Death Note: Blood Ties - 2. KILLER

Chapter 2: KILLER

Ethan:

Who should I kill?

The thought drifted through my mind. At first I thought it should be someone who deserves it. I thought of school and then I immediately thought of Joel Robinson, the Year 12 bully. He would deserve to die. Joel would only ever pick on someone when he knew a teacher wasn't looking. In primary school and even middle school troublesome students can be dealt with quickly and in a relatively harmless manner.

I knew though, that adults were much different. Once you crossed the bridge from middle school to high school the bullies you knew that used to flush heads down the toilet are now into drugs and committing vicious bashings.

If a difficult child in middle school could not be fixed when they entered high school they must be eliminated before becoming a threat to society. Joel Robinson was that such child. I had no doubt in my mind that people would benefit from his death. Not really believing that the death note would ever kill Joel I sat up from my bed and headed over to my desk. Hearing noises from outside my room I stopped and listened. Deciding it was nothing I opened the first drawer of my desk and pulled out a ball-point pen. I sat down on my bed with the notebook in my lap.

I heard the noises again: it was Mum and Reece. I think they were arguing about something.

I shrugged and then opened the notebook. Feeling a little silly I skipped past the used pages until finding a blank page. I lowered the pen towards the paper, then stopped - Reece was screaming at the top of his lungs. I heard him shouting my name and I realised they were arguing about me. Getting up I left the notebook and pen on my bed. I opened the door and went to the living room.

"He's got to go!" Reece was roaring "He's mooched off me here in this house for too long!"

"He's my son! He's only sixteen years-old!" my mother was smaller than me, but bravely standing up to her savage drunken partner.

Mum never did much ever since Dad died, right now she was still wearing her nightgown and slippers. I was sure the only reason she was with Reece was because he was our only source of income.

"He's not my son!" he growled through his teeth. Mum looked like she was about to snap back at him but then Reece did something I'd never be able to forgive him for. He stepped forward and grabbed her by the sides and started shaking her. Everything went red and I jumped forward before realising what my legs were doing.

"Let her go!" I screamed and grabbed one of Reece's large arms in an attempt to pry him from her.

He flung his arm back to knock my hands away. While being successful at that, the back of his hand also struck my cheek-bone and I was knocked off my feet by the impact. Mum gasped and Reece stared down at me as if in his drunken stupor he didn't know how I'd gotten there. My cheek seared with pain that caused my eyes to water, and my shoulder where I hit the floor also stung badly. Reece's expression remained perplexed for only a moment before it turned vicious again.

"You're not my son!" he repeated.

I got off the floor and ran to my room, tears of anger pouring down my face. I could hear Mum sobbing from the other room. As soon as I slammed the door closed I went straight to the notebook lying on my bed. In furious rage I picked up the ball-point pen and wrote across the page in a messy scrawl, all in capitals and with enough force that the indentations probably marked three extra pages: 'REECE CALDON'.

From the other room I could hear them talking. Reece was trying to comfort my Mum. I hated him so much. The thought kept circling through my head: I hope you die. I hope you die. I hope you die. Then I couldn't hear any noise coming from outside my room. I strained my ears to listen. Perhaps they'd left? Or maybe Reece passed out on the sofa while Mum locked herself in her room.

I felt disgusted by her as well. All the damage that Reece had caused and she still hung onto him. I understood that she was suffering from her husband's death, but Dad had died over three years ago. Reece was nowhere near a suitable substitute, in any way.

I heard a massive crash coming from the other room followed by a scream. My heart skipped a beat. I opened the door of my room and stared into the living room. Reece had collapsed onto his back with a look of horror frozen on his face. His eyes stared unseeingly towards me. Mum stared down at him with both hands covering her face, as pale as a ghost.

"He-he j-j-just collapsed!" she told me while shaking with fear. Mustering her strength she turned and raced across the room to the landline and dialed triple zero. I heard her asking for an ambulance, but that was all before my hearing faded. My eyes weren't able to move from Reece's face. My hands started shaking. My stomach was ice.

