Looking Ahead

Rain came down so hard and fast that it seemed edible, like noodles steaming fresh from the pot. All she could see were the dark streaks of liquid against the white cones of the Portland streetlights. The water splashed up from the ground as hard as it came down, so she was soaked from her feet on up, despite the protection of her black mac.

It didn’t matter, though. Rain was Biblical. It washed away sins.

Or blood.

Rachael let the water leach away the dark color from the blade until it gleamed silver beneath the fitful artificial light. She pocketed the knife and crouched down to check once again, like checking the locks at night, an almost unconscious part of her regular routine.

No breathing, no pulse. For tonight, at least, she’d been successful at stopping one more of them, permanently.

Her car was down the block. She stood and walked quickly through the strings of water, watching the ground pass her by. Sound was lost in the rattle of water on water, but she could feel her toes squelching in her rubber boots.

Her car was beneath one of the cones of light. It was neither new nor old, but had the odd dent or scratch that marked it solely as hers. She used the fob to unlock it and settled into the seat, the garbage bags she had earlier put across the bottom and back crinkling slightly as she shut the door and fastened her seatbelt.

Another job well done. She started the car. Time to go home.

“Late night?”

Rachael glanced at her grinning co-worker. “No,” she answered shortly. Justin seemed taken aback by her tone.

Pretend, Rachael reminded herself. She had already touched Justin’s hand when she started working here and found her co-worker harmless, if a little annoying.

It was always the hand. Touch the face, the hair, the shoulder, the arm, even, and nothing happened. But touch the hand…

Rachael rubbed a palm across her throbbing temple, then realized Justin was still looking at her. “Sorry,” she explained. “Just trouble sleeping. Migraines.”

Ever since the accident, her headaches never seemed to go away. She’d talked to doctors and they’d given her a variety of prescriptions, but they never helped. Only one thing caused the pain to fade to bearable levels. Only one thing brought her ease.

“Oh, okay.” Justin foamed up the milk, the machine making a loud slurping sound, and poured the frothy liquid into a cup with an economy of motion. “I know how that is. My last boyfriend—not Pete—he could never sleep unless he medicated. It became a—what do you call it—” He snapped his fingers.

“A vicious cycle?”

“Yeah, that’s it! He was such a grouch, too. When Pete came along and asked me out, breath of fresh air, y’know?”

Rachael nodded, filled cups with caf and decaf, foamy milk, shots of flavor. Justin’s voice and the voices of the customers washed over her in a soothing balm. Her headache started to subside, but it didn’t go away. It never went away.

She did have problems sleeping, but she was wary of taking drugs, especially after the therapists had given her a smorgasbord of pills to clear up her so-called problems. And she didn’t want to feel trapped in her own body again, like she did after the crash.

Squeal of tires. Impact. Blurring, confused images as the car spun. Flung against her seat, then the door, then the roof as the car flipped. The torn rip of metal, screech of the roof on asphalt, glass crunching. A surge of pain in her skull, then utter blackness.

Rachael looked up from the memory as Justin took off his apron. The sun slanted into the front window, orange as carrots. “Hey, girls,” Justin said to the newcomers at the door. The night shift was here.

Rachael finished wiping down the counters and pulled the strings to release her apron. She greeted the other staff, following Justin to the back room as they went to get their things.

“Any big plans tonight?” her co-worker asked as Rachael picked up her purse.

For a second, Rachael felt put on the spot, panicked. Like when she’d woken up in the hospital and couldn’t move. People talking over her, about her, but never to her. As far as they were concerned, she wasn’t even there. She’d heard “TBI” over and over again, but couldn’t ask what it was, not right then. After she “woke up” and had control over her body again, they told her TBI meant “traumatic brain injury.” Her mind was broken.

It was still broken today, according to them, but Rachael had stopped believing there was a reason to fix it. She had felt like a new person when she left the hospital—new, and unknown to herself.

Focus: coffee shop. Break room. Justin.

“No plans,” Rachael answered after the pause. “You?”

He rolled his eyes. “Nah, just the usual. See ya.” He walked out of the small break room with a casual wave.

Rachael didn’t linger, either. She didn’t have a prospect right now, but she didn’t worry about finding one. There were so many in the city, an overwhelming number—all of them coming to her. It was amazing how they asked for it.

He hadn’t asked for it. Her first. He’d had no idea she was coming for him.

After a slew of physical therapists to help her relearn the use of her body, and after months of effort and sweat and sobbing at the unfairness of it, she’d finally walked again. Not as she used to, but well enough.

But when she got back to work, that’s when she’d found out something else. When she shook her first client’s hand and gotten a vision, that vision that had shocked her down to her core.

