Rhodes stops his car, peering out his open window. The night is cool and the breeze makes me draw my coat around my body like a warm hug. Something I haven’t had in a while.

“Cops up ahead,” he says, sighing. “Hide our stash.”

I grab the bundle from next to me and put it in the glove compartment. “Their lights are so bright.”

“They’re just making themselves known. Maybe a DUI stop. We’ll see.”

He starts driving again, going closer to their flashing red and blue lights. He approaches at a slow pace even though there’s no one else on the road.

“They’re blocking the road,” he says, cursing. “I can’t get by! Hey!” He shouts out of his window. The car rocks back and forth as he opens the door and steps closer to the cop car.

When I hear the gunshot, I know it’s not a cop car at all. My senses take over and I go into a panic, crawling into the driver’s seat and backing away as I watch Rhodes’ body fall and a shadow of a figure step forward with one flare in each hand. One blue, one red. What we thought was a cop car was just a car.

The towering figure turns towards me, hauling one of the flares at the car. It narrowly misses.

I had survived the Charlottesville Pyromaniac. Book deals would come, a movie offer, hundreds of interviews. And with them all, while I sat there, done up, throughout the years, Rhodes was always standing behind me - decaying more and more each year until he was nothing but a festering mass of flesh on some journalist’s carpet.

No one else seemed to see him.