Did I just kill him? Did the death note I just wrote in kill Reece Caldon? I then found myself doubling over and throwing up on the living room floor.

The next day I made sure to get to school bright and early. I made my way through the gates and looked around to see only a handful of students were around. The less witnesses the better. I clutched the death note from under my blazer. I was still pale at what I'd seen the death note do to Reece. No, I mentally corrected myself. What I had done. I was now much more uneasy about and aware of what I was concealing and gripping so hard my knuckles were white. It was a weapon, a weapon of instant death. More than that. It was evil. Whoever created or at least used this notebook last realised it was evil and threw it into the forest intending for it to never be found. I knew what I had to do. I had to put it back there and make sure that no one ever found it again.

I recalled the ambulance workers carrying Reece away on a stretcher with a sheet covering his body. No matter how they'd tried to comfort her Mum never stopped crying. I'd never meant to cause her pain. Killing Reece had been selfish, even if he'd deserved it. Then again, who was I to decide who deserved to live or die? The only thing I did understand was that Reece was dead, and I'd killed him. His death would not be overlooked, karma would catch up with me and make me pay for what I'd done.

As soon as I reached the oval I headed towards the forest but stopped to look around and make sure no one was watching me. When I didn't see anyone I headed into the trees. I walked until the light filtered down in small holes, piercing the darkness from the canopy above. Still clutching the death note in my hand I removed it from under my blazer and then threw it like a Frisbee deep into the forest. I heard it crash into leaves as it spun through the air, hopefully where no one would ever find it. After that I turned and left all thoughts of the death note behind me.

One week after Reece died my mother had shown no sign that she'd gotten any better. I suppose Reece had been the second man she'd loved that died before his time.

I was happy to learn that Reece wasn't going to have a funeral. With no other living relatives and us not having the money for a proper send-off Mum thought it best to just not bother. Either that or she was too distraught to think about it. I'd never been eager to get a job, that had always been what Reece wanted for me. Now that the only source of income for my mother was centrelink and single-parent benefits from the government I had no money to buy things. In all honesty I was just being lazy, but I was really averted to the idea of finding work while I was still at school. Maybe in a couple of years when I was eighteen.

It was never like I'd been gifted things in the first place - other than a laptop for school. I hated hearing other kids talking about all their X-box and Play station games that their parents could afford to buy for them. I didn't complain though, I knew how much worse this must be for Mum. While she was distressed she'd actually blamed me saying that when Reece hit and knocked me to the ground that had triggered his heart attack. I didn't blame her though, considering I actually had been the cause of Reece's heart attack.

My brother had flown in from the central coast to comfort my mother, which was a strange thing because he hardly ever came to see us. He was twenty-four, seven years older than me and we rarely spoke to each other. I didn't know if he planned to help Mum financially and I didn't ask.

Nothing interesting had actually happened until Tuesday which was school assembly day. Mr Harris had been informing Year 11 students in the hall about the mid-semester exams. I was sitting with my roll group on the floor, not really paying attention to what he was saying. Exams were the least of my problems right now. The teachers were about half-way through the assembly and while a teacher had been explaining an excursion for a drama class the doors to the hall burst open.

Joel Robinson stood in the doorway and stared at everyone in the hall. Teachers and students all turned to look at him. I noticed his eyes: they were wide and frantic.

Then to my utter disbelief Joel raised his arms above his head and ran inside screaming "God will smite me! God will smite me!" over and over again. He darted past teachers and ran to the front of the assembly where he yelled one more time before collapsing, quite dead. Nobody made a sound. Then a very high-pitched scream could be heard from the front row, afterwards more people started screaming until the hall was filled with cries and noise. Teachers started to herd their roll call classes outside and Mrs Lee told all of us to leave quickly but carefully in single-file through the open doors that Joel had come through.

My face was frozen in utter astonishment, as was all of the students around me. As soon as we left to fresh air I started to think clearly. That had been completely out of character for Joel. Even if it'd just been an accident that he collapsed afterwards it wasn't like Joel to mess up in front of teachers, especially that bad. There was also no way that he would start screaming about something like God. Joel was not religious. He was obscene and vindictive but most importantly he was cowardly and feared teachers more than anything else.

