Taken by Time: Chapter One (excerpt)

My name is Pria Selene Arnulf, I’m 17 years old, and I have 168 hours to live.

That’s how they all started.

My name is Melissa Anne Vahn, I’m 49 years old, and I have 168 hours to live.

My name is George Kelsey Horin, I’m 87 years old, and I have 168 hours to live.

My name is Caia Lee Prescott, I’m 7 years old, and I have 168 hours to live.

Everyone was obsessed with them; they’d been going on for years. These videos released of people kidnapped, and recording their last words. The Cameraman was the headline of every news source and the topic of every college criminology course. There were conspiracies and even an award-winning documentary about this killer. Of course, the journalist who directed said documentary was found dead with a knife wedged in his heart two weeks later. His goodbye video reached ten million views on YouTube.

The killer went to London, New York, and Los Angeles, taking people worth mentioning, but he would also show up in random villages in South Africa and take people shopping in the mall. Maybe the only good thing about him was that he didn’t discriminate. He fed off fear and showed people that bad thing can happen to anyone. Still, no one expected The Cameraman to show up in our town of Optimism, British Columbia, where mining and a name like ‘Optimism’ were the only two things we took pride in. And surely no one expected him to take Pria Arnulf. We knew it could happen to anyone, we didn’t realize it could happen to us.

Pria was a tall girl with red hair cropped short above her shoulders, sharp evergreen eyes, and words that rolled off her tongue like liquid and cut through the soul like butter. No one doubted she would eventually do something valuable with her life. I certainly didn’t doubt it for a second since I met her. She could cure cancer, or eradicate racism, or discover all the secrets of the universe through philosophy.

But Pria would never get any of the opportunities she deserved. She’d be dead. I tried to start thinking about it that way, repeating the phrase over and over, getting it into my head so when it happened, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much. I tried to stop thinking ‘what if’, because ‘what if’s’ didn’t exist in real life.

So, what if The Cameraman finally slipped up and the cops found him before she died?

They wouldn’t.

And what if some vigilante found the serial killer and shot him right in the head?

They wouldn’t.

And what if something more important came up and he had to let her go?

He wouldn’t.

And what if she escaped?

She wouldn’t.

She’d be dead.

She’d be dead.

She’d. Be. Dead.

And maybe the worst part was that everyone could see the videos. All the private messages, all the memories we shared, they were all to be publicized for the whole world to judge. Even in her last moments, she’d have to hold what she said and be cautious of how many people were watching She always hated when people saw her cry but her most vulnerable moments were what the whole world would remember her by.

A steady pounding registered behind my eyes. Since the first video was released I hadn’t been able to stop my head from hurting. All these thoughts of Pria and The Cameraman just filled up every space of my entity, crowding me wherever I went, yelling and screaming at me to do something. And the more thoughts of Pria there were, the less space there was in my body, and my heart, and my brain, they were just being squeezed, and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t cry either, or scream, or throw my fist against the wall. It was like all my tears and screams and fist throwing abilities were just pushed down by some invisible force.

I was always the sidekick, the follower, the quiet one. And I was okay with that, I really was. Pria was the moon and I was just Leslie, just another star in the sky that was lucky enough to share some of the glory.

So, what if it was me instead?

It should have been.