30 Day Writing Prompts

7

7. You stumble across an online article that details a brutal murder. There are pictures of the victim. It's you.

I've always wanted to be part of the FBI. It's my biggest aspiration in life to study crimes like murders and kidnappings. Ever since I was a young boy and I met my dad's friend who works in the FBI, that's where I've wanted to be and I've never changed that.

Even today, I still do research on crimes and murders. I really love the True Crime community, and I've made a lot of good friends through my interest.

It's the weekend, I'm sitting at my computer like I usually do when I don't have school. I finished all my homework earlier, so it's time to sit on this chair for two days other than for bathroom breaks and food breaks. I open up voice chat and log on. Most of my usual crowd is online and already chatting, so I join our groupchat and greet them all.

"Hey Matt! How's it going dude!" One of my best friends, Willow says. She's the first out of only two girls in our group.

"I'm good. What are we talking about today?" I ask, a few other guys in the group chattering away.

"Nothing," everyone chimes in unison. I truly doubt that, so I try flicking over to some news websites for the city I live in. Nothing. Going a little wider, I go to UK and England news websites but there's absolutely nothing on crime. I even try US new websites but there's nothing on there either.

Grumbling a little, I scroll through tumblr slowly.

"It's totally weird, right?" Sal chips in, sending us a screen-share of her equally dull news articles from Australia. The rest of the group agree with her before sending in their own dull news articles. Most are about Trump, others useless buzzfeed-like articles about pop tarts and radical feminism. No crimes. No murder or kidnappings, which I suppose is a good thing but there's not even anything in there about a robbery or other petty crime.

We usually talk about crime or watch some sort of Crime TV show like the nerds we all are, but everyone just seems unamused with the lack of crime on the news today.

Closing down tumblr, I open up my email. I barely ever check my email, so there's almost 1,000 unread emails in my inbox. I roll my eyes and begin clicking through, deleting some so it clears out the inbox just a little. The lag is unreal though, so many emails is just too much to process for my computer, apparently. I talk with my friends whilst I delete all of the useless and unread emails from my email account. We talk about school mostly. It's very important to do well in school as we all want to work with crime in some way. My dad always tells me that if I want to be in the FBI I can't let my grades slip at all. I'm a decently smart guy, not super intelligent but I still get good test scores and I've done well in my exams.

Once I've deleted pretty much all my emails, (not that I was going to actually read them anyway), I refresh the page just in case I got any new ones in the almost 70 minutes that it took me to delete all of those other emails. There's only one new email when I refresh. Most of the other emails I had were from True Crime websites and other stuff I usually would've read up on anyway so I recognised the emails. Other emails were ones from school regarding assignments, homework, or school events.

I click on the unread one, acknowledging the strange subject name 'Crime Scene'. I got a little giddy at the fact that it seemed to be related to crime, so I tell everyone in the chat.

"Oh that's super neat!" Willow exclaims, excitement evident in her tone.

The email is from an account I don't recognise, with a strange email address I've never seen before. I read through the short message, which basically just tells me that there's been a murder in a town near Manchester. Interesting, that must be close to me, right? There's a link at the bottom of the page, so I click on it and the Chrome Browser starts loading.

A strange looking website is what I'm faced with when it finishes loading. It looks simple, as if it was made by someone who's never done website design before. It reminds me of when I did computing in my earlier years of high school and we made our on HTML websites. It looks exactly like the work of a thirteen year old starting HTML. I scroll down a little anyway, making a few jokes that my friends laugh at. I send a screenshare of the website and they all snort. It's definitely a joke, but there's nothing else to do I suppose.

When I scroll down a little, I get to a title that says 'Mangled Murder'. There's a lot of text detailing an extremely brutal murder. It looks just like any other news article, but the website background is plain black and the text is a bright red. Never mind the brutal murder, this website design is brutal enough.

I show my friends the text, which tells us that in a small town near Manchester (it doesn't mention what town) there was an extremely violent murder late in the evening. Police aren't sure if it was pre-meditated or was committed for another reason. The victim's body was mangled and his face cut up severely, almost to the point where the police could barely recognise who it was. The victim hasn't been named in the article at all.

"That's peculiar," Dan mumbles.

"What?" I ask.

"It usually names the victim in articles like this. Especially where it details the murder like so. It hasn't detailed the town name either. There's not much to look at," he says, sighing slightly.

I scroll down the page further, past the larger body of text.

"Holy shit..." I whisper as I come face to face with extremely gore-y pictures. They match what the text described, so I'm assuming that these are actual pictures of the dead body. I send the group chat the pictures and they all yell out.

"What the hell!" Willow screeches. I can hear her mouse click frantically. "Matt! You're such an asshole!" She mutters after she's calmed down a little. I apologise politely.

"That's even stranger," Dan states bluntly. It's unlikely that an article will actually include pictures of the body. Sometimes there's pictures of the crime scene or police officers, but there's almost never a dead body photographed.

I look at the pictures closely, an uneasy feeling suddenly working up in my stomach. I've seen gore before, and this is gross and all but I think I've seen worse. It's a different feeling though, not sickness because of the sigh of blood and a mangled body, but another feeling. A deja vú moment crosses my mind. I've never seen anything like this before, so I don't know what it is.

The pictures feel oddly familiar, which irks me a little. I lean in to my computer, studying the picture closer. The surroundings are ones I've definitely seen before, and the body looks like someone I've known. Is it someone I know? That'd be awful..

It's.. it's so familiar though.

"Matt?" Dan says, curiously.

"No!" I exclaim loudly, scrolling down the page further, right to the bottom. "What the fuck!" I yell. The date. The date is today! The time? 10:37pm. Three and a half hours from now.

"What is it?" Willow asks. She's worried, I know she is.

"That's... that's me," I whisper barely audibly, just as I heard the door open..