My eyes widened in horror as I came to the only possible conclusion. I actually stopped walking and felt whoever was behind me run into my back. There were curses and shouts of anger from behind me at whoever stopped the line.

The death note could control someone's actions before they died. I distinctly remembered reading the last rule on the first page of the death note. After writing the cause of death, details of the death should be written in the next 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Joel Robinson was widely disliked by a lot of people in the school for being a bully. So someone had found the death note and decided to test it on him, just like I almost had. Not only that, but this person had taken the time to write down a cause of death and details about the death as well.

This meant that someone must have seen me try to dispose of it by throwing it into the forest.

Damn! If only I'd tried burning the notebook instead! Whoever killed Joel Robinson was probably someone in Year 11 considering where he'd died and when. Then I shuddered as a new more frightening thought entered my head. Whoever has the death note saw me try to dispose of it, that means they know I know what it does. I'm the only one who could figure it was the death note that killed Joel Robinson, so I'm the only one who knows it was murder. This means that whoever has the death note could try to kill me next in order to cover up the fact they killed Joel.

Depending on who they are they might know me well if they're in one of my classes. In order to kill someone with the death note you need a name and a face.

So this person will either try to figure out my name or they already know it and are writing it down this very moment. My paranoid mind continued to furiously bombard me with these vivid imaginings. I imagined that in the details for the death they would force me to meet them secretly and tell them if I had revealed the death note to anyone else and to tell him/her what their names were before I died. It was too late to tell anyone about this now that I don't have the death note. They'd never believe me otherwise. Also, considering it would look weird if two students died of heart attacks in roughly the same time-frame this killer would probably use means other than a heart attack to kill me.

I shuddered as I pictured someone writing my name into the death note and then putting 'car accident' next to it. I had to find out who was in possession of the death note, and quickly, before they found me.

Jack:

I watched the dude quietly from a distance. I couldn't see the look on his face but I could tell by the way he'd stopped and held up the line that he'd realized someone followed him into the forest and found that book of his.

A week ago I'd made it to school early as usual, giving up on trying to get fucking Emma to meet me at the school gates, I just went and sat on the same seat I normally did. I hadn't had a joint since the Monday before and all I wanted was a high. I knew there were other kids at this school that also did drugs, so I figured some of the stupid ones might bring some to school and sell them to me. When I saw the scrawny kid with the black hair and glasses moving all frantic-like towards the forest at the edge of the sports oval I did think it a bit crazy. He actually looked around to make sure no one was watching him.

The seat I always sat on was mostly obscured by bush from his direction so he hadn't noticed me. Of course the first thought that popped into my head was he had drugs. It would explain why he was acting like a spastic and the forest would be a hidden place to sell or take drugs. It was when he left looking relieved that I became really suspicious. Like his anxiety had been replaced by a cool calm.

Not even I was crazy enough to get stoned while at school. So who is this kid? Did he just take drugs or hide them? I was considering walking up to him and asking if he would sell me any flat-out. I had a twenty dollar note, it probably couldn't get me much but just enough for a bit of a hit for when I got home. Although the fact that he looked so worried of whether or not he was being seen made it look like he wanted it all for himself.

I knew about three dealers that I met once in a while and their prices had sky-rocketed. They kept blabbing on about economy and the police getting close to catching them and it was all quite angering to listen to. I might even need to take up a second job just to keep buying the stuff. I could see the dark-haired boy no longer cared if anyone was watching him. So instead I decided to go into the forest after he'd bailed.

I walked through the trees; a normal person would have given up but a druggie like me was prepared to go the extra mile. I walked until it started to get dark from the thickness of the leaves overhead. That's when I stepped on something. I looked down and moved my foot. It was just a book, not at all what I was looking for. Dirt from my shoe had smudged the cover, but what made me pick it up were the two words written in white against the black cover in some strange font and all in capitals: 'DEATH NOTE'.

I took the notebook home that day and read all that was in it. I hadn't actually used it until the next day when I was supposed to meet with Tony.

