Keep Me

by Leah Holt

  Slowing down as I reached the area she tucked herself into, I bent forward and gripped my knees, trying to catch my breath. Sweat was running down over my temples, my chest felt like it was on fire and my heart wanted to jump out of my throat.

  Taking in slow gulps, I softly stepped to the bush and pushed back the leaves. Where the fuck did she go?

  It was empty. The girl was gone and I had no idea how the hell she vanished so quickly.

  Dragging my hands down over my cheeks, I rubbed my chin and turned in a small circle. She had to be some place nearby. There was no way in hell she could have quietly escaped with how frightened she looked.

  Checking behind some tree trunks and a few more thickets of briers and dense foliage, I couldn't understand what had just happened.

  I was so close. I almost had her and now she's gone. . . Again.

  A scream billowed out across the treetops, echoing around me like the sound had just morphed into a thick quilt, blanketing the air. My shoulders stiffened and the hair on my neck shot up. She was still close, she was still scared for her life, and that only fueled me more.

  This woman needed help, she needed a safe haven to rest and to find solace inside herself. She needed me.

  Turning on my feet, I debated which way her voice came in from. I just couldn't pinpoint it, it seemed like her scream came from every direction; North, South, East, West, she was everywhere.

  The woman cried out again, her voice scratchy and laced with despair. Lunging forward, I took a guess and hoped it was going to lead me to her.

  Tree after tree blurred together, the tall stalks turning into wall after wall of just red. And as I broke through the door at the end, my feet slowed to a stop.

  The woman was on the ground, her head hanging low as she rested on her knees. Her shoulders were slumped forward, hair hanging in around her face.

  My eyes scanned her body, noticing the soles of her feet and how black and raw they were, bleeding from wounds the harsh ground had delivered. Blue and purple bruises painted her arms, her clothes were dirty and stained in reddish brown smears. Is that dirt, mud. . . blood?. . .

  I wasn't sure if I really wanted to know.

  Reaching my hand out, I slowly lowered my fingers to touch her. My eyes kept shifting between the tremble in my hand and her battered shell. Never in my life had I seen someone so broken, so terrified of something, and it shook me to the core.

  Every inch of my body was electrified as my heart pumped adrenaline through my veins. I was hot and cold, I was shocked and worried as wonder and concern took over.

  Answers were what I needed, answers were what I was looking for. And I hoped that she could sense I wasn't violent or cruel, I hoped she could feel the softness of my voice and would accept my hand as I gave it to her.

  Standing right behind her, I was hovering over her shoulder, ready to sink into her skin and force her to look at me.

  The pads of my fingers brushed the fabric, it was cold and stiff as a sensation flared in my chest. I was scared of what I was about to learn, I was terrified of what this woman was running from.

  Tingles surged up through my toes and coated my muscles. It was as if the fear she felt was seeping into the dirt, swimming through the tiny grains and clawing its way up my legs.

  And yet, we were still all alone, all was quiet and calm. Not one sound fluttered between us.

  “Miss, are you okay?”

  Snapping her face up, her lids opened wide as she screamed the most horror-filled wail I had ever experienced. Tears exploded from her eyes and swept down her cheeks, her pupils ate away at the green pool surrounding them.

  I froze.

  I sucked in air and gulped it down.

  Then everything went black.

  * * * * *

  My eyes shot open as I sat up in bed. I was breathing heavy and my arm was actually stretched out, reaching for something that was never there to begin with.

  It's just a dream.

  The same fucking dream I've had almost every night for the past week. It had been driving me crazy, making it hard for me to think, to work, to do anything.

  I couldn't explain it, I didn't know why it kept happening, but I couldn't make it go away.

  The entire dream seemed so real, like I was actually there, like the woman was living and breathing and whatever the hell she was going through was the most terrifying thing in the world.

  She is real. . . Just not to you anymore.

  I could see her face, her eyes, her mouth, right down to the thick cracks that ate away the skin of her lips.

  She was so vivid, burned into every space of my brain. The bruises on her face and arms, the feel of her clothing, all of it felt so real, as real as the blanket on my bed and the pillow under my head.

  But the worst part of it all. . . I knew who she was. She was someone I had pushed into the depths of my memories. A girl that I shouldn't know, but did, a girl that had no place in my life anymore, but ultimately found her way back to me.

  It was just a dream. No, it was a fucking nightmare.

  Falling onto my back, I clutched my head and groaned. I just want it to stop.

  Beep! Beep! Beep!

  The alarm on my nightstand went off, the red light flickering, reminding me that it was time to get up. Tossing the blanket off, I threw my feet off the edge of the bed and pushed my toes into the cold wood floor.

  I was tired and drained. It felt like I had been out drinking all night and the alcohol found its way into my muscles, thickening like tar and turning into cement. I wasn't sure how much more of this I could take.

  It was to the point that I tried to stay awake, I fought sleep just to save my mind from the depressive images that would torture it under the cover of darkness.

  I don't know what the hell is wrong with me.

  But this needs to end.

  I can't keep having this nightmare.

  I can't have her in my head.

