Scream Catcher Read Online Free PDF

with nothing to eat but vitamins and chicken broth; nothing to do but stare at four concrete walls; nothing to do but scream; nothing to do but invent his own kill games; play them in his neuron-sharpened mind.
    Papa Lennox insists on perfect devotion not to the video game but to Jesus Christ. Or else face the wrath of “the fist and the belt.”
    Papa Lennox screams at little Hector to love Him more than the first person kill game.
    Papa Lennox smashes little Hector’s game systems with a claw hammer, burns the boy’s games to repeated Our Fathers on the back lawn; destroys the televisions and computers.
    Papa Lennox likes to hear his little boy scream bloody murder. It makes Papa laugh.
    But Little Hector would not take “the wrath” lying down.
    One day little Hector is able to free himself from his basement cell.
    Calmly he makes his way up the stairs.
    He calls out to the solitary figure—a crippled shadow of a man who drinks alone in the darkened living room.
    The drunken Minister turns to the skinny boy with caught-in-the-headlight eyes. He can’t believe the little beast still possesses the will, the physical strength to escape his “time out” room. It must be the devil inside him. And what is that in the devil’s hand?
    Without a word, young Hector proceeds to bash his Papa’s skull in with the claw hammer. But not without ordering the man to scream.
    “Scream, Papa!” shouts little Hector. “Scream! For! Me!”
    Perhaps the fully grown Hector’s attraction to a game like Hurl has something to do with the sentimental memories of that first kill. The kill and the scream. Case in point: now on the video game screen, a gruesome looking old man, who appears not altogether different from the late Papa Lennox, is rising up from a concrete tomb. He’s screaming into the first person player’s face. The business-suited, pale-faced mutant is approaching the player. He’s growing larger, more menacing, more monstrous, more ear-piercingly loud the closer he comes …
    … Until just the right moment when WHAM! off goes the mutant’s head with one quick, well-placed swipe of a computer-animated battleaxe.
    It’s an easy kill. But not very satisfying. It was the same story for little Hector’s first kill. The act of killing his father proved too easy.
    It made him sick. Not the sloppy murder itself; not the rage that instigated it. But the method by which he spontaneously chose to make it happen. There seemed to be no challenge to the whole business. No fun; no fairness. From the moment the EMTs lifted the bloody mess of a father off the West Los Angeles living room floor, little Hector vowed never to kill easily again. If he ever did kill again, he would do so as part of a grand design in which he was the controller, the master manipulator, the scream catcher.
    Killing, if it was to be done right, would have to become fair .
    Over the years, Lennox has developed a talent for controlling the events that lead up to the kill. In adulthood, happiness has not been derived from the direct act of triggering a pistol, plunging a blade or igniting an explosive.
    Satisfaction has come from the hunt, the chase; from the power he wields over the petrified victim. Gratification is derived in the choosing of the kill game site, the selection of the victim(s), the careful preparation of the contest, its implementation and in the end, the recording of the scream which will be added to the collection of recorded screams. As for the last act of killing, it is merely the necessary end-all to a game well played.
    His talents are not lost in the video game arena.
    The video game arena is his training ground. A place to hone his athletic kill skills.
    Fearlessness and control have made him a more aggressive, more determined kill gamer. His accuracy with the joystick and its red thumb trigger is unsurpassed. So much so that Townies of all shapes, sizes and persuasions gather round the white-dreadlocked muscleman while the arcade