She’d talked to therapists. They’d given her pills. They gave her hugs. They gave her a foam bat to work out her fear on an oversized stuffed monkey.

It didn’t stop the visions or the nightmares. And the pain in her head only grew worse.

Rachael took a deep breath. Outside the coffee shop, the orange light had melted to amber. If she wanted to try to get some sleep tonight, she would have to hustle home and get her gear.

The sky was just darkening by the time she left her studio apartment behind her. The dingy building seemed to hunch into the growing shadows, and the last, fading light lingered on stained concrete steps and peeling paint. On a barista’s salary, this place was all she could afford. If she wanted posh, she would need roommates.

She couldn’t have roommates. Not with the late hours. And certainly not with the nightmares.

After the brief pit stop, her car started without any problem, and she drove to the nearby park. Families were leaving, calling out to their children to, “Come right now or else…” The utilitarian bathroom echoed as she banged open the door, but it was empty. She changed quickly.

Back in her car, she drove north. Her last kill had been in the southern warrens of the city, where the daytime business faded away to blocks of industrial warehouses. In this direction, the small residential homes petered out into apartment buildings and strip malls. There—a bar, small and badly lit. Three or four bikes were parked out front.

Perfect. She pulled into the lot and turned off the car. One last glance in the mirror, fluffing the bangs on her brown wig.

No rain forecast for tonight, thank goodness. She just had to worry about blood on her boots.

“So I said to him, you want to watch that baseball game? Fine. Stay up all night and watch it, for all I care. Just don’t expect to wake me up in the middle of the night wanting to get some.”

Justin needed very little encouragement to talk nonstop. Rachael almost wished her co-worker fit the profile for a prospect.

Alas.

“Uh-huh.” It was all Rachael had said for the entire morning. Rachael poured hot milk into a cup and put it on the counter.

“Uh, miss? Miss? Excuse me?” She looked up. A woman waited, bangles jangling on stick-thin wrists. “I ordered soy. This isn’t soy.”

“Sorry,” she muttered and took back the offending cup.

Last night had been a real bitch. Afterwards, like usual, she couldn’t shut her eyes. Every time she did, she saw them—the images she picked up from the men. Stark pictures in light and red, flickering behind her lids. Women… and sometimes girls, some very young. Their staring eyes, blood everywhere. All in her head, the pictures playing like home video, flickering and focusing every time she closed her eyes.

The soy milk bubbled over and she poured it into a fresh cup. “Here you go,” she said, unsmiling. The woman stalked off in a huff.

“People,” said Justin, rolling his eyes.

“Yeah.”

“Is this where I ask, ‘What’s a nice girl like you…?’ ”

The man was in a suit, but no tie. The first couple buttons of his shirt were undone, showing a glimpse of smooth, dark skin. She lowered her lashes, and then looked up through them. Flirting 101. “Who says I’m a nice girl?”

He laughed. His hand was close to hers on the bar top, but it was too soon to touch him. “Buy you a drink?” he asked.

“Sure.” He caught the bartender’s eye and gave a half-wave, received the nod in return. She ordered a Gibson, he picked Jameson on the rocks. She swirled her straw through the drink she didn’t want and waited for him to speak.

“So… are you new to the city?”

She smiled to herself. “Why? Do I look like a tourist?”

He grinned with half-lidded eyes. A cool customer, Mr. Suit. “There’s something about you. Something different.”

“You need to work on your pick-up lines.” She took a sip from her drink, offering him her profile. As she knew he would, he scooted closer, clinking the ice cubes his drink and looking down the length of her body.

“Maybe I do,” he said huskily.

She turned back to him and his eyes flickered up to hers. He grinned, knowing he’d been caught looking where he shouldn’t. She grinned back and put a hand out to touch his hand, lightly, playfully.

The breath hissed in through her lips and she closed her eyes. It never took more than a second.

She remembered her first time, and how she couldn’t decide what to do after the vision had overwhelmed her. At first, she did nothing. Then the headaches came, and she couldn’t seem to concentrate. Food lost its flavor, colors seemed to dim. The images played over and over in her head, haunting her as the days passed. Her boss caught her arriving late, dozing on the job, and he called her into his office.

“We have to let you go. I’m sorry, Rachael—I know what you’ve been through with the accident. We’ve been patient, but we’re not a charity.”

Am I crazy? she had wondered as she packed up her office. Or is this real?

Rachael blinked, and the vision floated away. The bar flared back into focus around her. The man with the suit was in front of her. She was still touching his hand, but she quickly removed her fingers and leaned back.

“Are you okay?” he asked, crowding closer. The guy looked genuinely worried.

His concern was not an act, after all.

“Thanks for the drink.” She knocked it back and stood up.

