THE LAST STAND SERIES
THE LAST STAND
A Short Story
“You begin saving the world by saving one
person at a time…”
--Charles Bukowski, American short story writer,
poet and novelist
Sacramento, California
The jangling of the telephone woke Skye Kellerman
in the middle of the night. Fumbling to stop the noise, she brought
the handset to her ear and managed a groggy, “Hello?”
The person who answered spoke in a barely audible
whisper. “He’s here!”
At first, Skye wasn’t coherent enough to identify
the voice. But she recognized sheer panic when she heard it.
Blinking away the last vestiges of sleep, she maneuvered
herself into a sitting position--and a name came to her: Dahlia
Studebaker. It was the twenty-three-year-old woman from her victims’support
group, the ultra-thin one who looked more like a teenager.
Once Skye placed Dahlia, there was no need for an
explanation. She’d heard enough about the young woman’s situation
to guess who “he” was. Dahlia’s coworker, thirty-eight-year-old
Rex Rickman, had been leaving threatening notes, vandalizing Dahlia’s
car and house and frightening her with heavy-breathing phone calls
for nine months, ever since Christmas.
Heart pounding, Skye shoved her tangled blond hair
out of her face. “How do you know?”
“I saw something, or someone, outside
the window. God, I’m scared. He’s going to kill me. I know
he’s going to kill me.”
The tremor in her friend’s voice brought back
the night Skye had awakened to find a man in her own bedroom—a
man wielding a knife. It’d been two years since she’d had
to fight for her life. Oliver Burke’s trial was over and they’d
put him away. But, like the scar that Burke—- a well-respected
dentist--had left on her face, the fear would never go away.
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