BooksBarbecue
Back The Game
Chapters (68)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. NOW
  4. One
  5. BEFORE
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Eight
  13. Nine
  14. Ten
  15. Eleven
  16. Twelve
  17. Thirteen
  18. Fourteen
  19. Fifteen
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. NOW
  26. Twenty-One
  27. BEFORE
  28. Twenty-Two
  29. Twenty-Three
  30. Twenty-Four
  31. Twenty-Five
  32. Twenty-Six
  33. Twenty-Seven
  34. Twenty-Eight
  35. Twenty-Nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-One
  38. Thirty-Two
  39. Thirty-three
  40. Thirty-Four
  41. Thirty-Five
  42. Thirty-Six
  43. Thirty-Seven
  44. Thirty-Eight
  45. NOW
  46. Thirty-Nine
  47. BEFORE
  48. Forty
  49. Forty-One
  50. Forty-Two
  51. Forty-three
  52. Forty-Four
  53. Forty-Five
  54. Forty-Six
  55. Forty-Seven
  56. Forty-Eight
  57. Forty-Nine
  58. Fifty
  59. Fifty-One
  60. NOW
  61. Fifty-Two
  62. Fifty-Three
  63. Fifty-Four
  64. Fifty-Five
  65. AFTER
  66. Fifty-Six
  67. Acknowledgements
  68. About the Author

‘Why don’t you tell me how I think? That’ll be interesting.’

‘Well, apart from the obvious wanting to be caught part, you think unreturned love is something that should be punished. This isn’t to do with the lies they were telling to people online. This is all personal. The whole Game thing was just a cover. You used it to kill Holly. You found other people like you online and they built this into this game, where you were supposedly killing people to punish them, only that’s not what happened. Joanna, Emily, all of them – they didn’t deserve to die, but you still did it. You’re not even sure if they’ve done anything wrong, really. Holly didn’t want you and you couldn’t handle that. It doesn’t leave much room for freedom, does it? No room for people to make their own decisions. All of this was just a mask to put off what you wanted to do last year. You wanted to kill Holly Edwards because she turned you down, but you didn’t have the capacity to do so.’

‘I killed Holly Edwards because she deserved it. All of them did.’

Mark stopped, as John tightened his grip on the rope. ‘No one deserves to die for not loving someone. That’s just life.’

‘Like that’s all they did. These people needed taking care of. That’s just life? That’s a simple way of looking at it. It doesn’t mean a thing though, really. You want to know the dirty little secret, Mark?’

‘What’s that?’

John grinned and now Mark saw him for something else than he’d seen in the bedroom the previous day. He wasn’t a scared little boy. He wasn’t weak. He was stronger now. He had power, probably for the first time in his life.

‘I enjoy it,’ John said, a sparkle in his eyes. ‘This is the greatest feeling in the world. The fact that I can do this. Set myself free of these people. It’s incredible. And it’s not just me. There’s hundreds of us out there; so many people you will never know. You can’t stop us all. We’ve all found the truth and now there’s no turning back. The days of hurting people with no recourse are over. It’s our time now. The forgotten ones. Men and a few women too, the whole world over. All finding a truth you can’t ignore.’

‘This isn’t the way, John,’ Mark said, but he knew there was no way of getting through to the boy. And that’s all he was. A boy. One who had suffered some kind of mental break but a boy all the same.

Which meant, it shouldn’t be all that difficult to stop him doing whatever he was planning to do.