by S E Holmes
almost perpendicular in the hill became a rumbling mass of shards that fell like stalactites speared from the heavens. All the angst I’d suppressed about this track’s reliability on the way down to dinner burgeoned into frightening reality like an atomic cloud.
“Hold on, Winnie!” I heard Smith shout.
I would have been happy to obey, but there was a disconcerting lack of anything to hold on to and I felt myself shoved away from the hillside on a roiling tide of gravel and begin to fall. Abruptly, a muscled forearm thrust through the pall of grit, joined by the rest of Smithy as he plunged for me, apparently tethered to thin air. Impossibly, he barrelled into me, flipping us both upright. The impact threatened to burst my innards, forcing the breath from my chest. But the sheer absurdity of his acrobatics couldn’t be true. He sprang onto slipping earth with me securely in his arms and launched us in great unimpeded bounds up the slope.
It didn’t matter. I suddenly realised none of it was fact. Vegas hadn’t dived to certain death in a bid to save me. I was in the midst of another vision, probably spasming in the gutter with froth at my mouth, eventually rousing to a red-strobed ambulance, an anxious ring of strangers and cringing mortification at my loss of control in Smithy’s presence.
I relaxed and let the hallucination run its course. It wasn’t real. In it, Smith was a superhuman alien. We finally rocketed over the rim onto the street, skidded to a stop and he cautiously set me down. Given the action occurred in my head, I was not surprised to see he hadn’t raised a sweat or sustained even a tiny scrape. He was convincingly dirty though, his hair dust-logged.
“Ah hell, you’re all banged up and bleeding!” His face screwed up while he examined my injuries with soft hands under the watery corona of a streetlamp. “It’s too hard to get a taxi at this time of night. Can you run, Bear? I know it’s a lot to ask, but those things aren’t likely to give up. We won’t be safe until you’re home.”
“Sure.” I could manage a pretend race from ‘those things’. None of it was real anyway.
Fifteen
We’d run together often, both students of parkour. But to do it properly demanded attention to detail, especially when mapping the swiftest course. Safety was usually a prime consideration, but any hint of personal wellbeing was absent on this frantic dash. Smith bulleted us through the streets, never slowing as he checked behind and above for unnamed pursuers. My bare feet suffered because there was no chance to avoid broken glass or bruising stones as we blew past, the hurt as real as birth or death or any other actual event I imagined sane people experienced. This surely was the most authentic fit I’d had yet.
“I’m so sorry, Bear. We can’t slow down. They’ve spotted us! Run!”
He shepherded me in front of him. The quite evening suburb of leafy trees and outraged dog-walkers, scurrying aside for the two idiots ramming through them, gradually gave way to the traffic noise, diesel fumes and jaundiced fluorescence of the city proper. Saturday night revellers cursing such drug-fuelled madness replaced their more sedate neighbours. We streaked for the highway, which carved a moat teeming with mechanical monsters between us and the warehouse.
And then I heard them. A vast cloud of flapping wings whooshing and diving close on our heels in assault, their eerie caws gaining. Crows – omens of death and bad luck. Thousands upon thousands of the big, sharp-beaked birds that seemed hell-bent on one purpose. To annihilate us! I had never seen so many as the numbers I glimpsed over my shoulder – they obscured the moon’s glow. Their shrieking clamour deafened.
“Crows? From where?” I said, hysteria tinged.
“They are not crows! Don’t stop, Bear.”
Adrenaline shot through me and I careened out into the road, barely missing a horn-blaring screech of wheels, my heart thumping loudly in my ears. If not birds, then what?
“Hey! What are you doing, you lunatic!”
Racing onwards, I glanced behind to see Smithy raise his hands in apology at the car’s hood, earning another riled bleat from the horn when he dashed after me into two lanes of traffic. Lucky it was fairly sparse at this time of night. He took the lead to weave the clearest path ahead, which involved springing over the cement barricade in the middle.
“Don’t stop, Bear!”
Despite the fact we played chicken with lumbering semi-trailers and nimble sports cars, whose drivers were too distracted by hands-free headsets for quick evasive manoeuvres, I really didn’t need the encouragement. In my periphery, the lead attackers swerved from the heights on the offensive. The swarm scattered when a truck loaded with shipping containers ploughed through their midst, so close behind it skimmed my dress and the gust from eighteen rumbling wheels whipped hair across my eyes as I made the verge. The howl from the semi’s airhorn punched my eardrums. A tall noise-reduction wall finally signalled the end of the freeway, the concrete facade decorated with impressions of wattle and gumnuts.