  Chapter Three

  Cole

  It happened again, the fifth dre—nightmare this week. I was starting to think that I was going crazy, that something wasn't right with my brain. How does someone continuously have almost the same dream, about the same person, and have no idea why?

  You know why. This job is going to kill you.

  I see her pain, I feel her pain, I can smell her fucking fear the entire damn time. But this one was the worst so far. She was on the ground, on her knees, her head hanging just above her chest. Then it happened, there were hands wrapping her frail neck, squeezing with so much force the knuckles turned white.

  Those hands were filled with so much hate, so much anger and rage, it overshadowed everything else around me.

  But I couldn't help her. I tried, I really did. I ran to her, I reached for the hands and swung at blank air. Except nothing I did stopped her eyes from bugging out of her head or her face from turning blue.

  I watched her die.

  When I woke up this morning, I threw up.

  All of the other dreams had just been of her, no one else was there. But now there was someone else, someone I couldn't see. Someone that had taken shape without a face.

  Deep down, I knew something really bad was about to happen. It sounded insane, even I thought I was losing my fucking mind. It was just a dream, it shouldn't mean anything.

  But the woman in it, the girl who had taken center stage, she did. Years separated us, a wall of time had created more than just a void between us.

  This woman had infiltrated my brain long ago. And now, now she had staked a claim on the images that played when I couldn't control them.

  I felt like a puppet, like my mind was her playground. After all this time, she had finally decided I wasn't worthy of living any sort of existence anymore. It was torture, slowly making me question what psych ward I should check into.

  After everything that happened, you'd feel the same way.

  Sitting at my desk, I rested my head in my hands and scrubbed my temples. My he
ad was fucking killing me. I was supposed to be working this case, trying to plug in the missing pieces, looking for a link to help guide a suspect into the hands of the police for the recent murders in this area.

  Except I couldn't stare at the computer long enough to even read one damn word. My eyes hurt from the inside out, my head was fuzzy, unable to lift the fog and do my job.

  “Cole, you alright?” Dean, a detective from the station, asked as he dropped a stack of folders onto my desk. “Cole? Dude, you alright? What's wrong with you this morning?” Waving his hand in front of my face, he bent down into my line of sight.

  “Yeah, I'm alright, just tired.” Sitting up, I pressed back in my chair and stretched my arms high above my head. “I haven't been sleeping that well. What'd you bring me?” I asked, doing my best to seem alert and switch gears in the conversation.

  The last thing I wanted to do was try and explain to Dean how a damn dream was the root of my sleepless nights, and that a girl I had tried to forget was the star of the horror flick in my head.

  Pulling up a chair, he straddled it. “Well, there was another one, here's what we have so far. She's definitely connected to this guy—”

  Cutting him off, I asked, “What makes you think it's a guy? Maybe it's some crazed woman on the loose. We don't know anything yet.”

  Dean cocked his head, giving me a sideways glance. “You're not serious?” Chuckling, he smirked. “You and I both know that's a shit statement.” Shaking his head, he continued what he was saying. “She fits the same description as the last two; black hair, green eyes, medium build. The medical examiner said she was definitely raped, and he cut her face, same as the others; one slash down her left cheek. But this last one was a little different, he strangled her. There was bruising around her throat, her larynx was crushed.” Rocking his jaw back and forth, Dean's teeth bit down hard as he spoke. “It was fucking cold and cruel.”

  “Who is she?”

  “We don't know yet, hopefully the prints or dental records tell us that.”

  Instantly my heart sped up, the realization that my dream was fitting into the situation he was describing made me nauseous. What if it was her? What if I had a front row seat to her death the night before?

  Was that even possible?

  “Go on,” Dean said, pushing the top file closer. “Take a look.”

  Holding the folder in my fingers, I hesitated. It's not her, there's no way. . . But what if—Do I really want to see? Do I really want to know?

  Her face was there. The wide bewildered eyes as she talked about what he had done, what she had been through; it was those eyes that made me recognize the woman in my mind.

  She looked different in my head than I remembered, but I could never forget the almond-shaped eyes or the giant emeralds centered inside.

  How will I handle seeing her peering up at me from a one-dimensional image?

  Taking in a deep breath, I fiddled with the thin edge of card stock. A part of me wanted to just tear it open so I could know for sure, while the other part wanted to remain in the dark.

  Never see the face, never have the guilt of knowing I had been there with her in a strange paranormal way and could do nothing to stop it.

  You're not responsible if it is her, just like you weren't responsible then.

  Just do it. You have to know.

  Peeling back the cover slowly, I closed my eyes for a moment and held my breath. I wasn't sure what I would do or say if I looked down and saw her cold dead face.

  Would I throw the file across the room and yell in shock? Would I sit stone still and not react at all?

  You won't know until you see for yourself.

  It's not, it's not her.

  Just look already!

  Dipping my head, I lifted my lids and the weight fell off my chest, allowing me to breathe again.

  It's not her.

  “She's young like the rest. What is she, in her twenties maybe? She really does resemble the last two. When will the full autopsy results be in?” I asked, my eyes scanning her photo.

