The darkness hid the treacherous drops to the sides, so he tried to keep as central on the road as possible, but it was difficult, as there were no white lines in the centre of the road. He thought that there should have been a sign as people entered, The Pennines: Drive at your peril. Gordon was aware that it was an area in England that was meant to be driven through during the day so people could take in the breathtaking scenery. But his journey began in the evening, in the awful weather, and he was certainly paying for it now.
“This is ridiculous,” he muttered to himself.
He had no intention of walking any further and was certain that the person that they had hit had probably fell down the hill and was in a ditch, many metres below them. It appeared that a helicopter was going to have to be used in this search.
With the sound of the rain lashing at his body and the wind smacking his frame, Gordon could hear animal-like growling coming from the left of him, where the hill descended. He thought about the possibility of there being wild dogs out in the open, and this thought alone made his heart gallop at an insane speed.
He tried to shrug the noise off, but his walk back to the woman's car was becoming a quick affair. As he progressed and was only a hundred yards from the car, all he could see was the headlights assaulting his eyes. He looked down on the floor to avoid getting spots in front of his eyes and could see the woman was still outside, standing in the rain. She then called out, “What's that?”
Chapter Two
The weather was noisy and getting worse, but he could still make out what the woman had said to him.
What's that?
Gordon slowly turned around to see a figure, possibly a grown man, about fifty yards away, running towards him. He could tell by the body language that this man posed a threat, and Gordon's heart rate elevated whilst he stood there motionless in the rain.
Once his brain screamed at him to run, he did just that.
Gordon turned and ran towards the two parked cars. His car was still parked behind the one he had initially stopped for, and that was his destination, but the feet from behind him was gathering momentum. He didn't want to look behind him, but he was guessing that if he needed to run for another minute, whatever it was behind him was going to catch him up.
And then do what?
Gordon had no idea why he was running. All he did was listen to his mind, and adhered to it. He ran past the full-beamed car and saw the woman just standing there, perplexed.
“Get back in!” screamed Gordon. “Get back in your pissing car!”
“What's going on?” she cried out.
Gordon never had an answer for her, and ran past her car and opened his own and quickly jumped in. She did the same. He locked the whole car and peered through his windscreen, but the rain was disturbing his vision. He put the key into the ignition and switched on his wipers, and now his disbelieving eyes glared at what was happening in front of him.
Surely this was some kind of joke? Was this really happening?
From what Gordon could see, and what his car headlights were showing him, the running individual was dressed in some kind of green medical gown, and was now manically attacking the vehicle in front of him.
As if his life depended on it, the gowned man was head-butting the driver's side window and had got through on his third attempt. Even with his windows closed, Gordon could hear the screams from the woman, as her partner was being attacked in the driver's seat.
Gordon had no idea what was happening to the man who had a suspected broken neck, but by the sounds of the woman's screams, it was horrific. Through his blurry windscreen, due to the driving rain, he was unsure whether the man was being punched, scratched ... bitten!
Gordon leaned forward and moved closer to see if his eyes were deceiving him. Did that thing tear that poor man's face off?
Whatever had happened, the attack was brief and the thing outside had stopped, whilst the victim in the driver's seat remained still. Gordon was certain that he was dead. The gowned man then stood up straight, outside the car, and looked around as if it had just woken up. Suddenly, Gordon could see the driver, who had just been attacked, coming back to life and grabbing his female partner, and taking a chunk out of her arm.
Gordon felt such a coward sitting in his car, but he was paralysed by fear and didn't want to be hurt. His heart pumped furiously, and his breathing was so quick and sharp he thought he was going to have a heart attack.
Fuck waiting for the paramedics, he thought.
His shaking hands went for the ignition of his car and he turned the key, firing up the engine. Once he did this, the man standing outside the car, and the driver and his female partner suddenly began to stir.
“What the fuck?”
Gordon didn't stay for answers; he simply slipped his car into gear. The standing gowned man began to run at Gordon, whilst the two inside the car were struggling to get out.
“Pissing hell!” Gordon cried out as the man, dressed in the green gown, came at him.
Gordon took the handbrake off and floored the gas pedal, hitting the guy and almost swerving off the road. As he drove away, he could see that the man and the woman were frantically trying to climb out of the driver's side window that had been smashed. He only caught a glimpse of them, and he glanced to his left as he passed them in his car. They looked possessed. They both looked possessed.
He eased off the gas, knowing that he was going too fast for these treacherous bends, in this weather, in this darkness. He put on his full beam and could see the road straightening. It looked clear and he sped up.
At this point Gordon was nearly in tears, and had no idea what was happening. His vehicle was hitting fifty, and as soon as another bend appeared he braked harshly, making the car skid and perform a ninety degree spin. He stalled the car and the vehicle came to a halt. The only sounds he could hear was his own heavy breathing, the rain attacking the outside of his car, and the wind that had now picked up so much, the Mazda shook a little.
Knowing that with him panicking and speeding could end up turning into an accident, he promised himself to stick with thirty at the most, and either try and find somewhere to stay somewhere in this barren part of the country, or wait till he reached the M6, and phone the emergency services once he was at a service station.
