I, Death

Brecht: 6

Brecht still got chills thinking about that last encounter with O’Mallick.

After it, he’d gone back and re-read the teen’s blog, studied it intently.

Previously, he’d been convinced that the death curse was somehow channeled through the teen’s eyes. Some further studies and intense research he’d done about eyesight and the brain, led him to the conclusion that Brecht’s own albinism, and the resulting side effects of crossing optical nerve fibers combined with the mild Nystagmus, which causes very subtle rapid movement of the eyes, might both be factors preventing O’Mallick’s death stare from working on him. Hell, for all Brecht knew, it could even have just been the pop-bottle thick glasses he wore.

And he was pretty convinced that the boy’s high blood alcohol level during that face-off through the windshield had been preventing the boy from properly focusing and was likely also a diluting factor.

It took about a month for Brecht to put these facts together after doing a bit more reading about his own afflictions. And by then, of course, the teen had disappeared. His disappearance was in conjunction with police having found his uncle’s dead body lying on the floor in the house where the teen had been drinking himself into oblivion.

Following news stories and word on the street, mostly through his low level contacts from the small town of Levack, Brecht learned that the police believed O’Mallick was on the run down south in Toronto and they were desperate to talk to him about his uncle’s death. The police tried to make it clear that they didn’t suspect him for the death of his uncle and failed to understand why he would run from them. A spokesperson for the department speculated at length in one newspaper article that the boy must have cracked over the stacked-up deaths of both of his guardians as well as the classmates and teacher whose lives were tragically cut short. She made it clear that Peter O’Mallick was not to be considered a danger to anyone other than himself and pleaded for any information that would lead the police to find him.

Brecht knew that O’Mallick was hurt, angry and confused. He also knew this was the best possible frame of mind within which to bring the teen under his control.

[The rest of this novel will continue to be rolled out on a regular basis here on Wattpad, but if you can't wait to read it, the print and eBook versions are available through all major online retailers. Publisher Atomic Fez's page (with links) is here:  http://www.atomicfez.com/book-catalogue/9781927609033.html]