TAINTED REMNANTS: VOLUME 1

CHAPTER 4: THE BODY OF SARAH MILBOURNE

1:07 PM

01/08/2020

They were only a few minutes away from their destination now. Everette focused on the road. Thankfully, traffic was nonexistent during this time of day. Now that they were on their way, Duncan wasn't trying to rush as much. They were going to the spot where Sarah's body was found: a junkyard in one of the neighborhoods. This junkyard also happened to be very close to where Sarah lived. That couldn't be a coincidence.

On the way, Duncan explained that someone was throwing away trash when they found her body. According to him, the body was mutilated and stuffed into trash bags. Everette had been involved in murder cases before, so he at least wasn't going to start throwing up at the thought of the girl's body, but he still felt a little nauseous thinking about a young and innocent girl being killed in such a brutal way. He couldn't imagine how the parents felt about all this. Duncan said they didn't have any information on the state the body's in, but the family was called to identify it. They were getting closer to the junkyard now.

Everette thought about the case. A few months back, Sarah went missing during a school day. There was never any sign of a kidnapping, a murder, or even a runaway. She was just... gone. Even talking to her mother didn't give them any clues to her whereabouts. When the police learned she left school during her lunch period, they checked the cameras to see for themselves what caused her to leave in hopes of tracking her down. That just led to another dead end. The camera footage during that day apparently had a glitch that made it unwatchable. The teachers told them that they didn't notice Sarah's behavior change at all up until her disappearance. They also claimed to have not seen what happened to Sarah. The students on the other hand reported a different story. The students who were in the cafeteria at the time of the incident reported that Sarah fell to the floor and began turning into garbage before running out of the cafeteria.

When he first heard the reports, Everette believed that the kids were playing a cruel prank and were making up some insane story. He wouldn't put it past teenagers to do something like that, but then the students who witnessed the event were taken to therapy. According to the therapist's notes, all of the students saw the exact same thing, every single one. Everyone who was in that cafeteria at the time of Sarah's disappearance claimed to have seen her turn into junk.

After further investigation, it turned out that there was a gas leak in the school that went unnoticed by school staff, and since the pipe was in one of the hallways near the cafeteria, it was believed that the story the students told was the result of hallucinations caused by the gas. In the following months, the students kept receiving therapy after the incident and everything slowly returned to normal.

Everette couldn't help but be skeptical about the situation. Did he believe that Sarah turned into a pile of trash? No, of course not. But, he didn't think that the students sharing the exact same hallucination was necessarily believable either. He was aware of shared hallucinations being a possibility, but that cafeteria had hundreds of kids in it. If all of them saw the same thing happen to the same person, then the chances of that being a mass hallucination were slim. It would be cynical for Everette to assume that the kids were just playing a cruel prank, but it was more believable than a gas leak. Whatever he wanted to believe, Sarah was dead and that was a fact. He was sure the parents were devastated. Who wouldn't be? He was a father himself, and despite all the mistakes he made raising his son, he still loved him so very much, so losing him in such a way would be devastating to a degree not even he could comprehend. At least now, they can have some closure knowing the fate of their daughter. However, there will still be the question of who did this.

Everette parked the car outside of the junkyard and walked out, his partner following close behind. Outside the front gate, Everette could see a man talking to a few officers. The man was skinny with a long beard and was wearing a blue jacket.