And tell them what? He had no answer.
His head was still baffled at what had just happened, and he could make no sense of it.
Chapter Three
As soon as the car fired up once more, he pulled away and kept his eyes sharp. He noticed that the wind had grew angrier the higher his car climbed, and he felt some relief when he came to a huge decline in a road that snaked like a helter skelter. He was going to have to slow down even more because of the bendy road, but at least it was now spiralling downwards.
He released a sudden gasp and hit the brakes when something darted out into the middle of the road. Once the car stopped, Gordon slowly placed his head on the steering wheel and began to laugh to himself.
“A squirrel,” cackled Gordon. “A pissing squirrel.”
His laughter began to diminish; after all, it wasn't a squirrel that was chasing him before. He had no idea what that was.
He moved off again, paranoid that he was still being chased. It was obvious that some kind of infection had been passed on back at the car, because as soon as the man and woman in the front of their vehicle were attacked, they found a new lease of energy that appeared to make them manic and have the desire to—he guessed—attack anything that wasn't like them.
It had been a surreal evening even before these events had happened, with the eerie countryside and the evil weather, but witnessing the driver and passenger being attacked had made this evening even more bizarre, and, of course, frightening.
As he continued to drive, his mind wandered. He wasn't entirely sure, but he thought there was a strong possibility that the man dressed in the gown could have been the same man that had been hit by the woman's car. And t
he attack didn't seem to be an attack by an enraged man; it seemed the attack was carried out by a possessed, infected individual who had no control over their new, more sadistic, emotions. But where had the gowned man come from? Gordon then thought. A gowned man with no other clothes on underneath. Was he from hospital? A mental patient, perhaps. Gordon wasn't sure.
Gordon Burns eased off the gas once the car had reached the bottom of the spiral, and once the road straightened up he remained off the gas and could feel his eyes becoming blurry with tears.
He wiped the tears away with his forearm, and cursed himself.
He had no idea what he was crying for. Yes, he had just experienced an horrific episode. Yes, he was frightened. And yes, he was now at least a mile away from the possessed human that ran after him, but what was going to be the overall outcome?
The sooner he got back to Gretna, he thought, the better.
He released a strident yawn and applied a little more gas to make this horrific, arduous journey a little quicker. He drove for another five minutes and suddenly felt the steering wheel getting heavy and pulling to one side.
“You've got to be shittin' me.”
He tried to continue to drive, despite the flat tyre, but with the pouring rain and the vehicle continuing to pull to one side, he gave up and thought that he was going to do further damage to the car if he continued.
He allowed the car to come to a stop, and Gordon Burns looked out of his motor, unsure what to do. He couldn't sit in the car all night! He just hoped this episode would be a lot quieter than when he first stopped.
With the paranoia urging him to hurry the hell up, he wasted no time in jumping out of his car, checking which tyre was bust, and headed for the boot. He didn't want to waste time by dwelling on it, but he did wonder if he should turn his headlights off. If these ... things were still heading his way, which he very much doubted due to sheer exhaustion, he didn't want to help them reach their target by showing them the way with his car all lit up. However, he decided to leave the lights, so he could see what he was doing, and get a move on.
He took the tyre iron out of the boot of the car and looked over both shoulders before closing it.
“Pissing hell,” Gordon snapped. “This is like something out of the Twilight Zone. All I need now is the car not to start, followed by thunder and lightning.”
His eyes quickly veered to his right, and in the distance he could see a tiny blue flashing light. Ambulance, he thought. Fuck, I hope they're okay.
Trying to block it out of his mind he took out the jack and began raising the vehicle up. The rain continued to lash down, and despite leaving the car lights on, it was still too dark to see what he was doing. He felt for the nuts, took hold of his tyre iron and began unscrewing them. With the noise of the wind and the rain, Gordon knew any danger coming from behind was going to be hard to hear, especially see, and tried to go as quick as he could.
Once the tyre was free, he pulled it off and rolled the thing away from the car, eventually swallowed up by the darkness. He speedily went for the spare in the boot, still glancing around in the darkness, and began tightening the nuts on the spare. There were four nuts in all, he wasn't caring about the wheel trim, and by the time he had managed to put the second one on, he could hear a faint growling noise, like something from the cat family.
Oh no.
He didn't want to waste any more time, and once the third nut was on he thought, to hell with the fourth, and quickly lowered the car. Leaving the jack in the road he jumped back into his car, threw the tyre iron onto the passenger seat and started the engine. As soon as the car started to move, Gordon jumped and yelped in fright when he heard a loud bang come from behind him. He turned around and could see the man, that was dressed in only a gown, was trying to get in by punching his way through the back window.
Once the car was gathering momentum, Gordon had slipped it into third. The noise continued and Gordon looked above him in fright once he heard that this thing had managed to get on the roof of the car.
Shit! All this time, it had been sprinting its heart out to get to me. If I had dithered and decided to put the fourth nut on...
It wasn't worth thinking about.
