Isaiah

My vision was beginning to stabilize, but my body still felt like rubber.

I sank to my knees and crawled over to my backpack.

Before I got there, I tried to open the door.

As expected, it was locked.

I slumped onto the floor beside my backpack and unzipped it.

All that remained inside was the photo album.

They'd taken my notebooks and pens and my cell phone.

Of course they had.

I weirdly opened the photo album.

Instead of the photos that had been in there, ones of myself with my previous foster families, photos where I had attempted to look happy and hopeful even though I knew I wouldn't be there for long,

Instead of those photos, they were crime scene photos.

And in each one, I recognized one of my former foster families brutally murdered and covered in blood.

hell yeah see you know what though we didn't say that this story was written back during kind of the peak so I'm glad though it was almost a hyper realistic blood meme I love that but it is an actual crime scene so I guess the clowns murder everyone you've known all the foster families you've known that's their strategy I guess my heart raced and my stomach churned I began to turn the pages quicker each page a new photo a new family new carnage

I recognized their faces in the inside of their homes.

I had lived with these people, and now they were all dead.

I came to the last few pages.

There was a photo of a house at night, then a window of that house, then inside the house, a dark hallway with light coming from one doorway, then a photo of my caseworker, brushing her teeth in the bathroom mirror.

then a photo of her looking at the camera in horror, then a photo of her naked, covered in her own blood, contorted into an unnatural position in her bathtub.

I turned to the last page.

Written inside the back cover of the photo album were three words.