Life went back to normal for the small town. The people had a memorial for the deceased and paid to have a monument erected in Wickham Park with the names of all the victims on it. Emma’s name was on that plaque but Jazmine’s wasn’t. It seemed quite unfair to Kayla that the perpetrator got that honor while the hero who had stopped her was made an outcast.
Someone had to pay.
The official word was that Cody Mitchell had drugged Emma and murdered everyone at the diner. He was tried on eight counts of first-degree murder and one count of first-degree aggravated assault. Despite Kayla’s video, Cody was found guilty. He maintained his innocence and swore that he didn’t remember anything but none of that mattered. Cody was sentenced to death.
Someone had to pay.
Mateo was permanently blind. Some people said that was a good thing considering the boy’s melted face. He spent the rest of his life wondering why God would allow such a thing to happen.
Someone had to pay.
Emma’s bizarre behavior was explained away as a new kind of street drug. It was fatal if ingested but cleared after a few hours if it was inhaled. Her body was sent to the CDC in Atlanta for further study. They found no sign of the orange dust and determined her secondary cause of death to be “primary amoebic meningocephalitis,” PAM for short. Clearly, she had been infected the day she almost drowned. Wickham Lake was closed for the rest of the year, nobody allowed in or out.
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Someone had to pay.
Amy’s stood vacant that winter but was torn down for scrap the following spring. Despite the diner’s reputation for the best slugburgers in town, people didn’t want to eat there anymore
Someone had to pay.
Sonny Miller blew his brains out a few weeks after the incident. Nobody knew why and nobody cared. He probably had it coming.
Someone had to pay.
The less people talked about that summer, the less they remembered. That was the secret of how humans dealt with such tragedy: they found someone – anyone - to punish and then they moved on.
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Kayla sat at her desk and took a drink from her father’s whiskey bottle. Now that Emma and Jazmine were gone, she didn’t care anymore. She had spent the first 48 hours after their deaths in a drunken stupor. The guns had been her idea, after all. It was her fault that her friends were dead.
She opened the browser on her laptop and guided the cursor to the search bar. She had forgotten about Emma’s last words until today and she wondered what they might mean. Slowly, she typed the odd phrase:
crawling chaos
Kayla clicked on the first link and began to read.