Before giving the man the opportunity to punch his way through the sunroof, Gordon began to swerve the car to the left and right in the darkness, in a desperate and dangerous attempt to throw the thing off. It clung on somehow and Gordon was aware with the torrential rain, the darkness and the roads, his desperate strategy could end up becoming his eventual demise.
With his full beam still on, Gordon could see another straight stretch of road and his right foot went down a few inches and increased the pressure on the gas pedal. The car speeded up, whilst punches to his roof rained above him, and once it hit sixty, Gordon slammed the brakes, throwing the man off of the roof.
He flew twenty yards away, his body rolling along the hard road like a thrown dice, eventually coming to a stop. Gordon's breathing was loud and filled with angst; he looked out to the body that was lit up by the car's headlights, and could see that it was lying in the middle of the road, yards away. He felt a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach once he saw some movement coming from the body.
Is he getting back up?
Gordon shook his head in disbelief and released the handbrake and darted forwards, heading for the body, wheels squealing. The car went over the thing and Gordon's body jumped as if he had driven over a speed bump too fast. He then released a sigh and hoped that that was the end of this nightmare and surreal episode he had just endured.
Still driving and two minutes later, Gordon could see up ahead that his nightmare wasn't finished yet.
Chapter Four
“No, no, no.”
He shook his head and smacked the steering wheel in anger with the palms of his hands. “Please tell me this ain't happening.”
The car came to a stop and Gordon snarled, “Why now? Why the fuck did this have to happen now?”
He had no idea how many times he had stepped out of his means of transport on the Pennines this particular evening, in this God-awful weather, but he was hoping this was going to be the last. He now had a small matter of trying to remove a large quantity of dirt and grass off the road.
Gordon looked to the hill, to the right of the country road, and it appeared that some of the hill, probably due to the weather, had fallen away and had blocked most of the road off. There was no chance he could drive around it, because of the lack of space available to do so, or over it, as the part of the hill that had fallen away and crumbled was too high to drive over.
He went back to the car, grabbed the tyre iron off the passenger seat and his phone, leaving the lights on and the keys dangling in the ignition. With little deliberation with himself and knowing that that crazy person could still be alive and be out there somewhere, he began to jog around the huge mound of dirt and once he progressed away from his car, he was eventually jogging in complete darkness, drenched in panic.
He felt for his phone and took it out. He switched the thing on; it seemed to take an age to come on, then he punched in the four-digit security code. His phone was telling him that he wasn't receiving a signal, but he wasn't bothered about that, he was looking for his Flashlight App. His battery life was on fifty-eight percent, and he tried to ignore this as he put the light on. It came on and was pretty pathetic.
But what did he expect?
He was on the Pennines, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by darkness, and all he had for light was a small torch on his phone. There was no fat moon hanging in the sky, and the stars seemed to be taking a vacation as well. Even without the macabre events that had just happened, it was an outlandish and creepy night.
As he ran, holding his phone in his left hand, tyre iron in the right, he wondered if he had managed to kill the gowned man, and also wondered what the fuck it was anyway. What about the other two? And what about the paramedics? Were they attacked by the man and woman? Had the paramedi
cs now turned like the couple did when the gowned man attacked the male driver? It was all very bizarre.
The sooner he returned to Gretna, he thought, the better. He was going to have to put this down as one of the most bizarre evenings of his life. He then wondered about the other two, and how they had changed. Where were they now? Running along the dark Pennines, looking for something to feast on? Were they running towards the nearest town? Towards him?
Gordon decided to stop running, and bent over to catch his breath. Gordon's breathing became shallow and his body shivered in the torrential rain that seemed to have got heavier, if that was at all possible. The light from the phone was making little difference to his visibility, so he decided to shine it on the floor to the left. He could now see the edge of the road and used the edge as a guide. In front of him he couldn't see anything apart from blackness, but at least he knew if he used the light it would stop him from getting near any potential drops.
His walk continued for another ten minutes, and he looked behind him. He had no idea why he did this. He was surrounded by a blanket of darkness, and it didn't matter whether he looked in front, behind, to the right, or to the left, the scene was the same.
The road was now ascending again and the hill was making his thighs ache and his knees twinge. He had no idea how long he had to walk, as his knowledge of the Pennines was zilch, but he was beginning to think that he could die out here. With the night drawing in, the bad weather, and the lack of shelter, Gordon thought that there was a chance he could die of pneumonia. His clothes were soaked, right down to his underwear, and his shivering suggested that his body was dropping in temperature.
The man was exhausted, and once he finally reached the top of the road, all his exhaustion seemed to evaporate when he saw a light in the distance.
“Oh, thank God,” he cried.
Suddenly his thighs didn't ache anymore; his knees weren't hurting either, and as the adrenaline coursed through him, his legs had found new energy. He ran his heart out, and once the road descended, the run became easier as his soaked feet pounded the road. He was still unsure how bendy the roads were and had to tell himself to slow down in case he continued to run straight and unknowingly tumble down a hill. His phone wasn't making any difference, and once he saw that the flashlight was draining the hell out of his battery, now forty-one percent, he turned it off and placed it inside his pocket.
The Monsterland Trilogy [Books 1-3] Page 2
