mr. Popular, or a lot of people will miss me. I want to go without talking or meeting anyone. That way I will go like I have lived, being invisible. I don’t think I have anything philosophical to say and I don't think anything else I say will be noticed. Maybe they will if they know it will be my last words, out of courtesy, or more pity, that at least they won't have to listen to me again."

"I think she's about to go out now. I could hear her footsteps, imagining and guessing that she would be checking everything one last time and sprinting to get all her stuff before she leaves. Once, in a hurry to leave for office, she left the gas stove on, and our kitchen was on fire. It smelled like a 1000 burnt toast and it smelled like that for three whole days. Ultimately the smell went away but it left a dark mark on the wall. You can still see it behind the counter and sometimes a little bit of it peeks out from behind the chimney. I wonder if she would have made the same meat sandwich three times in the same week for my breakfast. I could hear her finally picking up her car keys and the thud of the door closing."

"I got out of my bed in my pj's, walked towards the door, and out of my room. I looked towards the kitchen countertop and there it was, sitting snugly on a plate - the ugly, rotten meat sandwich. I hated that frozen crap. But anyway, it's the last I am going to see it. I start to get ready for the showdown and gather stuff I need. I go to the porch where we usually keep the stool. But today, it wasn't there. I started to panic when the first thing I went looking for, I wasn’t there. I looked around the house, in the kitchen, and the drawing and the dining rooms, but couldn’t find it anywhere. Finally, after looking all over the house, when I accepted defeat and sat down with my head in my hands, I saw it lying under a table in the study room. The thought that I couldn't find the stool or that the stool was not in its usual place almost ruined my perfect plan. It was probably my nerves that were fucking with my brain or maybe it was a sign. Anyway, I bent a little to get it out of the under the table.

A little dust flew off when I picked it up and carried it to my room. I pulled out the noose I made last night before going to bed from the rope I took from the drawer and had in my room for the past week. I almost got caught once when my mother found it in my drawer. But I told her it was for a science project, and she accepted it. She probably would have accepted anything I said because ‘who has the time to think about the intentions of a 16-year-old boy. I placed the stool right beside my bed, almost under the fan. But I didn't care whether the stool was right beneath the fan or not because I just needed a wing of the fan to hang the noose and myself. I got up on the stool and put one end around the wing of the fan. I pulled on the rope from the other end because that's what I have seen people do in movies and other videos.

A large amount of saliva went down my food pipe. Suddenly, my mouth felt really dry and I started to sweat but I can't stop now. If I climbed down from the stool right now, I don't think I would ever be able to do it. I thought about all those times I was hit and slapped on the head unnecessarily or being blamed or punished because those bullies hid my bag or notebook when the teacher asked for them or tore my clothes because they were ‘just playing with me. The last thing I thought was the face of Callum and that did the trick. I felt a rush of blood and I put the other end of the rope around my neck and kicked the stool away. It made a loud sound but since nobody was there, nobody could listen. I thought I would die instantaneously, that I will not even know that I have died, and everything will be dark in front of my eyes and my body will go limp, but I was wrong. Slowly my fingers and arm and neck started getting numb, I started to feel dizzy, and I couldn't feel any air through my lungs. My eyes started to close, and everything started getting blurry. Then I heard a ringing in my ear, and I went unconscious. Then the ringing stopped, and it went completely dark."

Jason woke up. His head was banging hard. He has been having this dream for a long time now, so it did not surprise him. Sometimes, it's jumping off a building top, other times it could be being killed by a knife or shot in the stomach. But for the first time, he woke up with a stinging pain at the back of his head and the stink of a dead raccoon. He rubbed his palm to the back of his head. He moved his fingers to the point where the skin was swollen due to the hit and winced. It made him think about the attack. It filled him with panic and anxiety. He started to think about where he was and how he got there? He thought back to the event of last night...was it last night or just a few hours or days ago. Or maybe it never happened. The last thing he remembers was he was staring inside Callum's house and...and what happened next. He heard a car coming from behind, the engine, the tyres but he was too late. Before he could do step away from the oncoming car, something hit him. What was it? Who hit him? How long has he been passed out for? Did somebody notice him lying on the pavement because he was sure Callum or his friends wouldn’t have? Even if they would have seen anything, they would not have cared to stop their party and do something about it. They would have just closed the door and continued partying. So, who did? Who noticed and whose home was it? Was he safe or in danger? He noticed his t-shirt was drenched in sweat by the little panic attack he had had in the past 2 minutes. He opened his eyes and started to look around.

The room looked normal, but it was neat and well-organised. Everything was in its place and there was no dust or anything in disarray. He slowly tries to understand the unfamiliar surroundings and tries to take a picture in his head. He has seen all this in TV shows. He thought he needed to act smart as those kidnapped girls and guys do in the movies. He wondered how they even do it right from the start. Don't they have pain in their body or the will to die just to end it all or the bad stench? He kept looking. There's a side table, a double bed with a bedsheet that looks a little old and wrinkled, another side table, a dark brown cabinet, and...and what the hell is that? That's where the stench was from? But who the hell is she? Is she dead? She is not moving, and the stench is so bad and her clothes in such bad condition, it feels either she hasn't moved for the past week, or somebody has beaten the crap out of her and thrown her there.

He tries to get close to her. But he couldn't get up because of the stinging pain he was feeling. He crawled towards her and that's when he noticed his hands tied to a steel pole in the room. He can't move around. The girl looked fragile like worn-out pages of an old book in her oversized clothes. He looked around to poke her with something but couldn't find anything. He didn't want to treat her like an animal, but he had to find out whether she's dead or alive. He extended one of his legs. As he was trying to reach her, he heard footsteps coming towards the room. Suddenly, somebody was trying to turn the knob and open the door. He didn't know what to do but he started feeling anxious about what's going to happen next. In anticipation of what is about to happen, he quickly got back to where he was in time to not arouse suspicion.t

He was a big man. Jason had to move his head back to look at his face. But before he could, he had gone past him and towards the girl. Jason could only make out that he was wearing a white vest and blue pants. He walked right to the girl, turned her, picked her up, and started yelling "Why didn't you listen to me. Why didn't you just listen that it wasn't my fault? You were too young to be on your own. It wasn't her time to leave the world as well. But I couldn't do anything." He hugged her tightly and started crying. After crying which felt like more than just a minute, he hit her hard and left, the girl falling to the floor like a leaf falling from the tree in autumn.

All this time when he was holding her by her neck, the girl stayed lifeless like she had no energy to even move her eyelids, but Jason could hear her breathe. “She is alive!” Jason almost screamed and raised his hand in elation. But looking at the situation, he kept his excitement to himself, and the screams of joy ended in his mind. As the man turned to leave, he stared at Jason. Jason was scared for his life. He wanted to see how the girl is doing, but he was afraid to move and the cold pole he was tied to dug into his spine and he realized there's nowhere to go and he can't go back further. But the man just stared for a few seconds and then left like he was disappointed in him.

As Jason looked at the girl from head to toe, a mark on her ankle caught his attention. But he couldn't make out from where he remembered that mark. Because she was covered in dirt and his head was still bursting, he thought it was just something he is imagining. But before he could gather his thoughts, he heard footsteps again. He pushed the girl away to her position and got back to the pole he was tied to.

The man came in again but this time he walked directly towards the girl, picked her up, and went away. Jason scrambled and tried to make a dive to catch the man’s leg or anything he could grab on to. But he soon realised that he is too weak to do anything. Jason was upset, with his situation and the fact that he was unable to do anything for the girl. But his head throbbed so hard that although his mind was disturbed, he went to sleep.