“Wait!” he called out as she presented her back to him. “I thought we could…”

“Sorry,” she cut him off and walked out of the bar.

In her car, she leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. The images flickered again behind her lids, like fast-forward on a camera. The man from the bar, now in a dark tuxedo. A bride in a princess dress. Multiple kids, speeding from newborn infant to college graduation. An affair, concealed. Growing older, the faltering stutter of images as Alzheimer’s took over and his brain lost connections, memory. A nursing home. A closed box.

The man’s future, played out before her touch. Not blameless, but not guilty.

Unlike her former client. Her first.

After the car crash, after she had lost her job, there seemed to be only one solution. She needed to find out for sure. She couldn’t go on like this, wondering about herself and unable to focus on living her life.

She began to follow her former client, skulking in the background like some bad detective movie. Tommy was his name—she couldn’t remember his last name, now. Days passed and nothing happened. She began to think she was wrong—that she was crazy, and this was all in her head, like the therapists said.

Then it happened. Tommy hit a pedestrian with his car and drove off without stopping. She’d seen this in her vision. She’d fricking seen this. Rachael stopped her car at the hit-and-run, called 9-1-1, tried to help the woman until paramedics arrived. When asked by the police what she saw, she gave them Tommy’s license number. She’d done her job; the rest was up to them.

And nothing happened. She sat in her car outside Tommy’s apartment. He went to work. Came home. Whistled cheerfully as he collected his mail in the lobby. No one stopped by to arrest him. No one came to question him.

He had gotten away without consequences.

She’d seen more events like this in his future… and in his past. This wasn’t his first kill, and it wouldn’t be his last.

So she engineered a casual run-in outside his apartment. It was amazing how easy it was—the low-cut top to draw the eye, the flirty twist of hair. He pursued her, never knowing that she was the one in control. When he asked her out, she said yes.

The first kill was messy. She’d watched the usual array of cop shows, but it wasn’t the same in person. She surprised him with the knife, but he didn’t die right away. He managed to hit her first, giving her a good shiner and a ringing in her ears. And she had done it in his apartment, a rookie mistake. She was consumed with worry afterwards that she might have left some evidence.

Days passed. The money from her job had run out, and she got an eviction notice for the end of the month.

Maybe he had told someone about his date? Maybe someone would knock on her door next?

She waited it out. On the last day before eviction, she packed her stuff into her car and drove away.

She never looked back.

Only her first kill had a name. She didn’t know the names of any of the others, and she never would.

“Hey, baby. What are you doing here all alone?”

A woman with any sort of danger radar would have given this guy the cold shoulder. His hair was slicked back, greasy with product. His smile was slick, too.

She waved a hand around her and showed her teeth. Her stomach felt cold. Every time, her reaction played out like this—she dreaded finding a prospect, dreaded the hunt, the final results. But she had to do it. No one else could. And they always came to her—all she had to do was wait.

“Maybe I’m here with someone,” she suggested tiredly.

“Are you? With someone?” He wedged himself into the small space next to her, earning a dirty look from the blonde perched on the next barstool, but he barely spared the older woman a glance.

“No.”

He grinned. “Well, then. You look thirsty.”

“I am.” She tilted her head towards him reluctantly, although he seemed not to notice anything wrong. He put two fingers into the air and the bartender came over.

The same dance. Different result.

When she touched his hand, the images coalesced. A baseball bat—a woman screaming as it came down and down and down again. Black garbage bags and dark water at night. And then another woman, hands raised in defense. And then another. It took three bodies total before she saw suits, a crowd of jurors, metal bars.

She took back her hand. “I’m done here,” she said. Energy flowed through her—hate pricked her limbs, giving her goosebumps. It never failed. Another one had found her. Another one, asking for her own brand of justice. “Wanna split?”

He grinned, drained his drink. “Oh, yeah.”

Rachael used to keep count, but she stopped at the third or fourth town. It didn’t matter. They were all the same to her. It was who she was saving—those countless, unnamed victims—who were important, even though they would never thank her. They would never even know.

But she knew.

Rachael didn’t have much longer here. Maybe in a week—a couple weeks—she would pack her bags and move to the next town before someone found something to connect her to these men. She would forget Justin, the coffee shop, the shitty apartment. But this was just one town. There were so many more, waiting for her.

How long she could do this, she didn’t know. Maybe someday she would see her own face in a vision, cold and bloody, a victim of her intended target. Maybe she would eventually just get too old, too slow, too tired to continue. Maybe she would get caught.

Picking up her purse, she followed this man—this murderer—out the door.

Until then, Rachael had found her purpose. She had saved so many lives.

No one would ever know, but she was a goddamn hero.