Eternal Flame

Chapter ~1~

Bebe Rexha blared from the radio, but even over the loud music, I could still hear Izzy's bell-like voice singing I Can't Stop Drinking About You.  She bobbed her head and wiggled her shoulders, tapping her thumbs rhythmically on the steering wheel.

Her dark auburn hair was pulled back in a French twist at the back of her head and the dashboard lights illuminated her heart-shaped face, making her silvery blue eyes look even paler.   Her cheeks were a little fuller than usual and her skin had an uncharacteristic glow.

I wondered about her weight gain, had my suspicions, but I said nothing.  If she had something to tell me, she'd get to it in her own sweet time.  That was Izzy's way.

She slid me a sidelong glance. "What are you staring at, Perv?"

"Those man hands," I replied teasingly.  "You could palm a grown man's head with those mitts."

"Hey," she said, glaring at me.  "Do you want to walk home?"

"Yeah, like—"

And then, as I'd done hundreds of times in the last three years, I awoke in a cold sweat.  Heart racing, chest aching, I lay in bed and struggled to catch my breath.  I squeezed my eyes shut against the last few seconds of the car crash, but that didn't stop me from seeing it.  It never did.  The awful crunch of metal rang in my ears and I knew what was coming after that—the same images that always did, the ones that only got more confusing with time.

Memories of a deer and a boy tangled together in my mind.  I'd told the authorities of a person I'd seen as the car spun off the road, about the pale face of a stranger that had flashed in front of the headlights just before my recollection went blank.

I assumed we'd hit him, but they'd found no body, no evidence of blood or tissue on the blackened remains of the front bumper.  They'd assured me that no one could've survived being struck by a car going over fifty miles per hour.  They'd concluded that, since they hadn't found a body, the boy must've been a figment of my imagination, born of terror and trauma.

But I wasn't convinced, and after three long years, I hadn't forgotten him either.  Though the details of his face had faded over time, there was something about his eyes—a soul-deep agony, a burning self-loathing—that I'd never been able to get out of my head.  It had stayed with me since that night.  I was drawn to that kind of suffering, almost like a kindred spirit.

Slowly but surely, as I stared at the ceiling, reality returned, settling over me like a blanket of blandness.  The television played the early morning news reports, as it did every morning.

I was probably the most well-informed kid in school, mostly because I went to sleep every night with the television on and woke up every day listening to the most recent happenings as they echoed through my room.

I listened with half an ear to the Channel seven anchorman as he talked about the top story.

"Another body was found late last night in airely Preserve, near the area police have dubbed the 'Slayer's Slaughterhouse'."  The body was positively identified as seventeen year old Jesse Turner of Falls Town.  At this time, police are not able to divulge all the details surrounding her death, though they did confirm that she was killed in a manner typical of the Southmoore Slayer, including the animal attack-like markings on the neck, a fatal chest wound and exsanguination.  Turner makes victim number twenty-seven of the Southmoore Slayer and, unless he's captured, police fear that her death will not be the last.

Southmoore Chief of Police Edwin McDonnahough has teamed with local authorities from four neighboring towns to form a task force dedicated to the identification and apprehension of the Slayer.  Law enforcement officials from Harker, Columbia, Camden, and Sumter have devoted at least one officer to the team in hopes of bringing the Slayer to justice before the violence spreads across the borders into their townships.