Chapter Eighteen

Jessica pressed her hands to her ears and sobbed quietly as pain stabbed her temples.

People didn't know what a migraine really was. They felt a touch of a headache from drinking their coffee an hour later than normal, and they moaned about having a migraine and how irritating it was.

They had no idea what they were talking about.

A fresh wave of pain stabbed her, and she whispered, "Ow… Ow, ow, ow…"

The pain was a living thing sometimes. When Jessica first got a migraine, she was four years old. It was one of her earliest memories. She was crying so loudly and persistently that her parents had taken her to the hospital. She remembered telling the doctor that it was like a snake had crawled behind her eye and was biting it from the back.

It turned out that the reason for her headache was their old television. Flat-panel TVs wouldn't come out for several more years, and the cathode tubes in their old television hummed softly. Well, softly for normal people. For Jessica, the electric hum was more like a screech that was just loud enough to pierce through her skull like an icepick.

That's what it felt like now as an adult. Not a snake, an icepick. Or a jackhammer.

Yeah, that's what it felt like. A little mini-jackhammer that bored into her skull a thousand times a second.

"Ow!"

She collapsed to her knees, covering her ears to no avail.

What the hell was that damned noise? It couldn't be coming from her house because she had turned the electricity off an hour ago to try to escape the sound. She would have to replace all of the food in her refrigerator, but that was fine, just please, please, please make this sound go away!"

"Ow, ow, OW!"

She screamed, trying to drown out that noise with a louder noise, but it floated above her cries, found that tiny little spot on her eardrums that no one else had, that tiny little spot that gave her better hearing than anyone she knew, and just dug.

She covered her ears with a pillow, but the sound still attacked her. She buried her head underneath her couch cushions, but it was still there.

She couldn't take it. She couldn't sleep like this. She had to get out of here. She'd rent a hotel room in the city, and in the morning, she'd come back and try to figure out what was making that sound. If it was one of the neighbors, she'd talk to them and see if they would let her find the source and fix it for them. Hell, she'd drop a couple grand on a new appliance if it meant her head wasn't torn to pieces every night.

She got up and got her keys and her purse. She was in her pajamas and bunny slippers, but that was fine. She didn't give a shit what she looked like right now.

She walked into her garage and clicked her car on. The loud crack of the locks disengaging hid the crack of her larynx as it was split open by the killer's knife.

Her last thought as she fell was relief that her headache was gone.