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.

Download the PDF to read the rest of The Last Stand.