Erika rifled through the channels on the motel room’s TV. She was nervous and finicky and drop dead fucking tired. But her anxiety was winning out, as usual, and sleep wasn’t ever easy to come by anyway. Tomorrow would be an especially big day. They were going to Boulder. They were going to find Grace.

Erika fiddled with a little orange container, flicking its white top on and off and on again. Just inside that container, one of those tiny blue pills would make sleep come, kicking and screaming against the waking world. Sleep would come, sure, but so would a loss of control and an inability to defend herself.

If.

If that double-locked door blasted open and he came stalking through, leaving muddy bloody bootprints on the beige carpet.

If.

If that fourth-floor window somehow shattered inwards and the blade of an all-too-familiar knife slashed into the room.

If.

She’d had that little orange bottle for over a year now, when she finally caved and talked to the goddamn psychiatrist with her stupid waiting room and its miniature rock wall with water flowing endlessly out of it. Erika assumed it was meant to be calming; a serene nature scene to lull would-be patients into forgetting about how much their visit was going to cost them.

The doctor was just as helpful. She wanted Erika back twice a week and she recommended she see a therapist on top of that. But the goddamn psychiatrist prescribed the little blue pills that would make her sleep. So she carried around that little orange tube and fought against her screaming nerves to never dip into the stash.

Erika popped the white lid closed again and gave the bottle a twirl, rattling the little blue pills. She got up off the bed, put the bottle down on the dresser. It was time to run through her protocols, as she’d started to think of them.

She walked to the door, checked the locks. Pulled on the handle, hard. Locked. Definitely locked. Erika ran her hand across the mattress as she walked across the room to the window. It was draped with heavy blackout curtains, which Erika had pulled tightly closed when she checked in to the room. Now she lifted a corner of those curtains, peeked at the window. Locked.

It was a shitty little motel, and the windows were designed to open only a couple of inches. Just to let the air in. Just to let the night in.

From her curtain corner, Erika looked up at the sky. It was a clear night. A quiet night. She dropped the curtain, then lifted it again and pulled at the window’s handle. Definitely locked. She closed the curtain again, sat on the edge of the bed.

It had been a clear night then, too. Hundreds of stars pin-pricking the blue-black sky. A crooked moon hung up there like a dream. The woods were quiet, bare branches swaying slightly in the wind. Erika was pouring water over the fire, dousing the flames and kicking at the dust.

It was a normal campsite with normal people doing normal weekend things. But it was also the killing field, laid bare and just waiting for him to arrive. In the moments before it all began--before Erika would become something she never knew existed, before Matt and Kendra and William and Renee and a bunch of other people they didn’t even know were butchered in the deep dark woods so late at night--in those moments before, the world was quiet.

It was Erika, and the trees, and the sky above. It was dust kicked up from an extinguished flame. It was the way Matt had looked at her, when they were all seated around the fire roasting s’mores and thinking that life was everything they’d hoped for.  

Sitting on the bed now, Erika exhaled. Her therapist talked to her about reliving the Before. Just thinking about it put her there. She’d focus so damn hard on the Before that a part of her would return. To the camp. To the woods. To Matt.

It was okay to think about Matt, in the Before, her therapist had told her with a smile. Morning walks to their favorite coffee spot. Saturday afternoons at the bookstore. The couch, the TV, and a warm blanket. But Erika was focusing more and more on the Just Before. She was forever in those woods in her mind, forever on the cusp of the thing that would come to define her existence for the rest of her days.

The wind outside pushed against the motel’s outer walls, and the window to her left made a sucking sound. In one smooth movement Erika was at the window, gun in hand.

Ready. Waiting.

She knew it was the wind. She reached out to the curtain, pulled it open by an inch. There was nothing there. Just the wind and the night and the After.

Like all things that should not be, it happened fast but it took forever.

Laying in bed and staring at the cabin’s ceiling, Erika just couldn’t stop thinking about the campfire. Matt had dowsed the flames, sure, but Erika kept seeing Smokey the Bear, on her wood-paneled television set in between cartoons, telling her that only she could prevent forest fires.

So in her still-buzzed state, she patted Matt’s crotch, laughed at his reaction, and told him she was going to check on the fire.

“It’ll help me sleep.”

That’s the last thing she said to him. Ever. That was the sentence that closed the book on Matt and Erika, destined to wed and have three children and live a life. Like you do.

“It’ll help me sleep.”

It was the wind. Erika re-holstered her gun, hid it away under her hoodie. She got the permit within three days of getting out of the hospital. She knew it wouldn’t stop him. She knew it wasn’t enough.

Her adrenaline buzzing, sleep was a lost cause. She looked at the orange bottle on the dresser, stared it down. Don’t give in. Never give in. Hands on her knees and wide awake, Erika waited for the sun.