Headlights
Fiction written by C.J. Leede, published by Tor Nightfire
Daniel Stansfield was done. His cardboard box was packed, his badge was sitting on the desk, and he was ready to walk out. After years of looking at the absolute worst things people could do to each other, he just wanted out. He wanted a quiet life where he didn't have to carry a gun or look at crime scene photos. It was his last day with the Bureau.
Then the phone rang.
It was Denver on the line. That was the city he had spent the last four years running away from, and the message on the other end took away any hope of a clean break. The nightmare was starting all over again.
The state troopers out on the Colorado highways were finding people stumbling along the freezing asphalt. These were ordinary folks with completely blank memories. They had no clue how they got out there. But they were wearing the skin of murder victims they had never even met. When the medics checked their mouths, they found the exact same calling card every time. A long strand of a stranger's hair was knotted right around the survivor's tongue.
A ritual that specific meant Daniel couldn't just walk away and pretend he didn't see it. The evidence wasn't just pointing to some random, active serial killer. It was pointing directly at Daniel's own life. To figure out what was happening on those dark, snowy roads, he had to look backward. He had to deal with the gaps in his own memory and a childhood trauma he had spent decades trying to forget.
Something had been following Daniel since he was a kid. Now, it was out in the open, hunting him and the people he cared about across a freezing, isolated landscape. CJ Leede's Headlights tracks this whole mess across the Colorado wilderness, and it gets ugly fast.