My Little Brother Woke Me Up At Night And Said We Need To Leave Right Now. So, We Did.
Escape into the October Night
The casual way he said, “whoever Dad killed tonight,” made something crack inside my chest because my thirteen-year-old brother shouldn’t know how to talk about murder like it was just another item on a to-do list. I took the keys from him with numb fingers, and we moved through the dark house like ghosts.
Every creak of the floorboards made my heart stop. I could hear Dad snoring from the master bedroom and see the faint light under the door that meant Mom was probably reading in bed like she did every night.
Normal sounds from normal parents who were apparently planning to kill us this weekend and make it look like an accident. We made it to the front door, and I slowly turned the deadbolt, praying it wouldn’t make the clicking sound it usually did.
The bolt slid free with barely a whisper, and I eased the door open, the hinges mercifully silent because Dad had oiled them just last week. We slipped out into the October night air that was cold enough to make me wish I’d grabbed a better jacket.,
I pulled the door closed behind us with the slowest, most careful movement of my life. Then we were running across the lawn toward the street, our backpacks bouncing against our shoulders, heading for a blue sedan parked under a streetlight two houses down that belonged to someone who was probably dead.
I clicked the unlock button and the car chirped once, way too loud in the sleeping neighborhood. We threw our bags in the back and jumped into the front seats.
My hands shook so badly I could barely get the key in the ignition, but then the engine turned over and we were pulling away from the curb, leaving the only home I remembered behind us. I drove aimlessly for twenty minutes before my brain started working clearly enough to form an actual plan.
We couldn’t just drive forever. We had maybe $300 between us and a tank of gas that was showing half full.,
We didn’t have real IDs because our parents had always said they’d get us driver’s licenses when we were older, which I now realized meant they never wanted us to have official documentation. We couldn’t go to the police because what would we say?
Our parents were talking about killing us but didn’t actually do anything yet? And also, we stole a car that might belong to a murder victim?
That would get us sent straight back home where Mom and Dad would have a convenient explanation for everything, and we’d be trapped until that camping trip this weekend. Caleb was staring out the window with his arms wrapped around himself.
In the glow from the dashboard, he looked even younger than thirteen, just a scared kid who’d had to grow up way too fast in the last few hours. “We need to go somewhere they won’t think to look for us,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt. “And we need to find someone who can actually help us, someone with authority who won’t just send us back.”,
The Hidden Documentation
Caleb was quiet for a long moment before he pulled out his tablet. “Before we left, I took pictures of everything I found. The knife, the wallet, the fake IDs in the garage, the duffel bags of cash in the basement that I found last month when you were at the dentist.”
“I’ve been documenting things for a while because I kept noticing weird stuff and I thought maybe I was paranoid, but I wanted evidence in case I wasn’t.” He showed me his photo gallery, and my stomach turned as I scrolled through dozens of images.
Stacks of $100 bills wrapped in paper bands, multiple driver’s licenses with our parents’ faces and different names and addresses. Handwritten notes in Dad’s writing with names and addresses and dollar amounts.
That bloody knife was laid out on the workbench like some kind of terrible still life. “There’s more,” Caleb said quietly.
“I found a box in the attic three weeks ago when I was looking for Christmas decorations early because I wanted to surprise Mom. It had newspaper clippings about missing people, maybe fifteen or twenty different articles from the past decade.”,
“Some of them were from cities we lived in before we moved here, from when I was too young to remember. And someone had highlighted certain details in each article about the people who disappeared—their jobs, their families, their bank accounts. I took pictures of every single one.”
He handed me the tablet, and I pulled into an empty parking lot behind a closed grocery store so I could look at the photos properly. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely swipe through the images, but what I was seeing made my blood run cold.
Missing person after missing person, each one highlighted with notes in Dad’s handwriting about assets and opportunities and logistics. “Oh my god,” I whispered, because the implications were crashing over me like a wave.
“Caleb, I think our parents are serial killers or hired killers or something. This isn’t just about them wanting to kill us. This is what they do; this is their job.”
Caleb nodded, and his eyes were wet, but his voice stayed steady. “I know. I’ve known for like a month, but I didn’t want to believe it. And I couldn’t tell you because I thought maybe I was crazy.”
“But tonight, when I heard them talking about making our deaths look like an accident, exactly the way some of those articles described other people’s deaths, I knew I wasn’t crazy. And I knew we had to leave right now or we’d end up as clippings in someone else’s box.
