Matt's Story [COMPLETED]

Chapter 16 - Weekend Searches

He was glad it was the weekend. Telling Kristen basically that he liked her gave him things to think about. At least he had two whole days without her. Well, at least that's what he hoped. He had a feeling that he would end up seeing her more than expected.

          He couldn’t believe that it had been only a week since Kristen had entered his life. He felt so different. That wasn’t a good thing. He didn’t want to change. Change meant bad.

For some reason, though he knew it was happening, he couldn’t seem to stop. He was becoming soft, sloppy and almost vulnerable. He wasn’t constantly on his radar anymore and he wasn’t bothered if people came within just a few feet of him unlike a week ago when his radar was up so strong he couldn’t go anywhere without becoming weary.

          He was no longer stressed about Kristen. It was just the murders that had him muddled. He was still no where close to solving what was happening and who was doing it. He didn’t have any suspects, any clues or any evidence. He was basically searching for a needle in a haystack.

          He needed to discover something, anything useful, and to do this he had to look around. Once he turned, his stomach gave a growl and he quickly fed it with a nearby goat. Afterwards, though he still felt as hungry as ever, he forced himself to look around and see if he could find anything. Switching his radar on, Matt slinked into the shadows and hunched his back up. He sniffed the air and moved his nose around the pavement, jumping into bushes when people walked past, mostly couples or gangs who had nothing else to do.

          There was nothing new or different about the smell of the air. Scents of people walking past, smells of the greenery and the pollution from the cars. They all mixed in with the oxygen Matt breathed, but there was nothing strange about any of them. They were all the same. Either the murderer was on a break or he was missing something.

          Maybe they just weren’t in the area? Matt waited for the next couple to pass him, holding hands and laughing at a quiet secret joke they were sharing, before sprinting quickly down the road and around the corner. He kept on going, faster and faster, only slowing down when people came into view, their body heat radiating a 1 yard radius. It took him only a few seconds before he reached the next road on his list. He sucked in a breath and waited…

Nothing.

Still the same kind of smells, nothing different. Matt looked around. There was no freaky shadow thing hovering around him like the last time he’d been close to discovering anything.

He must be in the wrong place, he thought glumly. He had to be. There’d been so many murders in the past few days. The murderer couldn’t have just decided not to kill someone for one night. There had to be a reason if they weren’t on a war path.

          Matt pushed himself down another road, sniffing as he did so, trying to pick up anything that may be different about the boring smells that greeted him. Once he thought there was something peculiar about one smell, but then he realised that a squirrel had bounced across the road and up a tree. Even then he had to check to make sure, making him squeeze through branches in a nearby tree to check that no one was hiding up there for any kind of reason.

          For a whole hour he searched and searched, turning over every single smell that went into his senses. They were all the same. Trees, grass, earth, oxygen, pollution, food, animals and people. Nothing stuck out to him. Nothing different. Nothing unusual.

Maybe he was looking for a super bad-guy or something and it was just a normal person he was after. That meant that any natural smells could mean the murderer. That would just make it even harder.