Savannah Knight is a retired mortician with great plans to become a paranormal author. On her first day of retirement, she heads to the local library to start her new career as an aspiring author. But shortly after her first research session, everyo...
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Everything had happened so quickly in the library, but the concept of time had been lost on all of us. To me, it felt like it had been at least three hours, but I'd been there less than an hour. In less than an hour, these teenage boys had already killed five people at the library, but they weren't immune from humanity. They were worried. There wasn't enough time to hit the body count they wanted to, so they had to pick up the pace if they still wanted the world to know who they are.
Not only did they want to kill at least twenty people in the library, but they thought they had the balls to escape the police and travel across the country killing even more people. Their goal was to kill exactly as many people as the fictional serial killers, Mickey and Mallory Knox, in Oliver Stone's popular movie, Natural Born Killers. This meant their body count would need to be more than fifty. I wanted to laugh at their fucked-up ambition, but when you're dealing with blood-hungry murderers, it's best to err on the side of caution.
These guys had already laid out a plan to travel to Texas, Nevada, and California before they planned on getting caught—and it was all masterminded by the oldest boy, Norris Hall, an eighteen-year-old high school drop out who seemed to be frozen in a perpetual state of junior-high immaturity. But combined with his poor-little-white-boy fantasy, this immature young man was quite dangerous, already boasting he'd killed three teenage boys before he dropped out of high school.
Norris was raised by a single father after his mother abandoned them both shortly after he was born. And if it hadn't been for that one little detail, he might have lived a fully-functional life, but you and I both know that's not a minor detail. Being denied a life with any parent can seriously damage a child's psyche, and he hadn't been any different. Her absence heavily influenced how he felt about women, though deep down inside, a small part of him was looking for a mother figure to take care of him. When he couldn't find it in any of the girls he dated, that is what lead him to run away from his dad's house in search of his long-lost mother.
She wasn't hard to find because she'd actually been living nearly two hours away in Tulsa, Oklahoma. When he showed up on her doorstep, she realized exactly who he was because he looked exactly like a younger version of his father, a man she'd secretly loved all those years. But what Norris didn't realize was that she had no intention of going back to that old life. She'd changed her name and thought she moved far enough away to escape that old life. Nothing would threaten that new life she dreamed of living.
"I can't talk here," she whispered, and she asked him to meet her at the park in her neighborhood. It would be empty at that hour of the day, and it was likely that nobody would see her talking to a strange teenage boy. That was where she broke his heart a final time. That was where he decided he had nothing left to lose.
His mother had started a new family after she re-married, and she wanted nothing to do with Norris. "I'm sorry," she said, "but they'd never understand. I can't tell my family about you." She went on to explain how both her and her husband are respected members of their religious community, and even her husband didn't know about the past she'd left behind before she moved to Tulsa.
"But I'm your son," Norris said through his tears. "You can't just abandon me again. I need you." He broke down in front of the woman he'd hope would reach her arms out to him, but she never had any intention of comforting him. She still didn't want to be his mother after all these years.
After she left the park, he stayed there, surrounded by his pain and his anger, trying to understand how a human being could do such a thing. "It's not fair," he screamed into the wind and threw rocks at the birds flying overhead. He shook, he screamed, he cried, and the sky suddenly grew dark in his mind. That's all the world would ever be—loneliness, desperation, abandonment, and darkness. So, over the next few weeks, he walked from Tulsa back to Moore, and he started the next phase of The Dark Children's plan. He was going to kill as many people as humanly possible. The world would forget that Mickey Knox was a fictional character because he was the real natural born killer.
