The Milk Carton Kids
Written as part of @pitchhorrorweek for the day 4 prompt that I’ve taken the title from. I really wanted to write something for all of the prompts, but this is all my brain would let me do. I had a lot of fun writing it though, so maybe my brain will let me fill the other prompts later. As much as I love horror, I’ve never really written it before, so I hope you enjoy it!
~*~
It starts small, as these things often do.
First, one poster for a missing kid goes up, then another, and another, until the community bulletin board outside of the town hall is plastered with pictures of people’s loved ones.
And that’s where they stay, becoming worn and weathered by the elements.
Short lengths of paper with phone numbers typed onto them hang from the bottoms of some of the posters. A few have been ripped off at the perforated line, but most remain intact, fluttering in the slight breeze as though desperate to grab someone’s attention.
When the posters proved fruitless and even dedicated social media campaigns turned up nothing, the police department decided to fall back on an old method that had been instrumental in a number of missing cases back in the eighties.
“It’s kinda creepy,” Beca says around a mouthful of cereal as she stares at the image of seventeen-year-old Isaac Patrillo smiling at her from the side of the milk carton.
“It’s definitely weird.” Amy is stretched across her bed, reading a magazine and not even looking in Beca’s direction. “Wonder if they’ve gotten any leads because of them yet.”
“Are people even awake enough to properly comprehend what they’re seeing before noon anymore?” Beca turns the carton around with her free hand, shovelling another spoonful of cereal into her mouth, and takes in the imaged that has been copied and pasted onto all four sides. “I think I’d need this taped to my forehead for the first three hours of my day just to remember it’s a guy.”
They talk about the Milk Carton Kids on the news, in the papers, on blogs, and in podcasts, but months go by and there aren’t any leads.
Then, one afternoon, while Chloe is eating her lunch in the break room of the vet clinic, the small television set tuned to one of the news channels, she watches a woman and her daughter being interviewed by a local station.
“-some sick joke, well, I can tell you right now it isn’t funny. You can’t imagine the shock and fear I felt looking down and seeing my daughter’s face-”
The woman cuts herself off, her breath hitches with the threat of tears, and Chloe frowns as she puts her fork down and gives the television set her undivided attention.
“It didn’t make any sense! I’d just told her to go play half an hour before. I was frantic until I found her. She was just playing in the backyard, completely fine.”
The camera cuts back to an anchorman sitting behind a desk, looking professionally unsettled and concerned.
“This is now the third case of images of children who have not been reported as missing appearing on the sides of milk cartons. An investigation is underway to find the perpetrator of this distasteful prank and bring them to justice.”
Chloe recoils, her stomach churning unpleasantly as she wonders why on earth someone would do something in such poor taste, and she asks Beca as much later that night.
“I don’t know, dude,” Beca shrugs. “People are messed up. Probably just some douchebag looking for attention.”
Beca’s consensus seems to be a general one, for a while.
It’s two weeks later and Chloe is watching the news again when that same mother is back on t.v. holding up a similar-looking milk carton, only this time her daughter isn’t by her side.
“I don’t know who did this or why. I don’t know if before was some kind of warning, but please… please bring my daughter back.”
It quickly grows.
“My son, he was with me at the store when we saw his picture on the carton-”
“-thought I was seeing things and maybe it just looked a lot like her, you know?”
“I left him alone in his room for twenty minutes and when I went to bring him a snack, he was gone.”
“I waited outside school for him until the last kid came out and then I went in to find him. The school said he’d been marked as absent that day. I drove him there myself that morning! I watched him walk through the doors!”
“What do you think is happening?” Chloe whispers into the darkness. It’s late, but she knows Beca is awake beside her.
“I don’t know, Chlo.” Beca sighs, long and heavy. “But it’s seriously messed up.”
The first adult to appear on a carton is twenty-six-year-old Candance Trane.
Her boyfriend reports her missing a week later.
The police search every manufacturing plant, every warehouse, every place they can think to check, and they find nothing.
Jeffrey Parsons, forty-eight. Sam Evans, seven. Edith Brenner, fifty-five. Rachel Crandall, twelve.
David Wallace, thirty-two, father of three; he’s the next to go. His husband, Michael, appears on the news and talks about how he hadn’t let David out of his sight since the first milk carton had showed up. He thought that if he was with him at all times, whoever was doing this wouldn’t be able to get to him.
He was wrong. All it had taken was Michael turning around to answer the door.
“Do you think it’s like….” Amy appears to roll the word around in her mouth before saying it. “Supernatural?”
Neither Beca nor Chloe answer.
James Davies, nine.
Beca stops eating cereal.
But she still has to walk past the refrigerators at the store and it’s only by a slight inability to control her impulses that she catches it in the corner of her periphery.
Chloe’s face, beaming at her from behind the frosted glass of a milk cooler.
Her blood turns cold. She drops the basket of items she has clutched in her left hand and turns, breaking into a run as she heads for the door. She jams her hand into her pocket and pulls out her cellphone, fumbling as she tries to avoid people without slowing down while trying to select Chloe’s contact at the same time.
“Pick up!” Beca yells after the third ring.
“Hi, you’ve reach Chloe! You know what to do.”
“God damn it!”
The store isn’t far from their apartment, but Beca’s lungs are burning and her legs are weak by the time she arrives. She can barely get her key in the door.
“Chloe!” Her voice is loud but it waivers, fear shaking it as well as her body as she bursts into the apartment and takes in the empty kitchen and the empty bed. Her breath catches in her throat and her eyes begin to water. “Chloe.” It’s still a desperate call, but it’s quieter now, and Beca finds she has to lean against the wall in order to remain standing. Her heart hammers behind her ribs and sweat starts to bead along the back of her neck.
A toilet flushes.
The clothes rack shifts.
And Chloe appears.
“Beca?”
And Beca lets out a sob that isn’t completely relieved as she throws herself at Chloe.
“I saw-” she hiccups, tears rolling along her cheeks.
“Beca, what it is?” Chloe strokes her hand across Beca’s hair.
“You, Chloe. I saw you.” And Beca pulls back just far enough to stare into Chloe’s eyes.
And she sees comprehension dawn in them, right before fear begins to swirl in sky blue eyes, turning them a shade darker with the coming storm.
“What are we going to do?” Chloe asks, voice trembling.
Beca doesn’t have an answer.
