Just one more step forward, and it will all be over. One more step, and this can finally end. I could hear the wind whispering my name, echoing vengeful screams.
All the lives I had taken because I said that this would be the last year. The last one. The last bloody handprint marking my skin. Their voices cried out, screaming last words that nobody else could hear.
"No! Not me why me why are you doing this?" One of the girls had cried seconds before I slit her throat.
Most of them had just screamed, screamed until their lungs were hoarse and their pretty little lips were dry. Nobody ever heard them. Their tears were in vain.
My hands shook. I frantically blinked, trying to keep the appearance of their corpses at bay. I can't close my eyes. I don't want to see them. I attempted, feebly, to think other thoughts, divert the images from the forefront of my head.
It failed. But there was one thing that would always reassure me. The rush of a kill. The power of holding someone's life in your hands, watching as they struggled to break from your hold.
One of the girls, Maria was her name, had begged. She cried that she had a family, that they needed her. That her mother would be heartbroken, her father would never look the same way again. I took time in her death, breaking her into submission. She was the only one who had ever begged. The only one who didn't make me think that I should stop. The only one who inspired a true rush of passion into me. I crave it.
That's why I have to stop. I have to stop killing, stop seeing their bodies whenever I closed my eyes.
Howling wind, piercing screams, bright blue skies over the lip of the cliff. Red rocks, green trees, their bodies flashing before my eyes.
I have to do it. I have to let go.
I can't do it.
I can't do it!
I can't let go of the rush of the kill, the rush of adrenaline I get whenever I think about how the next one might beg, how she might plead at the sight of my knife.
I take one step back, then another. I turn around, and then I'm sprinting through the woods, away from the cliff and the blue sky and their eyes, following me, begging me to jump. Towards the people, the girls who try to take their lives in their own hands.
Just one more. One more won't hurt.
