The Third One

After the boy said that, the temperature in the car dropped to below freezing down, and the driver's face turned ashen.

"Just missing one hand?" The driver thought he had heard wrong. He had a hard time believing that he would hear something like that come out from the lips of a young boy. His pupils shuddered, and he glanced toward his phone. The article did not detail the boy's cause of death—it only mentioned in passing that the boy had been brutally murdered. Due to one comment by the boy, the atmosphere in the car changed.

The driver's hands that gripped the steering wheel were slick with sweat. The woman next to him was silent, and the boy on the backseat gripped the black plastic bag tightly, his face plastered with a smile that did not match his young age.