  “A few days. But I can't figure out why he changed the way he did things. The others were stabbed, so why was she strangled? What's different?”

  Placing my hand on the picture, I stared down at her cold eyes. “It's personal now.”

  Cocking his head, he eyed me. “What do you mean?”

  “The girls before this could have been practice, maybe even opportunity. Maybe he just wanted to see if he could do it, see if he could take a life. Now he's ready, he knows what he wants. That's why the last few have looked so much alike. He's changing, he wants that power, no more steel taking the lives for him. Whoever this is, he wants it to be done with his own hands, he wants the control. It's a completely different feeling when you become death, when you feel their heartbeat slow down and their pulse seize.”

  Dragging a hand over his jaw, he crooked his chin. “So you think this guy has a plan?”

  “He's had a plan all along, now he's ready to use it.”

  “Why now?”

  Shaking my head, I let my finger trace the young girl's face. “I'm not sure yet.”

  “Let's hope you can help us figure that out. We need answers, we need to stop the fucker before he does it again.”

  “I'm trying, hopefully I can put the pieces together. I'll look this over and let you know what I come up with.”

  Standing up, Dean pushed the chair in and slapped my back. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

  Nodding, I waited for him to leave, then slammed the file shut. Wiping my hands on my thighs, my head felt like it was going to explode. I honestly thought I was going to see her face, the one that had been screaming at me when I closed my eyes at night.

  When I saw it wasn't her, all my muscles relaxed, but it didn't ease the worry in my mind. I was too close to this shit, I'd been working on this case since the beginning and it was starting to fuck with my head.

  It made sense. In all the years I had been a criminal profiler, none of the cases I worked had consumed me like this one.

  This one was different, it mimicked a past I tried to run from. It shadowed a life that I wanted to forget and a time that was better left buried six feet under.

  You only knew some of it, the rest you couldn't prove.

  And that was why I wanted the case in the first place.

  I had seen pictures of all the victims, woman after woman that had been defiled and stolen from the world long before their time. Hearing some of the details and knowing that there was some sick fuck out there, preying on innocent girls would fuck with anyone's head.

  I was no exception.

  Lack of sleep equaled a brain that didn't function the way it should, and for the first time in days, I was seeing clearly. This was the reason and explanation for my dark dreams.

  Stacking the folders, I threw them into my bag and tossed it over my shoulder. I needed a break, I had to get out of the office and just allow my head to the chance to mend.

  Would I ever truly be free of it all? Not a fucking chance in hell. Not when my blood ran with the same as his, not when I was built from the same cloth and fed by the same hand.

  Space and time had done shit. If I closed my eyes and took a step inside my head, I was still there, watching from behind a curtain.

  But I picked up what pieces I had left and kept moving. And this was where I landed.

  “Cole—Cole, where you going?” Dean ran up beside me as I opened the door to leave, latching onto my arm.

  “I need to go home, I'm exhausted. I'm going to go through all this stuff, but right now, I just need to get some rest.”

  Pinching the bridge of his nose, he tipped his head. “If this whole thing is too much, let me know. I can find someone else, it's not a problem.”

  Shaking my head, I squared my shoulders. “No.” Sternly, I held up my hand and waved off his offer. “I got it, really.” Pushing the door open, I let it go and stepped out onto the street.

&nb
sp; Dean knew about who I was, he knew what had happened. He had even offered me the case file so I could read it all myself if I wanted to. I didn't want to know the details.

  What happened was not my fault, what happened was out of my control. I was sixteen then, there was no way I could have known what was going to happen. I had to believe that, I had to force myself to think that I was another innocent in all of it.

  It was your fault and you know it.

  You're just as guilty as if you stood right beside him.

  I couldn't escape it then, and I couldn't escape it now. The news had done enough damage, the one day I was at the court during the trial felt like I was sitting chest deep in a fucking furnace. I didn't need anymore than that.

  But I could have stopped it.

  It didn't need to happen.

  This case was important to me, no one was taking it away, I didn't come this far to hand it over to someone else. I just needed to get my head straight, I had to stop letting my night terrors wear me down.

  Whoever this guy was, he needed to be stopped. If I could help narrow down the pool of assholes, then that was what I was going to do. I already knew a little about the twisted creature that did so much harm.

  He was in his mid to late twenties, he was a white male, probably from a broken home. He most likely had issues with women, maybe his mother or a close family relative degraded him, shunned him, abused him.

  Those were the easy details, the most common aspects of a serial killer like this. I just needed more, I needed to know why, I needed to know what was the deciding factor when he chose his victims.

  Why did those features create such turmoil and make him snap?

  Ever since I was younger, I always had questions and a need to understand. I liked to decipher the mind and dig in, unlocking the dark secrets that made someone work a certain way.

  Nature versus nurture, how much of a role did that play in who we were? That was what ate at me the most.

  There were people who came from broken homes, people who had lived a life that no one deserved, but they didn't go out raping and killing people because of it. They didn't cause carnage and decide someone's fate off their own personal suffering.