Last Patrol
Officer Daniel Kessler had been a fixture in the quiet town of Lin for over a decade. To the townsfolk, he was a constant—always patrolling in that faded white-and-blue cruiser, nodding to shopkeepers, stopping to help stalled cars, or shooing away loitering teenagers with his gruff, no-nonsense demeanor. Lin wasn’t the kind of place where crime made the headlines. A bar fight here, a drunk driver there—nothing more serious than a petty theft every few months. People liked it that way, and they liked Kessler for keeping it that way.
But behind the badge, something in him had been rotting for years. It started so small he barely noticed. A faint murmur in the back of his mind during long night shifts. He’d be parked on a dark stretch of County Road 8, the cruiser’s headlights catching the skeletal outlines of bare winter trees, and he’d swear he heard someone whisper his name.
He’d glance in the rearview mirror—nothing but the empty back seat. He blamed it on exhaustion, on the monotony of the job, on the way silence had a habit of filling itself with imagined sounds. He was in his forties now. Maybe he just needed a vacation.
But the whispers didn’t fade. They grew louder, more insistent.
“They’re laughing at you, Danny… They know what you did… You’re not a real cop. Never were.”
At first, he argued back under his breath, muttering shut up while adjusting the radio to drown it out. But soon the voices stopped being background noise, they turned into conversations. Entire exchanges that went on for hours during patrol, his responses filling the empty car.
The hallucinations crept into his vision next. Shadows where there shouldn’t be any—thin, human-shaped smudges standing in the middle of an intersection, gone when he blinked. Faces pressed against darkened windows, mouths opening in silent screams before vanishing when he shone his flashlight.
The first real incident came in February. He reported seeing a man in a ski mask dart between two houses on Maple Street. By the time backup arrived, there was no man, no footprints in the snow—just Kessler, pacing with his gun drawn, sweat rolling down his temples despite the freezing cold. His fellow officers exchanged uneasy glances but said nothing.
Then it happened again. And again. He’d radio in suspicious activity at empty lots, abandoned warehouses, even the middle of a cornfield. The department started keeping unofficial notes on what they called “Kessler calls”—situations that never turned up evidence of a suspect.
By summer, it was worse. A speeding ticket issued to a car that didn’t exist—the license plate number didn’t match anything in the registry. A frantic arrest of a burglar who turned out to be a mannequin in a department store window. Reports of gunfire that only Kessler heard.
The younger officers started avoiding night shifts with him. Even Sheriff Harlan, who’d known Kessler for twenty years, began keeping their conversations short. Something about the way Kessler’s eyes darted now, like he was looking past you to something standing just over your shoulder.
He’d stopped sleeping properly. His neighbors said they saw his cruiser parked outside his house at 3 a.m., headlights on, engine idling, Kessler just sitting there in the driver’s seat with both hands gripping the wheel.
Then came October. It was a Friday night when Dispatch received a garbled transmission from Kessler. The recording later revealed the sound of ragged breathing, the crunch of gravel underfoot, and a voice—low, desperate.
“Shots fired! Suspect down! Requesting immediate backup!”
When officers arrived at the scene, an unlit stretch of road near the old railway overpass. They found him standing over the body of Jacob Riley, a local mechanic. Riley’s toolbox lay spilled on the ground, wrenches and screwdrivers scattered into the weeds. He had been walking home from a late shift when Kessler, eyes wild and gun trembling in his hands, ordered him to freeze. When Riley turned, confused, Kessler fired twice into his chest.
“He was reaching for a weapon!” Kessler screamed as the other officers approached, but Riley’s hands were empty. No gun. No knife. Nothing.
The department had no choice so they suspended him pending an investigation. But the whispers in his head didn’t quiet. They became screams.
“They’re coming for you… You’re finished… End it before they do.”
The week that followed was a blur of paranoia. Neighbors reported seeing him pacing inside his house at all hours, peeking through blinds, muttering to himself. One claimed they saw him sitting in the backyard at night, staring into the woods with a shotgun across his lap.
On his final night as a free man, Daniel put on his full uniform. Polished badge, pressed shirt, duty belt. He loaded his service pistol, checked it twice, then stepped into his cruiser one last time.
He drove the streets of Lin for hours, but not in his usual patterns. Instead, he took strange, winding routes—back alleys, old service roads, dirt paths leading nowhere. At one point, the dashcam caught him pulling over in front of the abandoned Miller farmhouse. He sat there for nearly twenty minutes, talking in a low voice to someone the camera couldn’t see. His tone shifted from pleading to laughing to shouting, then back to silence.
At 4:12 a.m., the camera showed him stopping in the middle of the empty town square. He got out, stood in the beam of his headlights, and aimed his flashlight into the shadows, calling out names—none belonging to anyone on record in Lin.
By dawn, his cruiser was found idling in a cornfield five miles outside of town. The farmer who discovered it thought at first Kessler was asleep in the driver’s seat. But the pale stain down the side of the door told a different story. The bullet wound was clean. His service pistol still rested loosely in his right hand. The corn around the cruiser bent in strange, circular patterns, as if something had been moving through it in slow, spiraling arcs.
When they reviewed the dashcam, they found nearly three hours of footage from inside the car. For the first hour, Kessler spoke in hushed tones to someone unseen. The voice on the recording was only his—but the way his eyes kept flicking to the passenger seat, the way he leaned forward as if listening, suggested he was convinced someone was there.
The final minutes were harder to watch. Kessler’s face was pale and slick with sweat, his lips trembling.
“They won’t stop, you know,” he whispered to no one. “They’ve been here the whole time.”
Then he turned to the passenger seat and said, almost gently:
“Alright… let’s finish it.”
He looked forward again, raised the pistol to his temple, and pulled the trigger.
The investigation closed with the official finding: suicide brought on by mental deterioration. But those who saw the dashcam footage never forgot it—because at the very end, just as the camera’s lens was spattered red, there was a flicker in the corner of the frame. A dark shape leaning in from the passenger side. Something with no face at all.
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