“Oh, God! More climbing,” I wheezed.
“I’m right here, Bear. You can do it.”
Smith linked his hands and I placed one brutalised foot within so he could hoist me up onto its face where the bumps and divots provided a surprisingly good scaffold. Several big black birds slammed recklessly into the wall next to me in an exploding hail of meat and feathers. And fur and talons and fangs.
“What are they? What do they want?” I screamed, scrambling up and over, my arms slippery with spattered gore. Couldn’t anyone else see them?
“Winnie, focus on me! You’re making them worse!” Smith bellowed from below.
I dropped to a deserted residential lane on the other side, lined with cars parked almost bumper to bumper. Finally off the highway, there wasn’t time for relief when a creature loomed into view like a hunting eagle with talons extended, gliding straight for me along the valley of vehicles. I lunged between two cars, the tips of its wings fanning my cheek as it missed me by a millimetre.
Terror pulsed through me. Up close, it was like nothing I’d seen before. They were hybrid beasts from hellish realms: wings a mix of leather and feather, beaks rowed with spiked teeth, claws with spines longer than my fingers and malevolent red eyes. Half nightmarish bat, half otherworld vulture to feast on my flesh. The more scared I became, the grosser and more frightening were their mutations.
The lone one flapped back around to join more of its brethren crowding the mouth of the street. On reflex, I launched upright to lash out as it flew by, connecting its solid body with a thud and a shriek. For a figment of terror, it seemed particularly sturdy and my attempt hardly punted the horrid creature from its arc.
Hoping the rest didn’t possess such initiative, I observed them amass to circle in wait while I cowered in vague safety, flanked by a station-wagon’s tailgate and the grill of a Toyota four-wheel drive. The back window of the wagon had one of those stick-figure ‘my family’ transparencies on the lower right, a twiggy girl in a tutu mocking me with normality. If only!
Bent double to stay concealed behind the row of cars, Smith slipped from the wall and ran along the path fronting parallel terraces to scrunch in next to me. “The stalemate won’t last.” He peeked over the roof of the wagon at the growing horde. His look was calculating. “Get your breath, we need to make another run for it.”
I stared at him, fear-stricken. “You can see them, right?”
He reached over to pluck an ebony feather from my hair and show it to me, the quill a grisly clot that turned my stomach. The feather gave off the strong stench of carrion.
“I see them.”
I offered him a feeble smile. “Well, at least I have a witness. Maybe even a friend to join me in the loony bin. Did you spike my lemonade with magic mushrooms?”
“Yeah, because this has really made the night a hoot,” he snorted. “A special memory.”
“I’d probably watch the sarcasm around Fortescue. You can’t make me go back out there, Smith.”
“Winnie, you must listen to me.” He gently took me by the shoulders, gazing intently at me with
those lovely green eyes. “The longer you stay here, the worse it will get. Don’t ask me how I know …” Smithy crinkled his nose in confusion – the expression I found irresistible. “I just do. I’ll distract them.”
“No! Let’s phone Bea to come and get us.”
Smith put a finger over my lips to still my objection, shuffling to swap sides so that he was nearer to the road. Evidently, we wouldn’t last long enough for rescue. His fingertips lingered along my jaw. “Wait for my count of three. Go low and stick close to the gardens in front of those terraces so they can’t get a clean angle. Do not stop. Keep running.”
Alarmed, I looked over at the path and the scant cover of the tiny patches of land with their scrappy, broken-down fences and scrawny weeds. In that second of inattention, Smithy was out and darting up the centre of the road towards the horrid pack of fiends, waving his arms and bawling at the top of his lungs, “Come on, bastards. Here I am! Ready, Bear? One!”
The flock’s interest immediately zeroed in on him and they spiralled high to retake bombing formation. “Great!” I muttered.
Not only had I sucked Smithy into my psycho-world, the spectres were poised to consume him. I gulped and took several sharp breaths in preparation for the dash, ignoring my burning, bloodied feet. Was this truly happening? What if I just lay down and took a quiet nap
