The October Malice ༄ (gxg)

twelve, her hands

The clouds were extra dark and dreary that day, as if the group of young adults that was now reduced to only four needed any more heartrending stimulus.

None of them had been able to turn on their televisions that morning, because they already knew what would be plastered all over the morning news—the story of a young woman's death, the fourth murder in Deliverance who was found in a ditch not far from her home, stabbed eight times in the back. She had been walking home that dusky evening after her classes, but she had never made it home.

Jules lived in the East-side neighborhoods, but her two-story house was settled at the farthest point away and was cut off from other houses by a small cluster of woods. There was a nice paved road that she had to walk everyday to get to her house. Her killer had stalked her, waited until she was away from the other houses and walking through the brush of trees to her home.

It was her mother who found her while she was driving home from work at one of the local banks. She saw a body lying face-down in the ditch on their paved driveway, the back of their white shirt covered in large splotches of blood barely visible under the green streetlights. When the woman noticed the brown, pompous curls around the person's head, her panic grew into grievous despair, and her scream had been heard even in the West-side neighborhoods.

The thing about Jules' death was that her location of murder was in front of her house, right on the paved road that was only yards away from turning into their very driveway. There was a sign sitting at the end of that paved road that signaled the house was protected by security cameras, meaning the killer knew exactly where the cameras could not reach.

It was planned.

It was almost as if it was some kind of horrible, twisted joke—she was killed right in front of her own house guarded with cameras, in the richest part of town where cops patrolled constantly to be preventive of any robberies (and also because they were bribed by the wealthier patrons who didn't think the middle class houses were worthy of protection like their large and luxurious estates). The cops even had a planned routing schedule defining which roads they would cruise and when. The killer just so happened to strike on the one increment that there was not a single cop car in the neighborhood, which was only about a fifteen-minute time span.

It was a planned murder, and it was a quick one.

The Deliverance mayor was quick to broadcast a television and radio announcement where he finally announced to the citizens that there was, in fact, a murderer running rampant in the small town, and he outlined a special curfew that prohibited anyone being out after dark or else they would get fined. He even said that cops and detectives from the nearby larger city—the one over the Northern mountain range where Opal's father used to work in—would be coming in to help keep an eye on the place.

Three murders of beloved citizens hadn't been enough for the mayor to take the situation seriously, but once an upper-class girl whose mother was the president of a local bank was murdered, things were suddenly so serious.

Opal, of course, could hold no resentment for that classism since Jules was her friend and her murder deserved to be handled properly, but she wished the same kind of action had been taken when Mrs. Browning had been killed. Maybe she was biased, but she believed that if the mayor had taken things seriously much sooner, Jules would have been sitting at the bench that college morning.

But it was only Opal and Sam, walking sluggishly towards the campus. Opal made sure to walk a little closer next to Sam who was for once in her life completely silent.

Their shoes crunched deadened leaves on the parking lot surface, a gentle but cold breeze brushing across their frozen cheeks. It was nearing the end of October, meaning that winter's touch was soon to be present.