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Part Twenty

   Like a flip switching in his head, Jamie knew exactly what room he was talking about. But killing people? That wasn't a possibility. The crazy person wasn't right in the head, that much was obvious.

   The more Jamie pondered over how things escalated so quickly, the longer he spent avoiding eye contact with the lunatic. His eyes roamed the nearby items in his cluttered room, searching for anything he could find that might help his situation. Jamie was a smart kid, he knew that, but being forced against your own will and unable to fight back against a wall of steel left his mind struggling to find a solution. That is, until his eyes caught a magnifying glass on his desk; something that brought him back to the last memory in his old house.

   He never liked that home. It was in the middle of farmland, with not much to do as a child unless his parents drove him somewhere, and he blocked out most of the year he experienced there. His parents were always moving around until they found his current home to settle in. Nothing special occured in that particular house.

   He searched for his magnifying glass the day they moved. He looked everywhere for it, until his last resort found him stomping in the kitchen, finding it right beside the wooden table. And next to the table, lay two bugs that his unfocused eyes had never seen before.

   "I...no... There were two bugs in the kitchen..." he started to explain, wriggling in the tall guy's grip.

   "There were people in the kitchen. Parents. With a son who watched the whole thing go down and still has trauma about it," he was pressed further into the wall for his efforts to escape, banging his head on a paper award for excellence in a project he made in fifth grade.

   "That doesn't make any sense..."

   "Really? The fact that you're a murderer, or the fact that you made someone's life a living hell when you killed his parents?"

   "No...there were bugs, and I sprayed them and I..." shit. Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit.

   "And what?!"

   "And I put them in my bag because I thought they looked cool." Jamie realized out loud, remembering the whole scenario at once as the images rushed back into his head. The bugs, without his glasses, looked special. He wanted to keep them, and eventually forgot all about them on the ride to his new home. He was always a  smart kid, but always a forgetful one.

   "I'm sorry?" The man raised his eyebrows, going from a look of complete hatred, to one of shock. That wasn't any better.

   "I...let me go. Let me go, let me check my bag, please."

   "It's been four years, you really think they would be there?"

   "It's worth a look, isn't it?!"

   "Fine," The stranger released him, and Jamie sprinted to his closet with a pounding heart and an ache in his shoulder. He dug through piles upon piles of old school bags, laundry, and completed notebooks containing multitudes of different species he found entertaining to study. If what the man said was true, he knew it wasn't good. Jamie had a history of sticking his nose in things he shouldn't simply because he was interested, and this was no different.

   The more bags he pulled, the more helpless he became. It was a black bag, he remembered that now. A black bag with yellow rims that carried old bug containers and books on the different species of butterflies in his area. If he remembered everything correctly, the...people he killed would be in the bag, four years later.

   "I found it!" Jamie screamed, snatching the bag from its pile on the floor and whipping around to face the stranger, only to have it yanked from his grasp and he watched with blood draining from his face at the sight of the man practically ripping it apart at every opening.

   "There's nothing in here," He declared, throwing it back to Jamie, who still lay crippled on the floor.