She Was His First

11

Jack was caught off guard. He hit the concrete hard enough to see a flash of light. The knife fell out of his hand. Charlie landed on top of him. He reached out for the knife. Amy ran forward and kicked the knife away.

Charlie ripped the tape off her mouth and screamed as loud as she could. "Mommy!" She believed whole heartedly that wherever she was, her mother would hear her.

"Help!" screamed Amy.

They both kept screaming like crazy, holding each other. Jack was scared. He stumbled back. He grabbed his knife, but he wasn't foolish enough to try anything now. People would be coming. He slipped out of his secret entryway--the little window. The girls didn't follow.

Charlie stopped screaming. She shook all over. Instead of the sinking feeling from missing a step, Charlie felt like she'd just missed a hundred steps. She collapsed on the ground and cried loud. Partly because she almost died, and partly because she was alive and Jack was gone.

The screams had alerted Sarah. She ran to get help. Amy helped Charlie get her shirt on, then held her until their parents came. Charlie was still crying when Mr. And Mrs. Shultz snatched her up and held her. Amy's mom was there, too. Amy told them all what she knew, then Charlie filled in the rest. Everyone was shocked. Both Amy and Charlie's mom's cried. Mr. Shultz was mad as a wet hen. He wanted to storm right over to Jack's house, but Mrs. Shultz stopped him.

"They're dangerous," she said.

So they called the cops instead. And they waited.

----

"Ma'am," the cop said to Charlie's mom. They were standing at Greta and Isaac's open door. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Shultz, but it looks like they've jumped ship."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"The boy and his father have gone. It looks like they packed a few things quickly and took off."

"But you can find them, right?"

"We're doing what we can. It seems like they don't even exist. Had they run the boy's name when the reports for the windows were put in, we'd know something about them was fishy, but...we can't find a record of a Jack and Mathew Avery."

Mrs. Shultz put her hand to her chest to steady herself. "So they won't be found?"

Fear threatened to smother Charlie when she heard those words.

"We're doing what we can, but fingerprints and DNA can only go so far if we don't already have theirs in the system," the officer said.

Charlie didn't know what DNA was, but she knew what the officer was saying. Her heart caught in her throat. They don't know Jack and they'd probably never be able to find him. Would he come back for her one day?

----

Many miles away in the stuffy cab of a truck, sat the psycho formerly known as Mathew and his disturbed son, formerly known as Jack.

"So where'd it go wrong again?" the father asked.

"I didn't get her far enough away and someone else saw," the son said.

"So now you know where you messed up," the father said. "Don't let it happen again. I don't like to have to up and move all fast like."

"Sorry, dad."

The father looked over at his son. He was kind of proud. Maybe the little twerp wouldn't be such a wuss after all. He was already trying to take after his ole man.

"I was getting tired of that place anyway," he said. "Hey, what you want your new name to be?"

The son gave it some thought. "I like Andrew. Or maybe Tyler."

---
THE END