It was raining that night. She could hear the movement of feet on the ground, the crunching of sticks, the sounds of panting and crying, shouting and swearing. All of these sounds ran clearly through her mind, but she saw nothing—she could feel nothing. It was almost like she was a corpse, slung over someone’s shoulder, getting ready for burial.

But she wasn’t dead. Not yet.

She was hardly breathing, each breath slow and hard-won, coming slower than the one before. But she kept fighting, not because she had something to live for—she wasn’t certain she had anything at all—but because it was just her natural instinct, to wait until the sights and the feelings and the memories came back. Until she could feel again.

Having just been brought back to conscious, she struggled to remember what was happening.

Her name was Madeleine Miller, and she would be dead by the end of the night.

Her body would be found by hikers in the woods. The news stations would blast announcements of the pretty blonde college student’s death. There would be a state-wide search for the person who did that to her.

Her face was massacred, making it difficult to identify her. Her mother broke down when she saw the body, exclaiming that it was her daughter, her little girl.

The man who performed the autopsy ruled that she had been dead for about fifteen minutes before the facial injuries occurred, and that she likely only felt the injury to the leg and the neck. A wave of relief was supposed to pass over all who were there to hear his statement, but no one felt satisfied.

This beautiful, charming, effervescent woman’s killer was still on the loose.