"Mr Macnair isn't it, how are you?" I said politely when I saw him arrive on time, as usual, to our meeting place at a park bench partially hidden by trees. It was a little too public for my liking but Tony always preferred it that way, in case one of his clients tried to rob him.

"Macmullen actually," he corrected. "But you can just call me Tony. You know that, you've bought from me for what, five months now?"

"Yeah, somethin' like that." really all I wanted was to find out his last name so I could test the notebook on him. Tony Macmullen was a few years older than me, skinny with blue eyes, a shaven head and a wide smile. He was always nice, to his clients at least.

"That'll be eighty." he told me after he'd given me the small piss-ant wrapped bag of weed.

"Eighty? Eighty what? Cents? Cause I sure hope you don't mean you want eighty bucks for this little thing?"

"Don't blame me," he said raising his arms in an attempt to look innocent. "I'm the distributor, so I need to fill a certain quota. Plus Nicki just got himself arrested so I have one less client now."

"How many regulars do you have other than me?" I asked him.

He clicked his tongue as he thought "'bout three maybe four." I stared at the bag he was carrying with him. It was situated behind his body from me on the seat. So he was still careful with me? So much for me being a trusted regular client.

"Is there more in there?" I asked pointing at the bag.

"There is if you're willing to pay for it." he told me. I angrily pulled out my wallet and gave him the money. More than half of the money I'd got from working at Video Ezy this week was now gone on this little bag of grass.

"Pleasure doing business with ya." he said with a smile, zipped up his bag and left to rip off another client.

There are lots of reasons why people kill. Jealousy, revenge, hatred are all reasons why some people kill. People who would kill for these reasons are called monsters in the eyes of society. Then there are those who kill and steal to sate their own addictions. These people are desperate and even more dangerous than the other kind of killer. I wasn't really sure about Tony's last name at the time. When I heard it I realised I wasn't sure whether his surname had an 'A' or a 'U' or if it had one 'L' or two. Lucky for me Tony was the kind of dude who liked to label things, not a good habit for drug dealers to have considering if the police found that bag it would lead straight to him. When I looked at his bag of drugs and asked Tony about it, really I was only trying to read his name written on one of the straps in black marker.

Tony Macmullen. Cause of death: Drug overdose. Circumstances of death: Leaves all the drugs and money he has on him in the public men's bathroom of New Farm Park in the furthest cubicle from the door. Ingests a small amount of cannabis and then exits the bathroom, crosses three streets and dies.

I was desperate and had no idea the death note would have worked as well as it had. It's incredibly unusual for someone to die from taking marijuana, unless they'd taken it in egregious amounts. I'm talking huge. I knew Tony got his drugs from some big drug gang leader although I didn't know who. If I'd killed Tony with a heart attack his superiors would've gone looking for the drugs he was supposed to sell so they could get them back. I'd made it so his death would be announced by professionals as a drug overdose. Unless this guy that Tony worked for had access to the information that the examiners who checked his body would have, they would have to assume that he ate all the drugs before he died.

They would never be able to find out the exact amount of drugs he'd taken. The fact is, there's always a tiny chance you will die from taking a bit of any illegal substance. What it boils down to is the person's genes or health, and chance. I didn't know what Tony's health was like, but I did control the chance of death with this new notebook.

If Tony's stash went missing and he hadn't died of a drug overdose, I was sure that his buyers would be suspected first. Tony told me he only had three or four regular buyers, so it wouldn't have been long before I was visited by another one of this gang leader's workers. Killing him this way was the only way to ensure that I wouldn't be found out, cause then I'd be fucked.

To be on the safe side I'd also have to make sure I don't sell any of the drugs, at least not large amounts of it, to anyone.

I didn't know who this dude was that'd thrown away the death note, but I wasn't so dumb. If I played it smart, I could have all the drugs and money I wanted. Tony had left the drugs in the bathroom and all his money exactly as I'd written. The killing of Joel Robinson had been for laughs. Next I should make sure the kid who owned this book last dies before he tells the secret of the death note to anyone.